He turned that thought over as she cleaned the scrape on his knee, sitting beside her on the cool stone step outside their annex, the evening air smelling of woodsmoke and the faint mineral tang that seemed to hang permanently over the villa grounds. "Why do they treat you and Father so badly?" he asked, and watched something old and tired settle over her face.
"Your grandfather and your father were never able to learn the Ashvale fire magic," she said finally. "For that, this family decided they were worth less than the mud on its boots."
"That's not fair," Corren said, outrage rising fast and clean in his chest. "You're both wonderful."
"Thank you, my darling." A faint smile touched her mouth, gone almost as soon as it arrived. "But people are cruel to feel bigger than they are. It has nothing to do with either of us." She drew a slow breath, the kind that precedes something difficult. "I was given to this family as a peace offering from my own people. They wanted the healing magic of my tribe, the Duskveil, passed down into their bloodline. But they never learned the chants properly. I think the elders of my tribe knew that would happen. I think they meant for it to happen."
The part of Corren's mind that had spent a career listening for the specific sound of language going wrong sat forward at that. "Can I learn it? The Duskveil magic?"
His mother studied him for a long moment, then nodded slowly, as though arriving at a decision she'd been circling for a while. "It's been two generations since your father or grandfather even attempted it. But there may be another way in. You may carry more of my tribe in you than anyone here expects."
She began to chant.
Corren listened the way he had once listened to recordings of dying languages salvaged from the last handful of elderly native speakers on Earth, hunting the shape of the grammar underneath the sound. Her words moved in a crude approximation of a language he half recognized from a life he was no longer living, something structurally close to a dialect he had once spent an entire sabbatical reconstructing from fragments. It translated, roughly, to something like a healing presence, my touch, a sacred deed, let waters cascade, a soothing balm they bring. As she spoke, water rose obediently from a nearby bucket and drifted toward her open palm, answering a command her mouth had only half-remembered how to give.
She laid that same hand against his scraped knee. Warmth bloomed under her fingers, gold and gentle, and within moments the wound closed as though it had never happened at all.
Corren stared at his own unmarked skin, something lighting up behind his eyes that had nothing to do with the healing itself and everything to do with what he'd just heard underneath it: a chant with the right bones and the wrong accent, like a folk song passed down so many generations that half the original words had worn smooth and meaningless.
"I want to learn it," he said, and meant every syllable.
"Then I will teach you," his mother answered, her eyes bright with something that looked very much like hope.
She sat him down that evening with a dead fish she'd intended for their dinner and recited the chant one more time, slow and deliberate, watching his face for any flicker of comprehension. Corren watched her mouth shape each syllable, listened past the syllables themselves to the pattern underneath, the way a musician listens past the notes for the key. When she finished, she fell quiet, waiting.
He closed his eyes. He held the chant in his memory the way he had once held down a stubborn verb conjugation, turning it, testing where the modern speaker's tongue had slipped and the original grammar had not. Then he opened his eyes and recited his own version, cleaner in every place his mother's had gone soft with generations of drift. A healing presence, my touch, a sacred deed. Let waters cascade, a soothing balm they bring. Come forth, waters, and weave your mending spell. Heal the afflictions that within this soul dwell.
The water in the bowl between them answered before he'd even finished speaking, rising in a smooth column that hovered above his small cupped palms, glowing faintly gold at its edges.
He turned toward the gutted fish lying limp beside the bowl and lowered his glowing hands over it without a shred of the childish squeamishness that might have stopped him a heartbeat longer. The water touched scale and flesh, and the fish twitched, gasped, and began to thrash with a violence that startled a laugh out of him even as his mother went pale with shock beside him.
For one strange, floating second after the light faded, Corren felt something drain out of him that had nothing to do with muscle. A faint dizziness swam behind his eyes, gone again almost as fast as it had come, the kind of tired you feel after holding your breath too long underwater. He filed the sensation away without quite understanding it yet. It would not be the last time.
"Corren." His mother's voice trembled. "How did you learn that so quickly?"
He gave her the easiest lie available to a child his age. "I guess I'm just lucky, Mom."
She did not press further, though her eyes stayed on him a while longer than usual, the look of a parent recalculating exactly how much of her child remained unknown to her.
That evening, when his father came home weary from the fields, his mother met him at the door with the news bursting out of her before he'd even set down his tools. "Aldric, you will not believe what our son did today," she said. "He's a genius with the chant. Better than I ever was."
His father's tired face brightened with genuine curiosity, and the next morning he took Corren down to the wooden pier behind the villa, past reeds that whispered against each other in the light wind, to teach him the Ashvale fire-breathing chant himself.