The river path kissed the city's edge and I stepped into Lenorien as if the stones had been told my name in advance. Water lapped at pilings with a sleepy, private rhythm. Copper lanterns nested in wrought cages along the quay, each flame a small conspirator. Farther in, a market drowsed under awnings, figs and fish and wool bundled into shadows. The House of Dominion, Marla had said, past the fig-sellers and up the broad steps by the water.
I kept to the seam where darkness met light and watched the way rooms behaved. Even a street is a kind of room. A pair of dockhands paused in the act of swearing at a stubborn rope. The pause wasn't long. It was long enough. One blink. One thread. The installed beat in my chest noted it and added the coin to a private ledger. A woman closing a stall looked up with the reflex of prey and then with the deliberation of a queen. Another line, finer than the first. A boy with a bundle taller than his chest staggered to a halt, mouth open, curiosity unashamed. His wonder was not desire. It tried to be. The Veil counted kindly and then forgot him.
Past the figs. Their perfume was a thick, sun-warmed sweetness holding on even in night air. Stacks of them glistened, soft green and purple. I could have stolen one with attention alone. I kept walking. The broad steps were just beyond, rising from the riverside like a declaration, three flights of pale stone that had learned to wear footsteps without complaint. At the top, a portico with columns as slender as wrists. Above it, a frieze in dark metal: a line of figures entering a hall, the first with head bowed, the last with head lifted, and in the center, a woman laughing with her eyes closed.
Two sentries flanked the doors. Not soldiers, not exactly. Their uniforms were tailored indulgences, their cloaks deep as midnight, their collars a suggestion of a leash no one dared tug. They carried short batons crusted with small glass beads that caught and threw the lantern light like rain. Their attention found me. I felt it touch the mark on my nape and notice that it wasn't paint.
"House business?" the left one asked. His voice was neutral, that practiced neutrality which knows what it could do if it wanted.
"Ambition," I said. "And an introduction."
The right one smiled, not at me but at the way I'd chosen to answer. "You know how to knock." He pushed the door open with two fingers. The wood moved as if the fingers had been a command.
The foyer was a room designed to notice your posture. Floors of cool stone veined like smoke. Walls wearing silk the color of old coins. A fountain whispered to itself at the center, water sloping over a shallow bowl where bronze leaves lay drowned in perfect arrangement. The air smelled of citrus peel and candle-wax and the faintest breath of something animal.
A woman waited near a low desk. Waiting is a skill. She had mastered it. Her hair was bound with a ribbon that pretended not to be a leash. The silk at her throat closed with a modesty that didn't fool anyone. She looked me over once, not up and down but through and back, as if confirming a rumor.
"Welcome to the House of Dominion," she said. "I am Solenne. Your name, if you intend to be remembered."
"Thero Idrest," I said, and felt the syllables ripple the fountain. It might have been my imagination. Very little is only imagination here.
"Your patronage?"
"Zaiara."
Solenne did not cross herself or kneel. That would have been a different House. She exhaled once, sharp, the way people do when a detail clicks an entire pattern into place. Her attention settled on the back of my neck, on the weight I could not touch. The mark is not visible, Zaiara had said. But those who know will know.
"You've come for a Crest," Solenne said. Not a question. "You will, of course, be measured first. We count the room. You understand?"
"I was told that rooms tell the truth," I said.
"They tell a truth," she corrected, and the faintest smile lifted the corner of her mouth. "Follow."
We moved through corridors designed to teach you the shape you were supposed to take inside them. Alcoves hosted statues of no one and everyone, bodies in the middle of deciding a thing. Candles lifted along the walls like eyes half-lidded. We passed a set of glass doors veined with gold where laughter rolled as soft as silk falling, then another with no sound at all, which I suspected was louder.
Solenne stopped before a plain door with a brass handle. Plainness in a place like this was itself a style, a cloth cut so well it did not need embroidery. She opened it and stepped aside.
The chamber was circular. No chairs, no couches, no desk. The floor wore a mosaic of dark tiles with lighter ones set among them like breadcrumbs. The ceiling hummed faintly, a note you could feel in your teeth. The only other person in the room was a figure in a robe the color of smoke. The robe was not for modesty. It was for misdirection. When they lifted their head, their face had the composed calm of someone who does arithmetic for gods.
"I am Veyl," they said. The voice was neither high nor low. It chose a register and you accepted it. "I interpret the Veil when it cares to speak, and I translate when it chooses muteness. Stand in the center, Thero Idrest. We'll see who follows you in silence."
I walked onto the mosaic. In the center, the tiles warmed as if remembering other bodies. The installed beat checked itself against the room's hum and found a tempo. Veyl stood at the edge and raised a hand. The hum shifted, a pressure in the teeth becoming a pressure on the skin, the way storms warn you with the weight of their future rain.
"Breathe normally," Veyl said.
The first sensation was a brush, the lightest flicker across the surface of me, as if a thousand invisible eyelashes had blinked. Then a tug in the sternum, courteous and insistent, which met the new heart and requested a dance. The mark at my nape cooled and then warmed, cooled and warmed, a pulse on its own metronome. Threads that had come with me from the street tightened. I could feel them now as clearly as hair against the wrist. Somewhere behind the walls, footsteps halted on instinct. Somewhere across the hall, a conversation paused at the rim of a laugh and refused to fall in.
Veyl's hand made a small note in the air. "Baseline. Your presence collects attention willingly, without coaxing. The Veil recognizes a patron's seal. It is not a weak seal."
Solenne stood very still at the door. Stillness is not silence. The room could hear her expect.
"Raise your head," Veyl said. "Look as if someone you love has just entered."
I thought of Zaiara like a taste under the tongue. I lifted my chin. The threads sang. Not loudly. That would come later. They were tuned.
"Lower your gaze to the floor," Veyl said. "As if you've decided to be kind."
I obeyed. The pull shifted. Another attention arrived that hadn't been there a breath before, hesitant, then certain. I didn't ask for it. I allowed it.
Veyl's eyes were closed. They didn't need them. "You understand permissions," they said. "Good. The House will not have to teach you to stop grabbing what is already moving toward you." Their mouth quirked, as close to a smile as their arithmetic allowed. "Now speak. One word. Any word."
I thought of the sentence I had left unfinished in a room that didn't exist anymore. I said, "Mine."
It was a whisper. It was enough. The hum in the ceiling wavered, then steadied at a fraction lower. Outside the door, a listener bit their lip without understanding why. My own body remembered something sharp and soft and leaned toward it like a plant toward light.
Veyl opened their eyes. "Yes," they said. "Yes, I see it. You carry gravity. With training, you will not have to raise your voice to move furniture. With poor training, you will break tables and call it hunger."
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding. The room released its grip on my skin, still present but no longer weighing. The threads settled to a background music. Veyl dipped their chin a hair in acknowledgment of a completed sum.
"Solenne," they said. "Crest him. House standard weight, Zaiara seal. Put him through the small door."
Solenne's stillness shifted into action with the smoothness of a blade leaving a sheath. "Come," she said, and for the first time it wasn't a greeting, it was a command softened into courtesy.
We returned to the corridor and took a turn that narrowed the world to velvet and scent. The small door was exactly that: a modest panel between two uselessly magnificent ones. Solenne opened it and the smell of warm metal and clean ink moved over my face. Inside, a bench, a shelf, a basin, a case on the wall like a reliquary. Within the case, a disc of tarnished silver hung on a hook beside a stamp with no handle. The disc bore a shallow depression at its center.
"Remove your coat," Solenne said. "Bare your throat and both wrists. The House prefers to see where it is welcomed."
I shrugged out of the coat and undid the laces at my throat. The air was cool and smelled like citrus again. Solenne washed her hands in the basin, then mine, her fingers professional, impersonal, the touch of someone who had washed bodies that had been worshipped and bodies that had not. She took the disc from its hook and set it on the shelf.
"This is an old vessel," she said. "It remembers numbers. It also remembers liars."
"I don't intend to lie," I said.
"Intention is a candle," she said. "It can light a room or start a fire." She lifted the handleless stamp and showed me its face. Not letters. Not a picture. An arrangement of lines that made the eye want to blink and look again. "The stamp is the crest. The vessel is the proof. When the crest rises, it will know the weight of those who watch you. That weight will change every day. But the first impression matters." Her gaze flicked to mine, quick and precise. "Do not flinch."
She pressed the stamp to the skin at the base of my throat. Not hard. Firm enough to be believed. The metal was warmer than I expected. It was an invasion that felt like an invitation. The mark at my nape sang in answer, low and private. When she lifted the stamp, nothing sat on my skin, yet I could feel the shape the way your mouth remembers a kiss.
Solenne touched the vessel to the place where the stamp had been, catching what wasn't there. The disc's depression drank something invisible. A sheen rolled across its surface like breath on a mirror. Numbers are not always digits. They can be weights and tremors and the way the air pretends to be nothing. The silver clouded, then clarified, and a small circle rose from the center, no bigger than a fingernail, etched with a glyph that made my eyes want to slide away.
She studied it. Her mouth did not change. Her breath did. A fraction. She returned the disc to its hook and took from a drawer a fresh crest, a thin medallion on a ribbon, similar to the stamp but smaller, built to be worn against the skin.
She tied it at the nape of my neck. The ribbon's knot sat exactly beneath Zaiara's unseen touch. Two weights, one mortal, one not, balancing each other like coins on a scale. The medallion warmed almost at once, as if the body had decided to adopt it.
"You came with a tide behind you," Solenne said, fingertips briefly steady against my collarbone as she adjusted the ribbon. "Not a wave. A tide. Slower. Larger. It lifts boats that think themselves immovable." She stepped back, the professional distance restored. "Now the small door."
I looked at the panel and felt the House listen. Then I stepped toward it, and the quiet on the other side pressed close, expectant as a held breath.