It was late the night she did it, and cold.

Ealin lay in her bed in the apprentices' quarters, her eyes closed as she feigned sleep, but she was too nervous to actually fall asleep. She waited until the hour was sufficiently late. She waited until all of her fellow apprentices had settled, until the sounds of hushed talking and rustling of bed covers had stilled for the evening, and then, only then, did she rise from her bed.

She looked around the long dormitory hall. There, narrow pallets were arranged with their heads toward the walls, a small chest at the end of each one, and in the beds lay the apprentice mages, near fifteen of them, each of them like a perfectly-matched game piece from a set for cross-the-sea. They lay with their heads on their pillows, all of them exhausted from the day's long work and study.

Ealin reached under her pillow and pulled out a small canvas bag. She tucked it into the front of her robe and then crept from the hall, moving silently on bare feet in the hopes that she would not be noticed by anyone—especially not the apprentice-master, a cruel whip of a man.

In her bag, Ealin had everything she needed except the solitude to work, and that, she found in a little-used storage chamber not far off from the kitchens. There, she had already placed an oil lamp and flint and tinder that would provide the illumination she would need to do her work.

The hinges squealed as she opened the door, but it was past the middle hour of the night, and everyone was abed. Ealin shut the door behind her, and in the pitch darkness, she groped for the lamp and made quick work of lighting it. She adjusted the wick, and the golden light spilled throughout the tiny chamber, illuminating the corners and casting flickering shadows up the walls.

She shivered.

From her canvas bag she took cotton padding, a roll of white muslin, a sewing kit, and a small flask of liquor. She also took out a bloodstone the size of her thumb, oblong and smooth, and a small kitchen knife she had ferreted away weeks ago for this very purpose.

Ealin laid these things on the canvas bag, spreading them before her on the stone floor.

This will work, she thought. This is the answer to his ambitions. I have solved it. If only I am brave enough.

She drew a deep breath, uncorking the flask and first wetting the blade, then the bloodstone. And then, in the privacy of that little room, she took off her roughspun robe and her shift and sat, shivering and naked, on the floor.

She had chosen a place that would be concealed by clothing, because she imagined there would be a scar. Over her chest, above her heart. She set the point of the blade to her breast and drew a breath.

The pain is temporary.

It took a very long time, owing to how much her hands shook. It is a strange thing, to cause oneself such pain—to carve a line down one's own chest in blood, opening a gap in the flesh sufficient to accept a foreign object the size of a young woman's thumb. There was so much blood. She rinsed some of it away with the liquor and had to bite her own tongue to smother her scream. It took some time for her to gather her wits again. When she did, she poured a little liquor over the bloodstone.

Ealin's fingers slipped and fumbled as she tried to tuck the bloodstone into her body. She was no stranger by this point to blood, nor to wounds, and so the nausea that had once threatened each time her father took a needle or a knife to her was nowhere to be felt.

Once the stone was pocketed beneath her skin, Ealin pressed the edges of her skin together and sat, shivering, staring down at the puckered wound and at the blood that had run in streaks over her breast and her stomach.

This will work. This must work.

She reached for the bottle of liquor and doused the already-threaded needle. Then, she lifted the liquor to her lips and drained the rest of the small flask. It was the first she had ever had in her life.

This part proved to be too much for her. She managed only a few stitches and an ugly, clumsy knot; it was too painful, too slippery, too delicate, and the adrenaline that had soothed her senses and the liquor that had numbed her nerves could not give her the courage to keep poking that needle through her tortured flesh. So she managed with the few hideous stitches, and she told herself she would bear the scar.

The cotton padding would stick to the wound when she tried to change her dressing, but for now, she was grateful for the way the soft material hungrily soaked up the blood; the bandage came next, wound around her chest several times to hold all the cotton in place. At last, she stood up, wobble-kneed.

It had seemed like she would drown herself in an ever-expanding pool of blood, but standing up and staring down at herself and the floor, she was amazed at how little there was. She could scrub up the mess on the flagstones with the canvas bag she'd brought, and she used the same to wipe the dagger clean. The extra bandages she used to clean herself as best she could, and, as she was tasked with the washing of her own laundry, she was not afraid of people seeing a bit of blood on her clothes.

She dressed, gathered up her things, and, feeling drunk in more ways than one, she made her way back to the dormitories and sank into a restless, unhappy sleep.

***

Ealin kept her secret for weeks.

She hid what she had done because the wound was healing. She watched it closely to ensure the flesh was knitting, and she kept it clean, and she bandaged it, and she bore the pain. Soon enough, she was assured that despite her lack of skill in the stitching, the wound would heal completely—if not cleanly.

Indeed, she was left with a hideous scar, a knot of tissue under her collarbone made more prominent by the presence of the stone underneath the skin. Although she had cut straight, her stitches had been ragged, and the resulting scar was a zigzagged and puckered mess.

It didn't matter. Ealin did not care what it looked like, and no one else in the world would ever see it unless she chose to show them. The scar was hidden easily beneath her clothes.

What mattered was that her experiment had worked.

She could summon magic now without a special weapon, without a bloodstone that could be dropped or lost or stolen. It was the culmination of her father's ambitions. She knew it was not precisely what he had dreamed; it relied, after all, on a bloodstone. Were she to bear a child, would she pass this power along to the baby? She did not know. She hoped she would, but a part of her knew she wouldn't.

Still: the Arcborn were marked when they were still quite small. It was a ritual that dated back to the Separation. Perhaps the Starborn, or at least those destined to become mages, would dedicate themselves to their own ritual.

Ealin was desperate to tell her father, to show him what she had achieved...but weeks lengthened into months, and there was no chance. He was more and more often at the palace doing important work with the emperor, spending his nights there frequently. When he returned, he locked himself away in his quarters, not to be disturbed.

Ealin had no opportunity to see her father, let alone speak to him. Let alone show him what she had done.

Time passed, and Ealin waited. She would be patient.

Her father was a great man, an important man; while the war was not more important than their destiny, she understood that it was momentarily more urgent.

She would reveal her success the next time her father called her to participate in an experiment.

That day never came.