It had never been about embroidery at all for her, had it? It had been a way to pass on the protection of the runes, something her family must have carried with them from mother to daughter over the centuries, back to the days the Stranniki had carved the symbols into their swords and armor.

But that memory was not important. It was just accessory. By the time I was six, the Strannik temple had been reduced to smoldering ruins, and that dim, labyrinthine neighborhood cradling the cliffside lay deserted and plundered. It would be another year until the Groznaya War ended, and another four until the snowy night my mother strode boldly to her death in order to save me.

What came next was the magistrate’s wife.

When my mother had brought me to the magistrate’s house for the first time, I remember shying away in fear, recognizing the young woman from the second-floor balcony of the Troika temple, where she sat alongside her husband and gazed disinterestedly at her feet. With her flaxen hair, waxen complexion, and rheumy blue eyes, when she sat in the shadows, she appeared on the verge of fading away entirely. I didn’t realize how young she was then. Everyone was an adult to me.

Even in her own estate, the magistrate’s wife seemed lethargic, sprawled on the window seat like a wilted hothouse flower while my mother tailored the armfuls of lace and silk clothing the magistrate had mail-ordered from Svet. The only time I had seen the teenage girl use her gift was to play with the raindrops on the window glass, causing them to flow in aimless patterns, until her interest waned and the streams she made sluiced away with all the rest. Sometimes, as my mother worked, the magistrate’s wife would squander her expensive rouge and powders on me, idly coloring in my face and curling my hair with iron crimpers heated over a candle, but most of the time she sat at the window and did nothing at all.

But the magistrate’s wife was not important. She, too, was just accessory to the tragedy.

The important thing, the truly important thing, had been the magistrate, hadn’t it? A good two decades older than his wife, striking in his crimson Tribunal coat, his polished boots, his mink-fur cap. He had ruffled a hand through my hair when he came across me in his wife’s sitting room and called me “little blackbird,” as though we were already familiar. The first time he requested my mother’s assistance in mending a tear in his uniform coat, she sat at the dining room table, silent and impassive, while he stood over her and watched her work.

“You have a pretty girl,” he told her, glancing over at me. His smile was warm, but something about it frightened me, and I shuffled behind her chair back. While his wife reminded me of a pet rabbit, with his sharply cropped brown hair, jet eyes, and severe features, he brought to mind a raptor. “She must get it from you. Your husband is not so pretty.”