“Yes,” Jae said, but Tal shook his head.

“No. Or, not only that. Jae, tell me if I’m wrong, but…even if we restore the binding, the Curse will just eat it away again. Fixing the binding would buy time, but to truly restore the Well—to make sure its magic stays bound forever—we need to break the Curse.”

Jae nodded, letting Tal’s words resonate in her mind. Break the Curse. She’d thought it before, when she’d first discovered her magic, before Elan had stopped her experimenting. That had been the goal: to save Aredann, then to break the Curse and free the Closest for good. It had actually seemed possible, just for a couple of days, before Elan had sought to control her. Before Rannith, before Elthis.

But now here she was. Free. She still didn’t know much about magic, but the elemental energies were so much easier to use now that she was unfettered by the Curse. With Tal here, safely away from Elthis and his threats, there was nothing to stop her. She would break the Curse. She remembered unraveling the barrier in the desert, and she even knew how.

“I saw its binding—that knife,” she said. “If we can find it, destroy it, the Curse will break.”

Tal’s face lit like the sun. “We can really do it. Save Aredann, save the Well, break the Curse.”

“But if you do, there will be war,” Elan said. “The Highest will never allow it. They’ll fight to the last to stop you.”

Just like that, Tal sobered. But Jae’s resolve was like a stone inside her, cold and unyielding. “Breaking the Curse saves the Well—and we Closest deserve our freedom. If there is war, so be it. I will fight. And I will win.”

“It won’t do any good to free the Closest if they all get killed,” Tal said softly. “Freedom won’t help Gali if she’s dead.”

Jae started to answer that she’d protect Gali, but stopped, falling silent. Because of course she could. She’d protect Tal, Gali, all the Closest at Aredann. But she wouldn’t be able to protect everyone, the rest of the Closest across the world. Even with magic, she was still only one person, and the Closest would be untrained against the Highest and the Avowed, with their weapons and guards. There would be war, and even if the Closest won, people would die on both sides.

But maybe it was worth it. Before her magic, if she’d had the choice to risk death for a chance at freedom, she would have taken it. She’d have risked anything for that chance, and as terrifying as it was, she thought Gali would, too. Tal was right, the cost of freedom would be high. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t worth paying.

Besides, without breaking the Curse, the Well would be lost. Maybe not now—if she could find what remained of the binding, she might be able to restore it—but eventually. The Curse had ruined the binding once, and the same thing would happen again.

“We’ll do what we can to be careful,” Jae decided. “But we’ll do what we have to.”

“Not careful,” Tal said. “Merciful.”

“The Highest have never shown us mercy,” Jae said.

“I know,” Tal said. “And when we have power—when you have power, Jae, you’ll need to decide what to do with it. What kind of person you want to be. If you want to be like them.”

Jae glanced at Elan, who had gone silent and was staring into the distance, across the Well. Not looking at either one of them as they talked about the fate of the people he’d grown up with, his parents and his sister, his friends. The family he’d loved, who’d lied to him, and now that he was disavowed, who would never forgive him or speak to him again.

She looked back at Tal, who was simply waiting for her answer. She thought about their mother, about Gali and Firran, about the generations before them who’d endured and survived. And Rannith and Shirrad, Elthis’s disdain, his cruelty and his lies.

She met Tal’s eyes and said, “We’ll win our freedom first. Then we’ll see.”

—

It was late afternoon by the time Jae had discovered the Curse’s binding lurking in the Well, and after fighting the Curse and nearly drowning, she was tired enough that she didn’t want to try any more magic without resting. In the morning, she’d try again to find and restore the Well’s binding—she’d be prepared to be hit with the Curse this time—but one night of sleep wouldn’t be the difference between saving Aredann and dooming it.

They had carried food with them from the orchard on the cliff top, so they decided to camp on the shore rather than climb back up. Not that there was much to their camp—they had no sleeping mats, no tent, almost no supplies. But they had flint, and a handful of branches and sticks had been deposited at the cliff base, stripped clean of bark by the water and rocks. They’d dug a pit in the sand and piled in the wood, but so far, none of them had had any luck getting a spark to grow into anything more. The wood was too damp.

Finally, tired though she was, Jae waved Elan and Tal aside and sat in front of the makeshift fire pit. “Let me,” she said, sliding into other-vision. Seeing things that way came to her easily now, and it was getting easier the more often she did it.

But sensing and manipulating fire was not. She struck the flint and forced herself to reach for the spark’s energy, but it was blindingly hot—and after a moment, it was gone. She couldn’t catch and hold it at all.

She struck the flint again, more cautious and aware of what to expect, already bracing herself for the pain. The energy burned once again, but she’d lived with pain every day of her life. She gritted her teeth, braced her mind against the pain, and held on to the energy, clinging desperately to keep it from fizzling out again. But she couldn’t call the energy to her like she could with land, and even holding out against the pain, she couldn’t direct it like she had with the wind. The fire’s energy didn’t just burn; it refused to obey her, and a moment later, despite her effort, it was gone again.

So much for that experiment. At least now she knew that she couldn’t use all four elements, though from what Elan had said, few mages could—and being able to use three was better than most. With the night’s chill setting in as the sun sank, not being able to light a fire was more frustrating than not being able to use the fourth element. If only the wood wasn’t so damp, they wouldn’t need magic to light the fire at all.

When she realized what she’d just thought, she almost laughed. She’d done this before, after all, when she’d first experimented with magic. She studied the wood itself in other-vision, finding the traces of energy in it. Like all things, the wood was a mixture of elements and the strange energy of life, left over from before it had fallen off its tree.