Dawn filed its edge against the yard.
Frost silvered the practice posts. Breath smoked from the mouths of boys who believed it proved something. The swordmaster walked the line with a limp so old it had become rhythm.
Seren crossed when the gate-man looked away. He climbed the low beam, eyes forward, arms loose. He fell once, twice, then learned to let the ground arrive without argument. Four in. Two held. Eight out.
"Rat," Cassius said, appearing as if the yard had thought him up. River-colored eyes. A practice blade in his hand that had chewed many knuckles. "You came."
"The yard was empty," Seren answered.
Cassius's mouth twitched. "Hold out your hands."
Seren did. Cassius rapped his wrists, light and quick. "Again." He feinted, grazed skin, watched for flinch. There wasn't one. "Good," he said, surprised at himself.
They moved. Cassius played. Seren learned. The practice blade bit his forearm; he stepped through the pain. It bit his ribs; he turned a shoulder to bleed force into air. Cassius pushed harder the way boys do when a game threatens to become something else.
When the yard stirred, Cassius stopped. He tossed a small skin. "Water."
Seren caught it. He did not drink. The leather smelled faintly of tallow and something colder. He tipped a drop on his wrist. It beaded and skated, refusing to soak, as if a skin had formed that disliked being touched.
"Later," Seren said, and knotted the thong at his belt.
Cassius raised an eyebrow. "Picky."
"Hungry," Seren said. "Hungry waits."
"Odd rat," Cassius murmured, and went to join the line.
Seren set the skin near the fence post in a patch of weed that should have been pulled last summer. He watched the leaf—serrated, five-pointed—drink the drop. A black vein traced from the wet to the stem, slow as ink in paper.
Ashroot likes iron, Eldrin's book had said. And men who dislike patience.
Seren left the skin where the yard could see it and forgot it.
---
Elara scrubbed the laundry table with lye until the wood's grain stood up like gooseflesh. "You look taller," she said without looking up.
"I fell better," Seren said.
She snorted. "Fall like a farmer. They live longer."
He dried cloth in the courtyard wind. A maid hurried past with a basin steaming too much for the weather. Her eyes slid off him. The steam smelled of rosemary and something that hid behind it, bitter as old tea.
"West baths?" he asked.
She flinched. "Her ladyship prefers it hot," she said, and fled.
Elara's mouth hardened. "Don't carry for the west when you can help it," she said. "They season water like meat."
Seren filed it.
---
The library soothed as always: old glue, lemon oil, the mouse quarrel behind the second row. Eldrin had a stack of thin volumes and a face set to hum. He pointed without looking.
Seren took On Coals and Clever Hands to a corner and worried at a paragraph on bellows ratios until the numbers agreed to be friends. He turned a page and found a slip of paper in the gutter—half torn, the ink smeared by someone who had not let it dry.
Courtesy is camouflage, it said in Eldrin's hand. Wear it until the room stops measuring.
Seren looked up. Eldrin pretended he had always been reading.
"Breath hides truth?" Seren asked.
"Breath buys you the seconds truth needs to behave," Eldrin said.
Voices in the hall sharpened. A boy laughed too loudly and ended the sound with his teeth. The laugh left splinters.
Eldrin closed his book. "Go home by the pantry," he said. "Do not touch the stew."
"I never touch stew," Seren said.
"Today don't be noble about it," Eldrin said. "Be fast."
---
The pantry was a cave of sacks and barrels. A copper pot rested on a trivet, steam muttering from its lid. The smell was wrong by the width of a hair. Not rot. Something that hardened the tongue.
A scullion ladled into bowls and traded them through the hatch to hands he didn't see. His own hands moved smoothly. Too smoothly. Practice where there should have been boredom.
Seren slipped behind him. He set two towels on a shelf, turned as if to go, and let his elbow nudge a wooden spoon from its hook. It clattered across the stones.
The scullion flinched. His next ladle slopped, splashing his fingers. He pulled his hand back with a hiss and stuffed it into his mouth the way boys do with kitchen burns.
When he tasted what he'd been carrying, his face changed. He looked at Seren and did not see a servant. He saw a mirror.
"Careful," Seren said in a voice that sounded like Elara when she spoke to knives. "Boil bites."
The boy swallowed, set the ladle aside, and reached for a rag. His fingers shook once, then remembered company. He wiped the lip of the pot with pointless care.
"Who told you to season?" Seren asked.
The scullion stared at the rag. "Instructions," he said.
"From who?"
The boy's jaw worked. "From instruction," he said, and the word had capital letters he hadn't earned.
Eldrin's note breathed in Seren's pocket. Courtesy is camouflage.
"Thank you," Seren said, and left as if bored.
He did not run. In places like this, running is not faster.
---
Twilight turned the river copper. Zephyros's page found Elara at the pump again. "The Lord," he said, "will see the boy at dawn. Bring him to the high hall."
Elara wrung the last bucket dry and set the handle down without a sound. "We will be there," she said.
That night, she oiled the wedge. Seren lay on the cot and drew breath through the narrow gap the window allowed. The iron taste from the stair lived elsewhere now—subtle as a thought you haven't admitted. When he breathed it into his hands and set his palm to the lintel, the wood told him about splinters in other fingers. One set had come often, then stopped three days ago. Another had come once, then learned.
"Tomorrow you say little," Elara murmured in the dark. "When they offer you courtesy, you wear it back to them."
"What does Zephyros want?" Seren asked.
"Proof his blueprint holds," she said. "Or proof it needs a new line."
He slept badly and woke ready.
---
The high hall hadn't warmed since summer. Zephyros sat with a whetstone again, drawing the blade along it as if he could file the morning smooth. The Patriarch stood at the slit window, watching a mist that offered no information.
"Breathe," Zephyros said without greeting.
Seren did. The Patriarch's eyes slid to him, took the measure a craftsman takes of material: grain, knots, yes, it will hold a nail.
"The house is ill," the old man said. "Some will cure it by cutting. Some by cautery. Some by prayer. What will you do?"
"Breathe," Seren said.
The Patriarch's mouth moved, almost a smile. "Adequate."
Zephyros set the whetstone down. "Who taught you to not drink when the yard offers you a skin?"
"Plants," Seren said.
"Which?"
"Ashroot. In the fence line. It likes iron. The water skated."
Zephyros blinked once. The Patriarch did not.
"And the pantry?" Zephyros asked.
"If stew is seasoned, the scullion should be bored," Seren said. "He was not."
Zephyros's gaze shifted, weighing, then dropped to Seren's hands. "You touched something," he said.
A pricked pad, almost healed. A faint chalk line if the light agreed to help.
Seren didn't look down. "I'm learning to count better."
Zephyros leaned back the width of a finger. "You will bring this 'counting' to the yard at night," he said. "Not the day yard. The other."
Elara held breath in her teeth. The Patriarch did not turn, but the room cooled.
"The river stairs," she said—before she could stop herself.
Zephyros looked at her as if remembering she could speak. "Yes," he said. "If the boy learns to breathe in rooms that want him, he also learns to breathe in ones that don't."
Seren catalogued the phrasing. Rooms that don't want him. Courtesy as a disguise. He thought of the mirror. Now you owe the work.
He nodded. "I'll learn."
Zephyros stood. The talk was done. "Tonight," he said.
They were dismissed.
In the corridor, Elara's hand found the boy's shoulder. "You will go," she said.
"I will."
"You will come back," she said, not as a question.
"Yes," he said. He meant I will try. In houses like this, those are the same sentence said to different listeners.
---
The river stairs ate sound.
They fell under the keep in a coil of damp and slick. The smell was moss and a city's skin—stone that had held breath for a thousand winters. A torch burned near the bottom, its flame thin as a knife. Two guards waited, bored the way men are when danger has agreed to meet them later.
Cassius leaned against the wall between them with a grin he had borrowed. "Rat," he said. "Welcome to the other yard."
Water lipped the lowest step. A narrow skiff rocked against the mooring. The river was black and slow and busy under the surface with intentions it didn't share.
Zephyros did not come. The Patriarch did not. This was the kind of test fathers outsource.
"Get in," Cassius said.
Seren did. The skiff shifted. He went to his knees by choice, weight low. The guard who pushed them off did it with the ease of a man who had done it with bodies aboard that did not climb back.
"Row there," Cassius said, pointing at a slice of darker dark. "Touch the post. Come back. Simple."
Seren took the oars. Wood complained. He set the blade and pulled. The skiff objected and then agreed. He found the rhythm a river likes—ask, wait, take, give. He breathed with it.
Halfway out, something bumped the hull. Not driftwood. Soft, then not. The oar caught, twisted. He released, reset. A second bump. The skiff yawed. A third, near his left foot—small, quick. Rats swim. Other things do, too.
On the next stroke, the left oar stuck as if the river had grown a hand. He pulled—harder than he should have. The oar freed and threw him backward. His shoulder struck the thwart. Breath left. Water came up the way fear does—fast, over edges you thought were high.
Four in. Nothing came. Two held. Nothing to hold. Eight out. Waste.
He made the count smaller. One in. One out. The world returned by inches.
He set the blade shallow and feathered. The skiff straightened. He let the bumping become information instead of threat. There—there—there—three points that liked each other. A net? No. A line strung with something that wanted to catch ankles. Courtesy in rope.
He altered angle by a hand's breadth. The oar slid clean. The skiff slid past a dark that made no ripple. He touched the post and let the wood tell his palm old stories: messages tied in storm, boys dared, men lost.
The return went worse fast.
The line had shifted. The river does work for men who know how to ask it. The skiff kissed the trap. A loop snared the oar, bit, held. He let go. Better to lose wood than breath. The current spun them toward the arch where the stone wrote scrollwork of drownings.
He dropped to the bottom boards and pressed his palm to the hull. Not magic. Attention. He felt where the river shoved and where it sulked. He shifted his weight and turned his back into a brace against the thwart, put his feet how the quiet book had drawn—second toe under knee—and pushed. Not hard. Correct.
The skiff slid; the loop let go; the arch missed.
He poled with the one oar left and the length of board meant for bailing. It was ugly, then efficient, then done.
They bumped the stairs. The guard caught the bowline.
Cassius's grin had emptied out. "Lucky," he said.
"Breathing," Seren said.
The guard who had watched with the attention of a bored saint spat into the river. "Again tomorrow," he said. "Bring your own oars."
Seren stepped onto stone and did not look at his shaking hands until the torch had permission to notice.
Cassius fell in beside him up the stairs. "You didn't drink my water," he said, as if returning to a joke he wanted back.
"No," Seren said.
"You should," Cassius said, and this time the voice under the voice belonged to a teacher with dirty boots. "Sometimes it isn't poison."
"Sometimes it is," Seren said.
Cassius laughed once. "Odd rat," he said again. "See you at dawn."
---
Elara waited with the spoon across her knees and the wedge within reach. She looked at the boy's wet cuffs, his raw knuckles, the river on his breath.
"You went," she said.
"I came back," he answered.
She let out the breath she had not admitted to holding. "Tomorrow we oil the wood," she said. "Oars lie when they're dry."
He lay down. Sleep arrived like a clerk to tally what the day had spent.
Just before it took him, a small weight pressed the latch from outside. Not testing. Placing. When he opened his eyes in the gray before dawn, a folded scrap lay on the floor, slid under the door with care.
He picked it up. Elara watched without moving her head.
The hand was neat, expensive ink.
Courtesy is camouflage. Your courtesy has been noticed. Meet me where the house does not look. South stair. Seventh landing. Bring no one. Drink before you come.
Under the words, a tiny rosette had been drawn—too many petals, or too few.
Elara took the paper and held it near the lamp. The ink didn't shine. Old habit. "No signature," she said. "Which is a signature."
"Do I go?" Seren asked.
She looked at him a long time, then at the wedge, then at the door, then at the window the rain loved.
"Yes," she said. "But we choose the drink."
She set two cups on the table and reached for the jar with the plainest label, the ugliest cork, the least to recommend it to a thief.
"Breathe," she said.
He did.
The south stair waited, and under it, a mirror that preferred the willing.