Coyote had three days to learn a spell that could win her a crown, and no roof to sleep under while she did it. She sat on the low wall outside the tournament grounds in Hailscar and counted her coins twice. Eleven copper. The registration clerk had taken the last of her silver that morning. Above the gate, banners snapped in a wind she hadn't called. Mages from every province streamed past her, and each one wore something she didn't: a master's sigil, a school patch, a teacher's name stitched into a sleeve. She had beaten two fire mages back home. The first charged her and she knocked him flat with a gust. The second lasted longer. She won anyway. That had felt like proof of something. Here, watching a boy split a stone bench with a single word, it felt like nothing. She found an empty lot behind the stables and started to work. The old traveler who taught her had shown her four movements before he pocketed her coin and left. She had built the rest herself, gust by gust. Now she tried to push further. She wanted one spell. One shape only she could throw. Something the judges would remember. A woman pushing a carriage crossed the lot and paused to watch. Coyote raised her hands and drew the air into a spiral above her palm. It held for a second and fell apart. A pink butterfly drifted through the failed spell and landed on the carriage handle. The woman smiled at it, then at Coyote, and moved on. Coyote tried again. The spiral tore. She tried again. A fly buzzed past her ear, its body strange and split-looking, guts showing under the shell. She swatted at it and lost the spell entirely. She sat down in the dirt. She thought about the room she couldn't go back to. She thought about the clerk's ledger with her name at the bottom. She thought about walking home with nothing, and realized there was no home to walk to. She stood up and stopped trying to copy what the boy with the stone bench had done. She thought instead about the butterfly. About how the wing moved. Small. Fast. Layered. She lifted her hand and made a smaller shape, thin as paper, spinning tight. She fed it more air. It grew teeth. It grew a body. When she let it go, it cut a line across the stable wall and left a gash the length of her arm. The wood smoked. She stared at the cut. Her hands shook. She had her spell. Then she heard the bell for the opening draw, and a runner shouted names down the lane, and she understood that whatever she had just made, she would have to throw it at a person by nightfall.