No Flame But Mine by Tanith Lee

she began to pick up on some other element. This was most like dully hearing something, or mistily seeing it at the back of her brain. Now and then the effect had occurred before. Azula never referred to it, or took much notice. Perhaps she had assumed others experienced similar moments. And perhaps they did, some of them.
    Skimming along the alleys, Azula hurried to Aglin’s room. The snowfall grew thicker as she went. It turned both colours of her hair to white. In the background, hundreds of miles away, something jangled dimly above in the sky, and Azula, who had no magic, listened with half her inner ear. Generally she did not think a vast amount. She acted as events happened. When they were over she filed them tidily behind some mental cupboard door.
    Running along the passage to Aglin’s apartment, Azula found the mageia awaiting her with a suppressed look of impatience. What could be worse, said the suppressed look, than trying to get blood out of a snowball? Fond mothers, said the look, always reckoned their kidlet was a genius. And if the other parent was a god – well.
    This did not distress Azula. She bowed to the mageia and closed the door. Turning, she listened with her own patience for the umpteenth time to the proper rules and chants, and watched Aglin bring fire from the air. ‘Now you try, Azula.’ And hey presto! Nothing.
    Dressed for the outdoors, Thryfe and Jemhara had remained in the attic. She had put on more beer to heat, and poured it for them, but the two cups stood untasted.
    Peculiarly, and both noted and thought this, they had begun to reminisce aloud over their pasts, as if they had grown very elderly and had nowhere now to go save backward. She had confessed to him her sins, which he knew of and had already witnessed replayed in the oculum at Stones, when he began to search for her. He talked of his training, of his journey to the Insularia at Ru Karismi, of the eagle familiars of his boyhood – stories already told to her.
    Then, step by step, they brought their two histories together. To the capital, to the death of the king Jemhara had murdered at the will of the king’s brother Vuldir, to Thryfe’s tenure of office and his riding away, and the last mission imposed on Jemhara by Vuldir, which had been to pursue Thryfe and somehow ensnare and destroy him.
    She had done it too, although she had not meant to. She had never suspected she could.
    It was their love they would have spoken of next, and sex and possession, and how time or their grasp of it had frozen the mansion over and caged them, willing and unknowing prisoners, inside an endless night of concupiscence.
    Something then suddenly interrupted the mutual narrative. Before they could reach the nostalgic peak of their idyll, a fearful revelation interfered.
    Speaking of his sleekar ride from the city to his house, and how the windows had been white with warning, and his gargolem servants out on the snow standing guard against some sorcerous invasion, and how the invasion had been Jemhara’s shape-shift to a hare, Thryfe abruptly grew silent. He was staring at an anomaly never before seen.
    Recalling how Vuldir had sent her to Stones and her own comfortless ride to the village, an hour’s journey at least from Thryfe’s mansion; her sulky sojourn there – she too beheld abruptly the same anomaly. It lay like a boulder on their path to meeting.
    They sat in the attic, halted by discrepancy.
    After some minutes he said to her, ‘You see it too.’
    â€˜I see it. How can it be?’
    â€˜I had left the capital some days before you.’
    â€˜It was because you had gone that Vuldir read such danger in your attitude and forced me to follow.’
    â€˜But that very night I reached the house the windows shone to warn me – and that night too I went out across the snow and found you at the Stones, in your shape of the little hare.’
    â€˜And I had been already at Stones two