The bus rolls off the coast road onto something older than pavement, a rutted track that runs between hedgerows gone feral, and Aria watches the green slide past through glass filmed with salt until the hills start to bare themselves—scrub giving way to gorse, gorse giving way to rock, the land shrugging off its coat one field at a time. Mike's shoulder is a solid weight against her left arm, warm through the wool, and she lets herself lean into it the way she used to lean into the couch on game night, back when leaning was a thing his body did without her noticing. The garnet ring sits in her pocket, a small hot coin that keeps finding the same spot against her hip, and she has caught herself checking for it twice now, the way you check a pocket for keys you know are there. Sera is halfway across the aisle, one knee on the empty seat in front of her, arguing with Gareth about distance, and Gareth is answering in miles and turnoffs and the name of a farm that sold out to the moors in 1911, which is his way of saying he does not know how to answer a simple question simply.

"So when you say barren," Sera says, "do you mean barren like the moon, or barren like my uncle's back forty after the divorce?"

Gareth considers this with the gravity of a man deciding whether a joke deserves a treaty. "The second," he says finally. "There is a house. There is a hill. Between them, nothing that would feed a goat."

Marcus leans over the aisle, one hand braced on the seatback, and says it like a verdict: the Warriors were soft, they couldn't have beaten the '96 Bulls, and Rodman would have eaten them alive. Sera doesn't even turn from Gareth. "You've said that."

"I'm saying it again." He taps the seatback twice, a gavel. "Because you keep not hearing it. Seventy-three wins against expansion teams and a league that forgot how to play defense. Put Draymond on a hardwood floor with Dennis Rodman in his prime and tell me who's still standing."

Sera finally swings around, one eyebrow up, wire-rims catching the window light. "You have a spreadsheet for this."

"I have a spreadsheet for everything. That's why I'm right." He grins at Aria. "Back me up. You watched those games with me."

Aria doesn't look away from the window. "Michael Jordan was on another level from Steph Curry," she says, and her voice does that thing it does now — high, almost ethereal, every vowel a small bell struck in a stone room — so that a sentence about basketball lands like a line of scripture read aloud by accident. "Not better. Another level. He played a game that no longer exists, against men who would foul you into the third row and then help you up so they could do it again. Steph plays the game they built after everyone got soft. He is the best at the game that exists. Michael was the best at a game that tried to kill him."

Silence in the bus, the kind that has a shape. Marcus's mouth is open. Sera has turned all the way around now, wire-rims down the bridge of her nose, staring at Aria like she's just watched a chess piece stand up and walk off the board. Dani, two rows back, lifts her head off the window glass and says, "Okay, I need to know something, and I need you to be honest with me." She lets the pause sit. "Does elf cable carry ESPN? Because that is not a take Jason Chance had. I knew Jason Chance. Jason Chance thought Steph was the second coming."

Aria's ears twitch — she hears the name land in the aisle and feels it go through Mike's shoulder, the small stiffening, the brother beside her hearing his dead name bounce off the seatbacks. She turns from the window. "Jason Chance was one year old when Jordan retired for good in '03," she says. "He watched the Warriors attempt a three-peat with his brother on a couch in Blue Castle and never once got to say the true thing out loud, because every room he would have said it in had a Steph jersey in it." She looks at Marcus. "So no. Elf cable carries nothing. I've just been sitting on that one for a decade, and I finally have a voice that sounds like it's allowed to say it." Mike laughs — one short, wet sound — and puts his hand on her knee, and the bus rolls on toward the barren, and Gareth, who has understood none of this, quietly asks Sera whether a jordan is a kind of bird. Without missing a beat, Aria informs Gareth that an Air Jordan can, in fact, fly.

Galahad comes forward down the aisle with the analyst behind him — a young woman with a clipboard she has not written on once in four hours, a pen she has not uncapped, and the patient expression of someone who has learned that the most useful thing she can do in a room is stand very still and count. He stops at the row behind Aria and braces one hand on the seatback, and he is old enough that the bus's rattle doesn't move him; he stands like a fence post and lets the road happen to the vehicle. "Mistress Mithlass," he says, and the title still lands on her like a coat two sizes too formal, though she has stopped flinching at it. "The barrens are twenty minutes out. I know you have never tested this spell."

Aria turns from the window. The green has gone; outside, gorse gives way to rock and then to nothing much at all, a landscape that looks like it lost an argument with the weather. Mike's hand is still on her knee. Sera has gone quiet in the aisle seat, one elbow on the seatback, watching Aria the way she watches a code branch she isn't sure will compile. "You've never cast it," Galahad goes on. "Not once, not even the small version. I am asking as a man who has watched a great many clever people try a great many clever things in places where there was no second chance. Do you need anything. Is there a ritual."

He says it without irony, which is the part that gets her — he genuinely wants to know, the way he wanted to know about the ward, the way he wanted to know about the Cabal's bending chamber. Aria looks at him for a moment. Then she pulls the garnet ring out of her pocket and turns it over once in her fingers, and the small hot coin catches the window light and throws a red smear across the seatback between them. "There's no circle to draw and no words to say," she says. "I don't need candles or a knife or a name." She slides the ring back into her pocket and looks out at the barrens, where the hill is just starting to show itself as a shape against the sky, low and long and patient. "But if you want to help, tell the driver to keep the engine running and point me at the hill. I'm going to need to see exactly what I'm aiming at, because I have never thrown anything that big, and I would very much prefer the first time to be at the right rock."

Marcus is already out of his seat, one hand on the overhead rail, the other fishing in the air like he's reaching for a coat hook that isn't there. "I can do it," he says, and there's a burr of excitement under the words that he doesn't bother to sand off. "Fly. Third level. I've had it since the beginning but basicly everyone has wings. Two hours, sixty feet a round, and I can put it on someone who isn't me." He looks at Galahad with the particular hunger of a man who has spent four months being the support character in everyone else's story. "You want a bird's eye, you need a bird. I can make you one. Well, not really, you'd still be the same shape, but you'llbe able to fly. I just need to touch your shoulder and say a word and you'll be able to fly straight up out of this bus like a pheasant somebody kicked."

Galahad considers him the way he considered the ward — slowly, from the boots up — and then does something Aria has not seen him do once in four days. He smiles. It's a small, dry, ancient thing, the way a door in a wall smiles when it finally opens. "I have not flown since the reign of Henry the Eighth," he says. "And that was on a ship, and I was seasick before the breakers cast me over the rail and flying into the sea. The ship sank." He looks past Marcus to the window, where the hill has grown from a smudge to a shape — a long low ridge with a single bald crown, no trees, no sheep, no fence, just rock and grass scraped down to the bone. "Very well, Master Skowronski. Make me a bird. But if I fall, I am taking you with me, and I will be extremely tedious about it the entire way down."

Marcus takes the permission before Galahad can find a reason to withdraw it, crossing the aisle in two strides and laying his palm flat on the old knight's shoulder like he's knighting him backward. He says the word under his breath — not Latin, not anything Aria recognizes, just a syllable that goes into the air and doesn't come back out — and Galahad's whole body jerks once, hard, the way a man jerks when he's startled awake in a chair he forgot he was sleeping in. Then he goes very still. He is feeling it, Aria realizes. He is standing in the aisle of a rattling bus with his hand braced on a seatback and he is feeling his own weight stop mattering, and something in his face has opened that she has not seen open once — not at the ward, not at the dragon, not at the blade that burns the dead.

"It's like," Galahad says, and stops. He lifts one boot off the floor an inch and sets it back down with the deliberate care of a man testing ice. "It's like standing in a river and deciding not to be carried." He turns his head toward the window, toward the hill, and the motion is the same as it has always been, but the rest of him does not follow it the way it should — his shoulders stay level, his balance stays wherever he left it, and Aria watches a five-hundred-year-old man discover that the ground has become a suggestion. "I do not require the bus to keep me upright anymore," he says, almost to himself. "I require nothing to keep me upright. This is deeply unsettling, Master Skowronski. I approve."

The analyst has been in the back of the bus behind Galahad for the entire ride with a clipboard she has not written on, and Aria has decided she likes her for it. Her name is Fen, she is maybe twenty-six, and she has the kind of brown eyes that go wide before her face remembers to stay professional — which is happening right now, because Galahad has just said "I approve," and Fen's pen has stopped moving entirely, and her mouth has come open in a small, unguarded O that she does not bother to close. She has been in the Order since she was fourteen, she told Aria at breakfast, and she has never once heard the oldest swordsman in the hall say he approved of anything. He disapproves of chairs. He disapproves of the way the young members hold their forks. He once disapproved of a sunset. And now he is standing on a moving bus with his boots a half-inch off the floor, grinning like a boy who has just been handed a kite, and Fen is watching a five-hundred-year-old legend get a piggyback ride from a man in a hoodie with a spreadsheet.

Marcus, for his part, has not stopped talking. "It's just third level," he says, hands sketching the air, "I could put it on all of you, I've got the slots, I've got nothing better to do with them — I mean, I cast Identify on a sword yesterday, that's it, that's my whole day —" and Galahad, still hovering slightly off the floor of the bus with the road bucking under them, considers him with the same slow gravity he gave the ward and says, "You are, I believe, the only person in this vehicle who is having a good time." Marcus's grin splits wide. "I'm an archmage on a bus to a magic rock, Galahad. Of course I'm having a good time." Fen's eyes get bigger. She has stopped even pretending to take notes. She is just watching, pen hanging loose between two fingers, the way you watch a thing you will describe to someone later and will not be able to describe properly, and Aria catches the look and files it away — the Order's youngest, standing in the aisle of a rattling bus, watching her legend call a hoodie-wearing nerd by his first name and approve of it.

Fen has been standing in the aisle with her pen loose between two fingers for so long that Marcus, mid-sentence about spell slots, gestures past her head like she's furniture, and that's the moment Aria decides the poor kid needs rescuing. She reaches up, hooks two fingers into the sleeve of Fen's corduroy jacket, and tugs her down into the empty seat beside her — the bus rattles over a rut and Fen lands half on Aria's shoulder with a small, startled sound she swallows before it finishes. Aria leans in close, close enough that her breath stirs the fine brown hair at Fen's temple, and drops her voice to a conspirator's register, the same one Jason used to use in the back row of a lecture hall. "Do you think we need to be worried?" A slow nod toward the aisle, where Galahad is still hovering half an inch above the floorboards, watching Marcus like the man is a vintage car he's just been told he can drive. "Galahad is looking at Marcus like he wants to adopt him. And I think he would be a very strict parent."

Fen's eyes go from Galahad to Marcus and back, and something happens to her face that Aria recognizes — the specific collapse of a person who has spent twelve years being professionally reverent and has just been handed permission to notice something funny. Her pen comes up to her mouth and she bites down on the cap to keep the laugh in, and it doesn't work, it leaks out the sides as a snort she tries to convert into a cough halfway through. "He made him fly," she manages, whisper-thin. "He said *I approve.* He's never — I have a log. Since I was fourteen. Every time he's said he approves of something. It's four entries. One of them was weather." She glances up at Galahad again, and the laugh dies in her throat the way a joke dies when you remember who's listening. "He's going to take him to the armory. He does that. When he likes someone he takes them to the armory and hands them a sword and then just — watches. It's the closest thing to affection he's got." She looks at Aria sideways, and there's something careful underneath the amusement now, twenty-six going on forty-five. "Is that a bad thing? For your friend."

Aria doesn't answer right away. She watches the aisle — Galahad has drifted a full inch off the floorboards now, one hand still braced on the seatback like he's holding a rail that stopped mattering a minute ago, and Marcus is explaining spell slots to him with the hand gestures of a man directing traffic in a city that doesn't exist. "No," she says, finally. "It's not a bad thing. It's the best thing that could happen to him. Marcus spent four months being the guy who casts Identify on swords and hides behind the fighter. If Galahad hands him a blade and stands there watching, that's Galahad saying, show me what you've got. To be fair though, when it comes to swords the answer will be ‘not much’." She tips her head toward Fen, and her voice drops the last register, to something that sounds like the truth being said on purpose. "He'll be insufferable about it for a week, though. He'll tell everyone. That's how you'll know it landed."

Fen writes that down. The pen uncaps, finally, and it's the first mark she's made on the clipboard in four hours — a short, tight line in the margin, not a sentence, just a tick that means this one goes in the record. She looks down at it like she's surprised her own hand did it. "I've been in the hall since I was fourteen," she says. "Twelve years. He's never — nobody gets taken to the armory unless they've already earned it. Aethelwine doesn't open the cabinet for just anyone. I've seen him open it for someone new twice."

T

The bus grinds to a stop at the bottom of the hill, and Aria is out of her seat before the engine stops shuddering, gilded sandals hitting the gravel, the wind taking her hair sideways like it has been waiting all day for something to grab. Galahad follows her down the steps with the new lightness still in him, and when he steps onto the ground his boots leave a half-inch of air between the soles and the dirt for one long second before they come down, and Fen — who has trailed them off the bus with her clipboard pressed flat against her chest like a hymnal — makes a small sound in her throat that nobody hears but Aria. The hill is exactly as promised: a long low ridge with a bald crown, no trees, no sheep, no fence, just rock and grass scraped down to the bone and the sky sitting on top of it like a lid. Aria stands at the foot of it and looks up, and the thing she is about to do settles over her shoulders the way the dress settled over her hips the first morning — wrong, then suddenly, horribly right.

She unfolds her wings. They come out of her back the way they always do now, not a tearing but a remembering, and the light off them throws a pale wash across the gravel and the faces of everyone watching. She looks at Galahad. "You go left, I go right, and if you see me start to drop, don't catch me — I'll land better than you will." He nods once, the way he nodded before he stepped into the ring with Mike, and then he is up, boots leaving the ground with the ease of a man stepping off a curb he has stepped off a thousand times, and he rises in a straight line with his arms at his sides and his white tabard snapping, and Fen's clipboard comes down to her side and her mouth comes open and stays that way. Aria launches a half-second later and the two of them climb together into the cold air, and from the ground they are two small shapes against the lid of the sky, one white and one silver, and Fen tracks the smaller one the way you track a bird you are afraid will not come back down.

Dani doesn't look up. She stays planted on the gravel with her hands in the pockets of her jacket, chin tipped back, watching the two shapes dwindle into the cold, and she says it without turning her head. "You're staring at my wife." Fen's whole body flinches like she's been caught stealing, clipboard snapping up to her chest again, and she starts a sentence three different ways and finishes none of them. "I was — Sir Galahad, I was watching Sir Galahad, he's ancient, and he's flying, I've never —" Dani lets her flounder for a full two seconds before she turns, and the grin she gives her is enormous and slow and entirely without mercy. "Relax. I'm joking." She winks. Fen stares at her. The wink does not decode. She looks at the clipboard, then at Dani, then back up at the sky, then at Dani again, and Dani just keeps grinning at her with her hands in her pockets, and somewhere in Fen's face you can watch a twenty-six-year-old analyst decide, in real time, that she is not going to figure this out today and is going to stop trying.

Above them, Aria pulls ahead of Galahad on the right and holds there, wings spread wide, and from this height the barrens look like something the map gave up on — rock, gorse, a single farm track that runs to nowhere and stops, and the bald crown of the hill directly beneath her, scored with old stone the way a knuckle is scored with scars. She hovers, and the wind comes off the ridge in a long steady push that she leans into without thinking, and she lifts one hand and points down at the exact place she means to hit — a broad flat shelf of bedrock near the summit, clear of the gorse, clear of anything that would burn. Galahad comes up on her left and stops beside her, treading air with the patient, faintly offended expression of a man who has decided this is fine but will be mentioning it later, and he looks down at the shelf, and then at her. "There," she says, and her voice carries on the wind the way it does now, small and clear as a bell. "That's the one."

"And that," Galahad says, "is where you intend to throw it." He says it flat, the way he said the hill would grow nothing, and he stays at her left shoulder with his arms crossed and his boots treading air, and he does not look at her when he says it — he looks down at the shelf of bedrock, at the long gray spine of the ridge running out to sea behind it, at the farm track that ends in gorse like a sentence that gave up. "The meteor storm. The one you told the chamber you have never cast. You brought us out here to a place with no roof and no walls and nothing for a mile that would burn, and you pointed at a rock, and I am asking you plainly: is this the test, or do you have some other interest in this hill."

Aria holds her hand out over the shelf a moment longer than she needs to, and the wind shoves her hair across her face and she doesn't move it. "This is the test," she says. "I've thrown bolts at a wall and a fireball at a ceiling and both times there was a room to catch what I missed. There's no room here. There's a hill and a sky and a mile of nothing, and that's the whole point of it — I need to see what I actually do when nothing is holding my hand." She glances at him sideways, and the wind is loud enough that she has to raise her voice, and the raised voice does the bell thing, so the sentence lands on the ridge like a herald's. "So yes, Sir Galahad. That is the rock. Unless you'd rather I practiced on the bus."

Galahad uncrosses his arms and lets one hand fall to his side where the sword isn't, and something in his face has gone careful the way it went careful before he stepped into the ring with Mike — not fear, exactly, something older and quieter than fear. "I have watched men try new things on old ground," he says. "Most of them are dead. I would like to watch you do it instead. But I will ask you one more time, and then I will stop asking: do you know what will come out of your hand when you have never opened it for this purpose?” Below them, on the gravel, Fen has stopped writing entirely and is holding her clipboard against her chest with both arms, and Dani has turned her face up to the two small shapes against the lid of the sky, and neither of them can hear a word of it.

Aria holds her hand out over the shelf a moment longer than she needs to, and the wind shoves her hair across her face and she doesn't move it. "Yes," she says. "I know exactly what comes out." She curls her fingers toward her palm, slowly, the way you close a hand around a coin you're not ready to spend, and drops her voice below the wind so Galahad has to lean in to hear it. "The storm drops one rock for every five square feet of ground it covers. A quarter mile across is about a hundred and sixty-five thousand square feet, which is thirty-three thousand rocks, each of them the size of your fist and moving fast enough to kill whatever it lands on. If I wanted to be careful I could make the circle a hundred feet and still put three hundred of them into that shelf. I don't want to be careful. I want you to understand that the small version is still a bombardment, and the version I have not cast is a mile of sky falling on a mile of ground — a hundred million impacts, in one breath, and I would not have to aim any of them." She lets her hand fall open. "So I will make it smaller than I have to. A quarter mile. That is the compromise, and it is still the largest thing I have ever done, and I would like you to be very far away when I do it."

Galahad does the arithmetic in his face before he does it in his mouth. She watches it happen — the flat gray eyes going inward, the jaw setting, the old soldier converting thirty-three thousand into something a man can hold. "The Somme," he says finally, and it is not a question. "The first day. That was a bombardment, and it took eleven hours to do what you have just described doing in one breath, and it did not stop at a rock." He looks down at the shelf of bedrock, at the long spine of the ridge running out to the sea, at the farm track that ends in gorse like a sentence that gave up, and for the first time since she met him he says nothing else. He just hangs in the air at her left shoulder with his arms at his sides and his tabard snapping, and lets the number sit on the hill.

"Then I'll be far away," he says at last. "Farther than you asked." He turns his head to her, and the wind has scoured the color out of his face, and he is still treading air with the patient offense of a man who has decided this is fine and will be mentioning it later. "One thing, Mistress Mithlass, and then I will go down and stand with the others and hold my tongue. A hailstorm makes for a terrible hammer."

Galahad banks away without another word, dropping in a long clean spiral toward the gravel where Fen has her clipboard clutched to her chest like a shield and Dani is still grinning at the sky. When his boots find the ground his knees take the weight the way knees do, and Fen makes a sound — relief, mostly, and something smaller underneath it — and he looks at her the way he would look at a chair he disapproved of, then says nothing at all, which from him is a kindness. Aria stays where she is, a quarter mile up, wings beating slow and even, holding her exactly in place against the wind like a nail set into a wall. She lets her arms fall to her sides. She closes her eyes.

The spell is not in her hands. She knew that before she left the bus, the way you know a word is on the tip of your tongue — the shape of it, the weight, the taste of the syllable before the sound arrives. She reaches for it the way she reached for the hallway the first week, not with muscle but with attention, and there it is: not a thing she is holding but a thing she is standing inside, a low enormous hum that runs up through her spine and out the top of her skull and keeps going, past her, past the ridge, past the sky. Her chin tilts back. Her eyes are still closed. Behind her lids she sees the circle — a quarter mile of air, measured, marked, the centerpoint sitting on the flat shelf of bedrock like a coin on a table. Her eyes snap open, fixed on that center, and there is no gesture and no word and nothing at all thrown from her hands.

The sky tears open. Violet streaks come down through the lid of cloud, tens of thousands of them, each one moving faster than a bullet and leaving a thin bright line behind it like tracer fire from a gun that has no end, and for one full second the whole ridge is lit from above in a color that does not exist in daylight. Then the first one strikes, and the second, and the third, and then they all do — six seconds, no more, a quarter mile of hillside coming apart under a hammer made of sky. The sound arrives late and all at once, a flat crack that rolls out across the barrens and comes back off the sea. Rock flash-melts where the impacts land and cools in the same breath into black glass. Molten fragments spin up into the column of violet-black smoke that is already swallowing the crown of the hill, and when the last streak lands the ridge is gone — a quarter mile wide, pocked and pitted and ruined, a piece of the moon dropped into Cornwall and left to steam.

She comes down through her own smoke with her wings barely holding their shape, the beat gone ragged, each downstroke costing more than the last, and she does not fly so much as fall with a destination. Her sandals hit the gravel a yard from the bus and her knees fold, and she is crying before the dust settles — not the clean, movie kind, but the ugly kind, mouth open, chest heaving, a sound that has nothing to do with the ridge she just unmade and everything to do with the fact that she did it. The violet light dies out of the air behind her and the hill sits there ruined in the ordinary gray afternoon, steaming, black glass glinting where the bedrock used to be, and she can't look at it. She can't look away from it either. Her hands are shaking and she holds them out in front of her like they belong to someone else, and the tears keep coming, and she keeps saying something too quiet to hear that might be *I'm sorry* and might be *I didn't want to* and might just be the sound a person makes when they've done a thing they cannot take back.

Dani is there before anyone else moves. She crosses the gravel at a dead run with her jacket flapping and she doesn't slow down when she reaches her — she just gathers Aria up, one arm around her back and one hand cradling the back of her head, and pulls her in hard against her shoulder, and Aria goes, all of her weight at once, face buried in the collar of Dani's jacket, both fists knotted in the fabric. Dani doesn't say anything. She holds on and rocks her a little, the way you rock something you're not trying to fix, just keep, and she turns her face toward the smoking hill and watches it with her jaw set and her eyes flat, and the hand on the back of Aria's head stays there, steady, while Aria sobs into her shoulder like the world is ending and it is, a little, some part of it that only she can see. Sera is two steps behind her and stops when she sees them, and something goes across her face — the dragon, the wife, the woman who has spent four months learning the shape of Aria's fear — and she doesn't crowd in. She stands at Dani's shoulder and puts one hand flat on Aria's back, between the wings that have already folded away, and leaves it there.

Fen is the last of them to move, and she moves wrong. She takes two steps toward the huddle and stops, because there is no version of this in the twelve years of log entries — no protocol for the wizard crying on the gravel, no column on the clipboard for the cost. She stands with the pen still loose in her fingers and watches Aria come apart against Dani's shoulder, and what she is writing in her head is not the quarter mile or the black glass or the sound that rolled back off the sea. It is the way the hands shake. It is the way a woman who unmade a hill in six seconds cannot hold her own fingers still. Fen has spent her life documenting the aftermath of power, and this is the first time she has watched it land on the person who cast it, and she does not know where to put her eyes, so she puts them on the ground and keeps them there.

Galahad has not moved from where his boots found the gravel. He stands a few yards off with his arms at his sides, tabard hanging limp now that the wind has died out of it, and there is a single line of wet on his cheek that he does not lift a hand to wipe. He has watched eleven hours of the Somme in one breath and he has watched the woman who did it fold at the knees, and the two things are sitting in him at once, and he does not reach for the soldier to sort them. He does not say the hill will grow nothing. He does not say it was a fine test. He just stands there with the tear drying on his cheekbone and his jaw working once, twice, and then going still, because there is nothing he can say that would not sound like a man asking a woman to be proud of what he made her do. So he says nothing at all, which is the only kindness he has left, and he lets the silence hold the hill.