24th of Deepwinter, 413 AH
The magnifying lens changed everything.
I'd set it up on the desk between the two clear jars, the gray-green herb from the market pinned flat on a clean square of cloth. Through the new glass I could see what I'd been guessing at for weeks. The veining was as expected, it branched in a pattern that repeated at smaller scales, the larger channels feeding into smaller ones that fed into smaller ones again, each split roughly the same angle as the last. Fractal. On Earth, that geometry meant efficient fluid distribution.
Two months of squinting through borrowed glass and losing specimens to bad seals, and a single trip to town had solved half my equipment problems in an afternoon. The other half would require a return visit to the shops I'd missed, but the lens alone was worth the excursion and the strange behavior of everyone I'd met.
I was mapping the third branching junction when someone knocked.
Aldric opened the door before I answered, which meant the knock was a courtesy. "Your father would like to see you in the library, young master."
"Now?"
"At your convenience." In other words, now.
I looked at the specimen. The third junction was half-drawn, the angle marked but the downstream channels not yet recorded. I could finish it in ten minutes, but Aldric was standing with the door open and Father's requests came through him rarely enough that ignoring one felt wrong.
I set the pencil down on the notebook, open to the page, so I'd know exactly where I'd stopped.
I pushed the chair back. In the corridor, Ren straightened from the wall where she'd been waiting and fell into step behind me.
The corridor from my room to the library ran along the east side of the estate's second floor, past the family quarters and the small living room nobody used. I'd walked it enough times in two months that my feet knew the distance without my attention.
The excursion flickered through, Ren's hand on the shopkeeper's wrist, her tone flat and final when she'd said "we're leaving." I still couldn't assemble it into anything coherent, but whatever she'd seen in that shop, she'd been certain about it.
I'd ask Father. He'd been outside the estate more often than I had. Maybe shopkeepers in Norvo were always like that with the household, and the excursion had been perfectly normal.
The library door was open, and I stopped in the doorway.
Father was pacing in a tight back-and-forth in front of the window, his hands doing something complicated with themselves, one gripping the other, releasing, gripping again. He hadn't noticed me yet.
"Father."
He turned. His face went through relief, then something that reorganized the relief into purpose, then landed on a version of warmth that was trying very hard to be casual.
"Klaus. Good. Come join me. Close the door." He was already moving toward the table. "Tea? I'll pour tea. Are you hungry? You've been in your room all afternoon, have you eaten anything since you got back?"
"I had the bread Aldric left."
"Just the bread." He said it to the teapot as he poured. His hands were steady, but he'd already overfilled one cup by the time he caught himself, pressed his lips together, and set the pot down to mop the spill with a cloth.
None of this bodes well.
He handed me a cup, and I took it. The tea was too hot and too full, the surface trembling at the rim.
"How was the excursion?" He settled into the armchair across from me. "Did you find what you needed? The lens?"
"Most of it. The lens is good, much better than I expected."
I sipped the tea and set the cup on the side table between us.
"Good. That's good." He picked up his own cup, then set it down without drinking. "And the city? What did you think?"
"Busy. Cold, even with the coat. More women than I expected, even accounting for the ratio."
"The men stay home, mostly." His voice had a careful quality, like a man walking on ice he'd already tested. "It's safer and more comfortable. The city can be overwhelming for some people."
He was circling something. The fussing was approach, but he hadn't found the words yet. I let him circle and sipped some more of the tea. I kept my face patient and my posture open, the version of Klaus that made Father comfortable enough to talk.
The fussing eventually stopped.
Father's hands went still around his cup, and his eyes, which had been moving between the fire, the window and the bookshelves for the last minute, stopped on me.
"Ren reported to your mother after the excursion," he said. "She spoke with me this afternoon."
"What did Ren report?"
"That you'd walked through the market improperly dressed and drawn attention, badly enough that she had to intervene with a shopkeeper." He paused. "She had to grab a woman in a shop, because..." He trailed off, looking into the fire for the next word and not finding it.
I waited.
"Because you were dressed like..." His gaze dropped to my shirt. "Your collar, Klaus, your sleeves. In public."
"My collar was uncomfortable?"
"It's supposed to be." The words came out fast, then his face flinched at his own tone. He tried again, slower. "It's not about comfort. When you, when a man or boy stands in a shop with his collar open and his sleeves pushed up, people notice you."
It was a signal, designed to be uncomfortable because the discomfort served a function, the way a lab coat's tightness reminded you to move carefully around equipment. Except a lab coat protected the work, while this collar protected other people from having to look at me.
Which was absurd.
"People noticed anyway even with the coat on."
"They noticed more when it came off."
I thought about the herb seller's hand closing over mine and the glazier adjusting her price before I asked. I'd cataloged all of it during the excursion and filed it under status deference, confidently enough at the time. Father was telling me it was mislabeled.
"I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about."
"Of course you don't." His voice had dropped. Father stood, moving to the window where the winter light was failing. "Klaus, do you know why men dress the way they do?"
"Aldric handles the wardrobe."
"Not Aldric. Men in general, when they leave their houses." He faced the window, and in the glass his reflection showed the face his voice was hiding, jaw set too tight and brows furrowed. "They cover up, with their collars closed and their sleeves down, and they're careful with their eyes. They don't look at women they don't know or stand too close to them." He turned back around. "They don't bend over tables with their forearms bare and their shirts open."
The list of things I'd done in the market, heard from someone else's mouth, assembled into something I hadn't seen from inside. The shirt I'd taken off the moment I entered a heated shop, the collar I'd undone before leaving the estate, each a separate decision that had seemed like basic comfort at the time. They were the moments when I'd stopped thinking about how a ten-year-old was supposed to act and just acted.
Forearms. He was telling me, in complete seriousness, that forearms were a problem. Something pressed at the back of my throat that would have sounded like dismissal if I'd let it out.
"The shopkeeper Ren grabbed." Father turned from the window. "She wasn't being helpful, Klaus."
"She was showing me the lens."
"She was touching you." He said it flat. "Her hand had been on your shoulder, your neck, your arm, all while you were looking at the glass and not noticing any of it."
I thought about the hand guiding me through the aisle. I'd registered the contact at the time and classified it as attentive customer service, but the same data led somewhere else if you changed one assumption about what the contact meant.
"Ren handled it." I gave a small wave of one hand.
"Ren shouldn't have had to." Father's voice cracked on the word had. A small fracture in the composure that had been holding the conversation together. He pressed his lips together and breathed through his nose.
I leaned back and laced my fingers over my stomach, though keeping them loose took some effort. "Alright, so the shopkeeper was out of line and Ren intervened. What are you asking me to do?"
"I'm asking you to..." He came back from the window and sat in the armchair, elbows on his knees and hands clasped in front of him. "Button your collar, keep your sleeves down, leave your coat on in shops, and don't look at women you don't know. Don't..." He pressed his clasped hands against his mouth.
"Don't what?"
"Don't make it easy for them," he whispered.
The room was quiet except for the pop of the fire, and outside the window the estate grounds were dimming into early evening gray.
An invitation, as if a bare forearm in a shop was a thing I'd offered on purpose so it could be touched.
"When I was your age," Father said, "before your mother and the household, I learned these things the way most boys do. I kept my collar done because women looked at my throat when I didn't, and my sleeves down because forearms drew attention. I learned to keep my eyes forward, stay close to my escort, and give women I hadn't been introduced to no reason to approach." He was looking at the rug between his feet, and his voice had gone somewhere far away.
Another set of rules. On top of the ones I was already running. I pressed my lips together before an expression could form. The thought landed flat and stayed.
"I was shy, and it helped. Being invisible was easy because I wanted to be invisible anyway, but I met boys who weren't shy, boys who looked women in the eye, stood up straight, and didn't care who noticed." He paused. "They learned faster than I did, and the lessons were harder."
I kept my face still. Whatever Father was remembering, the specifics lived in the gap between lessons and harder. I didn't want to imagine it.
"Your mother's world is politics, alliances and leverage and investment returns. My world is this." He looked up. "Keeping you intact and teaching you how to move through a room without drawing fire. You're a duchess's only son. You'll attend events and gatherings where women of power and influence will be watching you, and if you walk into those rooms the way you walked through the market today..."
He didn't finish.
"And one day you'll marry a woman of standing, someone political." He leaned back. "That's how this works for families like ours, and when it happens, your world gets smaller." He rubbed his face with both hands. "Your mother runs the duchy while I run the household, manage the staff, raise the children, make sure Rosabel eats her vegetables and Sera doesn't break her wrist in the training hall. That's my life. I chose it, I love it, and I wouldn't trade your mother for anyone."
He dropped his hands. His face was open in a way that I'd rarely seen, the shyness peeled back to show the structure underneath.
"But I learned how to carry myself in her world, when to speak, when to be quiet, how to stand at her side during a formal dinner without giving anyone a reason to question her judgment in choosing me. If I hadn't, I'd have been a weight around her neck instead of a partner." He met my eyes. "Whatever woman you marry, Klaus, she'll be powerful. Your real work will be to support her, raise a family, and carry yourself in a way that makes her stronger. It's a real life, but it requires you to move through a room without creating problems she has to solve."
He was describing my future the same way he'd described the market, except the market had been an afternoon and this was the rest of it. The collar done up permanently, the eyes down for decades, a performance that didn't end when you came home because home was the performance.
My fingers tightened against each other. I loosened them again.
"Sounds like performance."
Father stared into my eyes.
"It is performance. Every man in this world performs every time he walks into a room with women he doesn't know. It's how you survive."
He was describing a life, a whole architecture of behavior designed to make a man invisible to attention he never asked for. It rested on the assumption that the attention was inevitable and the only open variable was how much of it you caught.
Father had spent twenty years inside that architecture and his shyness turned into strategy. The quiet voice, the questions instead of statements, the eyes that went to the floor when a powerful woman entered the room. All of it was learned armor.
He was handing me the armor piece by piece, the same set he'd built for himself, fitted to a son who was smaller and younger, walking into the same world he'd navigated since before I was born.
I understood what he was doing and why.
I didn't want it.
I'd been carrying armor already. That was the thing Father couldn't know, the thing sitting underneath my patience like a stone at the bottom of a well. For two months I'd been learning to be a ten-year-old, calibrating how much to know, how much to ask, and how much curiosity was safe before someone looked at me too long. I'd hidden the biologist from Vael, been diplomatic with Mother, measured every conversation with Pemberton against what a child recovering from a head injury should plausibly say, and performed for Aldric every morning when he buttoned a collar I didn't want on a body that wasn't originally mine.
I'd built that performance myself, piece by piece, because the alternative was exposure, and I'd accepted it because the cost was mine to pay and the terms were mine to set. The rolled sleeves, the open collar, the bare forearms in shops, those were the cracks where the real person leaked through. The parts of the day where I stopped managing the mask and just existed.
Edmund wanted to seal the cracks.
I felt my posture change, straightening out of the patient, open, listening-son position I'd been holding for the last ten minutes.
"You're asking me to pretend." My voice was even, the version I used when the conclusion was already formed and the only question was whether to share it. "Every day. In every room. You're asking me to monitor myself constantly, to dress for other people's comfort, to avoid eye contact because looking at someone is apparently an invitation. You're asking me to carry myself like I'm guilty of something I haven't done."
"I'm asking you to be careful," he said tenderly.
"You're asking me to be someone else," I said flatly.
Edmund's face did something I hadn't seen before, a tightening around the eyes and mouth that pulled in opposite directions, grief and frustration competing for the same muscles. But underneath the frustration, recognition.
"You sound like." He stopped himself. Whatever he'd been about to say, he swallowed it. "I'm trying to protect you!"
"I know." That was what made it hard to say what I said next instead of what he needed to hear. A ten-year-old who loved his father would have softened. I kept my voice level.
"Then listen to me!"
"I'm listening. I have been listening. You've described a system where I'm responsible for the behavior of every woman in a room, and the solution is to make myself smaller until they can't see me." My hands were on my knees. My back was straight. My voice was the version of calm I used in grant review panels when someone challenged my methodology and the data was on my side. "I'm ten. In this system, I'm already a problem. What does fifteen look like? Twenty? Do I just keep shrinking?"
"You want me to be invisible," I said without softening it.
"I want you to be safe."
"You want me to change how I dress, how I walk, how I look at people, because other people can't manage their own reactions to normal behavior." My voice cooled.
Edmund's mouth opened, then closed. I watched him hear the argument, turn it over, find the logical structure sound, and reject it anyway.
"It doesn't matter whose problem it is." His voice was low. "You're the one who gets hurt."
"I didn't get hurt."
"Ren won't always be there, Klaus. She's one guard. What happens at a gathering where the women outrank her? What happens when someone with real authority takes an interest and Ren has to choose between stepping in and causing your mother a political crisis?" He swallowed. "There are situations where nobody can protect you. Not Ren, not me, not even your mother, if the politics are complicated enough."
He's right about that. The thought arrived unwelcome.
I pushed it aside. Being right about the danger didn't make him right about the solution.
"A shopkeeper touched my arm in a shop while showing me merchandise."
"A grown woman put her hand on your neck. On your wrist. She had her body against yours. You are ten." The word came out sharp. "You are my ten-year-old son and a woman I don't know had her hands on your skin and you didn't notice because you were looking at a piece of glass."
Because the glass was more important. The thought was automatic. I caught it before it reached my mouth. That wasn't a sentence a son said to a father who was trying not to cry.
"I'm not dismissing what Ren saw. If the shopkeeper crossed a line, then the shopkeeper was wrong. I'm saying the solution isn't to dress differently. The solution is that people don't touch other people without permission."
"That's not the world you live in."
"Then the world is wrong."
"The world doesn't care." Edmund stood. The conversation had been building toward something, the chair suddenly felt insufficient, the sitting posture wrong for whatever was coming next.
He stepped toward me.
The fidgeting stopped, his hands turning purposeful as he reached for my collar.
The movement was gentle. His fingers found the open button at my throat, the one I'd undone that morning. Aldric watched me undo it every day and said nothing, because he understood that some negotiations were lost before they started.
Edmund's thumb and forefinger closed on the fabric, drawing the two sides together. Fixing it.
His hands were telling me what his mouth hadn't. That he knew better.
His face, close enough now that I could see the lines around his eyes and the way his lower lip pressed against the upper, was the face of a man performing an act of love so total that he couldn't see it was an act of control.
I caught his wrist.
Not hard like the grip Ren had used on the shopkeeper, but definite. My hand around his wrist, stopping him.
Edmund looked at my hand, then at my face.
I don't know what he saw. Whatever lived behind my expression in that moment, it wasn't something the ten-year-old Klaus was supposed to carry. Something colder than anger and more set. Two months of performance, two months of hiding the biologist and measuring every word and action. I didn't mind all of it because the terms were mine. My cover. My cost. My choice about what to show and what to bury. Edmund's fingers on that button had made it his, and whatever lived in my face right then was the full weight of what that felt like.
"Don't."
I stood, his wrist slipping from my hand as the chair pushed back against the rug.
I was at the door before he could respond. My hand found the handle, turned it, pulled.
Sera was on the other side.
She was exactly where someone would stand if they'd been listening with their ear close to the wood, and her face, caught mid-expression with eyes and mouth wide open, confirmed it. Behind her, Ren stood at her post, giving the opposite wall the fixed attention of someone working very hard to look as though she hadn't heard anything.
I turned left. My feet moved faster than they needed to.
Shit.
Ren fell into step behind me, matching my speed without a word. She'd read the exit and adapted in the space of a breath.
Sera scrambled.
"I wasn't, I was just walking past, I wasn't listening."
She was half a step behind me and gaining, her voice pitching upward with the effort of talking and walking at the speed I was setting. I could hear the lie in the first three words and didn't care.
"Klaus, wait."
I didn't wait, taking the next corner without slowing.
I'd shown him something in that last moment, something that didn't belong to a ten-year-old.
"He's just, he worries, you know? He does that." She was breathing harder now. The effort of keeping up had disordered whatever she'd planned to say, if she'd planned anything, which seemed unlikely now given that she'd been caught eavesdropping and was chasing me down the corridor at a near-jog. "He gets scared and then he just goes on and on about things. It's not..." She swallowed. "It's not because you did anything wrong."
The words arrived in my peripheral hearing, recognized but unprocessed, like traffic noise from a window you've learned to sleep through. The trying was audible by how her voice kept adjusting.
"He did the same thing with Catrin before she left. He sat her down and told her a hundred things about how to behave at the academy, and she sat through the whole thing, then just left the room." Her footsteps faltered. "The same way you just did."
I turned another corner. My room was three doors down.
"Klaus."
Something in how she said it was different from the rest, quieter, just my name.
I didn't want to hear it.
I reached my door, opened it, went through, and closed it behind me.
The magnifying lens was where I'd left it, angled over the specimen, the notebook open to the half-finished sketch. The third branching junction. The angle I hadn't recorded.
I sat down and picked up the pencil.
My hand was shaking.
I set the pencil down and pressed both palms flat on the desk. The wood was cool and solid and didn't want anything from me.
Through the closed door, I heard Sera's footsteps stop outside my room. She stood there through a silence that lasted longer than the conversation had, then turned and walked away.