Wren sat.
The chair on this side of the desk was smaller than he’d expected, which he suspected was intentional.
The Tower Master watched him settle into it with the mild patience of a man who’d watched a great many people sit in that particular chair and had drawn conclusions from most of them.
“First things first,” he said.
“You’ve been calling me Tower Master.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t.” He waved a hand, dismissive of the whole thing.
“It’s a job title, and not a particularly impressive one.
There are eleven towers in this region alone and every one of them has a man in a chair being called that.
Vaelen.
Master Vaelen, if the formality helps you sleep.”
Wren wasn’t sure what to do with that.
“Yes, sir.
Master Vaelen.”
“Better.” Vaelen leaned back.
“You look like you were expecting an execution.”
“I wasn’t sure what to expect.”
“Reasonable.
I was fairly ominous last time.” He said it without any apparent regret.
“In fairness, you’d just done something that should have killed you, and I’d had about four hours to think about it.
I’ve had six weeks now, which is worse.
Six weeks is long enough to develop theories.”
“Corren said to answer you accurately.”
“Corren would.” Something almost like amusement crossed Vaelen’s face.
“He’s the least political man in this building and it’s made him deeply unpleasant at dinners.
I’d take his advice, though.
You’re a terrible liar — you went grey when you read the note, and the girl told me so before you’d made it up two floors.”
Wren felt his ears go hot.
“Don’t take it personally.
Everyone’s a terrible liar at your age.” Vaelen tapped the desk twice, thinking.
“Let me lay out my situation honestly, since I’d rather you understand the shape of this conversation than spend it guessing.
“This tower isn’t mine because I earned it.
My family holds four of them.
I was given this one at twenty-six as a sort of extended examination — run it, keep it profitable, produce mages worth the name, and demonstrate I’m not an embarrassment.
My cousins were given theirs under the same terms.” He smiled slightly, and there was very little warmth in it.
“They also make a sport of embarrassing each other.
A promising apprentice poached, a research finding published a week early, a rumor started at the right dinner.
It’s all very civilized and entirely exhausting.”
“That’s why you asked if I was a spy,” Wren said.
“That’s precisely why I asked if you were a spy.
And I’ve since satisfied myself that you’re not, largely because no competent infiltrator would draw this much attention in six weeks.” Vaelen spread his hands.
“Which leaves me with the considerably more irritating problem of you simply being what you appear to be.
Whatever that is.”
Wren didn’t answer that.
He wasn’t sure he could.
“So.” Vaelen straightened.
“Three explanations.
First: our talent scouts were wrong three years ago, and you always had this in you.
Second: three years of house service ground something into you that produced it.
Both of those are survivable answers.
Both of them would let me file you under ‘unusual’ and go back to worrying about my cousins.”
“And the third?”
“The third is that something happened to you.” Vaelen’s eyes didn’t leave him.
“That the boy who walked into this tower three years ago and the one sitting in that chair are not, in any meaningful sense, the same person — and that whatever changed him was done deliberately, by someone, for a reason I’d very much like to know.”
Wren sat with that.
He’d been carrying the memory thing for six weeks now like a stone in a pocket, occasionally forgetting it was there and then finding it again.
He’d assumed — genuinely, without ever examining the assumption — that it was in a file somewhere on this desk.
“Before three weeks ago.
Six, now.”
Vaelen went very still.
It was the first time Wren had seen him do that.
“No,” Vaelen said carefully.
“I don’t know that.”
“I told you.
The first time I was here.”
“You told me you woke up in pain with blood on your chest and didn’t know how you’d formed a circuit.” Vaelen leaned forward, and the casual quality had drained entirely out of him.
“I took that to mean you didn’t remember the incident.
Which is common.
People lose the hour around a serious injury all the time — the mind protects itself, badly, and that’s the end of it.” A pause.
“You’re telling me you lost the three years.”
“I’m telling you I lost everything.” Wren heard his own voice come out steadier than he felt.
“My family, if I had one.
Where I’m from.
Whether I ever chose to come here or was sold.
My own name — someone had to tell me that.
The Head Butler said it to me and I had to decide to believe him.”
The silence stretched out long enough to become uncomfortable.
“Six weeks,” Vaelen said finally, mostly to himself.
“Six weeks and nobody thought to write that down.”
“I assumed you knew.
Everything else about me seems to be public.”
“Everything else about you is interesting.
This is—” He stopped.
Started again.
“Wren.
Do you understand what you’ve just handed me?”
“No.”
“No, of course you don’t.
You’ve been reading about ore.” Vaelen stood, walked two steps toward the window, and stopped there with his back to the room.
“Memory loss from injury has a shape to it.
It’s messy.
It takes the hours around the wound, sometimes days, and it comes back in pieces — smells, faces, fragments that don’t connect to anything.
Have you had any of that?”
“No.
Nothing.”
“Nothing at all.
A whole lifetime, removed, with no bleed at the edges.” Vaelen turned back around.
“That isn’t what damage looks like.
That’s what work looks like.”
Wren’s mouth had gone dry.
“There are two disciplines that aren’t taught in this tower,” Vaelen said.
“They’re not taught in most towers.
They don’t fit anywhere on the elemental charts your instructors put in front of you, and there’s a reason your books don’t mention them past a footnote.
One of them deals with the mind.
Thought, perception, memory.”
“Mind magic.”
“Among other names.” Vaelen sat back down, slower this time.
“It’s rare.
It’s restricted.
Practitioners of any real ability could be counted on two hands in this region, and I know approximately none of them personally, which is by design on both sides.” He looked at Wren evenly.
“I’m not telling you this is what happened to you.
I want to be very clear about that, because you’re the sort of person who takes a fragment of information and stays up three nights with it — don’t argue, Corren’s told me about your hours.
“What I’m telling you is that a lifetime gone with no edges is not a thing an injury does.
“Like what?”
“Like whether it was done to you,” Vaelen said.
“Or whether you did it to yourself.”
Wren opened his mouth and found nothing in it.
“You drew your own circuit,” Vaelen went on, quieter.
“Alone.
Something almost nobody survives.
And immediately afterward, your memories vanish without a seam.
Those two facts sitting next to each other keep me awake more than either does alone.” He shook his head.
“I don’t have an answer for you.
I want to be honest about that rather than pretend to a certainty I haven’t got.
What I have is a boy in my tower who is, by every measure I can take, unreasonable — and now a hole where his history should be that doesn’t look natural.”
“What happens now?”
“Now?” Vaelen exhaled.
“Now I add it to a list and keep an eye on you, which is what I was doing anyway.
I’ll make some quiet inquiries.
I won’t tell you what they are, because if I’m wrong, I’d rather not have put ideas in your head, and if I’m right, I’d rather not have put a target on your back.”
That was, Wren thought, somehow more unsettling than a direct threat would have been.
“There’s one more thing.” Vaelen tapped the desk.
“Corren mentioned your chest.”
Wren’s hand moved toward his sternum before he could stop it.
“That.” Vaelen nodded at the gesture.
“How long?”
“Since the two-hour cast.
A month ago.” Wren lowered his hand.
“It fades.
It doesn’t leave.”
“It’s not going to.” Vaelen said it plainly, without any attempt to soften it.
“Metal sits in the lungs.
You already know that much.
What your books probably underemphasized is that the organ doesn’t reset — every overcast leaves a little less capacity than you started with, and if you’d been a normal first-year, you’d have run dry long before you did enough damage to notice.” He gestured vaguely at Wren.
“You are not a normal first-year.
You have the reserves of a fourth-year and the body of a boy who’s been casting for six weeks, which is an extraordinarily stupid combination to be walking around with.”
“I didn’t choose it.”
“No.
But you’ll choose what you do about it.” Vaelen leaned back.
“Go see Thale.
Properly, not as a lecture attendee — tell her I sent you and that you want an actual consultation about a redirection modification, chest or upper back.
She’ll tell you you’re young for it and she’ll be right, and you should have it anyway, because the alternative is you at thirty with the lungs of a man twice that.”
“They’re permanent,” Wren said.
“Modifications.
She was clear about that.”
“Everything worth having in this profession is permanent.
That’s rather the theme.” Vaelen waved him toward the door.
“Go on.
Eat something.
And Wren—”
Wren stopped.
“If any of it comes back,” Vaelen said.
“A face, a name, a room you’ve never been in that you recognize anyway.
Anything.
You come up these stairs, and you tell me the same day.
Not the next morning.
The same day.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Master Vaelen.”
“Master Vaelen,” Wren said, and let himself out.
He made it down two full flights before he had to stop on a landing and stand there a while, one hand flat against the cold stone wall, breathing carefully around the ache in his chest that he now understood was never going away.