Page 69 of Mother of Death and Dawn

AEFE

The vase shattered against the wall. Caduan barely flinched, stepping slightly to the left to avoid the glass that now twinkled across half the floor.

My shoulders heaved, breath ragged, muscles shaking. I still was not accustomed to that, my body responding so physically to my frustrations.

“I can’t,” I gritted out.

“You can.”

“I. Can’t.”

“How many times will we have this conversation?” Caduan nudged broken glass with his toe. “Soon I’ll need to send someone to buy more vases.”

I whirled to him, snarling. “You give me an impossible task.”

“There is nothing impossible about it. Its possibilities are endless, actually.”

I almost struck him. Perhaps then my magic would appear. My power had given Tisaanah the ability to wither flesh, Max the ability to reduce anything to ash. If I were to strike Caduan, perhaps a special gift that was only my own would appear. I imagined his too-calm face melting into a puddle of goo. This image brought me some brief comfort.

“Endless,” I scoffed. “It’s meaningless.”

“That’s not true.”

It was true. For the last several days, ever since I tentatively agreed to help Caduan in his war, he brought me up to his chambers and tried to teach me how to use my magic.

That, at least, was what he claimed to be doing. In practice, he was putting an empty vase before me, and telling me to “create something.”

Create something?

These instructions meant nothing to me. What was I to create? A butterfly? A flame? A snake?

“Any of those things would do,” Caduan said, passively, when I asked.

But I could not create a butterfly without first molding Tisaanah’s magic. I couldn’t conjure a flame without Maxantarius’s spark.

I asked for other suggestions. Caduan only said that he couldn’t tell me what to create.

“Why not?” I had demanded.

He replied, “Because that wouldn’t tell either of us anything worth knowing.”

“You are not telling me anything worth knowing.”

Caduan gave me a cryptic smile, and told me, more impatiently this time, to try again.

Days passed. The vase remained empty. Caduan’s instructions grew more demanding. My vexation bubbled to the surface. Another vase shattered against the wall.

It had been five days. Five days of this. I was sick of it. A tight feeling now lived in my chest, and every time I looked at Caduan’s disappointment, it grew more suffocating.

Enough. I agreed to try, but I hadn’t known what I was agreeing to. I hadn’t realized that trying something and failing—over and over again—made me feel just as helpless and trapped as I had in the room of white and white and white.

Useless. I was useless then, helpless, alone.

Just as I was now useless, helpless, alone.

That thought made my breath come faster, faster, faster. My hand closed around the water glass on the table. Lifted it.

Caduan cringed.

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