By the time I turned six, I had developed three personal rules for surviving life in the Veyrath estate.
Rule one: observe everything, react to nothing.
Rule two: never let them see you counting the small kindnesses. It made the absence of them harder to bear.
Rule three: stay out of Caelan's way on the days he practiced his swordsmanship. Not because he was dangerous — he was, objectively, terrifyingly so — but because watching someone move through the world with that much certainty about their own worth was, on certain days, difficult to stomach.
I was not bitter. I want to be clear about that.
I was simply — aware.
---
My mornings began the same way every day. I would wake before the household stirred, dress myself without calling for the attendants — a habit that confused them deeply and that I maintained purely for the private pleasure of their confused expressions — and make my way to the east garden before breakfast.
The garden in early morning was the one place in the entire estate that felt genuinely peaceful. Before the gardeners arrived with their geometric ambitions. Before the household woke and resumed its careful choreography of ambition and silence. Just the light coming in low and gold over the hedges, and Chancellor the fish doing his slow, important laps in the pond, and the particular quality of quiet that exists only in the hour before the world remembers it has things to do.
Lyra had started joining me.
She appeared one morning without announcement or explanation, settled herself on the stone bench beside the pond, and watched Chancellor with the expression of someone conducting a serious professional evaluation.
"He's gotten fatter," she said.
"He's been stress eating," I said. "The new gardener keeps rearranging the lily pads and Chancellor takes his environment very seriously."
She looked at me. "You talk about a fish the way other people talk about political advisors."
"Chancellor has more consistent judgment than most political advisors I've read about."
Another almost-smile. She was getting slightly less rigorous about suppressing them.
We sat in comfortable silence for a while, watching Chancellor make his rounds with great self-importance, and I thought — not for the first time — that this was perhaps the strangest friendship I had ever stumbled into. Built on the foundation of a lie she was living and a truth I wasn't telling. And yet somehow, in the early morning garden, both of those things felt very far away.
"Eiden," she said, after a while.
"Mm."
"Do you ever get lonely?"
I considered the question seriously, the way it deserved.
"I got lonely in my previous—" I stopped. Cleared my throat. "I think I've been lonely for a long time," I said instead. "I've gotten fairly good at it."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "Me too."
She didn't say anything else. Neither did I. Chancellor completed another authoritative lap.
It was, all things considered, a perfectly adequate moment.
---
The lesson that changed everything happened on an unremarkable Wednesday afternoon in my sixth year.
Mother was conducting my mana assessment herself this time. Master Perryn had apparently exhausted his professional ability to explain my results and had requested, with the careful language of a man who very much did not want to deliver bad news personally, that Archmage Seraphine evaluate me directly.
The assessment room was on the estate's upper floor — a long, high-ceilinged space lined with instruments I couldn't name and crystalline measuring devices that hummed faintly in frequencies I could feel in my back teeth. It smelled of old magic and something sharper underneath. Like the air before lightning.
My mother stood at the center of the room.
I had been in her presence hundreds of times. I had sat across from her at dinner, passed her in corridors, watched her from doorways. But there was something different about being in a room alone with Archmage Seraphine Veyrath when she was paying attention to you.
It was like standing very close to a very beautiful, very contained fire and suddenly becoming aware of exactly how much heat it was choosing not to produce.
She looked down at me with those silver eyes — the same silver that all the Veyrath children had inherited, the same silver I saw in my own reflection every morning — and her expression was the careful neutral of a woman who had trained herself out of every unnecessary reaction.
"Hold out your hand," she said.
I held out my hand.
She placed the assessment crystal in my palm. It was warm — it always ran warm, absorbing ambient mana from the air around it. In the hands of any other Veyrath child it would have blazed immediately, the color depending on their affinity. Caelan's turned deep red. Aldara's turned a precise, cold blue. Dorian's, apparently, had turned three colors simultaneously and caused Master Perryn to sit down heavily and fan himself with his ledger.
In my hand it sat quietly. Warm. Dark. Patient.
We waited.
Nothing happened.
I watched my mother's face very carefully during those long seconds. I had learned to read the Veyrath family the way you learn to read weather — not from what they showed, but from the tiny shifts in what they were working to contain.
And what I saw, in the space between one breath and the next, was not contempt.
It was pain.
Brief. Controlled. Immediately locked away behind the neutral expression. But it was there — a flash of something genuine and helpless, the look of a person watching something happen that they cannot stop and cannot explain.
She took the crystal back from my hand. Turned away. Made a notation in the leather-bound record on the table beside her.
"You are dismissed," she said. Her voice was perfectly even. "Tell Master Perryn I will send my assessment by evening."
I walked to the door. Stopped with my hand on the frame.
"Mother."
A pause. "Yes."
"The crystal goes dark for everyone at first, doesn't it? Before it activates?"
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Yes," she said. "For a moment."
"Then perhaps," I said carefully, "mine is simply taking longer than most."
I didn't wait for her response. I walked out and closed the door quietly behind me.
In the corridor, I leaned against the cold stone wall and breathed slowly for a moment, staring at the ceiling.
I could feel it — that locked thing in my chest, vast and completely unreachable, like trying to open a door with no handle from the wrong side. Something was in there. I was certain of it, the way you are certain of things you cannot prove and cannot explain.
I just had no idea how to reach it.
Or why it had been locked in the first place.
---
My seventh birthday passed without ceremony.
This was not unusual — the Veyraths were not, as a family, given to ceremony for its own sake. Caelan's birthday was marked with a formal dinner and a new sword. Aldara's with a private acknowledgment from both parents and a significant addition to her personal library. Dorian's, predictably, with a great deal of noise that he generated himself and that everyone else endured with varying degrees of exhausted affection.
Mine passed on a Tuesday — my birthdays had an aggravating tendency toward Tuesdays — with a brief acknowledgment at breakfast from Dorian, who appeared with a small wrapped parcel containing a pocket-sized book of what turned out to be more terrible poetry, with a note that said simply: *For your comfort. Happy birthday, weird face.*
From Aldara, that evening, a single look across the dinner table. Brief. Warm. Gone before anyone else could have registered it.
From my parents — nothing.
I ate my dinner. I did not let my hands shake. I had gotten very good at that.
That night, after the household had settled into sleep, I sat in the small dusty room behind the third library bookshelf with Dorian's terrible poetry book open in my lap, not reading it, staring at the opposite wall.
In my previous life, my birthdays had also passed without ceremony. The orphanage marked them with a small cake — shared among whatever children happened to have birthdays that month, a collective acknowledgment of individual existence that somehow managed to make you feel more invisible rather than less. Later, in university, I had spent my birthday studying alone in the library, eating a convenience store sandwich, telling myself it was fine.
It had been fine.
This was also fine.
I was fine.
I closed the poetry book. Pressed the cover flat with my palm. Breathed.
*I am fine*, I told myself with great firmness, *and I would appreciate it if my eyes would reflect that assessment.*
They did not reflect that assessment.
I sat in the dusty room for a long time, holding a small book of terrible poetry that my brother had bought me, and I let myself — very privately, very briefly — feel the full weight of what it meant to love people who did not know how to love you back.
Then I wiped my face, straightened my shoulders, and went to bed.
Tomorrow there would be lessons. There would be Chancellor's morning laps. There would be Lyra appearing on the garden bench without announcement, watching the fish with professional seriousness.
There would be Dorian's laugh echoing through cold stone corridors like a lamp in a dark room.
It was enough.
For now, it was enough.
---
*End of Chapter 2*