"Shit."
If he'd had the lungs for it, Michael would have said it out loud. Instead it crashed around inside his skull, small and useless.
He could still feel the word he'd just spoken hanging in the air between them.
Mama, I don't want to eat right now.
He had meant to say only Mama. One word. A test. See how she reacted, see if she thought it was a fluke of sound or something more.
Then she'd brought him closer, warm skin and the too-familiar smell of milk washing over him, and his brain had simply… flinched.
His mouth had moved before he could stop it.
Now he lay against Aerwyna's chest, her heartbeat suddenly loud in his ear. It had gone from steady to rapid the instant he spoke. Her arms had tightened around him, just slightly. Every instinct in him screamed at him not to look, but he tilted his eyes up anyway.
Her expression wasn't angry.
Her blue eyes were wide, lips parted as if the words had punched the breath out of her. Surprise, certainly. Fear, maybe. But beneath that, something softer—worry, aching and sharp, and a protectiveness that made his chest twist.
She's not going to drop me, he realized. That was his first, ridiculous measure of safety: she still held him like something precious.
He clamped his mouth shut, suddenly terrified of what might slip out next.
This wasn't the first time the world had lurched sideways on him this week—this month—these days. He didn't know anymore.
He had started losing time.
Sometimes he would wake to the feel of cloth against his skin, someone's hands turning him, wiping him clean. He would blink, and the room would be different—the light shifted, the sounds outside the nursery changed, Aerwyna's dress not the one he remembered. Hours, maybe more, gone without any sense of sleep in between.
Other times he surfaced in the middle of things. A hand under his arm, lifting him. Warmth at his cheek. A cup tilted against Aerwyna's lips as she drank, while he watched the water move and thought, distantly: I don't remember being put here.
And then there were the other moments.
The sharp ones.
They never announced themselves. One heartbeat he'd be fuzzy, weightless, trapped in a body that felt like someone else's bad puppet. The next, everything would lock into focus.
Sound came first. The crackle of a torch down the hall, the whisper of fabric when Aerwyna shifted in her chair, the distant clink of metal from the training yard below. He could tell which servant had entered the room by the rhythm of their steps, which direction Reitz was shouting from by the echo on stone.
Then his own body arrived.
His fingers stopped feeling like sausages attached to someone else. When he told them to close, they closed. Not well, not gracefully, but on command. His toes responded a moment later, slower, a half-beat behind.
The first time he realized he could control his breathing, it startled him. He focused on the rise and fall of his chest and found that if he wanted to, he could make it shallower, deeper, hold it for a second longer than any infant had the right to. His heart obligingly sped up when he pushed, slowed when he forced himself calm.
From there, it had been impossible not to experiment.
Lying in the crib with his eyes closed, he concentrated on his right hand. On bone, muscle, tendon—the things he knew should be there. He imagined the flexor tendons tightening, the tiny bones of the palm thickening, reinforcing, like running a simulation in his head and asking his body to obey.
His hand had clenched on the blanket hard enough to surprise him. For a moment, it felt heavier, the small knuckles more solid, the grip almost painful.
Then everything slipped.
The clarity drained away in a rush, as if someone had pulled the plug. His fingers went weak and soft again. Exhaustion slammed into him, abrupt and absolute. He didn't even get to swear at himself before sleep took him like a wave.
After that, he was more cautious.
He didn't have names for the way his mind kept flipping, but he knew the pattern: the clearer his thoughts, the more his body obeyed, and the sooner that terrifying, precise state burned out and left him sprawled and useless for hours.
The castle had filtered into his awareness in the same patchwork way.
Sometimes he saw only ceiling and crib-bars, a world of white plaster and polished wood.
Other times, someone carried him through the halls and his brain greedily grabbed at everything.
Carved beams overhead, dark with age. Stone walls smooth under fresh limewash.
Tapestries heavy with stitched battles and rivers and beasts he didn't recognize. Set high along the corridors were gems the size of a man's fist, seated into the walls like orderly eyes.
They glowed.
Not like fire. Fire wavered, guttered when someone walked past, printed moving shadows on the floor. These stones shed a steady, colorless light that bit at his eyes if he stared too long. No heat warmed his skin when the bearer paused underneath. Whatever powered them, it wasn't a wick and oil.
No wires. No fixtures. No faint hum of background electricity.
When one of the wall-gems began to dim, a servant didn't trim a wick or pour oil; they opened the sconce's brass backplate and swapped the small core seated behind the crystal, quick and practiced, as if changing a battery.
Only outside—courtyards, battlements, the long walk between wings—did fire still rule.
Torches flared and guttered in the wind. Smoke clung to stone. In rain, men sheltered flames with their hands like they were protecting something fragile.
The first time he saw the gem-light up close, his mind reached automatically for catalogues: chemical reactions, phosphorescence, radioactive decay. He ran through them as quickly as hisvocabulary allowed and found nothing that fit cleanly. It sat there, immovable, quietly disobeying his expectations. He added it to the growing list of things he would test properly once he could stand on two legs and reach more than a meter.
Language came easier.
He couldn't help it; his brain hoarded sound.
He listened through naps, through feedings, through the endless hours of lying still while adults talked over him as if he weren't there. Names repeated often: Aerwyna. Reitz. Blackfyre. Riverrun. Words tied themselves to gestures and routines. Eat, sleep, up, down, good boy.
He remembered everything.
He didn't know why that part of him had survived intact. Different brain, different wiring. By all rights, something should have been lost in the transfer—names, faces, whole years shaved away at the edges. But every conversation, every term, stayed sharp in his mind, ready to replay whenever he reached for it.
He was already filling in the gaps, stitching together meaning from context and tone. He was fairly sure now that this was not just any keep, but Castle Blackfyre. That Aerwyna was Lady Blackfyre. That Reitz carried a title heavy enough that even the servants softened their voices when they said his name.
He was also sure that none of that helped him figure out how to be a convincing infant.
The light around certain people had started as a trick at the edge of his vision.
In those sharp stretches, when sound cut clean and his own pulse felt like a metronome in his ears, the world changed texture.
Aerwyna's outline blurred, not outward but… inward. His mind supplied a glow, a soft halo clinging close to her skin, denser at her hands, brighter near her chest and head. Reitz, when he came close enough, burned hotter, the edges more jagged, like a torch seen through smoke.
The first time a maid passed while he was in that state, she barely registered at all. A dim, smudged presence, there and gone.
He chased the sensation.
Eyes closed, he tried reaching for that perimeter again, stretching his awareness until the air itself seemed to press back. At about the distance from his crib to the far wall, the feeling frayed, like static washing over the edges of his mind. Anything within that circle, though, had weight.
Some people glowed bright, most glowed pale. Furniture didn't at all.
He had no language for it yet. But he knew it wasn't normal to feel another person in the room when you couldn't see or hear them.
It was useful. It also made hiding harder.
Aerwyna had caught him before—once, at two weeks old, for only a breath, so brief she might have doubted her own eyes if she hadn't seen stranger things since.
Later, during one of those bright stretches, he had pushed himself upright, hands gripping the crib rail. It felt almost easy—muscles cooperating, balance cooperating, the world balanced on a knife edge of control.
He'd been so pleased with himself that he'd forgotten to check the doorway.
A presence nudged the edge of his awareness a second too late. He turned his head, and there she was: still as the carved saints in the chapel, watching from the shadow of the half-open door.
They held each other's gaze for a heartbeat.
He dropped back onto the mattress like a stone and went limp, mouth open, breath shallow. It was an awful performance, but it was all he had. When he risked a slit-eyed glance a moment later, she was still there, hand over her mouth, expression caught between horror and something like wonder.
Since then he'd been walking a tightrope.
Too much obvious control, and he'd be a specimen. Too little, and he'd waste whatever advantages this bizarre new existence had given him.
He'd told himself he would keep his mouth shut. At most, he'd try one word, someday, when he was sure.
Mama seemed safe. Babies babbled. Sometimes coincidence sounded like speech. He could pass it off.
He hadn't accounted for how his adult brain would react to being pressed, over and over, to an act that still felt viscerally wrong.
Milk from a bottle, from a glass, from a lab tank—anything would have been easier. This was skin and warmth and eye contact and the steady, unconscious intimacy of a bond he hadn't chosen, in a body that responded to it whether he wanted it to or not.
He could handle having his soiled cloths changed. He could grit his teeth through being wiped down and rocked and burped. All of that he could file under necessary humiliation.
This felt different.
He'd resisted all day, turning his head, clamping his mouth shut. Aerwyna had stayed gentle, but there was a strain in her eyes now, a tightness at the corners of her mouth. She was tired. Worried. Every refusal wounded her in a way he hadn't anticipated.
And then, when she tried one more time and he panicked—
"Mama, I don't want to eat right now."
Fourteen little words. Enough to burn the flimsy mask he'd been wearing to ash.
Silence sat between them for a heartbeat, then another.
Aerwyna's arms did not loosen. If anything, her hold grew surer, one hand cradling the back of his head as if she expected him to vanish if she let go.
He could feel her tremble.
She drew in a slow breath. He felt the movement in the rise of her chest more than he heard it.
When she finally spoke, her voice was soft, the way it always was when she soothed him in the dark hours of morning. Only the tiniest quiver at the edge betrayed how shaken she was.
"My dear child," she murmured, in the language of this castle, the words flowing around him with familiar cadence.
He caught my and child clearly. The rest he pieced together from memory.
"What would you like to do now?"