I was born in the ashes of her flames-- at least, that's how my mother told it. I was born in the drifting ashes of her absence, because she was gone. Most children grow up knowing that gone is a grown-up word for dead. But for me, gone was a different kind of not-coming-back. Gone meant a bright light snuffed out in gloved fingers. Gone meant the sister that I had never seen.

Gone may as well have been her name.

My mother hid her Sign for three days. Three days that Father didn't know. Three days that every guard in the Capital combed the city, searching for the Guardians. They found one. But for three days, they could not find her.

Until they did.

She was the empty room at the end of the hall, the whispers behind my parents's door, the startled look in my brother's eyes when only one sibling sat down for diner. The sadness behind my mother's eyes when she looked at us, the perpetually surfacing guilt on my father's face.

On the third day, Father saw the glint of gold on her new pink skin, and he knew. Or at least, he knew what his daughter was. He just didn't know what my mother had guessed-- the best thing they could have done was keep the secret.

He told everyone. His daughter was a Guardian. One of the strong, the powerful, the venerated. Guardians were like the gods to him-- and she was of his own blood, his own daughter.

Within a few hours, they had heard.

I never did. She was a flash of guilt and a palpable emptiness, an unused name and an unopened room, but never an explanation. 

Sometimes I asked my brother about her, but what he could say was very little. He'd known her for eight years-- she had been always getting into trouble-- her name was Adina-- and she was gone.

You should understand that this is not truly what I knew about her. It's what others knew about her, and what they told me. This story is one of those.

Three days after her birth, the man in green came to our house. His guards came with him. My mother told him they could not come inside, and because she was young and pretty and didn't seem to understand why he was there, he said that was fine. Very casually, he mentioned having heard of a recently born daughter. Equally casually, my mother asked him not to bring it up-- the baby had died during birth.

The look on his face must have been priceless, but my mother only served him tea and asked why he was there, took his hasty lie about merchant business with a smile and sent him nicely on his way.

He met my father on his way out.

My mother was an ever-polite but ever-serious woman, and I did not take after her. I was like my father: black hair, brown eyes. And like my brother: curious, clumsy. Early on we were taught about Father's business, his ships and trade that brought rich silks and pungent spices to our house in the Golden Quarter. My mother dressed in beautifully died fabric, scarves of plum and wine-red, shawls of cobalt fringed with indigo. My father bought her strings of obsidian and garnet, cuffs and anklets of copper and gold, beads of polished wood, anything he saw that reminded her of a childhood in southern Solangia.

I remember some neighbors whispered to each other in astonishment that her ears were pierced three times. She never did fit in with the Capital.

My father may have been loving and brave, but he was not tactful. "A visitor!" he shouted. "Come to see our daughter?"

And even my mother could not explain why a man would invite a visitor to see a daughter who was dead. She could do nothing as he boasted that his own child was a Guardian, unaware that the man in green was also one.

His sardonic smile must have scared my mother more than the guards waiting outside the door.

Adina was a southern name. Elegant, it meant, gentle, refined. Lady of grace and poise. Did she live up to her name? I didn't know. 

Kemp was also a southern name. It wasn't as nice.

"Goodness!" His voice was laced with sarcasm. "Can I see her?"

"No! No, you must leave." My mother looked to my father, trying to say without words how dangerous she felt the man in green to be. "He must leave. He must leave now."

But the Sage was already stepping up the stairs, his long robe brushing the floor. The faint sobs and wails of a baby drew him to the room at the end of the hall. The door swung open with rasp and his pale eyes narrowed at two cradles. "Two?" He murmured. He stepped closer. Yes, two, one dark-haired, wide-mouthed, wet-eyed child in each cradle. So young they were, he could not tell my sister and older brother apart.

There was a garden behind our house, where me and Kayim, my older brother, played. He would fill pots with water and bring them out so we could dump them out in the dirt and get our tunics dirty as we made mud pies. Most times it ended with one of us face-down in the mess and our mother yelling at us. It was the nature of me and Kayim's relationship that most things ended this way. He was almost nine years older, after all, with little patience for a sibling just learning to garble while father taught him to keep books of the shop. 

I suppose he got along better with Adina.

He cast a look behind him-- my mother dashed up the stairs, the terror in her face apparent.

"You can't!" She shouted.

"I must," he said coldly. 

"You don't know which one," she reminded him, grabbing hold of his arm. "And I will not let you touch them."

His lips pressed together in a thin line. "I don't need to." And he shook her off.

So I spent little time with Kayim. I played with the bugs that crawled up the sides of the house, I got under the feet of the kitchen servants, I shot my slingshot from the roof of the house, I made friends with the ally cats. Mother taught me the southern songs and dances, and when other boys made fun of the fact that I knew how to braid hair in the southern style I threatened them with Kayim's fists. 

My mother called me Pali, little one. Kayim called me Idiot, annoying one.

He strode across the room, each wide step calling a threatening creak from the floorboards as he drew closer to the left cradle, the glint in his eyes hard and cruel.

"No! Don't take her!"

How might things have different if she was there when I was a child? Surely, as close as they were in age, she would have spent more time with Kayim. As she got older, I imagine, many things would have been different. Eventually suitors would come to the house, there would be talk of engagement. By the time I was nine she could have moved out of the house-- although that would have been young to be married. Father would have tried very hard to find a noble, as almost all rich merchants were. They had money, anything they could buy-- but a noble title couldn't be bought, and so all merchants could hope to do was marry a child to one.

But of course that never happened.

So he knew immediately which one it was he had come for. 

The girl, the dark-haired hazel-eyed girl that stared up at him.

"Don't worry," he murmured, gazing down at the new Guardian. "You may keep her. For now."

For now lasted eight years. And then they came for her.

What happened was an emptiness, a pit between me and Kayim that we had to jump over simply to talk to each other, and an ashen etching of guilt between my father's eyes. And eventually, what happened was what my mother had expected three days after her birth.

"But she's my daughter." He looked as though he'd been slapped. For years he thought his money and standing was keeping his daughter out of the hands of royalty. But they just ignored him.

"Daddy!" She bawled, hands stretched out to him, but a guard slapped them away.

"I'll come get you. I"ll bring you home, Adina--"

And then she was gone. Snuffed out between gloved fingers. Gone, and not coming back-- gone, the sister I had never seen.

Gone may as well have been her name.