Kaelem woke up cold, which had never happened to him before in his life.

  Fire mages ran warm. It was one of the few unambiguous benefits of the gift. Winter was comfortable, fevers burned out quickly, and the general chill of early mornings that made ordinary people miserable simply didn’t register.

  He’d grown up in the Ember District, the poorest quarter of Solrath’s capital, where the heating braziers in the communal halls were always underfueled and half-broken. He’d never once felt the cold the way other children did.

  He felt it now.

  He was lying on his side in a narrow alley wedged between a dye-house and a building that appeared to have given up on its structural ambitions some years ago. It was held upright mostly by the dye-house’s wall and stubborn habit. The stones beneath him were cold in a way that went past the natural cool of shaded cobblestone. It was a deep, persistent cold that had worked its way through his coat and into his bones.

  And his breath was visible. In the middle of the fire kingdom’s capital city, in the third week of summer.

  He sat up and noticed that his hands ached.

  The burns were minor, not from Drev’s fire blasts, which he’d managed to avoid taking directly, but from his own magic running too hot during the panic of the binding ritual. His palms were reddened and tender from a burn that wouldn’t scar but would remind him of its existence over the next week. He flexed his fingers carefully and felt the familiar deep-core warmth of his own power stir in response, sluggish and strange, like an instrument that had been knocked out of time.

  “You’re awake,” said a voice in layered harmonics.

  Lumi was crouched on the ruined windowsill across the narrow alley. In the gray, pre-dawn light, the spirit was less visible than it had been in daylight, more of a suggestion than substance, a presence the eye kept sliding away from before correcting back to focus. Its eyes held steady on him with that deep-ice quality that didn’t diminish in shadow.

  “I wasn’t asleep,” Kaelen said.

  “You were unconscious for four hours. I made a distinction as a courtesy.” Lumi tilted its crystalline head with a condescension that seemed natural. “You also snored.”

  “Fire mages don’t snore.”

  “This one does.”

  Kaelen rose to his feet, which required more effort than usual. His entire body felt like he’d sprinted miles on adrenaline and then crashed hard. He pressed himself against the dye-house wall and listened to the surrounding sounds of the city ― early vendors, a cart rolling over uneven stone, somewhere a bell rang, marking the dawn shift change at the city guard posts.

  The guard posts.

  The full realization of the previous day arrived with the shock of facing a debt collector.

  “How many are still looking for me?” he asked.

  “In the immediate vicinity? I counted three sweeps through this district before you woke.” Lumi sounded almost conversational in a way someone discusses something they find irrelevant. “The Spiritward Office has been active since well before dawn. They are more organized than your local market enforcers.”

  “You were watching?”

  “I was not sleeping, if that’s what you’re asking. I have not slept in three hundred years. I don’t find it a significant loss.”

  Kaelen pressed his fingers against his eyes and thought. The Spiritward Office was the part of this he’d known, on some level, would be the real problem. City guards were manageable. They were looking for troublemakers, and troublemakers in the Ember District were common enough that individual incidents blurred together quickly.

  The Spiritward Office existed specifically to track, contain, and prosecute unauthorized elemental magic. They’d have his signature from the duel. They’d have it from whatever sensors registered the binding ritual. And they’d certainly have from their detection equipment whatever reading an active ice spirit in the middle of the fire kingdom city produced.

  “Can you suppress your signature?” he asked. “From whatever they use to track elemental presences? Can you go silent?”

  Lumi regarded him for a moment. “Partially. I am old enough to be subtle. But the bond between us creates a combined signature that is rather more difficult to conceal. You burn, fire mage. You’ve been burning since the moment you woke up.”

  Kaelen held out his hands and looked at them. The reddened palms. His own power, still restless and off-key since the ritual, pushing outward in ways he wasn’t directing.

  “I can control that,” he said.

  “Can you?” Lumi asked curiously.

  Kaelen tried to pull back the heat the way he’d done a thousand times with a simple compression, inward, contained. The warmth in his chest responded, and he felt the familiar gathering sensation, like drawing a breath, and then Lumi’s presence pushed back.

  It was aggressive, but not intentional, as far as he could tell. It was simply there, the cold existing in him now in a way it hadn’t before, and when his fire moved, it moved against the cold. The result was a flash-burst of icy air that crystalized the moisture around his hands into a brief, sparkling cloud of frost, which fell to the alley stones, causing them to become crunchy underfoot.

  Kaelen stood, staring at his hands.

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  “That,” Lumi moaned. “Is the problem.”

  He needed to move. The safehouse he had in mind was on the far side, just before the canal district, a place he’d used once before. It was run by a woman called Soot, named so due to the permanent gray smudge that ran across her left cheek that might have been an old scar or, as she claimed, simply a birthmark.

  Soot facilitated things for outlawed mages, not because she was sympathetic and not because she was altruistic, but because it paid extremely well. She had no particular feelings about the kingdom’s elemental regulations one way or the other.

  Getting there required crossing approximately two miles of city that was actively looking for him. The rooftops were faster but more exposed. The alleys were slower but offered more cover. He chose a combination, alleys where he could, rooftops where the alleys became too narrow or too populated.

  Kaelen had learned the city’s secondary geography the way poor children learn it, from necessity, over years. He’d learned to map where guards didn’t bother to go, where fences had gaps, and which rooftop junctions could be crossed if you were willing to step carefully and not look down.

  Lumi moved with him. Kaelen found it strange how the spirit kept pace without any apparent effort, its presence a steady cold just behind him. Twice, Lumi stopped, listening to the measured footsteps of Spiritward mages on sweep patterns a street over, causing them to change course. He didn’t ask how Lumi knew to pause, and he didn’t offer a thank you because he didn’t yet know what Lumi was to him. He had a policy about offering gratitude to anyone he hadn’t decided to trust yet.

  He almost made it to the canal without incident.

  The mage who finally confronted him was young, around twenty-five, wearing the gray and copper of the Spiritward Office’s field division. He came around the corner of an alley by a river, the area’s water source, the same time as Kaelen meant to enter. They both stopped, face-to-face, each one holding an expression of realization that this was going to be a problem.

  The Spiritward mage raised his hands. Fire bloomed ― controlled, guild-precise, already shaping itself into the containment configuration that Office mages used to prevent a target from fleeing.

  Kaelen pulled fire to answer it. Instinct, reflex, the response his body had built across years of practice and dueling and surviving situations he probably shouldn’t have survived.

  Lumi’s backlash hit him like a wall of cold water.

  It wasn’t a freeze burst this time. It was larger, more complete, the cold crashing through his whole body as his fire tried to surge through the spirit’s presence. His legs buckled. His hands went from burning to numb in the span of a single breath, the cold so complete and sudden that his grip on his own power simply vanished.

  The fire he’d been summoning collapsed, and he staggered sideways. He was suddenly teetering on the edge of the river he’d been standing two yards from.

  He went in.

  The cold, murky water hit him like a slap, the stench of it turning his stomach. The sound of the city was replaced by the muffled underwater world of rushing pressure. His fire instinct bolted in all directions at once, panicked and uncontrolled. Lumi’s cold fired back, and the surface of the river above them erupted.

  Kaelen didn’t see it, but he heard and felt it, a rapid series of cracks and hisses, steam and ice interacting in the six feet of water between himself and the open air.

  He surfaced downstream, gasping. The Spiritward mage was not around. The river’s current had moved Kaelen twenty yards from where he’d fallen in. He grabbed the nearest handhold, a rusted iron ring on the far bank, and hauled himself out, lying on the worn stone with water streaming off him.

  Lumi materialized beside him, dry. Kaelen cocked an eye at the spirit that appeared to interact with water the same way it interacted with most physical things: at its own discretion.

  “That,” Kaelen said, when he had enough breath to speak, “was your fault.”

  “You attacked using your fire without consideration for our current dynamic,” Lumi replied. “I reacted.”

  “I was defending myself.”

  “Ineffectively,” Lumi said bluntly. “We need to establish how your fire and my presence interact before you attempt combat again. What you experienced is what happens when opposing elemental forces conflict without a governing framework. The steam, the ice shards… that is all we are without discipline.”

  # # #

  Soot’s safehouse was a converted storage room above a candle shop that smelled overwhelmingly of tallow and burnt wick. It was accessed by pressing the third brick over and fifth brick up to the left, unlatching a door.

  She took one look at Kaelen when he appeared, eyeing his soaked clothes, burned palms, visible shivering from cold. Then she looked at the ice spirit standing behind him.

  She charged him double. He didn’t have double. They negotiated.

  The room she gave him had a narrow cot, a water basin, and a shuttered window that looked out over the same river he’d fallen into. He sat on the edge of the cot and looked again at his hands, pondering the burns, the numbness, the strange sensation of heat and cold existing simultaneously in his body.

  “They’ll have my signature from three separate incidents now,” he said, not particularly to Lumi.

  The spirit responded anyway. “Yes.”

  “The Spiritward Office won’t stop hunting me.”

  “No.”

  And if anyone in the other elemental kingdoms hears about an ice spirit active in the Fire Kingdom―”

  “They will hear,” Lumi said with certainty. “I am not unrecognizable to those who study elemental history. My signature is specific. There are scholars in the Water Kingdom who have spent their entire careers cataloging what a spirit like me would register as, if one were ever to resurface.”

  The spirit paused to observe Kaelen, then added, “You are a walking contradiction, fire mage. Your nature says one thing, but our bond says another. To any mage with sufficient knowledge, you will appear as a disaster waiting to specify its damage.”

  “That’s a terrible way to describe a person,” Kaelen muttered.

  “Perhaps, but it’s an accurate way to describe your current situation.” For the first time, Lumi spoke without sarcasm. “You are not the first mage to make a binding error. But you are the first in three centuries to make this particular one. The consequences will not be small.”

  Kaelen lay back on the cot and stared at the low ceiling. His clothes and hair were still damp. His hands ached. The double cold-and-heat sensation inside him was a constant low-level noise he suspected he would have to live with, the way you learned to live with a disability.

  He hadn’t meant for any of this to happen.

  Sleep came in pieces, shallow and restless, full of the sounds of the city outside the shuttered window. At some point, in the deep part of the night, he surfaced to consciousness briefly and peered through a gap in the shutter at the skyline across the canal that was shimmering strangely in the moonlight. The edges of the surrounding rooftops were lined with frost that hadn’t been there at sunset, spreading outward in branching patterns from the direction of the alley from where he’d approached.

  Lumi was at the window, motionless, watching the frost spread with an expression that wasn’t readable.

  “That’s coming from us,” Kaelen said. His voice was rough, sleep-edged.

  “From the bond, yes. The instability bleeds outward when you sleep, and your control drops entirely.” It paused to watch as the frost glistened silver beneath the moon. “You’ll need to learn faster than you think you have time for.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t,” Lumi said. “Not yet. This is only the beginning, fire mage. They’ll come for you.” It stopped, the silence cold as frost spreading across the rooftops. “And they won’t stop until you’re captured… or dead.”

  Outside, the city’s skyline shimmered.

  Kaelen closed his eyes. He didn’t sleep. He couldn’t. All he could think of was the shape of what he had stepped into and what morning light would bring.

  End of Episode 2

  Episode 3 “Chased by Shadows” coming soon!