The letter came sealed with the Mage Guild’s crest — a closed eye inside an open one — and Master Aldric brought it to the Duke himself rather than sending it up with the rest of the household correspondence, which told Corwin Veyland everything he needed to know about its contents before he’d broken the wax.
It was, on its surface, extremely polite.
The Arch-Cataloguer of the Virellon Guild had heard, through channels the letter did not specify, of an unusual affinity discovered in a ducal household to the north, and would consider it both an honor and a service to the realm to examine the child personally, at the Guild’s expense, at his family’s convenience.
“At his family’s convenience,” Corwin read aloud, in the great hall, to an audience of exactly three: his wife, Aldric, and a six-year-old who had not been invited to this conversation and had come anyway, sitting very still in the doorway in a manner he’d learned from his sister without either of them ever discussing it.
“Meaning they’ll ask nicely exactly once,” Isolde said.
Aldric, who had spent thirty years dealing with the Guild in one capacity or another, chose his words the way he always chose them — carefully, and a beat behind what he actually believed.
“They are not unkind, Your Grace.
Not as a rule.
But they are collectors before they are anything else, and a rare enough specimen tends to become, in their eyes, less a person and more a — ” he stopped himself, visibly unhappy with where the sentence had been going.
“There have been children, in the Guild’s long history, whose gifts were considered important enough that their families were persuaded it would be selfish to keep them close.
Some of those children did very well for themselves.
Some did not.
I could not tell you, honestly, which outcome is more common.”
“And if we decline?” Isolde asked.
“Then they will ask again in a year, more politely still, and again the year after that, until either the boy is grown enough to answer for himself, or something changes their interest.” Aldric folded his hands. Get faster updates on g.com.
“I would not call it a threat.
I would call it patience, which in my experience of that institution is very often worse.”
Corwin set the letter down on the table with more care than the moment strictly required, which was, for a man who generally treated paperwork the way he treated an unruly recruit, its own kind of answer.
“He’s six,” he said.
“He’s six and unusually attuned, which is precisely their interest,” Aldric said gently.
“I don’t say this to frighten anyone.
I say it because I promised you honesty when I took this on, and I’d rather you hear it from me now than from a Guild envoy standing in your hall in five years’ time, more charming than I am and considerably less inclined toward your family’s comfort over their own curiosity.”
Isolde looked at the letter for a long moment, and then at the doorway, where she had noticed her son sitting some time before either of the men had.
“Kaelen.
Come here.”
He came, the way he always came when asked directly rather than caught, without pretending he hadn’t been listening.
Some households might have punished a child for that.
Ashgrave, for reasons that had accumulated slowly over six years, had stopped bothering to pretend the pretending was possible.
“You heard all of that,” Isolde said.
It wasn’t a question. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
“Most of it.”
“Then tell me honestly — do you want to go?”
Kaelen thought about it with the same unhurried seriousness he brought to everything, weighing a feeling that had been sitting in his chest since the word specimen had entered the room and hadn’t quite left it.
He thought of Vaelith, though he had no memory to call it by that name — some old, wordless shape of the same wish, buried under six years of being an ordinary boy: I want to be loved specifically, not felt for what I am from a distance.
He didn’t have that language either.
But he recognized the shape of the fear well enough.
“No,” he said.
“I don’t want to be someone’s — thing they found.
I want to be Wren’s brother, and Bram’s worst student, and yours.
I can learn what I need to learn here.”
Corwin wrote the reply himself that night, in his own hand rather than a scribe’s, thanking the Arch-Cataloguer for the honor and regretting that House Veyland’s second son was, for the present, too young to be spared from his family and his training, but that the Guild’s generous interest would of course be remembered, should circumstances change.
It was, everyone in the room agreed without saying so aloud, a door left open exactly as far as it needed to be to close again quickly.
Wren, who had listened to the entire conversation from a second doorway with considerably less subtlety than her brother, caught him in the hall afterward and hugged him hard enough to make a point of it.
“They’re not having you,” she said, muffled against his shoulder, in the tone of someone settling a matter permanently.
“I know,” Kaelen said, and for the first time all evening, the weather in the room — his own, this time, not anyone else’s — went quiet on its own.