The summons wore the right seal.
Wax red, pressed deep with the house's dragon face. A page in black-and-gold carried it as if paper could bite. He found Elara at the pump and Seren at the bucket, as if habit made them furniture.
"By order of the House," the boy recited, voice steady from practice, "the Bastard Seren will submit to a correction in the outer court at first bell. Witnesses permitted. Weapons limited. Mercy expected."
Mercy expected meant someone had added poetry where law dislikes it.
Elara dried her hands slowly. "We heard," she said.
The boy blinked. "How?"
"Because the house breathes," she said. She lifted the seal with two fingers, tested the wax with her nail, sniffed the paper, and nodded. "It's real."
Seren felt the small blade under his ribs stir. "We go," he said.
"We go," she agreed. She tied the thong around his wrist—not tight, just honest—and slipped a leaf packet into his palm as if passing a note to a bad student she had decided to keep.
"Breath," she said.
"Four. Two. Eight."
They walked.
---
The outer court had healed the rakes of yesterday and decided to pretend innocence. Pale sand lay smooth, chalk circle redrawn with the care of men who want their arithmetic correct. Benches formed a crescent. The Patriarch's chair sat under its canvas awning, not shading so much as deciding.
Zephyros stood behind it, motionless. The shade laid a straight line across his face like a ruler. To one side, Aurelius rolled his shoulders as if entering prayer. Cassius lounged at a pillar, lazy grin sharpened by interest. Lyra stood near the cistern, ribbon asleep around her wrist, eyes too blue. Selene had chosen the arch's shadow. She did not bring a shadow; shadows brought her.
Merek hovered near the cask table, ledger under arm, ring on the finger that lies most convincingly. He had arranged cups again. The cork from yesterday had learned to hide.
The page announced, putting weight on words not meant to carry it. "Charge: insolence persistent. Remedy: correction by staff, witnessed."
Aurelius tossed a staff into the ring. It was honest this time. Grain straight, balance true. Seren caught it and rolled it once, the way courtesy tests a handshake.
"Begin," Zephyros said, not loud, not soft.
Aurelius entered the ring as if walking into a room he had built. They took their stances. The yard's air learned to hold breath.
The first exchange was clean. Aurelius pressed. Seren met, bent, bled force into sand. The second was harder. Seren took a cut on the staff's quarter and felt his wrists complain politely. He told them to write it down for later.
On the fourth pass, a small wrongness presented itself: a patch of sand darker than the rest where some fool had watered it to keep dust down. It would slide the width of a coin if you put weight on it. Seren catalogued it and did not step there.
"Stand," Zephyros said, as if narrating weather.
Aurelius changed angle and taught a lesson without declaring it. Seren learned it with his ribs. A bruise punched a note that would play later. He returned a tap at the forearm—Noted—not hard, correct.
Cassius clapped once, bored or delighted. With him the difference was a hinge.
The crowd gave noise because crowds have nothing else to spend.
That was when the correction became a net.
A hum traveled the awning posts the way bees travel a garden. A thread of sound, then two, then the kind polite weapons make when men agree to break rules with taste. Seren's ear caught it. Not lyre. Not string. Wire under tension, somewhere above, being drawn back by a hand that counted for a living.
Elara's head turned a thumb, just enough to taste air. She saw nothing. That meant everything.
Seren stepped into the next line and let Aurelius's strike kiss his staff high. The angle let him look up where men forget to. The awning's ridge held a decorative lattice, old wood braced with new iron. Behind it, shadow thicker than shade. In that shadow, the faintest arc of oiled bow, the smallest glitter of a pin where a string meets its patience.
An archer. No. Two.
"Again," Aurelius said, unaware or pretending.
Seren breathed. Four. Two. Eight. He returned engagement with economy. Through the cross of staff and blade, he said a word small enough to fit under breath.
"Up."
Aurelius's eyes flicked there and back. He did not move his head. His mouth did not change. He altered the tempo half a beat, then again, until both of them were in a rhythm that made missing look like choice.
The first bolt whispered. It took sand where Seren's heel had been yesterday. Men who hire archers like lines where boys stand still. The crowd did not see. Elara did. Her hand found the spoon she had not brought and clenched air around its absence.
Selene's perfume deepened. "How gauche," she murmured to no one. "We were promised courtesy."
Cassius's grin sharpened into a knife. He leaned and rolled a cork between fingers that had once learned card tricks from men who saw too much.
Aurelius pressed his blade. Seren gave ground where it cost nothing and took ground where it bought attention. He rotated his hips and let the staff's butt find the darker patch of sand he had catalogued. It slid, yes—just enough to make a man watching aim for a correction make the wrong prediction.
The second bolt whispered. It kissed the staff instead of his throat and sang away into cloth. The awning's hem twitched. The crowd laughed because laughter prevents thought from multiplying.
Aurelius's next cut came late, on purpose. He let space open behind Seren. The boy did not take it. He stepped sideways into inconvenience. The third bolt buried itself where his sternum had been taught to expect instruction. It hit sand. It learned humility.
Zephyros did not blink. His ring finger flexed once. Men who wear law in their bones prefer not to showcase the muscles that keep it upright.
Merek wet his lips. The ledger under his arm remembered ink. He looked at the awning as if he had ordered flowers and received snakes.
Elara did not move. She waited for a door to appear where none had been allowed.
Selene sighed. "Theatrics bore me when they spoil choreography."
Aurelius made a feint where Seren's jaw could have earned a lesson. Seren lifted too early and then corrected too late by the size of a coin. To the room it looked like error. To the lattice above it was a misdirection. The fourth bolt took wood again. The staff rang. Aurelius snarled—not at the boy. At the aim.
He stepped in hard and pressed Seren close enough for breath to cost.
"On my word," he said without moving his mouth.
"Yes," Seren said, and allowed his knees to lie about his balance.
The fifth bolt paused. The sixth decided to be brave.
"Now," Aurelius said.
Seren dropped. Not collapse—choice. Aurelius's blade flicked up like a crooked finger. The fifth bolt met the flat and skated into awning, severing a line that had been asked to do too much. The lattice shifted. A boot scraped.
The sixth bolt never left its home. The archer lost his purchase, cursed in a language gutter water learns, and fell most of the way out of his hole. He caught, scrambled, and showed enough face to be owned.
Selene's laugh carried like a bell rung under a pillow. "Oh, darling," she said to the ceiling. "Stand up so we can lie about you."
Aurelius turned, blade still low, and whistled a tone only men who have drilled answer. Two guards detached from a pillar as if the stone had unclipped them. They went up the posts like spiders who disapproved, reached the lattice, and dragged a man down who had learned to be brave at the wrong school. He hit the sand with a grunt that borrowed Zephyros's air without permission.
The crowd found its voice. It wanted outrage and found curiosity. Men muttered. Women stared with faces polite enough to hide arithmetic. A boy laughed because boys misfile fear.
"Who hired you?" Aurelius asked the archer, mild.
The man looked at the patriarch, then at Merek by mistake, then at the sand as if there were law written there for his use.
"No one," he said, as liars do. "I thought—"
Aurelius struck him gently behind the ear. The man slept. Aurelius's mercy lives just next to efficiency.
Zephyros lifted a hand a thumb. "Enough," he said.
It was not.
The second archer had learned his partner's mistake and chosen to pay it forward with spite. He loosed in panic at the man who had disappointed him. The bolt swerved in a way physics dislikes. It does that when a room decides. It shot for Seren's spine because stories like neatness.
Elara moved. She did not leap. She did not cry out. She stepped into a place that had been kept for her by the math of her life and put her hand where wood would pass. She caught the shaft with fingers wrapped in the cloth she uses to pull pans from fire and let the force eat fabric and not bone. It sliced palm, missed tendon, and painted the spoon she did not carry years ago.
She held the bolt until its tantrum ended. Then she dropped it, slow and impolite.
The court stopped pretending.
Zephyros looked at Merek without moving his head. Merek found that his feet had been taught to forget standing. "My lord, I—"
"Bring the second," Zephyros said.
They brought him. He tried to fight and discovered there are rooms where fighting is a way to write apologies no one reads. He knelt in sand because knees have learned democracy.
"Name," Aurelius said.
The man swallowed. He had a scar that bent his lip into a sneer and a twitch in his left wrist where bone had healed incorrectly after old bad work. Seren had seen that wrist coil rope at the river. In another life. Yesterday.
"Daran," the man said.
"Who hired you," Aurelius repeated, same mild tone that had put a dozen boys to rights.
Daran stared at the ring of sand as if reading could be learned here. He looked at Seren the way dogs look at children who do not run. "The steward," he said at last, and decided confession would be a kind of revenge.
Merek's mouth learned panic without language. He held the ledger like a shield and found it a poor one.
"I—"
Zephyros lifted his hand a finger. Merek's voice set. His knees thought about politics.
"Take them," Zephyros said.
Guards moved. Merek found his anger and pointed it uselessly. "This is slander! The boy—"
"Take him," Zephyros said again, and the word took.
They dragged the steward out of his own story. His ring hit stone and rang. The cask table discovered that cups can be frightened.
Cassius clicked his tongue. "Expensive morning," he said to the air. Selene's smile widened by the width of a lie.
Aurelius looked at Elara's hand. "You bleed," he said.
She rotated her wrist. The cut smiled back at him. "It keeps me polite," she said. He handed her a clean strip of linen without pretending to be concerned. She wrapped it without looking at it.
Zephyros turned to Seren. The court felt the turn like weather moving across a field. "Stand," he said.
Seren stood. He did not sway. He did not look victorious. He looked like a boy who had kept count.
"You kept your feet," Zephyros said.
"I counted," Seren answered.
Zephyros's mouth made a shape that could be mistaken for a thought. "Correction complete," he said. "For now."
For now fell into sand and sharpened the circle.
He looked up at the awning and then at the mirror court's distant wall. "No more lattice," he said, to no one in particular. When men like him speak to architecture, carpenters hear.
Aurelius put the staff back into Seren's hand. "Dawn. Mirror," he said.
"Yard too," Seren answered, which was insolence. Aurelius allowed it the size of a coin.
The court emptied the way staged rooms do when the play is over and actors remember taxes. Merek was gone, swallowed into corridors that keep receipts. The archers went under a law that does not write poetry. Lyra coiled her ribbon and did not meet anyone's eye. Selene drifted like incense. Cassius scratched a note into the back of his wrist with a nail that ought to have been cleaned.
Elara and Seren left by the seam where shadows decide they are friends. She did not ask him how his breath had behaved. She listened and found out.
"Say it," she said when the corridor held them without witnesses.
"I will not answer summons without his seal," Seren said.
"Say it again."
"I will not answer."
Word-Bound bit lightly, like a dog that knows your skin. The air leaned the width of a hair.
Elara nodded. "Good." She lifted her palm and let him see the cut again. The blood had clotted into a line that would become a sentence. "You watch one thing," she said. "They'll turn to another."
"I know," he said.
"You think you know," she corrected. "Thinking is wrong at this age. Do it anyway."
He allowed himself the smallest smile a day like this deserved.
They cut to the library because rooms with maps are good after rooms with weapons. Eldrin had already learned about Merek from a book that had not yet been written. He looked up and took Elara's hand as if it belonged to a tool he loved. He cleaned it with water that had known leaves and fire. He packed the cut with sap that remembers trees. He wrapped it in linen he had pretended was for a book spine.
"Tidy," he said to a wound that refused to be.
Seren stood by the long window and watched the mirror court across the inner roofs. Sun slid. Stone accepted. He imagined the pane at the far end and the seven doors behind the older self. One remained empty. Six stood like polite threats.
Eldrin followed his gaze. "It will call," he said.
"I know."
"Don't let it spend you to buy its answers," Eldrin said. "Rooms love answers more than truth."
Seren nodded. He put the thong in his pocket and felt its weight say rope even when it was only leather. He closed his hand over nothing and found that nothing had weight too.
---
Evening learned what had happened poorly and then decided to understand. Cooks burned fewer things. Guards sharpened less. Children who were not important ran in smaller circles. Men who think in ledgers learned that the numbers had moved while they watched.
A page came at dusk. He brought a note with law's seal. It did not bite.
The House suspends corrections. The Bastard will report for training only, under the eyes named. By command.
No flourish. Zephyros seldom bothered.
Elara pinned the note to the door with the wedge as if law needed help to stay. "Good," she said.
Seren lay on the cot and listened to the room admit it had survived the day. He closed his eyes and found the mirror court waiting like a coin under tongue.
He stood before the pane. The older self waited with patience that looked like despair wearing a uniform. Six doors. Cracks running toward a center that had not yet been purchased.
Choose, the thought said, not loud.
He did not answer. He set breath between them like furniture.
The pane clouded, then cleared. The older self lifted his hand. Letters appeared in blood without dripping.
One debt paid. Five to interest.
He woke with the lamp low and the wedge honest. Elara slept in a chair with a knife on her knee and the spoon making a cat of itself.
He breathed. Four. Two. Eight.
The house listened with new manners.