The window finished working while the hall was clearing.
[Item Detected]
[Analysing...]
[Umbral Root | Rank B]
[Type: Casting Focus]
[Binding: Released]
[Effect: Swift Channel] Casting speed increased by 30%.
[Effect: Steady Hand] Mana lost during shaping reduced by 20%. Spell control improved.
[Upkeep: Continuous mana drain while manifested. Drain scales with the gap between item rank and wielder rank.]
Adrien looked at the staff for a moment. ’It cuts my casting time by thirty percent, and I lose about a fifth less mana while forming the spell.’
He turned the wood over in his hand. It was a good piece of work and it was something he would use, because faster and smoother was the whole game for a mage, and he had been slow and rough at both since the day he woke.
And he could feel the other half of the arrangement.
The staff was drinking. Not fast, a thin steady pull out of his core the entire time it existed, and it had been pulling since the moment Léon lost his grip on it.
’Rank B against a One Star. Of course it drains me because it’s built for somebody many ranks above me and it’s making up the difference out of my pocket.’
Which would have crippled anybody else in that castle inside ten minutes.
’And I’ve got a bottomless well.’
He let it go.
The staff came apart into specks and went wherever manifested things go, and it was the first time in this life he had ever done that. It was not possible without a core. Items bound to a wielder through the core itself, so a coreless man could hold a staff in his hands like a stick and never once summon it.
Transfers were possible. Wagers, gifts, inheritance. Exactly what had happened four minutes ago on a sheet of ice.
’Eighteen years and he never got to do this.’
Adrien flexed his empty hand and went to find a door.
The hall had started emptying, though a fair portion of it had not. People were watching him the way people watch a fire after the fire has gone out, and Margaret was somewhere along the upper rail with the cat, and he could feel her attention on his back the whole way across the floor.
Nobles came at him again before he made ten paces. He got past four of them with nothing worse than a nod.
The fifth he did not get past, because the fifth was familiar. He knew the shape of the shoulders before he saw the face, and the recognition came up out of the body rather than out of him.
Tristan.
His older brother was taller than him by most of a head and considerably broader through the chest, built by a decade of swordwork, and everything about the coat he wore had been chosen by somebody with money.
Tristan Clairmont.
Except he was not called that any more.
’Tristan Rossignac.’
The resentment arrived with the name, and it was not Adrien’s. It came out of the body’s own basement, eighteen years of it, thick and old and personal, and for a second he had to hold his own face in place while somebody else’s feelings walked through him.
Tristan had traded the family name for a better one. He had gone to House Rossignac and taken their coat, and in exchange for a seat and a future he had put his signature and his voice behind the case against his own father.
One of the ones who helped bury Alaric Clairmont.
"Adrien." Tristan spread his hands, and the smile on him looked entirely real, which was the worst part. "I didn’t expect to see you looking so well after all this time. Life seems to be treating you kindly."
"Tristan."
"And I heard about the awakening." He shook his head like a man admiring a horse. "An SSS talent. At eighteen. Truly, that’s extraordinary." His face arranged itself into something regretful. "A shame Father isn’t here to see it."
"I didn’t expect to see you here either." Adrien let a beat go past. "Good to see you again. Yes."
He did not put any effort at all into selling it, and he made sure the seam showed.
Tristan’s smile did not move, which meant he had caught it and had decided to let it go by.
"Well. I only wanted to greet my little brother and say well done." He clapped Adrien once on the upper arm. "I hope we can catch up properly before long."
He went.
And the room went with him.
Adrien watched a knot of eight or nine people form around his brother’s back before he had crossed twenty feet of marble, and by the time Tristan reached the wine tables it was closer to fifteen.
Because whatever else Tristan Rossignac was, he had woken two S rank talents and a physique that people in this kingdom talked about by name, and none of the men shaking his hand cared what he had signed to get where he was standing.
’You sold your father and they queue up for you.’
The upside of a brother that popular was that he took the entire ballroom with him, and for the first time all evening nobody was walking toward Adrien at all.
He found a door onto a balcony, went through it, and got about two steps.
Absolute Mana Sense had already told him who was standing out there before his eyes did.
"You fought a good match."
Aurelian Valleroy did not turn round. He stood at the rail with his forearms on the stone and his attention on the city, and he had known who came through that door on the strength of one footstep.
Adrien glanced back.
The door had closed behind him. Two guards stood on the other side of the glass, facing out, with their backs to the balcony.
’So this wasn’t luck. He was waiting, and he knew I’d come out here, and he arranged for us not to be disturbed before I’d even decided to leave the hall.’
Everything Margaret had told him on the dance floor came back at once, and it fit.
There was no version of this where Adrien walked back inside.
So he crossed the balcony and stopped at the rail beside the First Prince of Valebrand, and did not bother with any of the words people were supposed to use first.
"What do you want, Aurelian?"
...
AN: Add the novel to collections and send (power stones and golden tickets) support if like it ;)