The Ashveils

The room they put me in is on the second floor of the east range and it’s twice the size of the one at the Crooked Nail.
I don’t unpack. I put the bag on the floor by the bed and stand in the middle of the carpet for about four minutes, doing nothing, the way you do in a room that doesn’t know you yet.
Then Mia knocks and says his Grace will see me now, and adds, without any particular emphasis, “Lord Halvard’s already in there.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s Sunday,” she says. “He shouldn’t be here at all.”

The door to the study is heavy and it doesn’t seal properly, which I imagine has been true for a hundred years, and which means I hear the last thirty seconds of the conversation before I’m part of it.
“-twenty years old, Cassian.”
“Mm.”
“Twenty. Two circles. No academy. No guild registration, no letters, no record, which I find remarkable in itself. I had Perrivale look, there is no record of this person anywhere, and Perrivale is thorough."
“Perrivale is very thorough.”
“And you’ve engaged him. Live-in. Before meeting him.”
“I have. As long as he can do the job.”
“On the word of one man.”
“On the word of Gordwin Bringer.”
There’s a short, tight silence, the kind that happens when someone has been handed the one argument they can’t win and has decided to keep going anyway.
“I’m not disputing the captain’s character-”
“Good.”
“-I’m disputing his judgement in a matter that is not soldiering. He hunts things for a living, Cassian. He is an excellent man for hunting things and his squad does a great job protecting the royal family. He is not a man who knows what a fourteen-year-old girl needs, and you have let him hand you a boy off the coast road because he felt sorry for him-”
“Halvard.”
“-when there are men in the capital with letters after their names who would come out here for a fee, and you know it, and I have offered to arrange it four separate times-”
“Halvard. He’s outside the door.”
Another silence. A slightly different one.
“Come in,” Cassian says.

Duke Cassian Ashveil is exactly as tall as I remember and considerably greyer, and he is standing up. Not behind the desk. Standing next to it, with a hand on the back of a chair, like a man who has been asked to sit down several times today and has declined.
He’s in a shirt with no coat over it. On a Sunday, in his own study, arguing with his brother. There’s mud on his boots that has dried and been walked in since.
“Iori,” he says.
“Your Grace.”
“Cassian, indoors, when there’s nobody about.” He looks at me for about two seconds. Not up and down. At my face. “Mia says you walked here from the Landing.”
“There weren’t any coaches available.”
“They come and go.” He glances at the window. “So instead of waiting, for gods know how long, for one to return you decided to walk two hours. That’s either a very sensible man, or a very restless one.”
“It was a nice day for it.”
“It’s freezing.”
“It’s dry,” I say, “which is new.”
Something happens at the corner of his mouth and then stops.
“This is my brother, Lord Halvard,” he says. “And that’s Perrivale, who advises him.”
Halvard Ashveil is the better-dressed version of his brother. Same height, less weather, a coat that fits properly and a ring on the hand that isn’t holding anything. He gives me the small nod you give a competent stranger, which is not nothing, and which is itself a decision, and I file it.
“Master Iori.”
“Just Iori, my lord.”
“Mm. No family name?”
“No, my lord.”
“How unusual,” he says, pleasantly.
The advisor doesn’t say anything. Perrivale is a thin, neat man of about fifty in a grey robe with a guild badge on it, and he is the only person in this room who is actually looking at me, and he’s been doing it since I came through the door.
Five circles, and he wants me to know it. There’s a certain kind of mage who leaves their mana slightly open when they walk into a room, the same way a man might leave his coat unbuttoned over a knife. It’s meant to be felt.
I let mine sit exactly where it’s supposed to. Two circles, standard, turning quietly, the work of somebody’s lucky nephew.
His eyes move over me the way a man reads a page in a language he doesn’t expect anything from, and his shoulders come down half an inch, and that’s that. I watch him decide I’m nothing. I watch him be slightly insulted that he had to be brought in on a Sunday for this.
That’s the whole exam. Fourteen seconds. Thank you, Perrivale.
“He’s going to be so cross,” she says happily from the windowsill. “One day. Not today. Oh, I hope I’m there.”
“Sit down,” Cassian says, to the room, and everyone sits except him.

“You’ll have heard my brother through the door,” he says. “I’d rather not have it twice. Halvard’s view is that you’re too young and too obscure, and that I’ve hired you on sentiment. Have I got that right?”
“That’s fair,” Halvard says. “Put crudely.”
“Everything’s fair put crudely. Iori. Do you want to answer any of it?”
I think about it.
“No,” I say.
Halvard’s eyebrows go up. Perrivale, who had stopped paying attention, comes back a little way.
“No?” Cassian says.
“I could tell you I’m good at this. Anybody can tell you that, and you’ve had a year of men telling you that, and none of it did your daughter any good.” I keep my hands still on my knees. “I’d rather be in front of her for three days and then be sent home. That’s a real answer and the other one isn’t.”
Cassian looks at me.
“Three days,” he says.
“To start with.”
“And then what?”
“Then I’ll tell you whether I can find the problem. Not solve it. Find it. Those are different things, and everyone who’s promised you both at once was lying to you.”
Nobody says anything for a moment.
“Well,” Halvard says. “At least he’s modest.”
“He isn’t,” Cassian says. “He’s just not lying.” He pulls the chair out and finally, finally sits down in it, and rubs one hand over his face. “Right. Halvard. Thank you for coming out on a Sunday, and thank you as well, Perrivale. I’m going to talk to this man on my own now.”
“Cassian-”
“You’ve said your piece and I’ve heard all of it. Both times. I’d like fifteen minutes.”
Halvard stands. He does it smoothly, and he isn’t sulking. That’s the thing, there’s nothing sulky about him at all. He’s a man who’s noted a decision he disagrees with and will be revisiting it later.
“You’ve my brother’s ear for now,” he says to me, and it’s almost warm. “Do try to deserve it.”
“I’ll try, my lord.”
“And Cassian.” At the door. “The gate. Your men should be on it, Sundays or not. Mine had a boy standing out in the cold for ten minutes because there was nothing written down. It’s sloppy, and it embarrasses you, not me.”
Then he’s gone, and Perrivale after him, and the door shuts badly.
“He’s very good,” she says. “I’d have believed nearly all of that.”

Cassian sits for a second with his hands flat on the desk.
“He’s not wrong about the gate,” he says. “He’s rarely wrong about anything small.”
And while he says it I make the mistake of looking past him, at the wall.
There’s a map up there. A big one, the whole northern border inked in four colours, and it’s mounted on a frame with a warp in the left side that somebody’s shimmed with a folded playing card. The card’s gone brown. It’s been there a long time.
I know that card.
I have stood in this room. Once, for perhaps twenty minutes, at seventeen years old, three paces behind a man’s right shoulder with my mouth shut, while two old friends talked over a table about how many men it takes to hold a pass in February. I didn’t speak. Nobody introduced me. I was a boy in a grey coat standing where he’d been told to stand, and at some point I noticed the playing card in the frame and spent the rest of the meeting wondering who’d put it there.
And now Duke Cassian Ashveil is sitting in front of me, three feet away, with his elbows on the desk and his sleeves rolled up, looking at me with polite, open, entirely unremarkable friendliness.
Nothing. Not a flicker.
Which is right. Which is correct. I was seventeen and half a foot shorter and I had my hair long then and I never said a word, and that was three years and a whole other person ago, and men like him meet two hundred boys in coats a year.
“Ouch,” she says softly.
It’s not ouch. It’s the best news I’ve had all week.
“Mm,” she says. “Your face is doing something, though.”
“Iori.”
“Sorry.”
“You’ve gone somewhere.” He isn’t suspicious about it. He sounds almost sympathetic. “It’s a long way from Fennmark in one afternoon. That crystal takes it out of people, I’ve never once stepped on one of those floors without wanting to sit down afterwards.”
“It’s the second I’ve ever used.”
“Then you’re doing better than me.” He shakes his head. “Gordwin uses them like doors. He came through here eleven days ago on his way east, ate my food, complained about my chairs, and told me to write to him if I ever got desperate enough to try something unorthodox with my daughter. Then nine days later he calls me off the road to say he’s found someone.”
“He didn’t say much about it.”
“He said almost nothing about it. That’s the whole reason you’re sitting here.” Cassian spreads his hands. “‘I’ve found a mage. He’s good. Take him on my word and don’t ask him questions.’ Twenty-six years I’ve known that man and he’s never once asked me for anything. You don’t say no to the first one.”
“No,” I say. “You don’t.”
“My daughter’s going to be worse than me about it, I should warn you. She’s very fond of him.” He almost smiles. “She used to call him, well still does, Uncle Winny. Nine years old, sat on his boots and wouldn’t let him leave the room until he’d told her stories about the mages he worked with.”
Something goes cold and slow down the back of my neck.
“Did he,” I say.
“Endlessly. There was one in particular she liked. Some paragon he had on his squad. Always did the work nobody was watching, wouldn’t take the credit for any of it, never bragged, always cleaning up after everyone else.” He waves a hand. “Half of it invented, I expect. That’s what you tell a child. But she’s fourteen now and I’d wager she still believes every word.”
“Oh,” she breathes, absolutely delighted. “Oh, this is going to be so much worse than I thought.”
“Sounds like a lot to live up to,” I manage.
“Don’t try. She’ll like you better for it.” He squares his shoulders, and something goes out of his face and something harder comes into it, and this is the part he’s been waiting to get to since I came through the door.

“Now. One question. You’ll answer honestly or you’ll be back at the Landing by dark.”
“Alright.”
“Every man who’s been in this house has told me there’s nothing wrong with her.” He says it very evenly. “Every one. Physicians, examiners, Perrivale’s people, a woman from the sands far in the north who cost far too much. Nothing is wrong with her circles. Nothing is wrong with her body. Nothing wrong with her mind, and one of them said that in a tone I didn’t care for.”
“I’ve read the reports.”
“Then you know how they all end. No physical cause identified.” He leans forward. “Which means they think she’s doing it. Or not doing it. That she’s frightened of it, or lazy, or lying, or that she wants attention, and every one of them was much too polite to write that down and every one of them wrote it down anyway.”
He stops. His hands go flat on the desk again.
“She practises six hours a day,” he says. “She’s done it for a year. She keeps her own notes. She gets up before the house to do it because she doesn’t want anybody watching her fail, and she thinks I don’t know that.”
And there it is. The whole thing, sitting in the middle of the desk.
“So. My question.” He looks at me straight. “Do you think there’s something wrong with my daughter, or do you think she’s doing it to herself?”
He asks it flatly. He’s clearly asked it before. He’s clearly had answers he hated.
What he hasn’t got is any way to be sure, because he’s a man with three circles that he’s spent his whole life cultivating and not one of them worth anything for looking inside a person. Add on a border to hold and a dead wife, and it’s been eating him alive this whole time.
“I don’t know yet,” I say.
His jaw tightens.
“But I’ll tell you what I do know. Nobody gets up early to fail on purpose.” I sit forward. “And no physical cause identified doesn’t mean there isn’t one. It means the men you paid couldn’t find it. Those aren’t the same sentence. Every one of them wrote down the second one and left you to read it as the first.”
Cassian Ashveil looks at me for a long moment.
Then he sits back in the chair and lets out a breath that sounds like it’s been in there since last winter.
“Three days,” he says.
“Three days.”
“You’ll meet her tomorrow. She doesn’t know you’ve arrived and I’d rather she didn’t find out tonight, because if she does she won’t sleep, and she’ll have prepared questions.” He waves vaguely at the door. “There’ll be a great many questions regardless. I’d like you to understand that in advance. Mia will show you the library. It’s yours, take anything you can lift. I’d prefer if you stay in your room for the night, so make sure you’ve got enough material. Mia will bring you dinner.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” He’s already reaching for a stack of papers, already somewhere else, a man with four hours of Sunday left and no intention of wasting any of it. “One more thing.”
“Yes?”
“You’ll be told, if not tonight, then tomorrow, probably by someone in the kitchen, that the reason this matters is the succession.” He doesn’t look up. “It’s true. If she can’t cast, she can’t hold the name. My son’s made it very clear he doesn’t want it, and there are people in this family who’ve done the arithmetic on that.”
He turns a page.
“It’s true, and it’s not why I hired you. I’d like that on the record with somebody.”
“It’s on the record.”
“Good,” says the Duke. “Go and eat something. You look like a coat with a boy in it.”