Isadora’s mother grasps her hands and smiles at her.
‘I know this is your first time, but everyone in the coven has been there, and we are here to support you’.
Isadora looks around the circle, nods, picks up a handful of herbs and throws them into the cauldron. As she stirs, she recites under her breath the first spell she has ever written. She dips a silver chalice into the brew but, before…
No matter how she tried, Rhona could never dispel the chill that seeped to her core. Be it the peak of summer, or the darkest day in Wintermarch, the Trevelyan's youngest had skin cold to the touch, the barest of breeze brought shivers that wracked her entire small frame, her nails: perpetually purple.
The healers thought it a slow wasting sickness, a remnant of the illness that swept through Ostwick a year after her birth. Even if they didn't say it, she knew her parents agreed; somber eyes and concerned, thin-lined mouths, whispered words from behind half-closed doors. Rhona was sharp for nine however, and the servants gossiped unchecked. Personally, the young girl disagreed with their assessment. She knew sickness, what it looked like: the wan countenance Elend always wore, the way her brother coughed and spasmed without warning. What it meant when he had one of his episodes and his nurse came running, poultice in hand, yelling for the nearest person to help carry him to his room. Her youngest brother was feeble and pallid, barely capable of going outside for the fresh air and sunlight he needed desperately. Rhona was not weak; she was just grey and cold, as if someone had dumped snow on the glowing coals she had been born with.
It wasn't an illness she knew, it was like... when one of her mother's love birds died last spring, and the remaining one, wilting and sad, managed little but chirping mournfully. Like she was cut off from a piece of herself with no inkling of how to find it again.
This was not an attitude anyone else seemed inclined to consider, and consistently, to her great annoyance, Rhona found herself being treated with the same soft hand used for Elend. Her other brothers, her mother and father, the servants and guards, even her friends; their pity and lack of understanding stirred a youth's fury, and just for an instant in those angry moments Rhona's embers dared to alight again.
Not everyone took this approach though, especially her tutor: a hawk-eyed, slip of a woman, and a sister in the Chantry. In her eyes everything came at the hand of the Maker's divine will; only piety and prayer could save you. Anything short of that was a false cry for attention. The youngest of the Trevelyan's resented this philosophy, if possible, more than she did the coddling. If the Maker was so omnipresent, if his power was everywhere, what more did she have to prove to feel complete?
According to her tutor: Much.
"Manners."
“Relight it, please.” Rhona stressed the last word, shivering even before the window was thrown wide open, beckoning in the late autumn wind. Her illustrious tutor made no move back towards the fireplace she had stifled only moments before. Rather, she fixed her young charge with a hard glare over her nose.
"Once you've finished your tables I'll consider it." That was a no. "If you can complain, then you can study. Your parents feed into your demands for attention far too often." The woman sniffed disdainfully as if somehow personally slighted by the Lord and Lady Trevelyan's attitude towards raising their children.
"It's not for attention." Glowering, the young girl fired back. "I'm cold. I need the fire going, my fingers have gone numb. Relight the fireplace or I can't work."
They often argued along these same lines until one of them (it varied by the day) relented. Today however, after months of this, neither would stand down. Both were at their ends with each other.
"Can't? Or should you say won't?" The breeze fluttered her robes menacingly as the Sister stomped to Rhona and her desk. "Pick up your pencil. Now."
Rhona crossed her arms and jerked her head back towards the cold hearth, goosebumps raised on her skin. "No. You restart the fire." She paused and met her tutors eyes, imitating the affronted expression of the woman's brows and mouth. "Now."
That was the final straw, her tutor wrenching her student's arm, her grip as powerful as the bite of a mabari. Rhona yelled, tugging against the constraint, much more angry than scared as her pencil was forced into her hand.
"You are an insolent child. Start your maths or not even the Maker will help you."
"Let me go you, you hag!" Rhona fought against her. "Damn you and damn the Maker! Don't take it out on me because he doesn't give a damn about you either!"
The slap echoed through out the room.
Rhona's cheek burned where she'd been hit, every bit of her body raging at being touched so. Her tutor towered over her, scarlet and furious; the little girl had struck a huge nerve. The woman's chest heaved as she fought between calming herself and laying another blow on the child still twisting in her other hand. The golden crest upon her robes had bunched up, ugly and deformed in the cold light streaming through the window.
"I said-" Spitting through her teeth, Rhona yanked her arm back unsuccessfully, hissing out the words with the same tone she heard her father use on those he had to punish. In this moment she hated her tutor, she hated the months of being told she was a liar, she hated being looked down on, she hated the stupid amulet that swung from the Sister's neck and the way her hair was pulled back. It boiled in her, volatile and unstable, with her free hand she pried at the fingers around her wrist. "Let. Me. Go."
The quill in her captured hand burst into flames, and at the same time her tutor yelped, dropping her, fingers bright red, having been burned. Any fury the woman was chased out by the fear. Their tables had been turned; Rhona's fists full of streams of fire, pulsing with her rapid heartbeat. Her tutor could only manage a strangled swallow somewhere between scared and disbelief. She was out the door before the youngest Trevelyan had a chance to harm her again.
For the first time since Rhona could remember, she felt warm, felt complete. She should have been stunned by the magic, perhaps been scared of the flames that licked her palms and danced up her fingertips. Instead Rhona was instilled with a sense of utter... there was no other word but rightness. Blood pounded in her ears, the ashes from the quill still floating down around her. The calmer she became, the more the magic faded, receding back beneath her skin, protective and warm. It tickled and pulsed with her heartbeat, replacing the hollowness that had plagued her for so long.
Curious she turned in her chair back towards the cold fireplace. Fingers extended, and with only a thought, the logs rekindled. Light flooded the room.
Brilliant, warm, sure. Finally the whole of herself.
---
Standing at the gates, her family saw her off the next day. Even Elend watched silently as the templars escorted her out with nothing but a small pack of clothes and the flames now resting in her chest.
Her parents wore a different kind of sorrow then they had before, these expressions now flecked with shame. Only her father would meet her eyes and Rhona's anger flared again as her brothers and mother refused to even glance at her. She wanted to speak, wanted to tell them that she was better, to prove she had never been ill. But judging from their expressions, that would not be of any consolation.
A templar gripped her shoulder, steering her off the estate as she lagged hoping for that one final chance to hear her family, the unexpected touch enough to startle the angry young girl. To her horror she reached for the fire to protect her, only to feel like she'd been dunked in an icy bath. Whatever he did sent her back to that frigid place, away from the magic that had put life back into her.
---
Rhona spoke not a word on the carriage ride to the Circle. In the weeks to come she'd learn how her emotions called forth her spells, how the templars worked to contain that. She learned to hate them, to resent their presence and their power over her, over her own power.
She couldn't ever go back to being cold, to being only a part of herself. The fire was hers, and she would see any who tried to take it burned.
