“His birth?” Wren asked. “You can’t hardly be blamed for that.”

  “I think I was supposed to be born first. I always told Kasper as much. Ah!” Greer said, triumphantly pulling a teal dress with tiny red and white dots from the rack. “This one was a gift and is much too small for me. Try it on.”

  Wren stepped into the dress as Greer continued.

  “Kasper and I did everything together as children. We were much closer than we were with our younger sister, Olivia’s grandmother. She was ten years younger than us, a surprise addition. I was there when Kasper first discovered his Gift. I ate most of his early work, which caught up with me.” She patted her bottom with a grimace.

  The dress was loose on Wren, but Greer cinched it with a wide leather belt, and the look wasn’t half-bad.

  Greer continued her tale. “We explored his Gift together, discovered what it meant. After Kasper became guildmaster, we uncovered that other guilds had similar Gifted, but with different talents. We still don’t know who all the Gifted are, or what they can do. The guilds guard their secrets jealously.”

  “Did you and Kasper discover why the Gifting occurs?” Why me? she thought. Why am I different?

  “No. We’ve never discovered why a particular person is Gifted while another is not,” she said sharply. “It frustrated Kasper to no end. He was even talking about trying to work together with other guilds, pool knowledge and resources.” She shook her head.

  “You don’t think that was a good idea?”

  “Kasper was always too trusting,” Greer said. “If there are two constants in this life, it’s men and their power. If they don’t have it, they want it; if they have it, they want more of it. Like roosters in the henyard. I didn’t think it was safe to trust anyone. And though it gives me no comfort to say it, perhaps I was right. Because now he’s dead.”

  Wren had to agree with the Guildmistress. But it was an interesting piece of information, if Kasper was indeed trying to cooperate with another guild. Perhaps his efforts to band together had gotten him killed. “What guild was Kasper cooperating with?”

  Guildmistress Greer looked at her shrewdly, and Wren realized she had gone too far.

  “Don’t you worry about that,” Greer said, suddenly shepherding her towards the door. “The king’s inspectors will uncover who was to blame for this horrible crime. No need to worry about things you don’t fully understand.”

  Wren chaffed at the dismissal but knew not to push the Guildmistress’s affability. “Thank you for your assistance with my dress. And Marina,” she added.

  “It was my pleasure. The girl’s only here because Grandmaster Beckett is her father. She misses no chance to make Olivia’s life miserable, so I don’t miss an opportunity to return the favor.” Greer grinned a wolfish smile, and Wren found herself smiling back.

  Wren tugged at the borrowed dress as she made her way to the teaching kitchen. Her stomach growled. She hadn’t been able to eat any of her breakfast, thanks to Marina’s cruelty.

  She found Hale already waiting when she entered the kitchen.

  “There’s my little hummingbird!” Hale exclaimed when she entered, clapping his hands. “I hear you, Marina, and your breakfast had a disagreement this morning.”

  Wren’s face reddened. “She did most of the disagreeing.”

  “Don’t let her bother you,” Hale said. “She’s jealous.”

  “Jealous? Of a suspected murderer?”

  “She wanted Sable to sponsor her, get her away from dear old daddy. He’s strict—and a bit of a self-righteous ass,” Hale said.

  “But… he’s her father,” Wren said. To have a father who cared… even if he was strict… Marina was luckier than many.

  “Right. Sable didn’t want any part of that family drama.”

  Wren shook her head. “I won’t let her pull me in. I don’t know what you saw in her.” Wren tossed this last bit out like a fishing line, hoping Hale would take the bait. Was there anything still between him and Marina? Her interest was purely academic, of course.

  “It was a fleeting madness,” he said. “There was a lot of eyelash-batting and hair-flipping. In the end, she wasn’t really my type.”

  “Your type?” Wren scoffed. “You mean female?”

  “Ouch, this bird has talons,” he said, pressing a hand to his broad chest in mock affront. He drew closer to her with a mischievous grin, threatening to overwhelm her with his size, his bright smile, his sculpture-fine features. “It’s all right, Wren. I like it when they bite.” He feinted towards her shoulders with fingers crooked like claws, quickly, playfully.

  Her heart skittered in her chest, and she drew in a breath, shying away from him. Steady, Wren. The man was incorrigible. He was flirting with her just because he could. Because he enjoyed the effect he had on women. “Are we going to cook today, or are you going to waste the whole morning with sad attempts to stroke your male ego?”

  “Oh, that’s not the part I’m attempting to get stroked—”

  “Hale!” she shrieked, punching him in the shoulder with all her might. “Enough!”

  He rocked back on his stool and guffawed with great booming laughs.

  Wren tried to hold the disapproving mask on her features, but it slipped with a twitch of her lips. She started laughing too, surprised at how good it felt.

  After a minute, Hale settled down, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. “You’re too easy to mess with.”

  “And do you mess with Sable like that?”

  “Sable…” He rubbed his jaw, seeming to be momentarily lost for words. He shook his head. “All right, Wren. You win. We cook.”

  And with that flipped switch, Hale began teaching her how to use her Gift.

  “Lesson number one. It’s a matter of intuition,” he said. “Which you know, because you already used your Gift without meaning to. But it’s important to learn what it feels like when you infuse a batch with magic. As far as we can tell, our Gifts are innate, and we can’t change them. Meaning, if your Gift is producing good luck, that’s pretty much it. You can learn to control the dose, the strength, how long the luck lasts, but you can’t create a confection that heals wounds or helps a man lift a cart with his bare hands.”

  “Makes sense,” Wren said, though she wasn’t sure if it did.

  “That brings us to lesson number two. Magic comes with a price. When you infuse a confection with luck, that luck has to come from somewhere. It comes from you. Your natural store of magic is depleted, transmuted into the food.”

  Wren’s mouth dropped open as her mind reeled. “So… if I’ve been infusing things without knowing it, I’ve been wasting my luck?”

  “Wasting it, gifting it, it’s a matter of interpretation. Who’s to say if it’s a waste?”

  “I am! Trust me, whoever ate those confections, I needed that luck more than they did.” The tenor of her life came into sudden focus. Escaping one cruel captor only to find another. Her father’s drunken rages. Losing Hugo. Brother Brax at the Sower’s orphanage. Life on the street—finding Ansel and his unruly gang of orphans, only to feel the string of his betrayal. Mistreatment, misfortune, misery. Every skinned knuckle, every rent seam, every cup of coffee spilled onto herself. They shone in stark relief. “Son of a spicer,” she cursed. “Everything makes so much sense.”

  Hale tried to hide the smile creeping onto his face.

  “You think this is funny?” Wren said. “My whole life has been a nightmare because I’ve been giving away my luck to gods-know-who!”

  Hale shook his head. “Best we can tell, the Gifting starts in puberty. Whatever woes you suffered before then, you can blame on the gods. Or your parents. Or whomever.”

  Wren calmed down slightly. That’s true. She hadn’t been Infusing things before she joined Master Oldrick, had she. So, she wouldn’t have been wasting magic back then. Another thought struck her with horror. “Will I run out? Have I wasted it all?”

  “No,” Hale said. “As far as we figure it, the depletion is temporary. But if you make an especially strong batch, it will take a bit longer for it to build back up.”

  The breath left her in a woosh, and she slumped back. So as long as she started hoarding her luck, things would look up. That was promising.

  “What’s Sable’s Gift?” she asked, watching Hale for a reaction to her mention of their sponsor. She couldn’t quite get the measure of Hale’s relationship with Sable, and it was bothering her.

  “Bad luck,” Hale said, his expression neutral. “She cooks a lot. Likes to get rid of it.”

  “That could be helpful. Can we give some to Willings? Or Callidus?” Wren said, only half joking.

  “Guildmembers are forbidden from imbibing infused food or drink without the king’s permission. It’s part of the Accord the guilds and the crown reached long ago. But that doesn’t stop us from sneaking a bite now and then.” He winked.

  “So we’re supposed to hand all this power over to the king? Trust he’ll use it wisely, for the good of Alesia?”

  “Yes.” Hale shrugged. “Isn’t that being governed is? Giving power and trusting that it will be used for the good of the people?”

  Wren crossed her arms. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  Hale mirrored her posture. “Enlighten me, my wise owl.”

  Wren rolled her eyes, but memories flared to life and refused to be silent. “I grew up in a logging town in the Cascadian foothills. The forest belonged to the king. The town stores belonged to the king. The blooming shack we lived in belonged to the king. He paid a copper crown for a week of work, and our rent was more than that. We were supposed to pay for wood to heat our hearth. Wood! It was all around us, more wood than a thousand kings could ever need. We had to pay for everything on credit and every month we sank deeper into debt. My father. My brother… It was slavery. It was worse than slavery. At least as a slave, you don’t pay to work. So tell me, Hale, how that served the good of the people?”

  His features were kind, his eyes soft like warm honey. He reached out to take her hand in his own and she yanked hers back, standing and spinning away from him, fighting the sudden sting of tears. Stupid, stupid, Wren. Why had she shared that? Why had she felt compelled? The past was best kept in the past, that girl kept locked away. Her father had deserved everything he had gotten, and more beyond. Visions of blood and violence swam up to meet her, and she shoved them back down, tamped down earth and night and iron over those memories.

  “Wren.” Her name was soft on Hale’s lips, and she gave herself one final shake before stilling her face and turning.

  “Sorry. I don’t usually don’t dwell on the past.”

  “I’m sorry your family went through that. I know the system’s not perfect…”

  “Forget it,” she said. “Let’s just talk confections. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” Hale said, with more than a little hesitation. “I thought we could make caramels today.”

  “Caramels?” Wren asked.

  “You’re familiar with them, I presume?”

  “Of course,” she said. “It’s been a while, but I know how to make them.”

  “They’re simple. I thought they would be a good confection to start with.”

  Wren and Hale gathered the ingredients from the icebox and the cupboards. They laid out the tools they would need—a heavy-bottomed steel pot, a large square baking tray, the confection thermometer, measuring cups, parchment paper, and the guitar cutter that would slice the caramel into perfectly even squares.

  Hale rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and tossed Wren a thick linen apron, donning one himself.

  Hale worked as the master confectioner with Wren as his assistant, directing her to measure the ingredients they needed: sugar, water, heavy cream, butter. So simple.

  “The magic, as best we figure it, is a combination of mind and body. It comes from your movements—the stirring, the pouring, the cutting or drizzling. But the movements themselves aren’t enough. It’s almost like meditation. You’ve felt it before, I’m sure, when you get in the zone of work. Your mind and body are humming together, your hands working as if they need no direction from your mind. It’s a place of feeling, of instinct and intuition, of transcendence.”

  Wren nodded, understanding his words exactly despite the vagueness of them. She had felt it, those moments where her talent took over and she was one with her confections. She measured and added while Hale spoke. The butter and cream, melted together and set aside. The sugar and water, turned on high to begin caramelizing.

  “It’s easiest to use your Gift when you’re alone, and when you’re in a familiar kitchen. It’s innate in you, but the more you consciously practice, the more quickly you’ll learn how to slip into the mindset, the better you’ll get at summoning it by will. Make sense?”

  “It does,” she said, looking at Hale with a new respect. He was more than muscled forearms and a trim waist in his apron. From the tenderness in his words… she could see that he loved confections as much as she did, felt this in his blood. She was unprepared for the sudden fondness that swept over her, awakened by her recognition of his kindred spirit.

  “I’m going to leave you now,” he said. “To let you finish. I wish you good luck in discovering your Gift.”

  Wren watched the caramel bubble as the thermometer crept higher, entranced by the luscious golden color that deepened and browned. The smell of toasting sugar frosted the air, swirling about her senses. Her soul felt at rest for the first time since Callidus had seized her arm in Master Oldrick’s shop. Her vision—her very consciousness—narrowed to the spinning sugar, the chemical reactions, the flickering blue flame of the gas burner beneath the pot. As she added the cream and butter, whisking the swirls of golden brown and milky white, she felt the power of creation within her, the giving of her life to create this joyful sustenance for others. She felt a trickle of self winding into the bubbling pot, infusing and binding until the caramel became something more than mere sugar and cream. She had felt this before and had thought it love and care and pride in her work. Now, she saw it for something more.

  Once the creamy caramel reached the right temperature, she seized the pot and heaved it, deftly pouring the contents out onto the waiting parchment-covered tray. She shook the tray gently until the candy settled to the bottom, as soft as silk and as smooth as glass. She sank onto the waiting stool before her creation.

  She had done it. Magic.

  Wren’s elation over her success was short-lived. While cleaning up the kitchen, she managed to whack her kneecap on the kitchen island, close her fingertips in a cabinet door, and trip over the stool, which seemed to manifest out of nowhere directly between her feet. Wren had been lanky and uncoordinated all her life, but had usually managed to keep it together in the kitchen. But now that she knew how cooking spent her magic, it seemed her luck had run out on that front as well.

  Wren left her confections to cool, and found herself in the hallway with an entirely unknown commodity on her hands: free time. Her growling stomach informed her of her first order of business, and since it was well past lunch time, she made her way to the real kitchens, where she managed to beg a bowl of cool cucumber gazpacho soup with a dollop of minted cream and triangles of buttered toast. She wolfed it down, the crisp tastes of the cucumber and mint silky on her tongue. Returning the licked-clean bowl with a murmur of thanks, Wren headed for the Guildhall’s library. It seemed as good a place as any to solve a mystery.

  Wren hadn’t been in many libraries, but she imagined this library was unique. First was the fact that it was brimming with cookbooks—some published, some hand-lettered in cramped scrawls and butter smears. It was evident that the collection was the result of years of study and collection by the guild members. Books on other subjects seemed an afterthought, relegated to a lone set of shelves in the far corner of the room. Second was the fact that it was really more kitchen than library. Bright and airy, rather than dark and forbidding, full of white and gray-veined tile rather than dark wood panels, this alternate rendition suited Wren just fine. Rather than a fireplace, a kitchen stove stood sentinel in the room, and coffee and delectables were laid out for the taking along the long countertop. Third were the mismatched sofas and armchairs that dotted the room like they had blown in from a squall. Cracking studded leather couches, velvety divans, and brocade wingbacks sat about the room in a potpourri of furnishings. The library felt worn and real, like catching a glimpse of the guild waking up in the morning before it had washed and put its face on. She loved it at once.

  Wren had the library to herself, and she set to work putting a kettle on the stove, filling the glass press with fragrant coffee grounds. She explored the room while she waited, peering at a fox and geese board left abandoned on one of the tables, its carved white geese and red foxes frozen in form. On a threadbare marigold armchair sat the front page of the day’s Maradis Morning, the city’s newspaper. She snagged it and returned to the stove, where the kettle was cheerfully boiling. Coffee in hand, she settled into an enveloping gray-blue sofa facing the far window. She closed her eyes and blew out a breath. Her days at the Guildhall had thus far been filled with people, navigating the treacherous water of human interaction. It was a far cry from her days with Master Oldrick, where the only conversation she might have had in a day had been with an unruly batch of nougat.

  She tried to categorize what she had learned so far but found her thoughts drifting to Hale and Lucas. Both had gone out of their way to help her. But why? For what purpose?

  Footsteps sounded down the hall and Callidus swept into the library, one of Marina’s lackeys in orbit behind him. What was the black-haired boy’s name? Lennon.

  Wren scooted down on the couch so her head wasn’t visible over its back, peering around the edge to watch the two men.

  “If you sponsored me, I could be useful to you. Assist with your duties, look out for your interests among the guild. I’m a trained journeyman; you wouldn’t even have to take much time to finish my education.”

 

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