She performed for two hours that first night. She made lights, the ones he'd already seen, but different this time, slower, like she was letting him look properly. Then she made shapes in the air above the table. A bird that flapped twice and dissolved into nothing. A horse mid-gallop that lasted long enough for one of the remaining guards to lean forward and squint at it like he thought he might be dreaming. A fish, which seemed like an odd choice until it opened its mouth and you realized it was also, somehow, blowing a tiny bubble that caught the candlelight before it popped. She made a sound like distant rain without any water. The whole hall smelled briefly like a storm was coming, that particular smell, wet stone and cold air, and then it was gone. Then she held a flame in her bare hand. Just held it, flat in her palm, a small orange flower of fire that sat there burning contentedly and clearly had no idea it was supposed to be hurting her. She looked at it the way you look at something you've done so many times it no longer surprises you but still pleases you a little. Davan watched all of it without expression. That wasn't unusual for him, he watched most things without expression, but there was a quality to his attention tonight that was different from his usual flat observation. He was still. The kind of still that meant he was actually interested, not the kind that meant he was somewhere else entirely. He asked her questions as she worked. How long had she been able to do this. Where did she learn it. Had she ever used it to hurt someone. She answered everything simply, without embellishing. A long time. Mostly herself, she said, with one teacher for a short while, a woman who had since died. And no, she said, to the last question. Not yet. That last part, not yet, she delivered in exactly the same tone as everything else, calm and factual, which meant it landed with considerably more weight than if she'd been dramatic about it. Carrick, the senior guard, shifted near the wall. Davan's expression didn't change. When she was done, he leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment, the way people do when they are thinking and don't care who sees them doing it. Then he looked at her. "You'll come back tomorrow." It wasn't a question. It wasn't really an invitation either. It was just a fact, stated plainly, like the sun coming up. Sera nodded once. "You'll be given a room," he said. "East wing. You'll eat with the household staff." "Thank you," she said and turned to leave. "Sera." She stopped. There was a half-second pause before she looked over her shoulder, just enough to be noticed, and Davan noticed it, and she knew he did. "What else can you do?" he asked. "What haven't you shown me?" She considered that for a moment. Or she seemed to. Her expression did the thing it often did, which was almost nothing. "A lot," she said. Then she walked out. Behind her, the candles burned. Davan stayed in his chair. One of his men, Carrick, who had been standing near the wall for two hours with the careful expression of a man who has learned to keep his face neutral in all circumstances, waited until the sound of her footsteps had faded completely down the corridor, and then said, "My lord." "Yes." "She's a magic user. We don't know anything about her. Where she actually comes from, who trained her, what she's capable of beyond what she showed us tonight." "No," Davan said. "We don't." "I'd like your permission to look into her background. Discreetly." "Yes." He stood, smoothed the front of his coat, a small habitual gesture. "But don't touch her. Don't frighten her. Don't let her know you're looking." Carrick nodded slowly. He was a careful man, Carrick, forty-three years old, had served Davan's father before him, and had survived this long in a dangerous position by being very good at reading rooms. He read this one now. "You want to keep her," he said. Not a challenge, just a fact. "I want to see what else she can do," Davan said. He walked toward the door. "She's interesting. It's been a while since anything was interesting." Carrick watched him go and said nothing, which was the right call, because there wasn't anything to say to that. ~•~ She came back the next evening. And the one after that. By the end of the first week she had a routine. Arrive at the great hall at sundown. He would already be there, always already there, like the room was his and he'd simply been waiting for the next part of his day to begin. She would show him something new each time, always something small, always controlled, always precise. And he would watch. The household staff had opinions about this. They were expressed in the way household staff always express opinions, which is to say quietly, in doorways, in snatched conversations over breakfast, never where anyone important might overhear but somehow universally understood anyway. "She's not scared of him," said a girl named Maret who did the laundry and was seventeen and had strong feelings about things. She said it like it was the most astonishing thing that had happened in her lifetime, which in the palace, it possibly was. "She's going to get herself killed," said Tomm, one of the kitchen workers, older, more experienced in how things went here. "Maybe," said Maret. "But she's sleeping fine. I've seen her. She just... sleeps." Tomm had no response to that and went back to his bread. In the great hall, meanwhile, Sera was learning Davan the way you learn a new place, by paying attention to where the edges are. He liked silence. Not the uncomfortable kind that other people try to fill, but real silence, chosen silence, the kind that meant he was thinking and expected you to understand that without being told. He liked things that moved slowly and didn't demand anything of him. He hated when his men laughed too loudly, or when someone spoke before he'd finished thinking, or when something that was meant to be impressive tried too hard and showed the effort. She never did any of those things. She was good at stillness. Had been, she suspected, since she was a child. It was the sort of quality that went unnoticed when nothing was happening and became extremely useful when something was. After the second week, he stopped keeping his other men in the room. It was just the two of them, and Carrick by the door, which was less an act of trust than a change in calculation. She didn't feel trusted. She felt watched by fewer people, which was different. After the third week, Carrick waited outside. She noticed all of it. She filed it away the way she filed most things, carefully, without making it obvious that she was filing anything at all. He started talking to her differently after the fourth week. Not about her magic. About other things. The kingdom, a trade dispute in the eastern provinces that was boring him, the way court functions had a tendency to repeat themselves until they felt like something you'd already lived through several times. He didn't ask her opinion exactly. He spoke the way someone speaks when they have been mostly alone for a long time and have almost forgotten that talking to another person can sometimes produce an unexpected thought. She listened. Asked small questions but she never pushed. One night she made a shape in the air above the table, a landscape, the northern mountains, the real ones, rendered in light and slow-moving shadow, peaks and ridgelines and the particular way snow sits on a high slope. She'd never shown him anything that detailed before. She wasn't sure why she did it that night. Something in the conversation, something about the way he'd been sitting, looking at the wall like he was trying to see through it. He sat forward. "Have you been to the mountains?" "Once," she said. "When I was small. My mother took me." "What did you think of them?" She looked at the shape still turning in the air between them, the slow drift of light that was trying its best to be a mountain range and mostly succeeding. "They were bigger than I expected," she said. "And quieter. I thought they'd be loud somehow. All that size. But they just... sat there." He was quiet for a moment. "Everything real is quieter than you expect." She looked at him then, and for the first time she let something show in her expression. Not warmth, exactly. Something more like recognition, the look of someone who has thought a thing privately for a long time and just heard someone else say it out loud. "Yes," she said. "It is." He looked back at her. Not the flat assessment he gave everything. Something a degree different from that, though she couldn't have named the degree precisely. Then he looked away, back at the mountains dissolving slowly in the air, and said nothing. Carrick, standing outside the closed door with his arms folded, heard the silence from within and stared at the wall opposite and thought, carefully and privately, that this was going to become complicated. And he was not wrong.

Part 02