“When I was seven or eight, everything was possible. Then I became Albert Grey’s apprentice and I gained this huge, dizzying, limitless world at the Guild, but I also lost something. He took little pieces of me, to keep me small, to keep me smaller than him. Then Jasmine died and I lost something else. My magic. My future. That belief we cling to as children that death’s something that happens to other people, not to us. And that’s what it’s been like ever since. Like little pieces of me keep chipping away, bit by bit, and each time something goes, that version of me dies.
