![]() ![]() I don’t know when I’ll return, but you will certainly be women grown by then. My dears, said the last letter, which had come eight years ago. She used to send them letters from Aqa, the imperial city, where, she wrote, people weren’t just white or blue, but every color, and the godsmetal palace floated on air, moving from place to place. ![]() ![]() The girls were only babies then, so they didn’t remember the blue-skinned Servants and their gliding metal skyship, and they didn’t remember their mother, either, because the Servants took her away and made her one of them, and she never came back. The gifts were in them, as they were in everyone, waiting-like an ember for air-should one only be so lucky, so blessed, to be chosen.Īs Kora and Nova’s mother had been chosen on the day, sixteen years ago, that Mesarthim last came to Rieva. Not all of these things together, of course, but one gift each, one only, and they didn’t choose them. They had war gifts and impossible strength and could tell you how you’d die. ![]() They could heal and shape-shift and vanish. They came and went through cuts in the sky. They could fly, or else they could breathe fire, or read minds, or turn into shadows and back. They were the soldier-wizards of the empire. They knew that Mesarthim meant “Servants,” though these were no common servants. They knew about their skin: “Blue as sapphires,” said Nova, though they had never seen a sapphire, either. Kora and Nova had never seen a Mesarthim, but they knew all about them. ![]()
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