Chapter 3: The Offer

"You cannot be serious."

Sera's mother was on her feet before the second rider had even finished dismounting, and there was nothing careful in her voice now, nothing hushed. "She is fifteen years old. You cannot ride into this village and tell me you're taking my daughter to the capital like she's, like she's livestock to be collected."

"With respect." The woman in grey, Sera had learned her name was Instructor Vell, didn't so much as flinch. "No one said anything about taking her against her will. I'm here to make an offer. Ember Academy is prepared to grant your daughter a full scholarship."

"A scholarship." Her mother's laugh had no humor in it at all. "For what? To be studied? To be paraded in front of the same people who bred her kind out of existence a hundred years ago?"

"To be trained." Vell's eyes flicked to Sera, steady, unreadable. "Untrained fire like hers doesn't stay small forever. It grows. And when it grows without discipline, it stops asking permission before it burns."

The words landed harder than Sera expected. She thought of the wildfire eating Maren's field, and then, underneath that thought, something colder: what if next time it wasn't a firebreak that came out of her hands. What if next time it was just fire, going wherever it wanted, and her standing in the middle of it with no idea how to call it back.

"What happens if I say no?" Sera asked.

Vell considered the question like it deserved real weight. "Then you stay here. And every collector, every hunting party, every noble house with an interest in fire magic will eventually hear that the old fire walked again in a farming village with no walls and no guard. I would not want to be here when the wrong ones arrive first."

Sera's mother went very still at that.

"Is that a threat?" Sera asked.

"It's a fact I'd rather you heard from me than learned the hard way." Vell's voice didn't change, didn't sharpen, and somehow that made it worse. "I am not the only one who received word this morning. I was simply the closest."

Silence dropped over the square, thick enough that Sera could hear the wind moving through the burned wheat behind them, dry stalks whispering against each other like they were passing the news along too.

"How long would I have," Sera said slowly, "to decide?"

"Not long. I'd like an answer before I leave tonight."

Her mother turned to her then, hands closing hard around Sera's shoulders, and for a moment the fear in her face wasn't about the strangers in grey at all. It was older than that, deeper, the fear of a mother who had already lost one person to a road that didn't lead back.

"Sera, you don't have to do this. We can hide you. We can go north, to your aunt's, no one would think to look—"

"And what happens to the village when they do look, and find out you hid me?" Sera kept her voice gentle, but she didn't look away. "You heard her. It's not only me they'd come looking at."

Her mother's mouth opened, closed. She had no answer for that, because there wasn't one, and they both knew it.

Sera turned back to Vell. Her hands had stopped shaking, she realized. Somewhere in the last few minutes they had simply gone still, steady, like something inside her had already decided before the rest of her caught up.

"If I go," she said, "does it stay away from here? From my village?"

"That would be my recommendation to the Academy, yes. Once you're under our roof, under our protection, there's little reason for anyone to trouble a farming village that no longer holds what they're looking for."

It wasn't a promise. Sera heard the gap in it, the careful legal shape of my recommendation instead of my guarantee, but it was the only door in the room, and every other option led somewhere worse.

"Then I'll go."

Her mother made a small broken sound behind her, and Sera turned and folded into her before she could stop herself, breathing in wood smoke and flour and the particular smell that had meant safety her whole life, holding on like she could store enough of it to last.

"I'll write," she whispered. "I'll find a way."

"You'd better." Her mother's voice was wrecked, but there was steel underneath it too, the same steel that had held this family together since Sera's father didn't come home. "You come back to me, Sera. Whatever they teach you up there. Whoever they turn you into. You come back to me."

"I will."

They left within the hour. Vell didn't wait for goodbyes to run long, and Sera understood without being told that this was mercy, not cruelty, that a short goodbye hurt less than a slow one. She climbed onto the horse Vell's remaining companion brought forward, a grey mare that stood as unnervingly still as the others, and she did not look back at the village until they'd crested the first hill, and by then the smoke from yesterday's fire had thinned to almost nothing, a grey smudge low on the horizon, already being swallowed by distance.

They rode in silence for the better part of an hour before Vell finally spoke again, not turning her head, eyes fixed on the road ahead.

"You should know something before we reach the capital roads. Something I didn't say back there, in front of your mother."

Sera's stomach tightened. "What."

"Fire mages of your kind were not simply forgotten, girl. They were hunted." Vell's voice was flat, careful, the voice of someone laying out a fact rather than an opinion. "The histories call it a fading. A natural death of the bloodline. That is not the truth."

"Then what's the truth?"

Vell finally turned her head, and in the hard morning light her eyes looked older than her face, tired in a way that had nothing to do with the ride.

"The truth is that fire mages are supposed to have died out a hundred years ago. And you are the first proof, in a century, that they didn't."