The Manor

Arriving by crystal is like being hit very gently by a wagon.
There’s the note, and the light, then a full second where you’re nowhere at all and you know it, and then the floor comes back. Forty of us on the checkered floor at Fennmark. Forty of us standing in a different room four hundred miles west, blinking, somebody’s baby screaming, a man two places along from me quietly and efficiently being sick into a bucket that the guild has thoughtfully provided for that exact purpose.
They’ve got six buckets. They know.
“Greywater Landing,” a clerk announces, to nobody. “Ashveil domain. Mind the step, no loitering in the chamber, the step is the one you’re on.”
I mind the step.

Outside, the cold gets into me like it’s been waiting.
That’s the first thing about Ashveil. It’s not winter, it’s not even properly autumn here yet, and the air still has an edge to it that Bellhollow never managed to have in three years of trying. Bellhollow was wet. This is clean, thin, coming down off something high and white that I can see over the rooftops the moment I clear the guild steps: mountains, an honest wall of them, running north to south with clouds caught halfway up like wool on a fence.
The border. Somewhere on the other side of that is everything the map stops caring about, and this house has spent four hundred years standing between the two.
Greywater Landing is a grey town, built out of the same stone as the ground it’s on, and it’s busy in a way Bellhollow never was. Rope. Iron. A smithy every third street doing bracket work and mail repairs rather than horseshoes. Two separate shops selling the same six kinds of dried meat. Everything here exists because somebody, somewhere up that valley, needs equipment and is in a hurry.
And yet, nobody’s hurrying because they’re worried. They’re hurrying because there’s work.
There’s a staging area for coaches near the edge of town. Empty. Guess I’m walking. So I walk, and it takes two hours, and I don’t mind. Two hours is fine. Two hours is the last bit of being a nobody I’m going to get.

The Ashveil manor doesn’t sit on top of a hill looking down at its people, the way houses in the capital do.
It sits across the mouth of the valley, wide and low and awkward, three separate builds’ worth of stone joined badly, with a curtain wall on the northern face that’s twice the height of the rest of the thing and doesn’t match anything. That wall wasn’t built for show. That wall’s had things hit it. Though it’s been a while since anything has made it this far.
I like it immediately, which I wasn’t expecting.
The gate is open. Two guards on it, one either side, in good grey coats with a silver device on the shoulder.
“Oh, look,” she says, from somewhere just behind my left ear. “A door. Your favourite.”
“Afternoon,” I say.
“Afternoon,” says the left one. “Deliveries go round the east side.”
“I’m not here for a delivery. My name’s Iori. I’m expected, I’m the tutor.”
There’s a pause of a very particular quality.
“The tutor,” he says.
“Yes.”
He glances across at the other one, and the other one makes a small noise through his nose, and something in my chest goes flat and cold and starts counting exits, because I know that noise. That’s not a bored man’s noise. That’s the noise of somebody who’s been given a name and told what to do about it.
“No,” the left one says. “Nothing here about a tutor.”
“Captain Bringer of the Royal Mage Guard sent word ahead. Three days ago.”
He called from the road the morning after we left. A short, to the point call, using something similar to the earring he gave me.
“Sent word to who?”
“To the Duke.”
“Duke’s not receiving today. Sunday.” He says Sunday like it’s a full sentence and an answer both.
“Then whoever’s holding the gate book-”
“That’s me. I’m holding the gate book. There’s nothing in the gate book.” He’s already looking past me at the road. “Sorry, lad.”
And here’s the thing.
I could argue. I could argue extremely well. Or I could take about four seconds and one spell and be over that wall without either of them noticing the temperature change, which would be the single stupidest thing I have ever done, and I’ve done some.
So instead I stand there in the cold and actually look at them, which I should have done a hundred yards ago.
Their coats are grey. The device on the shoulder is silver, a bird on a branch, wings folded.
I’ve been reading about this house for three days, because of course I have. Ashveil’s colours are grey and green. The device is a bird on a bare branch, wings open, and it’s picked out in green thread, and I know that because the Duke’s men have worn it on that shoulder at every border review for a century and a half.
These two are the same cut of coat with a different bird on it.
“Whose men are you?” I ask.
The left one’s chin comes up about half an inch.
“Lord Halvard Ashveil’s household,” he says. “We’re covering the gate. Duke gives his own men the day off on a Sunday, which is a very generous and very stupid arrangement, so his brother lends him men when he visits. You’re welcome.”
“Ohhhh,” she says, delighted. “It’s going to be one of those houses. I’m so glad I came.”
“Right,” I say. “Then could you send to the house? Somebody knows I’m coming.”
“Not today.”
“It’ll take four minutes.”
“Not. Today.”
Which is when a voice comes from about twenty yards inside the wall, from somewhere near a low door in the side of the gatehouse, and it says, very clearly and very pleasantly:
“He’s with me.”

She’s small, and she’s moving fast.
Black dress, white apron, dark hair pinned up under a white cap, and she’s crossing that courtyard at a speed that ought to look undignified and somehow doesn’t. She’s about fourteen, fifteen maybe. She’s got a folded paper in one hand and she’s holding it out in front of her like a warrant.
“Miss Mia,” the left guard says, and everything in his voice changes.
Not softer. Worse. Flatter. There’s a particular way some men say a name when they’ve been told they’re not allowed to do anything about the person attached to it.
“Her ladyship’s tutor,” Mia says, and stops in front of him, and does not look up at him for any longer than she has to. “Arriving today, by crystal, from Fennmark. Expected before dark. It’s in the house book. I wrote it in the house book myself the moment it came in, and the gate book comes from the house book, so if it isn’t in yours then you didn’t copy it out.”
“There’s no-”
“Page nine.” She turns the paper round so it faces him. “That’s the copy. That’s the Duke’s seal on the bottom corner. Would you like to look at it properly, or would you like me to go and get his Grace to come down here and have a look at it with you on his rest day?”
Silence.
“I’ll take him in,” she says. “Thank you.”
And that’s it. That’s the whole engagement. Fifteen seconds, no raised voices, and a man twice her size steps aside because a girl in an apron mentioned a page number.
“I like her,” she says, in my ear. “Can we keep her?”

Mia takes my bag before I can stop her, which is both her job and, I suspect, a way of ending the conversation about whether she’s going to take my bag.
“I’m sorry about that,” she says, once we’re in under the arch and out of earshot. “Sir.”
“Iori’s fine.”
“I’ll be calling you sir in front of the house, sir.”
“Fair enough.”
“They knew you were coming,” she says. “I want you to know that I know that, so you don’t spend a week thinking this house can’t read.”
We come out of the arch into the courtyard proper, and it’s enormous, and it’s not a garden. It’s a yard. Flagstones, a drain running down the middle of it, a stack of split timber under a lean-to and a set of practice posts off to one side, all of them chewed up. There are chickens. A duke’s house, and there are chickens.
“You made good time from the landing,” she says. “Did you take a coach?”
“None there. Walked.”
She glances at me, quick, up and down, the once-over of somebody who has been sent to fetch a great many specialists over the year and has developed opinions about them.
“Two hours,” she says.
“Roughly.”
“With that bag.”
“It’s not a heavy bag.”
“No,” she agrees. “It isn’t.”
And she leaves it there, which is the second time in a week somebody’s declined to ask me the obvious question, and I’m starting to feel like a man walking around with his coat on backwards.

Here’s the trouble, though.
Here’s the trouble, and it starts about four steps into that courtyard and it doesn’t stop.
I don’t look at people’s mana. Not usually, not deliberately. It’s not a thing you switch on. It’s more like you’ve got a sense of where the walls are in a dark room, and mana’s the same, it’s just there, a shape at the edge of things, but only if you have an eye for these things. Most people are a single quiet circle turning slowly, and you stop noticing it the way you stop noticing breathing.
Mia’s is turning. One circle, standard grade, perfectly ordinary.
And there’s something else going on with her, and it’s running all the time, and it’s running well.
It’s not big. That’s what makes it strange. It’s tiny, it’s a thread, it’s the mana equivalent of a man holding a note so quietly you’d only hear it in an empty room. But it’s continuous. It has been continuous since the moment she came out of that doorway, and it’s shaped into something, and that something isn’t a ward and isn’t a light and isn’t warmth, and I’ve built enough concealment in my life to know exactly what family of work I’m looking at even if I can’t see what it’s hiding.
She’s got a spell up. I can feel how long it’s been running. She’s had it up all day.
She’s walking half a pace ahead of me with my bag in her hand, telling me about mealtimes.
“-house eats at seven, and her ladyship eats with her father when he’s here, which he is, today, because it’s Sunday. You’ll eat with them tonight. After that you’ll eat with the house unless you’re asked, and you’ll be asked more than you want to be, so I’d learn to say yes politely.” She stops at a door. “Was there something else, sir?”
“No.”
“You’ve looked at me four times.”
“...Have I?”
“Five, now.” She isn’t exactly smiling, but something’s happening in the region of it. “It’s alright. People do. Mostly they look at the cap, not standard uniform is it?”
“Say it,” the other one urges, gleefully. “Go on. Ask her. Ruin everything in your first ten minutes, it’ll be marvellous.”
“It’s nothing,” I say.
“Mm,” Mia says.
And she opens the door, stands aside, and lets me into the house.