Three months into her stay at the palace, Sera had a routine. She woke early, before the household staff started moving through the corridors. She washed her face in the basin in her room, ate whatever had been left on the tray outside her door the night before, usually bread and something cold, and then she sat by the window for an hour and did nothing. Just sat. Watched the courtyard below. Let her mind settle. Then she practiced. Small things, in the privacy of her room. Nothing that would show under the door or make a sound. Just exercises, the same way a musician runs scales in the morning, not to perform, just to keep the hands ready. By sundown she was in the great hall. That was the shape of her days now. And the strange thing, the thing she turned over sometimes while sitting by the window in the morning, was how normal it had started to feel. The palace. The cold stone corridors. Carrick's neutral face appearing at her shoulder whenever she went anywhere. Davan in his chair at the head of the long table, watching her with that flat careful attention. Normal was dangerous, she knew that. Normal was how you got comfortable. And comfortable was how you forgot what you were there for. So on the mornings when it started to feel too easy, she let herself remember. --- Flashback --- She had been eleven years old. She had grown up in a village called Varen, three days east of the capital. Small place. Mostly farmers. One church with a cracked bell that sounded like it was apologizing every time it rang. A Saturday market that sold the same things every week and everyone came anyway. Her mother had been a healer. Her father had been a builder, tall and patient, the kind of man who thought carefully before he said anything. She had been, on the whole, a happy child. The morning everything changed, her mother had sent her into the hills early to gather herbs that grew better before the dew dried. Sera had a basket. She was thinking about nothing in particular. She stood at the edge of the road into the village and she didn't move for a long time. The smoke was coming from where the houses had been. Some of them were still standing. Some were not. There were sounds she didn't want to name. What had happened was this. The old king, Davan's father, had been sending soldiers east for three seasons, collecting taxes the villages had already paid, collecting grain people needed for winter. The soldiers who came to Varen that morning were tired and impatient. The village headman was a stubborn man who had a strong sense of justice and very poor timing. Someone said the wrong thing. These situations tip fast once they start tipping. By the time it was over, a third of the village was gone. Sera stood with her basket of herbs and she understood, with a cold clarity she hadn't known she was capable of, that screaming would not help. That running forward would not help. That she was alone, and that alone was what she was going to be for a while. She was eleven years old. She made a decision standing there. She was going to be very good at not showing people what she was thinking. She was going to be patient. She was going to learn things. And one day she was going to use what she had learned to avenge her village, her family. She was going to get her revenge on the King and or whosoever took the throne and was the King's bloodline. She went to the capital after that. To her mother's sister, a woman named Desa who lived above a grain shop in the lower quarter. Not a warm woman, but a practical one. She gave Sera a small room at the back in exchange for helping with the accounts. "I'm eleven," Sera said. "The accounts are not complicated," Desa had said. They got along fine. She worked. She watched. She learned the city quietly, the way her mother had taught her to listen to a patient, not for what it said but for what it was trying not to say. She practiced her magic in the early mornings before Desa was awake. Small things at first. Then harder things. She had one teacher for two years, a woman named Olla who came and went without explaining herself and who taught Sera three things she couldn't have learned alone, before dying of something that had been developing in her lungs for a long time. "You're going to be extraordinary," Olla told her near the end. "How do you know?" Sera asked. "Because you never show off," Olla said. "People who can't control power show off. You just practice. That's rarer than the gift itself." By the time she was nineteen, Sera had been thinking seriously about how to get inside the palace. By twenty-three, she had a plan. Not a loud plan. Not a dramatic one. A quiet, patient, very careful plan, the only kind she trusted. --- End of Flashback --- She knew exactly who Davan was when his men found her at the river market. She showed them the lights anyway, like it was nothing. Like she was just a girl who did a small trick at a market stall on Tuesdays. She had been planning this since she was standing at the edge of a road with a basket of herbs and smoke in the air. ~•~ Three months in, something shifted between them. It happened on a rainy night, the kind of heavy autumn rain that gets into stone buildings and refuses to leave. Davan had had a difficult day with his council. She could tell. He sat differently on bad days, a little straighter, more contained, like he was holding something in place. She didn't ask what was wrong. She had learned early that asking him directly was the conversational equivalent of walking into a room and immediately knocking something over. He'd give you the flat look and say "nothing" in a tone that made very clear the question itself had been the problem. So instead she built a forest in the air between them. Trees bending in a slow wind. A fox moving through the undergrowth with tremendous seriousness. Light falling through leaves in pieces the way it does in late afternoon. He watched it without speaking for a while. The fox found something and stopped and looked up. "My father did something like this for me when I was small," Davan said. "Not magic. He had a man with puppets. I used to watch for hours." It was the first personal thing he had ever told her. "What kind of puppets?" she asked, carefully. Not too eager. "Animals mostly. A few people. The man had a dragon that breathed real smoke somehow. I never understood how." A pause. "I asked him once and he said it was a secret. I was probably seven." "Did that bother you? Not knowing?" "Enormously," he said, and something in his voice shifted slightly, dry, almost amused. "I searched his cart once when he wasn't there." "Did you find it?" "No. Just old cloth and a smell of sulfur that explained nothing." The fox wandered further into the trees. Sera kept it moving without looking at it. "What happened to the puppet man?" she asked. "He got old. My father stopped sending for him." He paused. "Then he died. The puppeteer, not my father. My father died later." He said it completely flat. No weight anywhere. "Do you miss him?" she asked. "Your father?" He actually thought about it. She had noticed he did that, genuinely considered questions rather than answering from habit. It made him harder to read than she had expected. "No," he said. "But I miss the version of myself that thought I would." She let that sit. In the air between them, the fox had found a clearing and sat down in a patch of light. "People say power changes you," she said. "But I think you were already the person you were going to be. Power just gave you room to be it without apology." He looked at her. Not the measuring look. Something more direct. "That's either very wise," he said, "or very dark." "Both," she said. The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. The closest she had seen him get. "You're not what I expected," he said. "What did you expect?" "Something simpler. Someone who just did the lights and went home." She let the forest dissolve slowly, the trees first, then the light, then the fox last, looking back once before it was gone. "Would that have kept your attention?" she asked. "No," he said. "Then it's fortunate," she said, "that I'm not simple." He looked at her for a moment longer than usual. Then he looked at the empty air where the forest had been. "Go to bed, Sera," he said. Outside in the corridor, Carrick fell into step beside her. "He talked more tonight," Carrick said. "Did he?" she said. Carrick looked at her sideways. He had the eyes of a man who had gotten very accurate at watching people over a long career of doing exactly that. "You're careful," he said. Not quite a compliment. Not quite a warning. "Goodnight, Carrick," she said. She went to her room. Sat on the edge of the bed in the dark. Outside the rain was still coming down hard against the stone. She thought about a seven year old searching a cart, trying to understand a trick that had been kept from him. About what that kind of person became when nobody ever said no to them. Then she thought about her mother's hands. About a cracked church bell. About smoke rising above a road in the early morning. She lay down and slept.

Part 03