The mirror court had no roof. Dawn poured in uninvited, broke against black stone, and ran back into itself. The walls rose smooth and sheer, each a river frozen mid-laugh. Sounds went up, turned around, and came back wearing other people's steps.
Seren arrived with the broken staff slung across his back. Linen binding pinned the long split, neat as a scar. He stood in the ring's chalk and let breath arrange his bones. Four in. Two hold. Eight out.
Aurelius waited already warm. Plain staff. Heavier wood. Less mercy.
"You came," Aurelius said.
"You asked," Seren answered.
A nod that wasn't kind and wasn't unkind. "Again."
They moved.
Aurelius closed like a door that fits its frame. No feints. Correct lines. Seren let the first blow travel through wood into sand. He bled weight off the angle and made rope of resistance. The staff bent and lived.
"Better," Aurelius said.
The second pass came with a wrist turn that hid a small thrum in the wood—yard trick to break poor poles. Seren shifted his grip a finger-width to starve the vibration and gave it somewhere safe to die. The split hummed, held.
"Again."
They circled. Chalk remembered yesterday's feet and made a suggestion. Seren took it and turned it into a line. On the fourth exchange, Aurelius's staff kissed his ribs the size of a coin. He accepted the tax and returned a tap at the forearm that said Noted. Not hard—correct.
The mirror walls watched. They did more than watch.
On the ninth exchange, the glass to Seren's left wavered as if breath had fogged it, though the morning air was knife-clean. The reflections lagged a heartbeat, then leapt ahead. A dozen Seren moved where one stood. A dozen Aurelius stepped into strikes they had not yet chosen.
"Ignore it," Aurelius said without looking. "Fight me, not the room."
Seren kept breath on count and low. Four. Two. Eight. He let sound in the glass be theater and the man in front of him be the work.
Footwork drew small circles. Drift half-step. Weight into outside edge. Aurelius pressed. Seren gave ground where it was cheap and took ground where it could be resold. The split in his staff sang again—complaint, not surrender.
From the high arch, perfume arrived before its owner. Selene did not step into light; light went to meet her and came back understanding less.
"Pretty," she said, voice walking the wall. "Mirrors like pretty. Try not to make them jealous."
Aurelius did not answer. He altered angle a thumb, a correction a craftsman would have enjoyed even if it broke his favorite chair. Seren matched and found there was no chair to break. The next contact shivered from shoulder to heel and left him more awake, not less.
The wall to the right rippled. In it, one Seren struck first and paid for it. In it, one Aurelius stepped on old chalk and kissed sand. The real men did neither.
"Again," Aurelius said. Breath steady. Eyes flat. Ribs beginning to remember mornings.
They went faster. Staffs blurred. Wood complained like beams in winter. Seren's hands burned where linen rasped. He shifted, again, and the rasp turned into information.
The mirror showed him late once. He refused the lesson. It showed him early once. He refused that, too. The glass grew interested. Its surface cleared until it did not reflect hard edges so much as intent.
On the twelfth pass, a different Seren stared back with eyes ringed pale as river-light. His palm—his palm in the glass—bled. Words traced in that blood and ran slow along the pane:
Seven left. Choose wrong and none remain.
Seren did not speak. Eldrin had said: If a voice asks twice, don't answer. Some voices are glass.
Aurelius saw the blood-writing. He did not turn his head. "It wants a purchase," he said. "Don't sell cheap."
Selene's breath laughed, soft. "And don't hoard. Greed makes rooms hungry."
The mirror's bleeding script smeared itself into a handprint and vanished. A breath later, the far wall rippled with something else—a figure the height of a man, featureless save for nine lines across the place a face should be, each line refusing to cross the others.
It didn't step out. It only looked as if it had chosen to be invited.
"Again," Aurelius said, fiercer, to drown attention.
They did it harder. Aurelius cut from the shoulder and then from the wrist to test both hinge and brain. Seren let one pass close enough to name and turned the next around the pivot of his hips until the blow arrived in air he had prepared to forgive it. The court rewarded correctness, not courage.
"Good," Aurelius said at last, voice stretched. He dropped the staff point a finger. In this house, that was as much as a bow. "Drink."
A servant came when Aurelius's eyes flicked, not when he called. Bucket. Honest water. Seren took the dipper from the servant, turned to the mirror, and saw himself drink in a dozen angles. One reflection did not lift the dipper. It mouthed a word instead. Never.
Seren set the dipper down. Word-Bound lay under his ribs like a thin blade in cloth. Never is frivolous language. He did not spend it here.
"Enough for today," Aurelius said, but his glance at the glass said the room had yet to agree.
He left. He did not look at Selene. If a man never looks at a shadow, the shadow is forced to decide whether it will do the first rudeness.
Selene's perfume thinned to memory. The court breathed out a colder breath.
Seren stayed. He walked the ring slow, felt where sand hid ridges. He stood before the tall pane with the iron ribs and bowed a finger-width. The pane cleared. The older reflection came back—his face with years that hadn't happened yet, a thin silver line nested under the skin along the ring finger like a quiet river.
The mouth moved.
"Return," said the reflection he would become, soundless and exact.
Seren did not answer. He let breath answer for him. Four. Two. Eight. He turned away before vanity could say it had a point.
---
The library took him the way silt takes river secrets. It pooled him in quiet and gave him stacks as ribs. Eldrin hunched over a map that had been born under different banners. Raven lounged where a beam dared a wall and spun a coin as if gravity were his apprentice.
"You stink of glass," Eldrin said without turning.
"The room wanted my attention," Seren said.
"Rooms are vain," Raven offered. "Give them crumbs. Never give them bread."
Eldrin lifted the ugly oath-book with two fingers as if it might decide his knuckles were lies. He set it down gently. "What did it write?"
Seren tasted the leaf's ghost and the steel under his tongue and chose a truth that could walk with him. "Seven left."
Eldrin's beard twitched. "Left of what?"
"Rooms like to ask better questions than they answer," Seren said.
Raven laughed once. "Oh, you'll grow teeth fine."
Eldrin finally turned. His eyes counted dust on Seren's cuffs, river at his hem, and the straightness of his spine. "Listen to me," he said, voice raw not with age but with too much reading. "Mirrors don't tell truth. Mirrors punish sloppiness. They will offer you versions of yourself that make sense. Don't fall in love with any of them."
Seren nodded.
"Say it," Eldrin said.
"I won't," Seren said.
Raven flipped the coin and caught it without looking. "Teach him the trick with the palm and the wick," he suggested.
Eldrin snorted. "Not yet."
Elara came through the door like a knife chooses a sheath. She had a cut on one knuckle and lye-burn on the other. She set a heel of bread and a strip of salted meat on the table. "Eat," she said. "Thinking on an empty belly is how men invent wars they can't afford."
Seren obeyed. He watched Eldrin with the edges of his eyes. The old man reached under the table and brought up a slate wrapped in linen. He pushed it across.
"Two lines," Eldrin said. "Then back to me. And don't show anyone who owns more rings than tools."
Seren unwrapped the slate. The characters were Astralith, cut in wax, inked once, then dried until the strokes remembered themselves.
If blood fails, memory must carry. If memory fails, stone must speak.
Underneath, in Eldrin's neat small hand: If stone fails, break the right wall.
He wrapped it again. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me," Eldrin said. "Pay me back by not dying stupid."
Elara nudged the meat toward Seren's hand like a general pushing a pawn into a square that will be needed later. "After noon, yard," she said. "Aurelius will pretend he wasn't there at dawn. Humor him."
Seren nodded.
Raven's coin clicked once more. "One more thing," he said. "Dreams you have after mirror courts are not gifts. They are thefts. Hold onto your pockets."
Elara flicked him a look that meant stop telling truths that bruise sleep. He grinned and stopped anyway.
---
The yard wore midmorning like armor it had outgrown. Aurelius was already there, moving slow through a pattern with a blade that wasn't meant for boys to admire. Men watched out of the corners of the eyes they used for pride.
Cassius leaned against a pillar with a treaty book upside down. He had brought a cork and the patience to make it mean something. Lyra stood by the cistern with her ribbon asleep around her wrist, bored in a way that studies.
"Footwork," Aurelius said without preamble.
Seren set his feet. He let the wide world become the size of two handspans of sand and a heartbeat. The first pass stung the bruise from dawn; the second ignored pain and made new lines. Aurelius did not soften. Seren did not dramatize.
After a span that counted as work, Aurelius lowered his staff a finger and did the courtesy of water. The servant he had not called brought a dipper. Seren drank because this water kept its promises.
Selene drifted into a patch of shade that agreed to be called hers. "Say something true," she said, lazy as noon.
Seren set the dipper down and turned the small edge under his ribs into language. Word-Bound likes aim more than noise.
"If you send men to the river again," he said evenly, "I will return. You will be there when I do."
He did not mean a threat. He meant a shape of world. The court tilted a hair toward that shape. Selene's eyes flashed slow, then quiet.
"Careful," she purred. "Words eat their makers."
"I brought a knife," he said.
She laughed for real, a brief bright thing that made two men nearby shift as if reminded they had spines. "Keep your knife clean, little brother," she said. "We don't want infection."
Aurelius watched her back until the hall's angle reclaimed it. "Don't spend sentences you can't afford," he said.
"I keep accounts," Seren said.
Aurelius's mouth conceded the width of respect. "Keep them twice," he said.
---
The day pretended to be ordinary. The kitchens miscounted onions and discovered they liked violence less than lye. Merek scolded cups as if they were traitors. Guards sharpened for the pleasure of making sparks. Elara washed blood from linen that did not belong to anyone who would say thank you. Eldrin argued with a map until the map agreed to be wrong. The raven counted swallows from a high beam and decided history needed more birds.
Seren carried bread, water, buckets. He carried the room's mood like a man who has learned that moods are floors. He moved through corridors that forgot to be enemies because he did not ask them to remember.
Toward evening, the house cooled. Shadows connected. The seam by the Black Gate did not open. That was its way of saying it had learned patience.
He ate with Elara in the small room where the wedge fit the door as if the carpenter had known the shape of this year. She slid him half her portion. He returned a third. They did not talk about debt.
"Show me your hands," she said.
He did. No shakes. Raw spots that would be skin by next week. A splinter he had forgiven until now; she teased it out with the point of a knife that had never met a throat that didn't deserve it.
"Sleep," she ordered.
He lay on the cot. The beams argued with roof and lost politely. He closed his eyes to give dark employment.
Sleep came hard and then came with an unwelcome guest.
He stood again in the mirror court, alone with the pane. In the glass, seven doors stood in a crescent behind his older self. Each door was black and had no handle. Each door bore a different crack, fine as a hairline, and each crack ran toward the center without touching any other.
His older self did not speak with a mouth. The word arrived between thoughts.
Choose.
Seren felt Word-Bound stir. He put his palms behind his back so dream wouldn't think it could borrow his fingers. He looked at the cracks, tracing with mind not eyes. One trembled as if it wanted to be chosen. That is a trick. He did not pick it. Another crack bent toward him a finger more. He did not pick that either. He counted breaths. Four. Two. Eight.
He woke with the lamp low and Elara's knife on her knee and the spoon exactly where it needed to be. His heart obeyed the count by habit. The dream trailed a thread of cold that didn't belong to rooms with roofs.
He rolled to sitting. The wedge didn't move. The door did.
A folded scrap slid under, neat as craft.
Elara had the lamp before he reached the paper. She held flame close enough to make ink remember it had been liquid.
He read.
The circle waits. Sand is patient. Dawn. Alone. Bring your breath. Leave your pride.
No rosette. No flourish. The ink smelled faintly of stone that had never seen sun.
Elara met his eyes. She did not argue with the paper. She argued with the world.
"You will go," she said. It wasn't a question. "And I will be near."
He shook his head. "Not in the ring."
"I said near," she repeated. "I didn't say visible."
He folded the scrap twice and fed it to the flame. It blackened, curled, and turned to a small honest ruin.
"Eat," she said, and pushed a crust at him because food is a kind of armor.
He ate. Breath found the count. Four. Two. Eight.
Outside, the house turned over in its sleep. Somewhere below, the Black Gate remembered laughter and decided against it for now. Above, a raven pressed beak to feathers and drew one stroke through its wing, neat as a line on a map.
Dawn would come. The circle would wait. Mirrors would pretend to be patient.
He slept anyway. That is a skill.