Chapter 2: The Collectors

"You. Girl. Come out here."

Sera didn't move at first. She was sitting on the edge of her cot, hands pressed flat between her knees like she could keep them still by sheer force, and the voice from outside the door was not one she knew. Not Bett's, not her mother's. A stranger's voice, clipped and cold, the kind that expected to be obeyed the first time it spoke.

"I said come out."

"Sera." Her mother's hand found her shoulder, and it was trembling, actually trembling, in a way Sera had never felt from her before, not even the night her father didn't come back from the mountain pass. "Sera, love, you have to go out there."

"Who is it?"

"I don't... I don't know. Three of them. They rode in an hour ago, on horses like nothing I've ever seen, all grey and silver, and they asked for you by description before anyone even said your name." Her mother's voice cracked on the last word. "They knew, Sera. Somehow they already knew."

Sera stood. Her legs didn't feel entirely like her own legs.

Outside, the morning was too bright, the kind of hard clean light that comes after a fire's finally out and the smoke's cleared and the world looks scrubbed raw. Three riders sat their horses at the edge of the square, and Sera understood immediately why half the village was pressed against their windows instead of standing in the open to look. The riders wore grey, head to boot, with silver clasps at the throat shaped like something Sera didn't recognize, a circle split by a jagged line. Their horses didn't fidget the way horses did. They stood dead still, ears forward, watching her the way the riders were watching her.

The one in front dismounted first. A woman, maybe forty, with a face like she'd forgotten how to be surprised by anything a long time ago.

"You're the one who stopped the fire."

It wasn't a question, so Sera didn't answer it like one. "Who are you?"

"That's not how this works." The woman's eyes went over her, slow, the way you'd look at a horse you were thinking of buying. Not unkind exactly. Just utterly without warmth. "Show me your hands."

"Why?"

"Because if I have to ask twice, I stop asking nicely." But even as she said it, something flickered behind her eyes, quick and gone, and Sera realized with a strange lurch that the woman was afraid. Not of Sera exactly. Of what Sera might be.

Sera held her hands up. Ordinary hands. Calluses from the well rope, a burn scar on the left thumb from years back, nothing at all to look at.

The woman stared at them like they might do something on their own.

"Elder said you cut a firebreak fifteen feet wide with your bare hands." This from the second rider, a younger man, still mounted, who hadn't taken his eyes off Sera since she'd stepped outside. "Said it stopped dead at the line you drew. No jump, no spread."

"I don't know what I did." That much was true, at least. "I just... I reached for it. And it came."

The three of them went very quiet at that. The woman glanced back at her companions, some silent exchange passing between them that Sera couldn't read, and when she turned back her face had changed, gone tighter, more careful.

"What's your name, girl?"

"Sera."

"Sera what?"

"Just Sera. We don't, we don't really do family names here, not since, well, not for a long time."

The woman nodded slowly, like this confirmed something. She crouched, right there in the dirt of the square, bringing herself down to Sera's eye level in a way that felt less like kindness and more like a hunter getting a better angle.

"Sera. I need you to understand something, and I need you to understand it now, before this goes any further." She paused, and for just a moment her voice lost its flatness, dropped into something almost, almost gentle. "What you did yesterday. That kind of fire. It isn't supposed to exist anymore. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"

"No." Sera's voice came out smaller than she wanted it to. "I don't understand any of this."

"Fire affinity like yours was bred out a hundred years ago. Hunted out, some would say, though you won't hear that phrase where we're going." The woman's eyes didn't leave hers. "You are, as far as I know, and I have been doing this work a very long time, the first true fire mage born on this continent in a century."

Behind Sera, someone in the village had started crying, quiet, and she didn't dare turn to see who.

"That's not, that can't be right, there's no one, there's no one who could have taught me, I didn't, I never—" The words were tumbling out faster than she could organize them, and she made herself stop, made herself breathe, the way her mother always told her to when the panic got too big for her chest. "I've never even left this village."

"I believe you." The woman stood, brushing dust from her knees, and something in the set of her shoulders had shifted, some decision made. "Which makes this worse, not better."

"Worse how?"

The woman didn't answer that. Instead she turned to the younger rider, still mounted, and gave a short nod, and he wheeled his horse without a word and rode hard back the way they'd come, dust kicking up gold in the morning light, gone within seconds like he couldn't wait to put distance between himself and the square.

"Where's he going?" Sera's mother's voice, sharp now, stepping up close behind her daughter like she could shield her with her own body. "What did you just do?"

The woman in grey looked at Sera for a long moment before she answered, and when she finally spoke, her voice had gone very quiet, almost careful, like she was choosing to say less than she knew.

"He's carrying word to the capital." She held Sera's eyes, unblinking. "Three words, and they'll know exactly what they mean, and exactly what to do next. The old fire has returned."