Hina walked south all day. The road was narrow and winding, climbing steeply into the hills.

Flocks of red birds flew overhead, and Hina watched them as she walked. She had never seen birds like these before, bigger than Hina had thought that birds could be. But they flew high above. Bean gripped her shoulder tightly and was silent for most of the day. He clung to her like a statue, except for when he greedily accepted bits of food from her hand.

He didn't fly overhead as they walked like he had the day before. Hina wondered if he was still injured, or if he was just tired.

In the afternoon she camped at the entrance to a shallow cave, protected on three sides. She checked it thoroughly for signs of habitation, but except for a few old bones and some spiderwebs, it was empty. Nothing had been here for a long time, and no passages led deeper into the hill. She cooked, and ate the best meal she'd had in weeks, meat and rice and beans, spiced and seasoned with the salt shaker.

Mentally, she thanked Olivia for the food, and then cursed her for leaving Hina alone. Or perhaps that wasn't fair. Hina couldn't decide. She wished that Olivia was here.

That night, Hina dreamed that she was in the bakery again. Her hand was on the knife as it went in to Lagi's chest. And it felt right. A warmth flooded into her as Lagi collapsed to the ground. The sense of satisfaction lingered until she woke with a start, and rolled over to look for Kai, and then remembered.

She was alone.

* * *

The birds sang as the sun rose. Though their voices sound more like angry shrieks than the music of the birds that Hina was used to. And they were loud. But no matter. Hina was up and moving before the sun had fully risen. And that was a good thing, because she had a lot to do today.

Today was the day—Hina was going to try the sigil. And it would kill her or save her, she didn't know which. But she had to try.

She ate slowly, sharing leftovers from last night with Bean while she thought it over. He was still quiet, but he chirped and croaked in response to the food. While she ate, she thought about the sigil, and how she was going to tackle it.

There were no backups here. If she got into serious trouble like last time, Kai wasn't here to save her. Olivia was gone. But if she didn't do this, then she had nothing and Kai was as good as lost. There was no world in which the light working would be enough to overcome Gerda and save Kai. She needed more.

And if she ended up losing herself here to the sign, trying to save Kai, was that worse? Worse than going to The Grove with nothing to help her? Worse than losing Kai for good?

Hina didn't think so.

Kai was worth the risk.

Crossing her legs beneath herself, Hina sat on her blanket by the ashes of the fire. She felt for her boundary—for the edges of her ambit, and the potentia that flowed beyond. She drew it in, cycling potentia into power again and again until her well was full to brimming.

The sigil popped fully formed into her mind as she the thought of it, but no—she dismissed the sigil with a flex of will.

Hina could do better than that. There was no need to be impulsive. She was in control, and she would take her time.

From her bag, she took out everything that had a chance of helping her: the two earth-aspected beast cores, her wand, and the crisp white paper card with the sigil printed on it.

She considered the trinkets for a moment, but decided that they wouldn't help, not without knowing what they did. Or, perhaps—she took out the bell and considered it. A bell of unbinding, Olivia had said, though she hadn't been sure. Maybe if she rang it, it would help Hina to dismiss the sigil if it got out of control.

With careful hands, Hina unwrapped the string around the clapper, and set it on the ground in front of her. And then she put the card with the sigil on it directly in front of her, and rested her the wand in her lap. The beast cores she balanced on her folded knees—inside her ambit, just in case she needed them.

It wasn't that she knew that the wand or the beast cores would help, but they couldn't hurt. The cores were earth-aspected—probably—and she was working with stones. It seemed appropriate.

She also took out her notebook and a freshly sharpened pencil. She put these to one side, within reach. If Hina succeeded, she wanted to record everything.

Hina needed to learn its lessons.

From the pouch at her belt, Hina took three of the heavy black stones that she'd taken from The Spire and placed them in a triangle around the card.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Glancing at the images on the card, she reached out with her mind, and summoned the sigil.

It filled her mind's eye with complex twisting lines—lines that reminded her of the vines of a thorn bush, or the roots of a tree, coiled into a three-dimensional ball.

It hung there dormant, rotating slowly. Radiating its sheer want in waves of rising intensity. When the growing pressure didn't get a reaction from Hina, the waves began to decrease in strength. It settled into a pattern of rising and falling waves of want as Hina watched it.

It wanted power.

Hina held it there, looking for a sign that it was going to overpower her, a sign that it could.

The sigil didn't move beyond its constant rotation. It didn't fight her. Maybe it couldn't.

It gave her a sense of interrogation, of waiting.

Hina took a deep breath. She was in control. It couldn't hurt her.

The sigil felt like a well of infinite patience, waiting for her to make the first move. To tell it what she wanted.

Hina breathed, and focused on what she wanted to happen. The stone at the top of the triangle, floating.

She fed the sigil a trickle of her power. A tiny thread extended towards it.

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The sigil flared to life within her mind, rotating faster and faster. It yanked on the thread of power she'd offered it, pulling hard, trying to draw more from her.

With a flex of her will, Hina held the thread steady, resisting the pull. Holding to what she was offering, allowing nothing more. She tried to stay calm, reminded herself to breathe deeply.

When she was calm again, Hina focused on the stone once more. Up, she visualised. Up.

Nothing.

Maybe it needed to be within her ambit? Oh. Of course it did.

Cheeks reddening, Hina picked up the stone. She rested it on top of her open hand in front of her lap. Not directly under her face—it had a clear path to the sky. Up, she visualised again. Up.

The sigil pulsed in reaction, tendrils unfolding within her mind. It pulled hard on the thread of her power, and when it didn't succeed in expanding the channel, it stopped fighting her, and drew on the thread.

Hina had the sense of a cup, filling up slowly as a trickle of water was poured into it.

After six heartbeats, the cup was full to brimming and she felt the last drops meet a threshold. A pattern flashed into her mind, empowered, twisting—she only caught a flash of it, and then it was gone. Replaced by another, which was banished just as quickly.

The stone shot into the air with a loud whoosh as it passed her head. It flew up and up, and then it was gone.

Hina dismissed the sigil with a flex of her will, and waited. After a moment, she picked up her bag and held it over her head, just in case. The stone did not return.

The barrier around her campsite broke with an loud snap.

Hina looked around, but nothing else happened. Nothing crashed back into the ground where Hina had been sitting. She put the bag back down.

Bean croaked at her, tilting his head to one side.

Hina shook her head as she turned to a new page in her notebook. She sketched out approximations of both of the patterns that she'd briefly seen in her mind before the stone had shot up. She wrote down the date, the approximate time of day—morning—and the location. She estimated the length of time that each pattern had been shown—fractions of a heartbeat—and the timing between the two. And added a drawing of the stone just in case.

She would need to try that again before she was sure that the pattern was right.

So she did.

Hina summoned the sigil again, and fed it a trickle of power, and shot another stone into the air and once more wrote down the patterns that it flashed into her mind.

They were the same patterns as before, and between the two sketches, she was pretty sure that she had transcribed them correctly.

It was enough for now, time to try something else.

Collecting the beast cores that had fallen to the ground, Hina took her position again. She put two more of the shiny black stones on the ground, and held one in her hand.

She was going to need to go looking for the stones she'd sent flying, but it could wait.

The sigil popped into her mind and Hina fed it a tendril of power. She was ready for the pull now, and held steady. She visualised the next stone—something less dramatic this time—floating in a slow circle around her.

The sigil pulsed, tendrils unfurling. It yanked on the thread of her power—it wanted more, much more. Hina resisted, fighting the sigil. After a few moments, the sigil ceased, went still.

Nothing happened.

There was no sense of a cup filling, just stillness. A sense of waiting.

Why did that not work? All she wanted was for the stone to float around her. Was that too complicated? Was it difficult to do?

Hina dismissed the sigil while she thought about it. The stone was starting within her ambit—the other working hadn't worked until the stone was inside her ambit. But to orbit, the stone would need to move away, and then come back. And when it came back, it would have to do that from outside her ambit.

Maybe that was too difficult.

But the first time she'd used the sigil, boulders had lifted into the air from well outside her ambit. What had been different? The working had been entirely out of her control, the sigil had been running wild.

Maybe it wasn't a good comparison for what she was trying to do now. Something to ask about at the academy.

Working under the assumption that she could only act on the stones while they were inside her ambit, what would be the most useful thing that she could do with them?

Slung stones shattering the animated statues in the temple came to mind. If she could use the working to throw them with more force than she could manage with the sling, and without the wind up, that could be a useful weapon. Especially if she could learn to throw them more accurately.

Hina summoned the sigil again, and fed it a tendril of power. She visualised the stone in her hand, and visualised it flying through the air, flying forward.

The sigil pulsed, tendrils unfurling. The image of a cup filled over the course of a heartbeat. Patterns flashed into her mind, one after the other in staccato sequence.

The stone flew forward and smashed into the rockface on the other side of the campsite with a deafening crack, sending a cloud of dust and shattered stone flying in all directions.

Bean squawked loudly from his perch nearby and flapped into the air, his wings beating hard.

Hina uncovered her face. None of the stones had been thrown her way, luckily. "Sorry!" she called out, but Bean was already gone.

Fair enough. That could have gone worse. Better not to chase him, she supposed.

Hina wrote down the patterns while they were fresh in her mind.

And then she tried it again, aiming further afield, at a pile of rocks about a hundred meters away.

The patterns that flashed into her mind were different this time, different in both symbols and sequence. The stone flew through the air, and smashed into the rocks, sending a cloud of dust up.

She wrote it all down as best she could.

When she tried it a third time, with the same target, the patterns were the same as the previous time.

She added speed on the next attempt, willing the stone to fly towards the same set of rocks, only faster, with more force.

The image of the cup took half a heart-beat longer to fill, and the patterns were entirely different from the previous attempts.

After the third attempt at that same working, she thought she had the patterns recorded correctly.

The question was, could she use those patterns herself, without the sigil?

Hina dismissed the sigil, and took a deep breath.

The working as she'd recorded it consisted of only two symbols, but the sequence was precise and the timing seemed to be important. She practiced the patterns, summoning them one after another in turn until she felt like she'd gotten it right.

And then she considered the power. She visualised a cup of power filling up, to roughly the same size as the cup that the sigil had shown her. And then divided it into four equal parts—on her best guess about how the sigil was distributing the power between the individual patterns.

With the portions of power ready, she summoned the first pattern and shoved a portion of power into it, and then the second, and then the first again, and then the first one a final time. The timing as close as she could manage to what the sigil had shown her.

The pressure of the working built up within her, and Hina focused on the direction that she wanted the stone to go.

The stone shot out of her hand, flew through the air and smashed into the rocks. A cloud of dust erupted into the air.

Success.

Mostly. It had worked, but it was not quite the same. The working had taken her longer to complete, and the stone had flown noticeably slower than it had with the sigil. She supposed that some of the force of the working had been lost somewhere—maybe the timing was off, or maybe the power distribution. The working had felt unbalanced, somehow.

But it had worked. Even if it wasn't perfect, it was a start.

She would need to work out a better solution for practice as she travelled. Some kind of target, maybe. The flour sack stuffed full of something soft and yielding. Maybe she could stuff it with grass.

Hina looked up at the sky, the morning was half-gone. She needed to get going.

Whistling long and low, Hina wondered if Bean would come back, or if this was it. A lump formed in her throat at the thought of losing him, too. She needed to be more careful.

After a few long moments, Hina whistled again, and then she waited. She hoped she wouldn't have to tell Kai that she'd lost him.

An answering whistle came from behind the rocks on the other side of the campsite, and then Bean fluttered down from the sky to land on her shoulder with a croak.

"Hey, welcome back," she said.

He nipped her earlobe.

"Ouch!" she said. "I'm sorry, okay!"

"Bad girl!" Bean croaked.

"I didn't mean it! Ow!" She covered her ear with one hand.

Bean nipped her thumb.

"Hey! I'll let you know next time, okay?"

Bean croaked at her, stopping the attack on her fingers. "Break-fast?"

"Fine, fine. Give me a sec."

Hina opened up her bag and took out a handful of beans and offered them to the monster clinging to her shoulder.

Bean cackled in between bites.