5th of Darkfall, 412 AH
Sometime before dawn I gave up on the kidneys.
They'd done nothing wrong. The experiment had. Last night I'd confirmed the mana itself, real, internal, everywhere I checked. The hours since had gone to how. Attention eased toward one site at a time, waiting for structure to resolve. Did it sit evenly through the tissue or pull toward the organs. Did it sit inside the cells or between them. Was there a grain to it like muscle's, anything with an edge I could map.
Every site gave me the same answer. The mana was there, the same faint occupancy as before, but attention gave me nothing beyond that. I was trying to do histology by attention, which was about as productive as counting cells with a fingertip. You could confirm the arm existed.
So that was the night's finding. The project was one day old and had outgrown the equipment. Somewhere along the way, I'd ruined my sleep schedule too. I sighed. My eyes felt like sand.
Below, the household was already moving, a pump working in the yard, a woman's voice counting buckets out in the cold, boots on stone.
I checked the desk from across the room.
One page, written in the large clumsy writing I'd invented for other people. The real questions lay folded flat under the lining of the drawer. The staging was done and this morning would be its first run.
The knock came with the first light.
"Come in."
The servant entered with a basin filled with water, set it down at the washstand, and moved through the room on what I assumed was his usual route. Shutters, wardrobe.
"You're up early, young master."
"Couldn't sleep," I said, and the yawn for the audience came out real. Half a night of trying to feel your own kidneys will do that.
The servant, meanwhile, was busy. I washed my face and watched him from my peripheral vision, while trying to pass for a boy half-asleep at the basin, which wasn't very hard.
He collected yesterday's shirt from the chair. At the desk he straightened what little there was to straighten, shifted the staged page until it sat square with the desk's edge, seemingly without reading it. I couldn't know since his back was turned to me. Then he laid the pencil back in line beside it. The drawers he never touched.
I finished washing my face, mostly to keep my hands busy. He'd worked within arm's reach of the pages and never thought to look. It made sense, keeping the room in order didn't require opening the drawers. A thorough cleaning might change that, but for now it was good enough.
Then he dressed me. He worked up the buttons, reached the collar, and closed the top one, a single motion, no comment, the same motion as yesterday. I let him finish the cuffs, then undid the button. This time, he left it alone.
"Breakfast won't be long," he said, gathering the washing water.
He didn't get to finish gathering it.
Two knocks at the door, sharp, evenly spaced. The valet straightened into a full vertical commitment.
I got as far as "Com—" before the door opened.
"—in," I finished, quietly.
Tall, dark hair threaded with gray and braided down her back, a folded letter in one hand. And gray eyes, the same eyes I'd spent half a corridor meeting yesterday, an entire lineage of them. The same eyes, that I'd been using.
The portraits had resolved into a person. The person crossed the room without a word, took my chin in two fingers, and turned my face toward the window.
Her hands were warm and entirely procedural. She tilted my head a few degrees further and studied the temple where the bandage had been, and whatever she found there earned a small nod that didn't feel like it was addressed to me. "Better," she said, to herself more than to anyone. Then, "You were asleep for my visit."
So she'd come before. Whatever else she was, she wasn't indifferent.
She released my chin, pulled the desk chair around to face the bed, and sat.
She looked around the room first. The desk. The single page. Me at the edge of my bed. I'd watched surveyors work a field once, and this had the same quality, a sweep that was secretly a measurement.
"Aldric." She looked at the valet. So that was his name. "How long has he been awake?"
"Since before dawn, Your Grace."
The gray eyes came back to me. "Klaus."
"Good morning."
She crossed one leg over the other and leaned forward.
"What do you remember?" she said.
Straight to it, then. Time to perform.
"I remember some things." I tipped one hand side to side. "Others are just gone." I nodded toward the desk. "I've been writing the gaps down when I trip over them."
She half-turned to the desk and took the page off it.
This was the system's first field deployment, point at the gaps on purpose and give the watchers somewhere harmless to put everything strange about me.
"The carvings. You didn't know they're wards."
Wards. So that was the word.
"I still don't. Not properly." I shrugged. The best lies ran on a spine of truth, this was all spine.
She set the page on her knee. "The whole estate runs on one system," she said. "An artificer maintains it. The runes carry whatever function the artificer imprints into them. Crystals set into the stone draw mana from the air. The mana crystals gather a little on their own, but not enough, so they draw from the network too. The same network heats the walls and powers the kitchen wards that keep food from spoiling."
Ambient mana, so there was a permanent supply, the air itself running at some baseline concentration. Crystals to draw it, grooves to move it, so the supply could be gathered and routed, this world had solved distribution.
Crystalline. Crystals had structure, and inside that structure mana was being stored and transported. That should produce something observable if I looked closely enough. I needed magnification. Hopefully this world had made it to the lens.
The one person most likely to know where I could get one was sitting in front of me, checking me for damage. This wasn't the right time to ask, I'd add it as the next entry for the pages in the drawer.
"Does the ambient mana ever run out?" I asked.
Her gaze lifted to the light-stone for a moment. "I don't know, actually. It hasn't yet."
"But the lights are on all day," I said. "The heat too. If it never runs out, the air must fill back up as fast as the house drains it."
She stopped. Her eyes went over the desk again, then back to me.
"Yes," she said. "That is how it works." A pause. "The healer said the injury spared your reasoning. She appears to have been conservative."
I said nothing. I'd take it as a warning.
She set the page back on the desk.
"Your father sat with me last night," she said.
At the edge of the room Aldric drifted to the shutters and found a latch that needed his attention.
"He told me you were polite. Calm. That you asked him questions and listened to the answers." She turned the letter over once in her hand. "The word he used was unfamiliar."
I could feel my pulse pick up a notch. Unfamiliar. The problem with that word was that it was accurate, my father had reported exactly what he'd sat across from, and his instincts were spot on.
Better to walk it into the gaps myself than let her pick how it landed.
"That seems fair," I said. "Most things are unfamiliar for me too."
It came out level, which I was reasonably proud of. She studied me in silence.
"He didn't say you'd forgotten him," she said. "He said you were unfamiliar."
I stopped myself from swallowing. That would be its own confession.
Silence stretched. I’d expected questions, hell, even an interrogation. Instead, she’d delivered the verdict and waited to see how I responded.
"I feel fine," I said.
She watched me a moment longer before she sighed and closed her hand around my wrist.
"You will be," she said.
Two knocks on the door.
"Come in," she said.
The door opened halfway and stopped. The girl from yesterday's corridor with the training leathers stood in the gap.
Her eyes went to the duchess. "You wanted to talk to me, Mother?"
"Your brother woke up," the duchess said.
The girl didn't move. Her hand stayed on the edge of the door, her head tilted slightly to the right, like she was still waiting for the part that needed her.
"Sera," the duchess said, and the name was an order on its own. "Come and see how he's mending." Gentler. "You were worried, remember?"
The girl flinched and shut it down almost as it started. Then she came two slow steps into the room, the shoulders going slack on the way. Her eyes went over me once, and moved off.
"You look better," she said, to a point slightly past my ear, in a flat voice that sounded sad to me.
"Thanks," I said.
She was already turning, and drew the door shut behind her so carefully it made barely any sound at all.
"That's Sera," the duchess said. "Your sister." She looked at the closed door a moment. "She's been worried."
I nodded along with the official version. The unofficial one had been standing in front of me for a good fifteen seconds. Worried wasn't the word I'd have picked. Whatever had earned that predated me, and I wasn't sure I even wanted to know.
But I was starting to figure out the woman in the chair. She'd watched the same girl I had, and worried was the version she'd decided on. I was starting to suspect that this house ran on her versions.
She lifted her letter at last, as though it were the next item on an agenda only she had seen.
"Your sister Catrin is at the academy. This is hers." She didn't open it. "You don't remember her either," she said. "She's well. Two more years there." Her eyes came back to me. "She'll want to hear about the improvement."
Improvement. She was talking about me.
The standard she was measuring me against was a boy I'd never met. Ten years old, and four days dead, and here was his mother using him for the low end of a measurement, to his face as far as she knew. I felt sorry for him. That was a cruel thing to say about your own child.
"Why did you go on the wall?" she said.
There was nothing clever to do here. I didn't know why the boy had gone up on the wall and a crack in the skull explained that perfectly. So I gave her the truth and hoped she wouldn't press me on it.
"I don't know," I said.
She rose from the chair. "You don't go up on the wall again. There will be a guard with you from now on. Her name is Ren. She goes where you go. If she tells you to do something, you do it."
Great. A healer's order came with an end on it, a week, a month. This one had none. A permanent watcher.
"And Master Pemberton resumes your lessons the day after next. He has tutored you for two years." She paused at the door. "You will participate."
The emphasis told me the lessons had gone badly before. As far as threats went, it missed. I'd have paid for someone to explain this world to me, and in two days it was going to be compulsory.
"Keep writing things down," she said, with a glance at the desk, and left. The door closed behind her.
Aldric exhaled.
It's way too early for this. An hour of sleep, no breakfast yet, and I'd already been read, named, scheduled, and assigned a guard. The tiredness I'd been holding off arrived all at once.
Aldric came back through the room collecting the basin and restoring the surfaces, the morning route running itself in reverse. When the door closed behind him I gave it a slow count of ten, then brought the real pages out from under the drawer lining and added one entry in my own writing. Ask her for the lens, on a better day. I folded it flat again and closed the drawer over it.
The lens could wait. There was a cheaper move to make, and it had been sitting outside the window all morning. The air ran at a baseline of mana everywhere, her words, which meant everything alive on these grounds was steeped in the same thing I'd been searching in my own kidneys all night.
The hedges, the lawns, insects, a whole estate of specimens that would never notice they'd been enrolled in a study. One subject read from the inside had given me presence and nothing else. Fifty read from the outside might give me differences, and differences were the closest thing to data a man without instruments was going to get.
Also, I couldn't hide where I went, or how long I spent crouched over a hedge. The memory gap system needed a field edition.
While the injury was still taking most of the blame, I could let more of myself show, a little at a time. By the time the injury stopped being an explanation, none of it would look unfamiliar anymore. It would just look like me.
All that thinking made me even more tired than I already was. Sleep first. I deserved it.