Coin woke up to heat.

  The air was burning, rolling past in waves. Coin was in a pouch, bouncing hard against someone's hip, and the world outside was loud.

  Then the pouch swung wide on a hard turn and Coin caught a glimpse through the open top.

  The forest was moving.

  The trees themselves were pulling free of the ground, roots tearing through soil, trunks twisting toward something at the center of the clearing. Vines whipped between them like rigging on a ship coming apart. The underbrush was crawling, bramble spreading across the forest floor, thorns erupting from soil that had been bare a second ago.

  And in the middle of all of it, something stood.

  Taller than the trees it was pulling toward itself, a mass of woven bramble and thorn so dense it looked solid. Limbs, six or eight of them, each one thick as an old oak, reaching and tearing at the air. Where it stepped, the ground split and new growth erupted, vines spreading outward faster than a man could run. The whole forest in every direction was answering to it, bending toward it, becoming part of it.

  The person carrying Coin stopped running.

  Coin felt the weight shift, the hip squaring up, the whole body going still with focus.

  The air changed.

  Coin knew magic. Coin had been around magic since before humans had words for anything. This was the real thing. It gathered in the air around the pouch, heavy and humming, and the temperature climbed until Coin could feel it in every edge and surface.

  The archmage opened his hands and the world went white.

  A wall of fire rolled forward across the clearing. It hit the bramble on the forest floor and the bramble screamed, green wood burning wet and loud. The vines curled black. The crawling underbrush shriveled and died in a line that swept outward from the archmage's position.

  The bramble thing, whatever it was, some overgrown thorn monster with too many limbs, turned toward him. All of it, the whole mass, every limb orienting at once. It moved faster than something that size should move, bramble-legs driving into the soil, and the forest moved with it. Trees bent in its wake. The ground ahead of it erupted with fresh growth, thorns rising in a wall between it and the fire.

  The archmage burned through the wall. Didn't slow down, didn't adjust, just poured more heat into the wave until the thorns went from green to black to ash and the fire kept coming. The air tasted like char and sap and something worse.

  It hit him with a limb.

  Not directly. A vine, thick as a man's torso, whipping in from the left where the trees were still answering. It came fast. The archmage twisted, caught it with something that wasn't fire, a barrier that flared blue-white where the vine struck and sheared the tip clean off. Sap sprayed. The severed end hit the ground and started growing again, rooting into the soil, reaching back toward the main body.

  It regrew. Of course it regrew. Bramble hydra, then.

  The archmage didn't watch it regrow. He was already moving, circling, keeping distance while the fire did its work on the outer growth. The bramble hydra's base was still untouched, still dense, still wrapped in thorn so thick it looked like armor. The root-mass was in there somewhere. That was what mattered. Everything else was limbs and regeneration and time.

  The archmage was burning his way inward. Layer by layer, clearing the growth, denying the regeneration, working toward the core while the bramble hydra threw everything it had at keeping him out.

  The fire flared again. Brighter. Hotter. The pouch swung and Coin caught the full force of it, copper and detail swallowed in white.

  The light faded. Coin's surface came back for half a second, threw copper into the smoke.

  Another flare. Gone again.

  LIGHTING CONDITIONS: UNACCEPTABLE.

  Coin had seen monsters before. Coin had seen monsters with too many teeth, monsters made of fire, monsters that spoke in languages no living thing remembered. Coin had been carried into battle against things that made grown men forget their own names. Coin had—

  The fire flared so bright it turned the inside of the pouch white.

  The battle kept going without him. Coin could hear it, feel it, the archmage throwing fire and the forest screaming back, and none of it needed Coin's attention or opinion or presence. Every flash burned so bright that copper meant nothing against it. And between flashes, when the light dimmed just enough for Coin's surface to catch something, the next one came and swallowed it again.

  AUDIENCE: ZERO.

  PERFORMANCE: CANCELLED.

  THE NOTHING.

  ***

  Velvet. Blue, deep, pressed into a groove that fit him almost perfectly.

  Coin had woken up in worse places.

  A display case. Glass on all sides, good light, a setup that took presentation seriously. Beyond the glass, dark wood paneling and more cases, rows of them, each one lit from within.

  Sparklamps. Coin hadn't seen sparklamps outside the empire.

  The case to the left held a set of rings on black silk, still humming with whatever they'd been made to do. Nice enough. Matched set, old dynasty, the binding work competent but not inspired. Coin had seen better rings on worse hands. They hummed like they thought humming was impressive.

  To the right, a dagger with a blade that drank the light. Better. Older than the rings by a few centuries at least. Whoever forged it knew something about metal that most smiths never learned. It also had its own dedicated light, angled to catch the blade just so. Unnecessary.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

  Coin has been sharper than that dagger. Coin has been brighter than those rings.

  Across the aisle, a war axe mounted on red velvet. Big. Dramatic. It wanted you to know it had seen battle. The haft was wrapped in leather that had been re-done at least twice, which meant someone kept dressing it up for display instead of letting it be what it was. Trying too hard.

  ASSESSMENT: COMPENSATING.

  A carved horn sat in a tall case near the wall. Ivory, old, covered in script that Coin could read but wasn't going to. The horn was fine. The horn had probably done something notable once. The horn was not the most interesting thing in this room.

  Coin was the most interesting thing in this room.

  This wasn't arrogance. This was inventory. Coin has outlasted the dynasties that forged that dagger. Coin has been the thing that changed hands at the moment the deal closed, the battle turned, the throne moved. These were artifacts. Coin was still here.

  The velvet was comfortable. The groove was the right depth. The light was warm without being harsh. And the company, while not Coin's equal, was respectable enough. A good room. A considered collection. Someone had put thought into what belonged here, and Coin belonged here.

  SITUATION: FAVORABLE.

  COMPANY: ADEQUATE.

  The hours passed. The rings hummed. The dagger sat in its darkness. The axe continued to compensate. Somewhere deeper in the building, doors opened and closed, voices too far away to matter.

  Coin sat in the velvet and was content.

  Then the voices got closer.

  Footsteps on hard floor, several sets, and one voice above the rest. A man, pitched to carry, leading his group and telling them what to think about what they saw.

  "...and this wing is where I keep the truly exceptional pieces. The ward-work is custom. I had a specialist come in from the eastern provinces, spent nearly a month getting the layering right..."

  The footsteps entered the room. Someone's shoe squeaking on polished floor. Murmured appreciation.

  "This set here, these rings, each one is a command-binding from the old dynasty. Took me the better part of a decade to assemble the full series. My dealer nearly wept when I told him I'd found the last one."

  Polite laughter. The group moved case by case and the man talked about each one. Every piece had a story and every story circled back to him. How he'd found it. What he'd paid. Who he'd outbid. The pieces were props in a longer performance about the man who owned them.

  The dagger got a full minute. Longer for the rings. The axe earned a speech about provenance that went on until Coin stopped listening.

  The footsteps arrived at Coin's case.

  "Now. This." The man's voice dropped. "This is something truly special."

  Well-dressed, soft hands, the permanent ease of a man who'd never been refused. His guests clustered behind him, necks craning.

  "What you're looking at is a genuine spirit-bound artifact. Pre-dynasty. Possibly older." He paused. "And it talks."

  The murmuring picked up.

  "His name is Coin. Isn't that precious? He named himself, apparently." The man produced a small key. The glass lid rose on silent hinges. "I'm going to take him out so each of you can have a moment with him. He can be a bit moody, fair warning, but I find that's part of the charm. Think of it as meeting a very old, very small celebrity."

  His hand reached into the case.

  THE NOTHING.

  ***

  Coin woke on a desk.

  The desk was small, and so were the chairs arranged in crooked rows around it. Bright paper covered the walls, crude drawings and alphabet letters pinned up everywhere, the cheerful mess of a room built for children. Morning light came through windows set too high for small hands to reach.

  The room was empty. Not for long, based on the evidence. Tiny coats hung on hooks by the door. A shelf held jars of paint, brushes stiff with yesterday's colors, a stack of paper already curling at the edges. The floor had been swept recently and badly.

  Coin has been on worse desks. Coin has been in worse rooms. The light was good. The morning was quiet.

  A bell rang somewhere in the building and the quiet died.

  Footsteps. Dozens of them, small and fast, drumming down a hallway. The door burst open and they poured through it. Twenty bodies crammed into crooked rows, chairs scraping, bags thumping, every one of them talking at once about something different.

  VOLUME: CONCERNING.

  A woman followed them in. Middle-aged, patient in a way that required practice. She waited for the chairs to stop scraping. She waited longer than that. Eventually the room found calm. Or its nearest neighbor.

  She picked Coin up off the desk.

  "Good morning, everyone. Today we have a very special guest." She held Coin up for the room to see, and twenty small faces turned toward her with expressions ranging from wonder to confusion to the blankness of children who needed to use the bathroom. "This is a probability spirit. Can everyone say hello?"

  "HELLO, PROBABILITY SPIRIT."

  Coin has been called a spirit before. Coin has been called a demon, a curse, a blessing, a trick, and once, memorably, a very elaborate button. Spirit was fine. Spirit was close enough.

  The teacher set Coin on her desk, propped against a small stand so the class could see. She explained probability in small words. She talked about luck and chance and how some things were more likely than others. She gestured at Coin periodically. The children listened with the attention of people who could be distracted by a bird at any moment.

  She knew her material, more or less. The broad strokes were right. Some of the details were wrong in ways that didn't matter enough to correct. Coin sat on the stand and let himself be taught about.

  "Now," the teacher said. "I want everyone to take out your drawings."

  DRAWINGS: UNEXPECTED.

  Shuffling. Paper rustling. Small hands reaching into desks and pulling out sheets covered in colorful scrawl. The teacher walked between the rows, collecting them, making encouraging sounds at each one.

  "These are wonderful. You all worked so hard on these yesterday."

  She returned to the front, drawings clutched in a thick stack. Turned to face the class.

  "Let's show our probability spirit what we made! I'm sure he'd love to see how you drew him."

  ASSUMPTION: INCORRECT.

  She held up the first drawing.

  A circle. Brown. Lumpy at the edges, misshapen in ways that suggested the crayon had fought back. Two dots for eyes, a curved line for a smile. The word COYN written underneath in shaky letters.

  "This is Mira's! Isn't it lovely?"

  COLOR: WRONG.

  EXPRESSION: COIN DOES NOT SMILE.

  The teacher kept going. Drawing after drawing. A yellow blob surrounded by wavy lines. A square with a face. A circle with legs.

  One that was actually just a potato. The child had drawn a potato and labeled it PROBABILITY SPIRIT and apparently no one had corrected this.

  REPRESENTATIONAL ACCURACY: CRIMINAL.

  "Oh, this one is special." The teacher held up a drawing with evident pride. "Marcus worked very hard on this."

  Marcus had drawn Coin with arms. And legs. And hair. Coin had a full head of curly hair in Marcus's interpretation, flowing behind like Coin was running somewhere. Coin was also bright green.

  GREEN: ABSOLUTELY NOT.

  HAIR: COIN IS BALD. COIN IS METAL. COIN DOES NOT HAVE A SCALP.

  MARCUS: ENEMY FOR LIFE.

  "Doesn't everyone's art make our probability spirit feel welcome?"

  The children cheered. Several waved their remaining drawings in the air, hoping for their moment. One child in the back had started drawing a new picture, tongue poking out in concentration, adding what appeared to be wings.

  WINGS: NO.

  ADDITIONAL DRAWINGS: PLEASE STOP.

  The teacher clapped her hands. "Now, before our special guest has to go, let's sing the song we learned!"

  THE NOTHING.