The door kept closing.
Stone ground stone—slow, inevitable. Dust sifted over Seren's hair. The mirror held his not-breathing twin and the slow-creeping shadows that learned how to bend.
Choose, the glass whispered in his bones.
He chose breath first.
Four in. Two held. Eight out. Not to calm. To count. Counting pushed fear onto rails where it could not buck.
The shadows paused as if listening with him.
He stepped toward the mirror until the cold hummed in his teeth. His palm lifted to the fractured surface. He stopped a finger's width short. He had touched hot filament once in another life. Pain teaches respect. Respect is not fear.
"Willing," he said, the word too big for his mouth and just big enough for the room.
The reflection did not speak. It answered. The boy in the glass exhaled without moving. Frost bloomed across the silver backing, traced a slow star with too many points. A flake of it drifted down inside the glass and vanished.
Behind the not-Seren, the shadows curled closer. Edge, edge, edge—like hands deciding whether to take or test.
"Breath for answer," Seren said, a whisper that made no sound, and began the count again.
Four in. He drew the iron taste to the back of his tongue, remembered the note. Ash means death. Iron means life. Two held. He let the air press against his ribs like a firm hand. Eight out. He gave it to the mirror.
A hairline crack brightened along one of the fractures. Light did not leak; it threaded, as if someone pulled a filament through glass with a needle too fine to see.
The door grated farther. The seam narrowed to a handspan.
No time for doubt. He pressed a fingertip to the glass.
It bit him.
Not sharp. Hungry. A sting, quick, clean. A bead of blood welled and spread into the crack like ink along paper. The iron taste in the room grew stronger, almost sweet.
The shadows recoiled.
Words burned again—fainter, at the bottom edge, where a hand could hide them if a door opened too quickly.
Will takes the place of what is missing.
"What is missing?" Seren asked.
The glass did not answer.
He felt the next choice arrive. Doors do this—present themselves as if they had not already been chosen by the hand that built them. Step through or step away. He had no years to be brave. He had a wedge in Elara's door and a fire that ate oil like a lesson. He had breath.
He placed his other hand on the mirror.
Cold climbed his arms to the elbow and then learned how to stop. The not-Seren's eyes widened the fraction that means we agree. The shadows behind it flattened, became seams in the reflection where none had been.
"Awakening," Seren whispered, and that was not a plea. It was a label.
Something in the mirror leaned.
Not a door. A plane. Two rooms trying each other on.
Seren's ears filled with the pressure he had felt at the sixth landing. He swallowed against it and felt the swallow slide wrong, then right. He did not resist the lean. He allowed it the way you allow a wave to lift you rather than break you.
The chamber tilted. The mirror became a surface with depth. The not-Seren's chest rose once, a small rebellion that broke the painting-trick. The shadows ran like oil finding a crack.
Cold threaded his lungs.
He breathed in four. The cold went where the breath went. Two held. It waited in him, not heavy, not light. Eight out. He exhaled into the glass and watched the frost star erase a single point.
Pain sparked behind his eyes—the kind precise instruments give when they tell you what they cost. He did not cry out. The hurt flowed down into his hands, and under his palms the glass warmed the width of a coin.
The words changed.
Now you owe the work.
The shadows slipped away entirely.
The mirror stilled. His reflection breathed with him.
The door struck his shoulder.
He flinched and spun. The seam had narrowed to the span of three fingers. Stone pressed like a tired jaw.
He shoved an elbow into it and learned why doors win. He tried again. He lost air. He breathed the count he'd earned and bent his body the way the quiet diagrams had taught—knee over second toe, weight through the outside edge of the foot, spine long. He put push on structure, not meat.
The seam gave a finger's breadth.
He set his shoulder, exhaled on the effort, and the gap opened enough for a boy who had measured himself against doorframes to flatten and slip.
He did not look back at the mirror.
He did not run.
He climbed.
One landing. Two. At the third, the ash-taste rose sudden and thick as if something below had exhaled through a throat packed with cinders. He stopped, turned his face into his sleeve, and waited. It eased. He climbed again.
At the top he slid the tapestry back into place, tugged the mildewed cloth flat so its holes disguised the wall, and stood very still. Breath out. Silence listening.
Footsteps approached down the corridor. Light feet, careful. A tray clinked softly—cup to saucer, a spoon that did not touch the rim because someone had taught the hand that carried it. The feet paused near the tapestry. The clink stilled. A breath near the cloth—a test.
Seren stepped three paces left and faced the wall as if counting stones, a servant boy in a nightshirt with an errand too late for scolding. The tray moved on. The spoon clicked once now, on purpose, to let someone behind it know it had seen nothing.
He waited until the tray's echo dissolved, then slipped back to Elara's door and eased it open with the wedge in his hand.
Her eyes were open.
She had not moved from the latch. Her other hand rested on the wooden spoon laid across her knees. She watched him step in and shut the door and slide the wedge down in the groove she had worn for it.
"Breathe," she said, and he did, and the breath came with the taste of iron and old stone and the memory of a frost star missing a point.
He held up his finger. The pricked pad had stopped bleeding. A thin line remained, pale as chalk.
Elara's gaze dropped to it. She did not ask what. She asked how much.
"Enough," Seren said.
She exhaled once, set the spoon aside, and reached for his hand. She turned it palm up and traced the pad with a thumb that had known splinters and hot pans and harder things. "They teach the house in different registers," she murmured. "It listens in some and not others."
"Registers?"
"Ways of speaking," she said. "Words, work, water. You've learned to breathe in. Now learn how to carry out." She released his hand and nodded at the cot. "Rest. Whatever has your finger will take from sleep first."
He lay down because orders keep you whole. He closed his eyes. The mirror's words waited there, polite and inexorable: Now you owe the work.
Sleep came as a thing he let in, not a thing that took him.
---
The debt began with morning.
Seren woke with the bell and a pressure behind his eyes like rain wanting to be thunder. He breathed it into his belly and out into his hands and felt it leave the skull and settle in fingers and feet. It didn't vanish. It became available.
The yard was empty at first light. He hung from the rings and counted. At twenty-three, the tremble that usually arrived at twelve showed up late, curious. He placed his knee over his second toe when he dropped as the quiet book had said; the shock went into bone meant to take it. He breathed on the landing and kept two parts of the breath to himself like a miser with coin.
He walked the beam. He fell. He got up. The second time he fell, he did not startle. The third, he kept his eyes quietly ahead while the body solved the problem of ground. Four in. Two held. Eight out. The pain obeyed the numbers as if it had been waiting for instructions.
By the time the yard filled, he was gone.
In the laundry, Elara wrung sheets and did not flinch when the bell in the west wing rang not for meal nor meeting but error. Down the corridor, boys with clean nails and political fathers walked quickly without looking like they were hurrying. Someone had knocked a cup from a tray. Someone else had stepped away from the spill without thinking and then thought too much about the stepping.
Seren listened to the news the floor told. He did not step in it.
---
The Patriarch's page found Elara at midday with a message neither of them could refuse. "The Lord will see the boy at twilight," he said, eyes skipping off the child and fixing on the knot of Elara's apron. "Do not be late."
Elara nodded, kept wringing. The page felt snubbed and did not know why, which is the best kind of safety.
At twilight, the keep's highest hall smelled of pitch and dried herbs and the faint copper the river leaves in stone when it loves a city too long. Zephyros sat on a bench with a blade across his lap and a whetstone in his hand. He drew the stone once, precisely, and the scratch ran along the walls and returned a different sound at the end. He listened to that, not the beginning.
"Breathe," he said without looking up.
Seren did.
Zephyros's eyes lifted to the boy's hands. They found the healing prick on the pad of the finger and did not pretend not to. He glanced once at Elara. She looked at nothing at all.
"You will stand when struck," Zephyros said. "You will not answer unless called. You will take what is given and find the work in it."
Seren thought of the mirror. Now you owe the work. He nodded.
Zephyros's gaze searched the boy's face as if for a letter he could not quite sound. "At eight," he said—this part was written in a book no one had opened and everyone knew by heart—"you will take the boat to the island. Until then, you will be invisible."
He set the whetstone aside. He did not sheathe the blade. "There is a sickness in this house," he said, voice flat as a planing board. "It kills from the inside. Find the parts of you it can't see. Keep them."
Elara's breath caught. "My lord—"
Zephyros looked at her. The look had weight without threat. "You keep him warm," he said. "I will keep him small."
He stood. The conversation had ended.
On the way down the stair, Elara's hand found the boy's shoulder and stayed there until the corridor narrowed and there was no room for two at once.
"You touched something," she said.
"Yes."
"Did it touch back?"
"Yes."
She exhaled through her nose, the sound a stitch pulled tight. "Then we teach it manners."
---
Night carried rain again. The wedge held. When the bell spoke the second time, Seren did not go to the south stair. He lay on his back and watched the ceiling remember storms. The pressure behind his eyes returned. He breathed it into his hands. He imagined the quiet diagrams—brow to belly to toes—and drew a line with his attention the way a smith draws heat along iron.
He traced the line to his palm. The pricked skin tingled, then warmed, as if a coal the size of a seed had decided to remember what it used to be.
He turned his hand. In the dim, the pale line on his fingertip glowed the suggestion of a suggestion. Not light. Notice.
He set the pad against the lintel above the door. The wood told him what it had been: oak. What it had taken: hands. Where it had cracked: there. Which hands had lifted the latch most nights: the one with a ring that bit a little, worn on the index finger because the middle was thickened by old breaks.
He took his hand away.
Elara, eyes open in the dark, didn't ask. "Tomorrow," she said, "you will carry towels to the west wing. The ones for the cold baths."
"Towels," he repeated.
"They buy you time in corridors," she said. "Time is a key used politely."
He slept, owing work, owning breath.
In his dream, a frost star missed a point and did not mind.
Far below, in the sealed chamber, the mirror held the warmth the size of a coin where a boy's hand had rested. For a moment only. Then it went back to being a patient piece of glass that waited for those who learned to knock without sound.
On the river, a boatmaker checked a keel with his thumb and said to no one, "Eight years," and did not know why the words had come.
In the west wing, someone measured powder with a steady hand and thought about how long houses take to die when they think they are merely sleeping.
And in the highest room, Zephyros touched the thin scar on his cheek and listened to the rain until it told him a story he did not believe yet.