The summons did not wait for bells. It lived under Seren's ribs until he woke to it.
Elara had already tied her hair and hidden the knife where sleeves pretend to be empty. She looked at the door, not him. "Dawn," she said.
"Alone," he answered.
"I will be near."
He did not argue. She had not asked to stand in the circle. She had asked to exist.
They walked the servant path where walls remember fewer names. The castle's breath was thin. The river worked without witnesses. When they reached the last bend before the mirror court, Elara stopped. She pressed the thong into his palm.
"Not for your wrist," she said. "For your head. If it tries to wear you, tie it off somewhere you can find."
He nodded. He tucked the strip under his collar like a promise that knew its place.
"Breath," she said.
"Four. Two. Eight."
He stepped into the court and left her in shadow.
---
The mirror court waited empty. No benches. No herald. The sand lay smooth but for one shallow line across its center, as if a giant had tested a knife and then become bored.
Above, sky wore the color of unripe slate. The black walls took the light and ate it patiently. The tall pane at the far end watched without blinking.
Seren walked to the ring's chalk as if a bell had rung. He did not call out. He did not bow. He set the broken staff on his shoulder and let the room do the first rudeness.
It obliged.
The pane rippled. Reflections multiplied, then thinned until only one remained—the older self, the one with the faint silver vein under the skin of the ring finger. Behind that self, the seven door-shadows from his dream stood again, each with a hairline crack, each refusing to cross the others.
The reflection's mouth did not move. The word arrived in his head like a hand finding a familiar rail.
Choose.
Seren stood still. He let breath count its fence posts. He waited for the second ask.
Choose, the word came again, softer, too polite.
Eldrin: If a voice asks twice, don't answer.
He didn't.
The court changed tactics. Sand hissed as if a snake had learned to be flat. From the arch behind him, a step sounded—light, precise. He did not turn. The step stopped at the edge of the ring and let perfume do the introduction.
Selene did not cross the chalk. "The room is generous," she said. "Seven doors. Seven errors. One lesson."
"Which?" Seren asked, because questions are salt.
"The one it keeps asking," she purred. Her eyes moved to the pane. "It likes the sound of that verb."
He kept his eyes on the glass. "Why are you here?"
"Because I do not like being left out of games that eat boys," she said, almost kind.
The sand moved again. A figure rose from it—no face, bronze mask hammered with nine lines that refused to cross. It held no weapon. It carried a chain of smoke between both hands, sagging like a net.
Seren lifted the staff. His palms had healed to new rawness. He did not adopt a stance. Stances show rooms where to bite.
"Choose," the reflection said a third time, not asking this time. Command.
Seren exhaled. He stepped forward, not back, and let the staff's blunt tip touch the sand exactly at the chain-man's feet. He did not strike. He drew a line—straight, shallow, through the middle of the court, cutting the space between him and the pane.
The chain-man moved to cross it.
The sand did not permit.
Its foot slid. The net of smoke snagged on air as if air had acquired teeth. The figure paused—confused, if things made of rules can be.
Seren drew a second line, this one curved, the way rivers bully fields. He closed one loop, then another, not trapping the figure so much as instructing the court where edges should be.
Selene's head tilted. "You're teaching it rules," she said, amused. "How clever. Rooms love new toys."
The pane clouded. The older reflection lifted its palm. Blood beaded along the lifeline and wrote:
Seven left. Choose wrong and none remain.
"Why does it want the word?" Selene asked the air, almost to herself. "What does it think will happen when you spend it?"
Seren didn't answer. Words that cost should not be thrown at spectators.
The chain-man tested the drawn line again. Smoke hissed, thinned, tried to cross, failed. It stepped to the left and found the second curve. It snapped the chain overhead and brought it down where a boy would be if he had learned fear from the right teachers.
Seren stepped inside the fall. He slid his staff under the smoke loop and lifted—not hard—correct. The chain lost a piece of itself and recoiled into the figure's chest. The bronze mask rang like a small bell struck without malice.
"Careful," Selene murmured. "Glass bruises easily."
The pane brightened. The seven door-shadows behind the older Seren moved as if a hand had stirred them. One trembled—the same one that had trembled in the dream.
Tricks repeat. He ignored it.
The chain-man struck again. Seren let his feet remember the ridges chalk had raised yesterday. He stepped where betrayal wasn't, laid linen-wrapped wood against the inner crook of a motion and bled it into sand. He didn't hit the figure. He interrupted it. Interruption is a language.
The room changed again. It always would as long as he refused its first suggestion.
A second figure rose. Then a third. Now three masks, three chains, three nets of smoke making a small storm, polite but intent. The pane's glass smoothed to a calm that meant it had stopped offering and started taking.
Selene exhaled. "The room is done flirting," she said.
Seren drew two more lines in sand with the staff's blunt end. He completed a circle with a gap and then left the gap empty. Rooms lie with circles; drafts don't. He felt for air with the back of his free hand. There—a thread of cooler breath slipping along the wall to his left, gathering near the floor. He stepped to ride it.
The first chain fell where he had been. The second curled for his ankle and found line instead. The third tried polite strangulation. He fed it the thong Elara had given, let it catch there, then twisted his wrist until the thong took insult and not skin. The chain ate leather; Seren ate breath.
"Again," Selene said, but he was not her student.
He put the staff's split end into the first loop of sand he'd drawn and lifted a thumb. The line broke where he wanted it to. The net of smoke, deprived of edge, sagged, swallowed its own slack, and kissed the mask that owned it. The figure blinked—if masks can.
He walked instead of lunging. He set his feet as if measuring a table. He found the ridge of last dawn's work. The staff butt found it too. He used the old ridge to lever the present breath into a new position. The second chain missed. The third tightened on nothing he needed.
The pane cleared completely. The older reflection stepped aside and revealed the doors more plainly. Up close, their hairline cracks were not random. They were tally marks. Seven strikes left on a ledger.
Selene watched the recognition cross his face. "Oh," she said softly. "So that is the price."
The court offered him the verb again without sound.
Choose.
He could refuse. He had. He could refuse all morning. The room would escalate. It had more figures. He had only lungs.
He tasted iron on the word waiting behind his teeth. Never wanted out like a horse that thinks it knows where home is. He swallowed it. Reckless language is a luxury. He was poor.
He did not say choose.
He said something smaller. He turned Word-Bound on its side and set it on a single hinge.
"I will not choose what the mirror asks," he said.
The air bent. Not much. Enough to make the sand ripple outward in a ring the room had not drawn.
The chain-men froze. The smoke chains went slack as if the thought had left them. The pane's surface shivered as if slapped.
One of the seven doors cracked fully, a clean break, and vanished. Six remained.
Selene's laugh was a bright knife. "You paid with the smallest coin," she said. "And the house took it."
The chain-men moved again, angry now, if laws can be. They struck together. Seren did not meet force. He took one step—half-step drift—and let two chains collide where his head had been. Smoke tangled smoke. The third chain came late, caught both, and made a knot out of aggression.
He breathed. Four. Two. Eight. He set the split wood against the knot the way a craftsman tests a joint, and pushed a thumb's worth. The knot tightened on itself and forgot him.
The pane showed him older again. The mouth formed a new word.
Later.
He nodded once. Agreement without obedience.
"Enough," Selene said to the room, and for a moment—only a moment—the court obeyed her. The chain figures softened into ash and fell. The pane fogged, then cleared to show only blue sky cut by stone.
Seren lowered the staff. The world returned to simple arithmetic: him, sand, a sister who liked puzzles that bleed. He did not look for witnesses. If Aurelius watched, he would prefer not to be thanked. If Eldrin listened, he would prefer not to be named. If Elara had moved closer, that was between her and the wall.
Selene stepped across the chalk, the rudeness elegant. "A question," she said.
"No," he answered.
Her smile did not dim. "You learn quickly."
"Slow," he said.
"Slow keeps funerals cheap," she murmured. She passed him so near her perfume tried to rent his attention and failed. "Eat something that isn't pride," she added over her shoulder, which may have been kindness or insult; with her, the distinction was a game.
He left the ring without bowing to the pane. Courtesy is armor; worship is habit.
---
He found Elara in the shadow where she had become a piece of wall. She did not ask what the room had said. She turned his wrist palm-up and checked for rope-bit. She looked at his eyes and judged whether words had moved in without paying rent. She nodded, small. "Breakfast."
They walked to the kitchen by the long way that picks up maps. The bustle had not yet boiled. Merek argued with a ledger and lost. Cassius, already oiled with laughter, spun a cork in his fingers and greeted them with a grin built for audiences.
"How are our courts?" Cassius asked. "Did the glass applaud?"
"It asked rude questions," Seren said.
"Family resemblance," Cassius said cheerfully. He let the cork roll across his knuckles and land in Seren's palm as if by accident. The cork wore a gray stain that wasn't wine. Seren pocketed it.
Lyra drifted near with a basin of greens. Her ribbon blinked awake a handspan and went back to sleep. She looked at Seren's pupils and at Elara's jaw and said nothing. That was also a kind of care.
Aurelius appeared later, after the kitchen had earned its noise. He took one look at Seren's staff and then at his hands. "Again tomorrow," he said.
"Mirror or yard?" Elara asked.
"Both," he said, and left because he liked using one word when three would have been worse.
Eldrin intercepted them near the library door, lamp already lit as if light had been waiting. "You spent a word," he said.
"A small one," Seren replied.
"There are no small ones," Eldrin said. "Some just take longer to punch you."
Seren met his eye. "It removed a door."
Eldrin's brows knit. "Of seven?"
"Of what it showed me," Seren said.
Elara's mouth went hard. "So it will keep asking until none remain."
"Unless we teach it boredom," Eldrin said. "Or starve it."
"How?" Elara asked.
"By answering different questions," he said, and waved them inside because the corridor did not deserve the rest of the thought.
---
They ate bread at the back table where the atlas of failed colonies props one leg. Elara shared her soup. Seren returned a spoonful. They stacked quiet between them until it felt like furniture.
"Say it," Elara said at last.
"I told it I wouldn't choose what it asked," he said.
"You did not say you wouldn't choose," she noted.
"No," he said.
"Good," she said. "Leave yourself roads."
He touched the thong under his collar. "It took a door."
"It took its own toy apart because you refused to play," she said. "Houses do that."
He nodded.
She set her spoon across her bowl. "Next time, choose before it asks."
He looked at her.
"If you must," she said. "Choose something small that belongs to you. Make the ground yours before the question arrives."
He filed it where new tools live.
Raven leaned into the doorway as if the frame had requested a rogue. "Also," he said, "steal a cup from the court."
Elara's eyebrow climbed. "Steal a cup from a room with no cups."
"Exactly," Raven said, pleased. "It will be too busy being insulted to be clever."
Eldrin groaned. "Don't listen to him."
"Listen to both," Elara said. "Then do the thing neither said."
Seren smiled, a small honest thing that lived and died in a breath.
---
By afternoon, the castle remembered it had to pretend to be a home. Children who weren't important ran where guards could pretend not to see them. Women who held the house together lifted water that refuses to lift itself. Men of rank made decisions that would be carried by people without titles. The sun did its work. The river kept its count.
Seren trained until his hands stopped shaking and then trained a little more so they learned not to start again. Aurelius took one strike to the ribs for every three Seren paid. He did not complain. He did not praise. He said "tomorrow" the way other men say "bread."
As the light dulled, a page in black and gold found Elara at the pump and Seren at the bucket.
"By order of the House," he read in a voice that wore someone else's boots, "the Bastard Seren will present at the outer court at second bell. Witnesses permitted. Questions permitted."
Elara's eyes were knives with patience. "Who writes this?"
"The steward," the boy said, glancing down as if letters might sprout new lines to save him.
"Merek," Elara said, tasting the name like vinegar.
The boy swallowed. "Yes."
"Tell him," Seren said, "I will ask questions with a hand on glass."
The boy blinked. He had not been paid to carry that kind of reply. But he was young enough to be stubborn. "I will tell him," he said, and left with the dignity of a messenger who wishes to live to old stories.
Elara turned to Seren. "Second bell," she said.
He looked at the sky. He looked at the court. He looked at the thong beneath his collar.
"Before then," he said, "I will take a cup from a room with none."
Elara didn't smile. She nearly did. "Be smaller," she said.
"After I finish growing," he answered.
"Annoying," she said, fond as a bruise you chose.
---
Dusk slid its knife through the day. The mirror court cooled to stone and listening. The pane stood blank as if innocence were a craft.
Seren stepped inside the ring and set his staff down as if measuring a bench. He walked the wall and checked every seam. He found no cup. Of course.
He stopped before the pane. He bowed the width of a finger, not one hair more.
"I brought my own," he said, and took Elara's dipper from under his sash, oak plain, iron hoop honest. He set it on the sand at the base of the mirror, handle pointing toward no one, and stepped back three paces.
The room did not move.
He waited. Four. Two. Eight. He waited until waiting became its own tool.
The pane rippled.
In the glass, his older self bent and lifted an identical dipper. The seven doors did not show. The word did not come.
The court had accepted the insult. Or the offering. With rooms, the difference is bookkeeping.
He picked up his dipper. He left.
Outside, Elara leaned in the dark with arms folded and a face that meant This is a bad idea and also the right one. "Cup?" she asked.
"Cup," he said.
"Good," she said. "Now eat and then be ready. Second bell is where men pretend to be brave."
He nodded.
They walked away. Behind them, the court held its breath and then released it slow, like a creature that had decided not to pounce today.
From high on the wall, a raven watched their heads and calculated. In his mind, maps grew lines. Some met. None yet crossed.