They had only glimpsed her, so she could only touch their eyes. There would be more opportunities later. Over time, she would make what she knew replace their mere beliefs, and she would make their most zealous twice as earnest in that zealousness. She would make brown and black bend the knee to white, once they had served her purpose. But all of that would come later. For now she was content to work by increments, to use who she could.

Thralls milled around her, seeing to individual tasks. She had heard one of Chevalier’s men saying the word, and she’d liked it enough to keep it. They applied restraints to people who were one step away from being corpses.

All around her, thralls paid her their worship, and they invoked her. She allowed fragments of herself to manifest, to look around, and she could see everything.

But with her own eyes she saw Chevalier. She approached him, and she raised a foot, planting it on his shoulder, while he knelt with hands and knees on the ground. His armor was too heavy for him to lift. Teacher had stolen his power.

That touch of foot against shoulder reverberated through the man.

She took that reverberation and she made it into touches. An embrace that crawled across his skin.

He’d looked at her earlier, and now she filled his eyes.

But more than anything, he had sensed her with something else, something beyond sight. He had seen her aura, and now she invaded that seeing, took hold of it. He could look at those blessed with power and know them on a profound level, see memories, history, feelings, and the nuances of power, often in abstract.

So she gave him that. She gave him herself. Memories of herself as a pregnant teenager, praying, praying for recourse. Her parents had tortured her, her school had abandoned her. She hadn’t even known what pregnancy really was, let alone the labor, and each new aspect of it was a horrible surprise. The only grace, if it could be called that, was that the state had said it was her right to care for her child. They did not force her to give up her Elijah to her parents, as her parents had demanded. Her parents had forced her to choose between home and the child of her womb, and she had chosen the child.

It had not been easy. It had been the stark opposite of easy.

Particularly when her child, still suckling at her breast, had looked up at her with eyes that flashed, and had asserted his will over hers. Blessed child. Cursed child. One in a million, among those who were one in thirty-thousand.