Lyra's eyes went unfocused.
Not in the blinking, disoriented way of someone surprised. In the slow, absorbed way of someone watching something that had their full attention. Her breathing stayed even. Her hands, resting on the garden wall, went very still. Tsuki, who had been watching Arthur with increasing interest throughout the lesson, turned to look at Lyra's face instead.
It lasted about twenty seconds.
Then Lyra blinked, and her eyes came back, and she sat there for a moment with the expression of someone who had just been shown something and was fitting it into where it belonged.
'I saw it,' she said.
'Really? First, how do you feel? Any pain?'
'I feel perfectly fine but I understood it.' She said it like she was still slightly surprised. 'I understood all of it. How to draw the mana, where it goes, what it — '
'Perfect,' he said. 'That's the point. You have it now. You just have to call it.'
Lyra stood up from the garden wall. She looked at her hands.
Then she turned and ran for the open yard.
Arthur stayed on the wall.
A moment later, from the yard:
'WATERBALL!'
He heard it from the garden, heard his mother's startled noise from the kitchen window, heard Clara's chair scrape back. He stood up and walked to the garden gate in time to see the aftermath.
Lyra was standing in the middle of the yard with both hands out in front of her. Between her fingertips — floating, wobbling slightly, approximately the size of a large apple — was a ball of water. It caught the morning light and held it, perfectly formed, dripping slightly at the bottom where the surface tension was doing its best.
Tsuki was doing loops around Lyra's head. Not hovering — actual loops, small rapid circles, her white coat leaving faint silver trails that faded before they finished forming, the twin tails spinning. She made the chirping sound she made when something had genuinely delighted her.
Lyra was screaming. Not in distress — in the specific register of someone whose body had produced a response before their brain had finished processing what had just happened and screaming was the only available output. She looked at the water ball and she looked at her hands and she looked at the water ball again and screamed.
Clara hit the kitchen door at speed.
Mira came out a step behind her.
They both stood in the yard and stared.
'She just — USED MAGIC!! ' Clara started.
'Hahah I know, I taught her.' Arthur proudly said with a smug smirk across his face.
'From her hands — '
'Mhmm, Yes.'
Lyra, apparently remembering he existed, turned toward him. Her eyes were bright and her voice had not yet come down from the register it had climbed to.
'ARTHUR! Now what?!'
He looked at her. He looked at the ball of water she was still somehow holding. He said, very reasonably:
'Put it in a bucket. Or on the garden. Or just let it go, it's water.'
Lyra stared at him. The waterball wobbled.
'That's it? I can't shoot it at something? I can't hit a monster with it?'
'Pffft, it's just a water ball, Lyra.'
'But it's my first spell! It should be — I don't know — more. Can't it explode? Can't it shoot out really fast?' She looked at it with the expression of someone who had received a gift and was trying hard to appreciate it but had been hoping for something with a bit more firepower. 'It's so anticlimactic.'
Arthur's eyebrow moved.
'You just made water appear out of thin air from your hands,' he said. 'Using magic. Which you have had for approximately forty seconds.'
'I know but — '
'The water ball exists because it is how you learn to control mana. Once you can control mana, I can teach you the spells that shoot things and hit monsters.' He paused. 'Which I am now going to do, so perhaps hold your complaints until the part where I teach you those.'
Lyra's expression shifted immediately from disappointed to interested.
'You're going to teach me offensive spells?'
'I was always going to teach you offensive spells. I started with water ball because if something went wrong I wanted you to be wet rather than hurt.'
'...Fair.'
She let the water ball go. It splashed onto the dirt between them in a perfectly ordinary way.
'Arthur,' she said, and her voice had come down to something that was just warm and genuine and quiet enough that Clara and their mother couldn't quite hear it. 'Thank you. Baby brother.'
He looked at his sister, who had just cast her first spell, whose magical signature he now recognized as something unusual and promising and not yet fully understood, and who was looking at him with the specific expression she reserved for moments she wasn't going to make a fuss about but was going to remember.
'Don't thank me yet,' he said. 'You have a lot of homework.'
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He had been back at the garden wall for approximately three minutes when the shadow fell over him.
He looked up.
Clara was standing in front of him. She had her hands clasped in front of her and Kiiro was on her shoulder and both of them were looking at him with variations of the same expression — Kiiro with the amber-eyed patience of something that had staked out a position and was prepared to hold it, and Clara with the very specific look of someone who understood that they were about to win an argument and was being gracious about it in advance.
'No,' Arthur said.
'I didn't say anything.'
'I know what you're doing.'
'I'm just standing here,' Clara said. She tilted her head slightly. The morning light came through her long blonde hair in exactly the way that it did and she knew that it did and Kiiro, as if aware of this, shifted to sit more prominently on her shoulder.
Arthur looked at his sister. He looked at Kiiro. Kiiro blinked once with the slow deliberate patience of someone who had already won.
'I was going to teach you anyway,' he said. 'You can quit the puppy dog eyes.'
Clara's expression became the expression of someone deciding whether to be dignified about the fact that they had just been caught.
'Can I go first?' she said.
'Lyra went first.'
'But she's already done. She's standing over there being very excited about water. I could go second.'
'Sit down, Clara.'
She sat down on the garden wall immediately, hands in her lap, with the precise posture of someone who had decided that being the model student was the fastest path to what they wanted.
Arthur looked at her for a moment. Then he reached out and ran the diagnostic.
Clara's signature was different from Lyra's. Where Lyra's had that quality of patient readiness — the quiet vibration, the clean light — Clara's was something he could only describe as compressed. Dense and very warm and contained with the specific tension of something that wanted out and had been sitting on itself for thirteen years without knowing that's what it was doing.
He had a strong suspicion about what her affinity was going to be. He thought about the water ball and decided he was not starting with fire.
He built her an ember spell instead. Small, controlled, stable — the spell for lighting a fire. Safe, practical, warm. And if he was right about her affinity it would come naturally, which was a better introduction than struggling against something that didn't fit.
He built it carefully, one component at a time, the same methodical single-mind construction he had used for Lyra.
Then he imprinted it.
Clara's eyes went unfocused in a way that was entirely different from Lyra's. Where Lyra had gone still and absorbed, Clara's face moved through three expressions in about four seconds — surprise, recognition, and then a wide grin that she didn't quite manage to contain.
She was on her feet before the twenty seconds was up.
'EMBER!'
A small, precise flame appeared above her fingertip. Not a spark — a flame, steady and warm and confident, burning without fuel in the open air above her hand. She looked at it with both hands up and her face lit by its light and a quality of delight that was entirely, recognizably Clara.
'IT'S SO WARM,' she announced.
Kiiro, on her shoulder, turned to look at the small flame with an expression that suggested she approved of it on a foundational level.
Their mother, still in the yard from Lyra's demonstration, looked at her second daughter producing fire on the same morning the first one had produced water and pressed one hand against her chest with the expression of someone who was going to need a moment.
'They're all right,' Arthur told her. 'They're supposed to be doing that.'
His mother looked at him. 'I know,' she said. 'I just — ' She stopped. Looked at Lyra still occasionally producing small water balls into the vegetable garden, and at Clara examining her flame from different angles with Kiiro leaning in to look as well. 'This is a very large morning.'
'It is,' Arthur agreed. 'It's going to get larger.'
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