The evening had turned cold early, though the candles crowded around her desk kept the chill from mattering much. Mira's black hair had come loose from its pins hours ago, and her golden eyes hadn't left the page in front of her for the better part of an hour.
Mira was three chapters into A Practical Study of Rare and Untraceable Poisons when Zoe knocked twice and let herself in without waiting for an answer.
"Dinner is served, young lady." Zoe's eyes caught the book's spine before Mira could turn it face-down. "Does the Marquis know what his daughter reads before bed?"
"He knows I read." Mira closed the book anyway, marking her page with a pressed leaf that had long since given up being green. "He's never asked what."
"Perhaps he should." But Zoe was already at the wardrobe, running a critical eye over the dress Mira had worn all afternoon. "You can't go down looking like you fought the armchair and lost, mistress. Give me one moment."
Ten minutes and one hairpin crisis later, Mira was presentable enough to be handed down to dinner.
Ronan was smiling when Mira came down, the easy, unguarded smile he wore most evenings with no particular reason behind it — just a father glad to have his children at the same table. It didn't last past the second course. He set down his glass, and Eric sat up straighter without quite knowing why.
"The Temple sent word this morning," he said. "The yearly prayer for the nobility falls on the full moon this cycle. Your mother and I will attend, as always." A pause — the kind Mira felt a beat before she understood why. "They've asked that Mira attend as well, this year."
Lizie made a small, delighted noise into her soup. Eric looked between his father and his sister as though trying to decide which of them deserved more awe.
"Me?" Mira said. It came out flatter than she meant it to.
"You're eighteen now." Silvia's voice carried the particular gentleness she used when a subject was tender. "Eighteen-year-old daughters of the nobility are expected at the Temple of Glory. It's tradition."
Mira knew what the tradition actually meant, even if no one at the table wanted to say it plainly over the soup. Eighteen was the age a Source finally settled. The age a family presented their newly-ranked daughter to the immortals who'd died protecting the realm she now had a measured place in. Look what we made.
She had nothing to present. Everyone at the table knew it.
"I'd like to go, Mom," Mira said, and meant it, mostly. "I've never seen the Maya shrine. Only paintings."
Something crossed her father's face too quickly to name — pride, maybe, or worry wearing pride's clothes — before he reached for the water pitcher and refilled Eric's glass like nothing at all had happened.
"Tell me about her," Mira said. "Properly. Not the nursery version."
Ronan considered this the way he considered most things — slowly, and with the sense that he was choosing each word before it left him rather than after. "Maya Immora," he said finally, "was a warrior born into a noble house in the Divine Realm, much like this one, though I doubt her father expected her to become what she became. She didn't ascend to godhood by blood the way most immortals do. She earned it — battle by battle — until even the heavens had no choice but to call her what she'd already made herself into."
"And the shadows," Mira said. "The ones from the underworld."
"A thousand years ago, they rose against the Source Stone — the very thing every living Source in this world descends from. If they had devoured it, nothing you or I have ever known would exist." Ronan's voice had gone quieter, the way it did whenever he wanted something to actually be remembered, rather than simply heard. "Every god the heavens had went to that battlefield. It wasn't enough. It was Maya who ended it. Alone, by every account that survives."
Eric had stopped eating entirely, chin propped on both hands, and even Lizie — who had heard this story more times than she could count — was leaning so far across the table that her elbow had landed in the butter dish without her noticing.
"And then she disappeared." Mira had heard this part a hundred times, and it never sat right, no matter how many times she turned it over. "No body. No explanation."
Silvia took a slow sip from her wine glass, and over the rim of it, gave the table a look that was half fond and half exasperated. "You children," she said, "how many times are you going to listen to the same story and still lean in like you don't already know how it ends?"
"Oh, let them," Ronan said, with the same easy smile from earlier, before turning back to his daughter. "No one has ever explained it," he continued. "The heavens searched for years. Some say she simply walked away from a world that had already asked everything of her." He didn't finish the sentence the way the old stories usually did — with the colder word, the one about betrayal — and Mira noticed the omission without knowing what to make of it. "Whatever happened to her, she's the reason the nobility still kneels once a year and gives thanks. Whatever you feel when you stand in front of that shrine, Mira — trust it. Most people only get to feel it once."
Silvia reached over and covered her husband's hand with her own, briefly, and said nothing at all, which was somehow louder than if she had.
The portrait of the Maya shrine hung at the top of the staircase, the way it had for as long as Mira could remember climbing it — Maya rendered mid-battle, flame caught frozen in the paint, a face the artist had clearly guessed at more than known. Mira stopped in front of it longer than she meant to, the way she always did, and did not have an answer for why.
Zoe was sitting on the edge of Mira's bed, turning down the sheets, when Mira came back up from dinner.
"You've gone quiet, young lady." Zoe didn't look up from the linens. "That's usually a bad sign."
"I asked my father about Maya." Mira sat at her vanity and began pulling pins from her hair one by one. "Properly, this time."
"And?"
"He told me the story carefully. Like there was a version he wasn't giving me." Mira caught Zoe's eyes in the mirror. "You don't have to pretend you didn't hear all of it from the hallway."
Zoe had the decency to look only slightly caught. "I heard enough, mistress." She set the last pillow in place and came to stand behind Mira's chair, taking over the hairpins with practiced hands. "I'll say what I wouldn't say at that table. The whole capital is going to be watching you, not the shrine, at that Temple."
"I know."
"I don't think you do, entirely." Zoe's hands paused. "I've heard the maids two houses over call you the Marquis's hollow daughter. I wanted to slap someone."
"You'd have gotten yourself banned from an entire noble household."
"Worth it." But there was no real humor left in Zoe's voice now. "I don't understand it, young lady, if I'm honest. Every healer your family has ever brought in says your Source is there. Just sitting quiet, waiting on something. That isn't how it works for anyone else I've ever known."
"I know," Mira said, and meant it more than Zoe could have realized. "I've tried every morning since I was seven."
"I know you have." Zoe's voice softened, dropping some of its careful distance for just a moment. "I'm not saying it to be unkind. I'm saying it because I don't want you standing in that Temple pretending you don't hear what they whisper."
Mira looked down at her own hands in the mirror's reflection — at fingers that had never once, not on the coldest morning of her life, produced so much as a spark of anything. Source was supposed to be simple. It flowed down from somewhere above the world, and it settled into a person the way breath settled into lungs, and by eighteen it had a name and a color and a place in the world's understanding of you.
Water. Light. Earth. Wind. Fire. Source energy could manifest into almost anything — the power of an element, or, more rarely, a spirit bonded to it — but everyone alive walked through exactly one of those five doors by the time they came of age.
Mira had never walked through any door at all.
And yet — this was the part she'd never said aloud, not even to Zoe — she had never once felt empty. The healers always measured the same thing: energy level nine, one point short of the ten Manifestation required. Source existed in everyone. Hers simply wouldn't cross that line.
She simply had no idea what it was waiting for.
"Get some sleep, young lady," Zoe said at last, setting the final pin aside. "Whatever's waiting for you at that Temple, it can wait until morning."
Mira nodded, and did not say that she wasn't entirely sure sleep would help. The Floridae name had carried four generations of healers before her — Water and Light, gentle hands and gentle magic — and she had none of it, not a single measurable drop, no matter how many mornings she'd tried. She blew out the candle and lay in the dark, thinking about that until, eventually, she slept.