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“I just want to say,” Kat managed over an uncertain burble in her throat, “that I think the fact that I’m here is what we should focus on.”

“Is it?” Mira retorted, eying her up and down.

Kat hadn’t made time for a run-in with a reflective surface this morning, but surely she couldn’t look as bad as the face her centurion was giving her implied.

She’d wiped the drool from her cheek. She’d even gone through the trouble of putting her hair in proper battle braids, though that was mostly because the tug of them did something for the headache drilling into her skull.

There had been an attempt, was the point.

The fault was with Mira, if anything, for getting her hopes up.

Kat had staggered back into the decade tent only a few hours ago.

Making it to the field that bordered the marching camp at sunrise was a complete triumph.

“If I wasn’t serious about this, I’d be sleeping in.

Or throwing up in the road trench. I’m ready to give this my all.

Or, well.” Another hitch, this time accompanied by a flush of bile she had to swallow back.

“As much of my all as I can give at the moment.”

Mira’s lip curled. “If you’re so eager, then I suppose we should get started. With laps.”

Kat wilted.

By the time the sun had risen completely, Kat was starting to suspect Mira had no intention of training her as an Aurean, only punishing her for having a bit of fun last night.

Twice she’d had to pull over to the edge of the field, where no one could fault her for leaving a mess, and the token hanging around her neck went unmentioned as Mira ran exercise after exercise side by side with her.

The centurion wasn’t verbally extolling the benefits of temperance and getting to bed early, but Kat could hear the lecture all the same and was starting to think she had some good points.

She was on the verge of begging the hosts for an intercession when Mira finally drew up short at the fence. “Now that the body is ready, the mind can follow,” she said.

Kat would have argued that both were in pretty rough shape, but she’d resolved to grit through Mira’s nonsense.

“Tell me about your token,” her centurion continued.

“It does light,” Kat said.

Mira pinched her brow. “I’d picked that up in the past three years of campaigning with you, believe it or not.”

“I don’t know what more I’m supposed to say. You know the rest. It’s a Light of Angels token, and it’s uncultivated.”

“Have you drawn on it before?”

Kat hesitated. She wasn’t certain what counted in this scenario. She’d managed flickering glimmers from time to time, but she was never sure if they were more on account of her own effort or the angels’ power. “Maybe?” she decided after a long minute.

“Helpful,” Mira deadpanned.

“I thought we’d been over this,” Kat snapped. “Some of us didn’t have tutors to guide our every move.”

“Your token lights up. It should be obvious.”

“Fine. Yes. I’ve had a few times where it listened when I tried to call on it. But it never felt like something I did.”

“It never does,” Mira replied.

“Something I might have known if, again, I had some help along the way. What does that mean?”

Mira ran an idle hand up the chain that held one of the tokens in her array.

“The power a token has is not yours. It starts to feel like yours the more you use it, but the base truth is that these tokens are pinpricks in the fabric of our plane that channel power from the heavenly realm.” She paused, taking in Kat’s dumbfounded expression.

“Surely someone’s explained this to you? ”

Kat snorted. “Makes no sense. The token has the power, doesn’t it?”

“The token is a conduit for the power.”

“But cultivated tokens are more powerful.”

“Cultivated tokens are more easily able to access power. Hosts, what are they teaching in schools these days?”

“Reading. Writing. Addition. Useful skills for a tradesman’s daughter.”

“So then it was your mother who neglected your education,” Mira said with a lancing degree of flippancy.

“Do you want me here?” Kat spat.

“I’m trying to see how badly you want to be here. I’m not going to teach you if you’re not committed to the work. Hosts know I’m busy enough as it is.”

Kat’s dignity frayed, and for a harrowing moment, she thought it might snap. She was on this field of her own volition, and she owed Mira nothing. When she took her release at the end of the road, she’d probably never see this woman again.

But the real problem was what Kat owed to herself.

This was her last chance to wring something more out of the three years of her life that the draft had stolen, to make herself into the kind of woman who could face her father and tell him it hadn’t been for nothing.

She didn’t have years now—she had one summer to turn it all around before she walked back through his door.

And if there was one thing Mira had taught her already, it was how to straighten her back and take a hit. “Tokens are conduits of power from the angelic realm?” she asked through gritted teeth.

Mira’s approving look scraped like gravel on skin.

“That’s correct. Power is not inherent to a token but is instead drawn through it from a different plane by creating an alignment of intention.

Understanding that is key to being able to wield that power yourself and is the first obstacle most people need to overcome to become functional Aureans. ”

Kat would have argued that the first obstacle most people encountered was not being born with a token in their lineage, but she was trying to be a team player. “And cultivating isn’t about increasing a token’s power, it’s about…easing that access?”

“The visualization my tutors used was one of a hole. When a token is in its natural state, it’s a pinprick of access to the heavenly plane. Cultivating is the process of widening that hole, allowing more power to channel through.”

Kat held up her index finger curled into her thumb’s first knuckle, then slid it until she had her fingertips pinched together. In principle it all made sense, but…“How do you make the hole bigger?” she asked.

Mira looked thrown. “Well, you just…I mean…Let’s focus on the basics of channeling before we worry about cultivation.”

“Got it,” Kat said, not at all reassured. “So how do I channel? Because I can tell you from experience, holding on tight and begging the angels for help has not been working out for me.”

Again, Mira looked as if she’d just been asked to join the engineers building the bridge over the river.

“Oh, I knew it, ” Kat snapped. “All this talk about how you’re going to teach me and you don’t even know how to explain the things you do.”

“I can explain them fine,” Mira snapped back. “I’m just trying to figure out how to get that explanation through your meathead skull.”

“If it’s that complicated to wield a token, how do eight-year-olds do it? Or was Daya Imonde making shit up?”

Mira snorted. “I wouldn’t put it past her, but you’re right.

If an eight-year-old can do it, you should be able to pull it off too.

” She folded a hand over one of her tokens, her eyes going distant.

“It sounds like your concept of Aurean magic was always based around the idea that the power was stored in the token. If that’s how you conceptualized what you were attempting to do, it’s no wonder your attempts didn’t succeed.

When you did succeed, you likely chanced into alignment and didn’t even realize you’d been thinking about it differently.

When you put out the call, you’re opening a pinprick of a hole between our realm and theirs, a hole the angels themselves forged a thousand years ago.

Power can only pass through that hole in…

it’s sort of like a straight line, so the hole has to be lined up with the power’s direction… ”

As Mira droned on, Kat began to lose the thread.

She let her fingers play over her own token, trying to get her thoughts into that precious alignment Mira was talking about.

It still felt too abstract for her to grasp, even if she tried to visualize a wall, a hole in it, and a spear jammed through the opening.

It felt delicate, and Kat had never thought of herself as meant for delicacy. Delicacy was for smaller people. More refined people. Not girls born in a forge or women who took up a spear on the front lines. Kat didn’t think about her next move—she was ordered into it by a blast from Mira’s whistle.

But her mother had done this, and if the stories were to be believed, she worked it out on her own. If Bronwyn, crass and bright and maybe not quite as big as her daughter, could work this out, Kat had no excuse.

Hole. Spear. One correct angle of attack. Kat squeezed hard on her token.

And light momentarily speared from between her fingers.

It was gone just as quickly as it came, but the impression it left streaked over her vision was unmistakable. Mira’s monologue had broken off, her centurion rendered momentarily speechless. “That… Yes, that. Do that again.”

Put on the spot, Kat could only flounder. She reached for alignment, but it was as if the hole had moved, as if she had to recalculate that angle of approach all over again. She swore out loud, her fingers aching around the gold as if she was trying to flatten it, but nothing answered.

This was the moment she’d dreaded. The churn in her gut was already awful on account of last night’s choices, but it swelled to a dangerous peak as Kat felt the echo of the moment her mother had slipped away from her.

For one glorious instant, she’d harnessed the magic that had told her stories in shadows on the walls, that had made her feel safe in the depths of a cold winter night—and then she’d lost it all over again.

“What was it? What did it?”

Kat shook her head, her eyes burning. “Not sure.”

“But you felt it. You can feel it again—it should come easier.”

“Yeah, funny how it’s not,” Kat ground out.