Aerwyna had never fumbled a cup in her life.
Water had always obeyed her. As a child by the river, she'd made cups out of it for fun—little spheres that shimmered in the air, catching the light before she let them fall back into the stream. By the time she was twelve, she could pour three pitchers at once without spilling a drop and freeze a waterfall in mid-cascade just to make the servants gasp.
So when the ceramic slipped from her fingers in the nursery, it wasn't the cup that frightened her.
It was the reason she dropped it.
Her son was standing.
Not propped up. Not held. Not wobbling along a bench with a nurse's hands under his arms.
Standing. In his crib.
She'd seen it once before—at two weeks, for a single breath, so brief she'd later wondered if exhaustion had tricked her.
This time he held the rail and looked at her as if he knew exactly what he was doing.
For an instant, her mind simply refused to accept the sight. The world narrowed to the crib rail, his chubby fingers clamped around it, the too-steady focus in those deep violet eyes.
The cup tumbled from her hand.
Her training moved faster than her thoughts. Water leapt to her call before the ceramic even reached the floor, surging up in a smooth, instinctive ribbon. The cup and its contents froze mid-air, locked in a transparent cradle inches above the stone.
Only then did Aerwyna notice she was breathing hard.
Ezra's gaze flicked from her face to the suspended water, then back again. He did not cry. He did not laugh. He just stared, as if cataloguing the phenomenon.
Aerwyna swallowed and, with a flick of her fingers, let the water fall back into the cup. It settled into her palm as neatly as if she had never dropped it.
Her hands, she realized, were shaking.
Hours later, she sat by the crib, the same cup untouched on the table beside her, and watched him sleep.
The nursery was quiet. Outside, somewhere deep in the keep, steel rang on steel as Reitz drilled the knights. The muffled rhythm of blows and shouted orders bled faintly through stone and timber.
Ezra lay on his back, small mouth slightly open, fists tucked beside his cheeks. In sleep, he looked like any other infant—soft, oblivious, harmless.
It should not have been possible to reconcile that with the image burned into her mind: the tiny body pulling itself upright, the way his eyes had found hers and held them, clear and strangely aware.
Aerwyna exhaled slowly, pressing her fingers to her temple.
She pressed her fingers to her brow and tried to steady her breathing.
"Great Omnipotence,"she whispered as her voice cracked, "What in all the Seats are you?"
She reached out, almost without thinking, and let her Aura spread.
It was a habit as old as her first lessons: relax the muscles behind the eyes, loosen the grip on her core, let her mana seep outward in a thin, invisible shell that brushed the room. Walls, furniture, sleeping child—everything within reach pushed back against her in small, familiar ways.
A person's presence touched her Aura Field like shape and texture. As a water mage, she felt them as density and flow—warm pools, hard stones, fast streams.
Infants before Awakening were usually nothing at all. Their mana stayed tucked inside the body, quiet and unshaped. At most, if she pressed her Field right up against them, she might feel a faint fuzz of static clinging to the skin.
Ezra should have been barely a smudge.
What she felt from the crib was…muted. Not empty. A lake under ice. Something deep and very, very still, pressed tight against the edges of his tiny body so it wouldn't spill.
Her aura slid over it and found no obvious leak, no wild flare that would mark a true Awakening. No shockwave, no uncontrolled spill—none of the chaos that came when a child's circuits finally burst open.
But the weight was there.
He hasn't even Awakened, she thought, a chill running through her. You're not supposed to feel like this until you've blown half a wall out.
She pulled her Field back into herself, unsettled.
Her father had once told her that law was just another kind of river.
"The Duel keeps us from drowning in our own blood," he'd said, bent over a map in his solar in Riverrun, his finger tracing the borders of Primarch seats and gifted lands. "One sword instead of ten thousand. One grave instead of a field of them."
She'd been fifteen then, more interested in pushing her power to freeze entire ponds than in listening to lectures about the Law of Ascent.
"It's not mercy, Wyn," he'd added when she'd shrugged. "It's a bargain. We all agree to put our throats under a single blade now and then so the rest of the realm doesn't burn."
Back then, she'd thought he was talking about Primarchs and Emperors and people whose names were written in gold leaf in the histories.
Now, watching her son's chest rise and fall, she understood the warning in his eyes a little better.
Reitz had jumped straight into the heart of that river.
In her youth, he had been her rival—or so she had told herself. A fiery young man who had managed to retain his house even after the ascension duels of his generation. He'd been a Seat-holder—one of the chosen few under their region's Primarch, a man whose duels were watched in crowded arenas and whispered about in courts. The Primarch had practically carved his sigil into Reitz's back. Champion. Blade. Shield.
To Aerwyna, he'd seemed unbearably arrogant then—always grinning, always challenging, always pushing harder than decorum required. Only later had she realized he had been trying, in his blunt way, to impress her.
And then the Rex Imperia had come calling.
Armies on the border. Praetorians at his back. Invitations that were really orders.
Reitz had sworn to the Throne, traded Primarch oaths for Imperial ones, and taken Blackfyre fully into the Imperialist camp. The Primarch hadn't forgiven it. Neither had half of Aerwyna's kin in Riverrun.
"You're marrying a turncoat," one uncle had muttered when he thought she was out of earshot.
She had married him anyway.
Because when Reitz laughed, the whole hall felt lighter. Because when they sparred, he never treated her like delicate glass. Because when he spoke of the future, he didn't talk about seats and edicts; he talked about roads, ports, keeping their people alive.
And now they had a son who stood at eight weeks and stared at frozen water like it was a puzzle to be solved.
In a realm where law put a sheen of order over everything—and ambition still found its way through the cracks—what would a child like Ezra be?
A blessing. A threat. A prize.
Aerwyna's stomach knotted.
She reached through the crib bars and brushed her fingers over his cheek.
"You," she murmured, "are not going to be anyone's token."
His lashes fluttered. For a heartbeat she thought he might wake, but he only shifted closer to her hand with a soft sigh.
**
In the days that followed, she paid more attention.
It wasn't just the standing. It was everything.
Ezra almost never cried.
It wasn't just the standing. It was the way he came and went.
Some hours Ezra was nothing but a baby—warm weight in her arms, red-faced and indignant, crying with the simple fury of hunger or a wet cloth. He would kick and fuss and cling, then wear himself out and sleep so hard she could lift him without waking him.
Other times, he went eerily quiet.
He still rooted when he was hungry, still wiggled when he was uncomfortable, but the sound didn't match the need. A cry would start, thin and sudden—and then cut off as if someone had snuffed a candle. His face would smooth. His gaze would sharpen. He would stare past her shoulder with that too-steady focus, tracking something only he could feel, until the effort seemed to drain out of him and he sagged into sleep again.
"It's…not right," she admitted to her mother over a lukewarm cup of tea in the solar that overlooked the training yard. "It isn't that he never cries. It's that he cries like an ordinary babe one moment, and the next he's gone quiet—gone \elsewhere\. As if he forgets to be a baby. As if he remembers again."
"I've only ever heard him truly wail once," Aerwyna went on, throat tight. "At the slap after he was born. Since then it's…bursts. Flickers. And then he just drops, like he's spent."
Later that evening, when Reitz came in from the yard smelling of sweat and steel and tried to tell her she was doing too much herself, she answered with a tired smile.
"I'll feed him," she said. "If I'm trapped in this castle instead of flooding Primarch seats, I may as well do something useful."
"You have Catalyna," Reitz protested gently. "You don't have to be nurse and lady both."
"Catalyna can have him when I can't," Aerwyna replied. "This part is mine."
Reitz laughed and kissed her forehead. "As you command, Milady."
She let him think it was about boredom.
Over the weeks, the flickers changed.
The sharp, absent spells still came—she could see them in the way his gaze would go too still, the way the air seemed to tighten around him—but they no longer ended in the same limp collapse. More and more, he would \stay\. He would come back to her eyes and remain there, present in a way that made her skin prickle.
It did not comfort her.
It frightened her more.
Feeding him turned out to be its own oddity.
Sometimes he latched immediately, warm and heavy in her arms, eyes sliding closed in contentment. Those moments felt almost normal. She could almost forget the standing, the too-sharp gaze, the frozen cup.
Other times, he turned away from her breast as if the smell offended him. He never cried. He just pressed his lips together, small brows drawn in a stubborn line.
"You have to eat," she whispered once, alone in the nursery in the middle of the night, the castle quiet around them. Her chest ached with fullness. Her back hurt from too many hours in the same chair. "You'll make yourself sick, little one. Please."
He stared at her collarbone, not her face. For a moment she swore there was guilt in his eyes.
That was impossible.
She started watching him when she thought he wasn't looking.
Sometimes, when he lay "asleep" in the crib, his breathing slow and even, she would draw her Field in tight, then let it thin and spread just enough to brush the room. Not probing, not pushing—just…feeling.
After a few minutes, his eyes would open.
He didn't look around with the unfocused randomness of a normal infant. He scanned. The ceiling. The far wall. The window. Once, his gaze fixed on the spot where the old wardstone was buried deep in the keep's structure, far below the nursery—no visible mark, no reason for a baby to notice.
His tiny fingers flexed, as if testing tendons, as if…reaching for something only he could sense.
The air would grow oddly taut, like the moment before a storm. His presence swelled against the edge of her Field for a heartbeat—never quite spilling past his skin, but pressing there, deliberate.
Then his head would turn the slightest fraction toward the door, toward where she stood hidden in the shadows. Their eyes met.
His entire body went limp. He squished his face into a textbook parody of infant sleep, mouth falling open, lashes trembling as if in a dream.
If he'd been older, she would have called it guilty.
"You are a terrible actor," she murmured one afternoon, leaning on the crib rail. "And entirely too clever."
He gave himself away with a twitch of his lip.
Aerwyna's chest tightened. Fear and a fierce, aching pride tangled under her ribs until she wasn't sure which hurt more.
Word of "strangeness in the nursery" would spread, if she wasn't careful.
Servants talked. Knights gossiped. Even loyal men liked a good story, and an infant who behaved like a little lord in council instead of a squalling bundle was exactly the sort of story that traveled fast.
So Aerwyna started quietly trimming the branches that led to her son.
She rotated maids frequently, she made sure that no one with any magic ability, aside her and Reitz attended to Ezra, if word leaked that they had a monster of a son, then the heir would be a target. She discouraged casual visits to the nursery, pleading healers' advice about "overstimulation." She asked Reitz to keep Ezra's appearances at feasts rare and brief.
The only constant was Catalyna. The wet nurse was careful, punctual, precise—and, most importantly, discreet. If she noticed anything odd, she held her tongue.
"Let him grow a little before we parade him," Aerwyna said when Reitz protested. "He startles easily. And if the Primarchs' spies want to know whether Blackfyre has a future contender, they can wait until he's old enough to throw a stone."
Reitz's expression hardened at that. He hated thinking about the old Primarch at all these days, let alone what that man might do with information.
"You're right," he said eventually. "The fewer eyes on him, the better. Let them guess."
It wasn't much. But it was something. A few more layers between Ezra and the world.
Between Ezra and the Duel.
The day it all broke open was not dramatic in the way ballads loved.
It was simply long.
Ezra had been in one of his sharp, quiet states since morning, eyes too focused, body too still. He refused to nurse every time she offered, turning his head away with that same tight little line to his mouth.
By mid-afternoon, Aerwyna's patience was threadbare. Her breasts throbbed. Her nerves were frayed from lack of sleep, from worry, from the constant low roar of imagined futures—Ezra in an arena, Ezra in a Primarch's court, Ezra on an execution block because someone decided his existence was too dangerous to tolerate.
"Enough," she murmured, bouncing him gently as she paced the nursery. Her voice stayed soft, almost coaxing. "You can be stubborn when you're ten! Right now you need to eat."
He didn't fuss or fight her. He just stared at a point somewhere over her shoulder, that same distant calculation in his eyes that no baby should have.
She sank into the chair with a sigh and shifted him in her arms, untying the laces of her dress with fingers that felt clumsy.
"I don't want Reitz worrying himself sick and dragging a court healer up here because you've decided starving is a good idea," she whispered, trying for lightness and not quite making it. "Whatever idea that is. You're four months old."
Ezra blinked slowly, as if considering that information.
"Come on," she coaxed more softly, lifting him closer. "Just this once. Cry, even. It would make my life simpler."
She guided his head toward her.
For a moment, nothing happened. His mouth stayed stubbornly closed. The room felt very small. The ticking of the old clock on the shelf seemed suddenly loud.
Then he inhaled.
Aerwyna braced herself, finally, for the inevitable wail—the primal, wordless sound every babe made when pushed too far.
It didn't come.
Instead, her son looked up at her, met her eyes with impossible steadiness, and in a clear, piping voice that should not exist in a body that small, he spoke.
"Mama," he said, each syllable soft but distinct.
"I don't want eat right now."