“And for Nats — for the traveling performers, the lowest caste — Shakti was death. The High Throne's law was explicit: wild magic users (the term for anyone who wielded Shakti without court sanction) were to be reported, detained, and — the law's language was bureaucratic but the meaning was clear — eliminated. The wild magic purges had happened three times in Ritu's lifetime. She had been too young to remember the first two, but the third — seven years ago, when she was nine — she remembered. She remembered the Rakshak soldiers passing through, asking questions, checking hands for the particular calluses that magical practice produced (the calluses were a myth, but the checking was real, and the checking was the terror). She remembered Amba hiding the family in a barn for three days. She remembered the silence.”