Sundeera watches Kywen fidget from the stands. No less surprised than anyone else, she tries to imagine why Kywen would bid the Elemental clans. It is Sundeera who can easily harness water, air, and fire, and the more she thinks about it, the more this choice makes no sense. About the only positive she can come up with is that it’s better than the disaster of Kywen risking herself to the Wiovan, but she was sure she had convinced her to impress the Flora clans enough to be able to snag her choice of a northern contract.

She tries to catch Kywen’s eye, but she doesn’t want to draw the attention of those around her. Weighing the options, she feels the recognizable creep of panic begin to bloom in her belly. Closing her eyes, she whispers a chant of mindfulness and concentrates on her breath. Maintaining control of her emotions, she opens her eyes and movement flickers at the edge of her vision. Without turning her head, she watches someone slide smoothly into the corner of the stands a few paces from where she stands. Initially bathed in shadows, he stops halfway under the smallest pool of moonlight spilling through the crown shyness of the canopy above.

Her calm starts to falter again as recognition dawns upon her. The Heir Watcher stands nonchalantly among the crowd, eyeing the bidders with keen interest. He looks taller than she remembers. It could have to do with the fact that he was only sixteen when she and Kywen saw him at the last Silverleaf Festival two seasons ago or that he was always a hundred yards or more away.

She cringes at the thought of Kywen making a fool of herself in front of the heir. Despite Kywen’s tendency to put on a careless attitude for everyone else, she knows all too well how deeply her nexum’s sensitivities run. Lighting a twig on fire, as is her most impressive Elemental feat, would only lead to immense embarrassment, especially with Jorrel standing front and center for the display. She wonders if her plan can be altered to kill two birds with one stone. Make Kywen look good, but keep her true strength hidden.

Sundeera considers a wild new idea, thinking back to when the two of them used to play Push. Using unregulated magic is frowned upon, but using it against anyone outside of formal instruction is highly illegal, and the risk was part of the fun. Their game had them face each other twenty paces apart and hurl their currents against each other in a reverse tug-of-war, using strength and control to push . Whoever lost enough ground would gather their magic into a shield at the last second, and the other’s current would burst against it in a shower of sparks. But the last time they ever played, Kywen started backing up and slipped on a patch of slimy mud just as Sundeera began to overpower her. As she fell, Kywen’s shield no longer swirled in front of her. It pointed up at the sky instead, and Sundeera hit her with a blast of magic, unable to recall her current.

The instant panic that washed over her effectively erased Sundeera’s memory like a wave over a message scrawled in the sand. Only minutes later, she couldn’t recall what kind of magic she had been channeling or how, exactly, her magic had struck Kywen. She could only remember Kywen starting to fall and then seeing her nexum sprawled in the dirt, groaning. Sundeera ran over, and as she got closer, she could feel an electric charge around them. She reached out to her, and a thin blue spark arced between them with a crackle. As Kywen sat up with her help, the charge in the air became audible, buzzing until their ears popped. Within minutes, the low hum had all but disappeared, and by the evening, they agreed to pretend the entire thing had been nothing but their imagination.

It didn’t take long, however, before she could sense some kind of connection, something tethered between them, especially when they were close. She kept being pulled like a magnet towards her nexum like she could sense the magic running through Kywen’s veins, and it was the first time she got an idea of Kywen’s strength as well as the odd way her magic pooled around her.

The noise of the Collaboration fades away as Sundeera pictures the balmy afternoon, days after the accident, when they were practicing their latest elemental lessons from Keeper Rhandi. A gentle breeze stirs around them as they sit in the tall grasses of the meadow by the creek. Kywen had been growing more and more frustrated with her inability to craft a flame globe larger than a grape before it would fizzle into a wisp of smoke. Sundeera could feel a deep tension in the air, but her mind was on Kywen’s palpable annoyance.

“Why don’t you focus on the sensation of fire, let the heat spread out from your core and into your fingers, like this,” she said and closed her eyes to begin the spell.

She had only been trying to help, she remembers as another bidder is selected and walks over to the sparkling clear pond near the front of the arena, trying to show Kywen the way she connected with fire. After a small shiver danced down her spine, she had heard Kywen scream and opened her eyes as a flaming sphere the size of an over-sized melon burst from her cupped hands. She watched Kywen shove them away from her face. Without thinking and still tethered to Kywen, Sundeera reached out and released the fiery globe, sending it flying in an arc towards the creek. The girls watched with their mouths hanging open as the fireball scorched across the sky and landed with a sizzling splash into the water.

“What in the spirits was that?” Kywen yelled.

“I didn’t . . . I just,” Sundeera stammered, “you didn’t conjure it?”

“I definitely did not just nearly singe my eyebrows off,” Kywen said, the whites of her eyes shining, “it just happened out of nowhere. I wasn’t even trying to channel.”

“I think, maybe, it’s possible I did something? I don’t know, I could feel how upset you were getting, and I just imagined, er, well I pictured us doing it at the same time.”

Kywen was silent for a few minutes, looking down at her hands. “Do it again,” she whispered.

For the rest of the afternoon, Sundeera tested the limits of the strange ability. As long as they remained within eyesight, she could channel an impressive amount of Elemental and Spirit spells through Kywen, as if they were performed by Kywen. The connection remained for half a moon cycle, but even the idea of someone else finding out about what happened turned their stomachs, so they rarely channeled together after the first few days. Knowing the punishment for performing unregulated magic on another person, they made a pact to never tell another soul, not even Kywen’s parents.

After the tether eventually broke, they agreed not to try again, and Sundeera was relieved that neither of them could quite remember how to attempt it again. She continued to thank the spirits each night that Kywen wasn’t hurt by her magic. They had no idea how or what they had done, and she was ready to keep it that way. That is, until the uncannily vivid dreams she began to experience halfway through her Inaru training.

When a novice passes the Netherlight Trials, they are given the first of the Inaru’s initiation potions. Dreamsong potion, a bubbly, glowing blue liquid, enhances Spirit magic, opening the user to a well of power for a limited amount of time. After swallowing the fizzy brew, her head began to pound, and her vision blurred. She had gone to sleep that evening with her head as heavy as stone, and during the night, memories of the Push accident unfolded with vivid detail.

Sundeera assumed it had been her primary discipline, Elemental magic, that she had been battling Kywen with, but in the dream she found herself experiencing the event from Kywen’s perspective. She was surprised to see the deep purple glow of Spirit magic as it spiraled toward her in a slow spiral. Her vision went dark, and her perspective shifted back into her own body, watching as Kywen’s legs flew out from under her, arms swinging up into the air. The magic entered through Kywen’s feet and coursed through her body, colorful sparks crackling throughout her hair and at the tips of her fingers.

The crowd’s roar snaps her attention back to the present, and Sundeera swallows the lump in her throat as she takes a few steps to her right. She doesn’t want to be too close to Jorrel as she forges a binding. She allows only a trickle of magic to flow into the Spirit spell she casts, sending a thin, nerve-like network of filaments through the deck and into the ground. Ignoring the bidder’s water dragon swirling through the air, she gently pushes the tendrils towards the spot where Kywen leans against the wall. Her breathing steadies and slows as she presses forward with nearly undetectable twitches of her fingers, the magic twisting its way through the dirt like sentient vines. She exerts a steady flow of energy to minimize drawing the crowd’s attention, but the dwindling pool of bidders forces her to push her limits. She can feel how close she is to Kywen as she drives the violet coils just a few more feet, guiding them until they wait just under her boots. As a thin layer of sweat lines her forehead, she hesitates for a moment. Taking one last look around, she flicks her hand up with force, bent at a severe angle at the wrist.

She feels the connection right as Kywen jumps from the jolt. The ground around her flashes a darker green, and Kywen looks startled to realize she is up next. “Spirits watch over us,” Sundeera whispers as she steps back from the crowd while they lean in with excitement.