Anna at ten years was a troublingly lovely child, pale and petite, with thoughtful dark eyes and vivid, rose-red lips. Her hair was a sheer, waist-length veil of black silk, held back with a length of scarlet ribbon. Ewan had handed down his love of all things red, which delighted Nathaniel to no end. In his mind, the two people he loved most in the world wore red, the colour of blood and life and joy and magic. At present, she wore a beautiful dress of dark red velvet with a muslin collar, white stockings and bright red shoes with pearls on the clasps and rhinestones studded on them and red sequins throwing up clouds of sparkles. While her colour preferences came from Ewan, the love of fine clothes and extraordinary shoes she had learnt from Nathaniel. Around her neck on a length of black velvet hung a small but ornate pendant of eighteenth-century Spanish gold, set with a ruby the size of a quail’s egg, blood-red, of perfect clarity, with a heart of fire that did not quite glow, yet had an unsettling life to it nonetheless.
Anna could see things. Like Nathaniel, whose own gifts had been birthed and nurtured by the magic of his mother, Anna was steeped in enchantment from before her first birthday. She did not have Nathaniel’s talent for cantrips, nor did she have Alexandra’s more dramatic gifts. Instead, she could see the truth. She could look through things and around things, she could see to the heart of things and into the souls of people in the street: a rosy banner unfurling over a pair of lovers, a flash of crimson anger behind a still face, fear throbbing behind a smile. If she put her mind to it, she could dive into their hearts and minds, she could collect their secret thoughts and fears and desires like butterflies. She could even change the way people saw her, to alter her own presence and become a great beauty, or else not exactly ugly, but unmemorable. If she was angry enough, if she really wanted to, she could hurt people. She could gather up her thoughts and her will and hurl them, her gaze piercing as a spear, wounding them as surely as if they were cut with knives. Before Nathaniel taught her to control her gift, people who upset her would find themselves breaking down sobbing, or screaming with a terror they could not explain, or half-mad with delirious joy that made clear thought impossible.