Everyone in the kingdom knew the rule.
If Prince Davan called for you, you came. No excuses. No sick days. No "sorry, I'm in the middle of something." You dropped whatever you were doing, you put on your best clothes, or at least your cleanest ones, and you came.
And if you came, you had one chance. One. You stood before him in the great hall, in front of his men, in front of the candles and the cold stone walls, and you did the thing you were brought there to do. You sang, or you juggled, or you told a joke, or you danced, or you breathed fire, or you balanced a chair on your chin, or whatever strange gift the gods had seen fit to give you.
It didn't matter what it was. What mattered was whether he liked it.
If he liked it, you left alive and went home. You hugged whoever was waiting for you. You ate dinner. You lived your little life.
If he didn't... well. Nobody talked much about that part.
But people talked in other ways. In how fast they crossed themselves when his name came up. In how mothers pulled their children close when his men rode through the market. In how the entertainers from the southern roads had stopped coming through the kingdom altogether, taking the long route around, adding three days to their journey just to avoid the chance of being noticed.
Word travels. That's the thing. It always does.
Prince Davan was not a bad-looking man. That was the strange thing about him, the thing people always mentioned first when they described him, like they were still trying to make sense of it themselves. He had dark eyes and a calm face, the kind of face that didn't give much away. He was tall, well-built, the sort of man who looked like he'd been designed specifically to wear a crown and have people not argue with him. He never shouted. Never lost his temper in a way that looked messy or undignified. When he was pleased, he might lift one corner of his mouth, barely, like he was considering a smile and then decided against it. When he was displeased, he just looked at you. Quiet and steady. Like you were a math problem he was solving in his head.
And then he nodded once to the men standing beside the door.
That nod was the last thing a lot of people ever saw.
He was twenty-nine years old and he had been doing this for four years. His father, the old king, a loud and sentimental man who had loved wine and long speeches, had died of a fever. Or so the official account said. His two brothers had also died, one after the other, within six months of each other. A fall from a horse, then a sudden illness. Nobody asked how. Nobody with any sense, anyway. And now there was just Davan, and the kingdom, and the game he played with it.
He wasn't at war with anyone. The borders were fine. The taxes came in. The roads were kept. The grain stores were full. By all the normal measures that kingdoms are usually measured by, things were running smoothly. A visiting diplomat from the east had called it "a model of stable governance" in an official letter, which would have been funny if it wasn't so deeply unsettling to the people actually living in it.
But Davan himself was bored.
Deeply, completely, profoundly bored. The kind of bored that gets into your bones. The kind of bored that makes a man with no limits start looking for ways to feel something. And boredom in a man with no limits is a dangerous thing. The most dangerous kind of thing, actually. More dangerous than ambition. More dangerous than cruelty. Because cruelty at least has a direction. Boredom goes wherever the wind blows.
So his men went out. They combed the villages, the markets, the traveling roads. They had standing orders, find something interesting, bring it back, don't come back empty-handed.
They brought him entertainers. Acrobats who could fold themselves into boxes. Musicians who could play two instruments at once. Storytellers who had memorized entire histories of wars nobody even remembered fighting. Fire-breathers who could hold a flame in their mouths long enough to make everyone in the room uncomfortable. One man who claimed he could talk to birds, which turned out to be a lie, spectacular and poorly thought-through, and which did not end well for him or honestly for the birds either.
Most of them lasted one performance. Some lasted two. The record was a comedian from the northern hills, a round little man named Betto who smelled of onions and had a gift for physical comedy, and he managed four shows before Davan apparently ran out of patience with the bit about the traveling merchant. Nobody replaced him after. There was a gap of three weeks where the great hall was just quiet, and the men who served there said those were the worst three weeks of their lives, because a bored Davan was worse than an angry one.
And then, on a Tuesday in early autumn, they brought him Sera.
She didn't look like much.
That was what the men said when they came back with her, which is the kind of thing men say when they are trying to explain why they almost didn't bother, and also when they have already been proven spectacularly wrong and are trying to manage their dignity about it.
They'd been sent to the river market, told to look for anything interesting. The river market on a Tuesday was mostly fish and vegetables and people arguing about the price of salt. Not exactly a showcase of extraordinary talent. Gregor, who'd led the search party, a thick-necked former soldier with a nose that had been broken twice and reset badly, had been privately planning to come back and lie about having looked thoroughly.
Then he saw her.
She was at a small table near the fish stalls, doing something with her hands that made people stop walking. Just stop, mid-step, and stare. Which in a market full of people trying to get somewhere is remarkable, because people in markets are not in the habit of stopping for anything short of a fistfight.
She wasn't charging for it. She wasn't even performing, exactly. She was just sitting there, both hands resting on the table, moving her fingers in a slow pattern, almost like she was playing music on a surface that wasn't there, and above her palms there were lights.
Not fire. Not lanterns. Lights, like pieces of something that shouldn't exist, small and slow-turning, the way dust moves in a sunbeam except these were bright and deliberate and very, very aware of themselves. They drifted between her fingers and hovered above her wrists and occasionally one of them would drift up near her face and she'd look at it the way you look at a cat that has decided to sit somewhere unexpected, curious and unbothered.
Gregor watched her for a while before he approached. Long enough to feel embarrassed about standing there staring, and then he approached anyway, because he was a professional.
When he did, she looked up at them without surprise. Not without interest, her eyes moved over each of them quickly, taking stock, the way a person does when they want to understand a situation before it understands them. But without the flinch. Without the sharp intake of breath that most people gave when the prince's men appeared at their table unannounced. Like she'd been expecting this. Like she'd maybe been waiting.
Her name was Sera. She was twenty-three, slight, with dark hair that she'd pulled back practically and eyes that were a shade of brown that looked almost gold in certain light. She lived in the lower quarter of the city in a room above a grain shop, which she said with the tone of someone stating a fact, not complaining about it. She had no family in the city. Just herself.
"Just yourself," Gregor repeated, which wasn't really a question.
"Just myself," she said. And then she looked at him and waited.
They brought her to the palace.
She walked through the gates like she'd done it a hundred times. The guards noticed that. They mentioned it to each other afterward, in the way that people mention things that bother them without quite knowing why. Usually people trembled when they came through those gates. Or they stiffened, went very formal, tried to look like they were the kind of person who walked through palace gates regularly. Or they talked, nervous and too loud, filling the silence with whatever came to mind. Sera just walked. Hands loose at her sides. Eyes moving over everything, the walls, the towers, the guards' faces, the carvings above the archway, like she was reading a place she'd heard described but never seen. She said nothing.
They put her in a waiting room for two hours, which was standard practice. Partly logistics. Mostly strategy. Two hours in a small stone room with nothing to do but think about what was coming either broke people down or it didn't. Either way, you learned something.
Other people who'd waited in that room had paced until the guard outside could hear the footsteps through the door. Or they'd sat and prayed quietly, lips moving. Or they'd cried in the careful way of people who are trying very hard not to be caught crying. One man had tried to escape through a window that was definitely too small for him, which had been both sad and faintly comic, and which had not improved his situation at all.
Sera sat in the chair and was still.
Not tense-still, where you can feel the effort of it. Just still. Like a person who was comfortable inside their own head and didn't need the room to be any different than it was. Like someone who had learned, at some point, that waiting was just another thing you did.
The guard checked on her twice. Both times she was in exactly the same position. He found this deeply unnerving and told his colleague about it afterward in a voice slightly higher than his normal speaking voice.
When they finally brought her into the great hall, it was evening.
The candles had been lit, the good ones, the thick ones, two dozen of them arranged along the length of the long table and in the iron holders along the walls. This was deliberate. Everything in the great hall was deliberate. Davan had understood from a young age that power wasn't just what you did, it was what people felt when they walked into your room. The cold stone, the candlelight, the men along the walls, the long walk from the door to the chair at the head of the table. All of it designed. All of it sending the same message.
You are small. I am not. Let's see what you've got.
Sera walked the length of the hall. Her footsteps were even. Unhurried. She looked at him the whole way, which was the first interesting thing she did, because most people looked at the floor.
Davan watched her come.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Sera."
"What can you do, Sera?"
She held up one hand, palm open, flat, like she was offering something. And from nothing, from the still candlelit air of the great hall, three small lights appeared above it. They turned slowly, like they were breathing. One was white, clean and sharp. One was pale gold, soft at the edges. One was a color that didn't quite have a name, something between green and silver that made the eye want to chase it and couldn't quite land.
The men along the walls shifted. Someone made a sound, a low involuntary exhale. One of them, near the far door, took half a step forward and then stopped himself. The candle flames bent slightly toward her, like they were curious too.
Davan didn't move.
The lights drifted between her fingers, circling slowly, occasionally brushing past each other the way fish move in a shallow pond, aware, unhurried, deliberate. The cold stone walls caught the color and gave it back changed. For a moment the entire room felt different. Like something had come into it that had no business being there, and was entirely unbothered by that fact.
Then Sera closed her hand.
The lights went out. Clean and complete, like they had simply decided to stop.
The hall went back to being candlelight and stone and twelve armed men.
Davan was quiet for a long moment.
Then he said, "Again. But slower this time."
And something shifted in Sera's face, barely, just the smallest thing, less than a smile, more than nothing. Like she'd been waiting for him to ask.
She opened her hand again.