The Broken Mage and the Duke's Daughter

A week after, and I still can't get up the stairs without stopping halfway.
Three days flat on my back. Two more in a chair by the window being brought things. On the sixth day I got as far as the yard and had to sit down on the edge of the horse trough and be walked back in by a cook.
That's what a ten-circle draw costs. Nobody's ever written it down because nobody's ever survived one to write it, and I would very much like to tell you that it's noble and terrible and comes with visions. It isn't. It's a week of being tired in a way that sleep does nothing about, and a nosebleed every time you stand up too fast, and hands that won't do buttons.
Bessin has developed a system of feeding me that I am no longer resisting.

Gordwin's squad were here four days.
They counted the village. Thirty-eight, which is worse than forty, because thirty-eight is a number somebody arrived at by going and looking. They took statements from everybody in the house, they wrote up the reception hall, and they put Perrivale in a cart to the capital under guard with two men who don't sleep at the same time.
And the whole of it, every page, says that a Royal Mage Guard squad on training rotation in the valley responded to a distress marker.
Nobody has asked me a single question. Not one. Ellery brought me a bowl of soup on the second day and sat on the end of my bed and talked for forty minutes about a mattress in Fennmark and never once mentioned a white mask, and when he left he stopped in the doorway and said "glad you're not dead, sir," and went.
Brask gave it back on the last morning. Wrapped in a shirt, inside my own bag, without a word.
Gordwin didn't stay. He'd have stayed and I told him not to, because there is a difference between a captain covering for a friend and a captain sitting in the house he covered for, and one of those is a great deal harder to explain later. He went east to Coldrun to find the Duke, and before he got on the horse he put both hands on my shoulders and looked at me for about four seconds and said, "Eat something."
That was all. That's the entire conversation we had about any of it.

Verena came up on the third day with eleven questions written out in order.
None of them were about the mask.
Two of them were about boundary mechanics and why a half-arrived creature has to respect a plane it can pass through, which is a genuinely brilliant question that I don't have a full answer to. Four were about her own ward and whether four seconds is good, which it is. One was about whether she'd done the infusion properly, because she can't remember most of it and would like to know for her records.
The last one was: is the hole in the floor going to be a problem for the flagstones structurally, because I've looked at the load table and I don't think it is, but I'd like a second opinion.
She sat in that chair for two hours. She called me teacher four times, on purpose, with a perfectly straight face, and on her way out she said "half nine tomorrow, when you can manage stairs," and shut the door behind her.
Mia brings the tray up twice a day with one arm in a sling and puts it down on top of whatever I'm reading.
She has not looked at me differently once. Not in the corridor, not at the door, not on the day she found me trying to do my own buttons and simply did them without asking. The only thing that's changed is that she doesn't stand post by the door any more. She sits down in the chair.
I asked her about it on the fifth day. She said, "I know what's in the room now, sir.”

Cassian came back on the eighth day, and I heard the horses from upstairs, and I heard him take the courtyard at a run.
He went to his daughter first, which is correct. He was in there for a very long time.
It's evening now, and there's a knock on my door that isn't Mia's, and he comes in without waiting and shuts it behind him and stands there with his back against it.
He's aged. Not the way you mean it as a kindness. There's ten years on that man since a fortnight ago and he's been on a horse for four days and he has just been shown a hole in his own floor.
"Sit down," I say. "You look worse than I do."
"That's not possible." He sits down heavily in the chair by the window, the one Verena uses, and puts his hands on his knees. "Bessin says you're eating."
"Bessin is a tyrant."
"Bessin is the reason this house functions." He looks at the floor for a moment. "Right. I've come to tell you how it's ended, because you'll hear a version of it from the kitchen otherwise and I'd rather you had it properly."
"Alright."
"Halvard's confessed. All of it. Every part." Flatly. "He didn't argue and he didn't try to be clever about it, which I'm told surprised the magistrate. He gave them the village, and the names of the two men he paid, and the dates. He's been organising it for eleven days and thinking about it for eleven years."
"And?"
"Attainder and execution. There's no other sentence available and nobody's looking for one." Cassian's jaw works. "It'll be in the spring. I'm required to attend, as head of house, and I'm going to, and I'd be obliged if we never discussed it again."
"Understood."
"Perrivale as well. Accessory and unlawful summoning. He's alive and he'll not cast again and it won't save him." He pauses. "He's talking, by the way. Constantly. To anybody who'll listen."
Everything in me goes still.
"What about?"
"You." Cassian looks up. "He's telling them that my daughter's two-circle tutor took a four-circle seal off a door and then ran a ten-circle draw in my reception hall. He's told the magistrate, he's told the escort, he's told the clerk, and I'm informed he's put it in writing twice."
The room is very quiet.
"And?" I say.
"And he's a disgraced five-circle mage facing execution who has taken severe feedback to the head," says Cassian Ashveil, "and every single person who hears it puts it in a drawer and pats him on the arm. There's a Guard report that says otherwise and it's signed by Gordwin Bringer, and there is nobody in this kingdom who is going to take a condemned man's word over that captain's."
He shrugs.
"He's the only person alive who's telling the truth about that afternoon," he says, "and he's going to die shouting it at people who feel sorry for him."

Neither of us says anything for a while.
"Mia told me some of it," Cassian says eventually. "Not all. She's very clear about what's hers to tell and what isn't, that girl."
"She is."
"And my daughter's told me nothing whatsoever, in about four hundred words, which was extremely impressive to watch." He almost smiles. "So I'm not going to ask you. I want that understood. I've had a week on a horse to decide and that's where I've come out."
"Cassian—"
"No, let me get it said properly. It matters that I get it said properly." He leans forward with his elbows on his knees. "A man came into my study eight weeks ago and told me he'd rather be in front of my daughter for three days and then be sent home than promise me something he couldn't do. And then he found what nine men couldn't find, and finished what my wife couldn't finish, and stood in my hall in front of my child when there was nobody else in this kingdom to do it."
"Your wife did the work."
"My wife did the work." His voice goes. He lets it. "Amelia built it and you fired it, and she'd have liked you enormously, and I have spent four days on a road trying to think of what to say about that and I haven't got anything."
"She left it for whoever came next. She wrote that down."
"Yes." He rubs his face with both hands. "Yes. She did."

"So here's where I am," he says.
He sits back.
"I don't know who you are. I've worked out that you're somebody, and I've worked out that Gordwin's known the whole time, and I've worked out that the two of you have gone to a considerable amount of trouble over six weeks and I'm apparently the only man in this house who didn't notice."
"Cassian—"
"I'm not finished." He holds up a hand. "And I don't care.
"I want that on the record as well. I don't care. Whatever's behind you, whatever's in the capital, whatever it is that makes a boy of twenty hide four circles in a border house — it's yours. It's not mine and I'm not owed it. My brother killed thirty-eight people in a village he owned and told me he was delighted about my daughter over the top of a crate of wine, so I'm no longer in the business of worrying about what men are hiding."
He stands up. Slowly, the way a man does at the end of a very long week.
"But I've got a problem," Cassian Ashveil says.
"Have you."
"Mm." He straightens his cuffs. "My daughter can cast now. She's fourteen, she's got a year until the Academy, she can hold a second-circle bulwark for four seconds and she's decided that's insufficient. She's got four hundred spells in her head and nobody to argue with. She's been up since six every morning this week even with her head stitched."
"That sounds serious."
"She's already drawn up a schedule. It's conservative, apparently." He goes to the door. "So I still need a tutor for my daughter. And I'll be honest with you, the last one I hired came very highly recommended, and I've since been told at great length by several people that he's unqualified, obscure, and far too young."
He opens the door.
"Half nine tomorrow," says the Duke. "She's told me to tell you she'll come up here if you can't do the stairs, and that she's not being kind about it, it's a matter of scheduling."
"Cassian."
He stops.
"Thank you," I say.
"Mm," says Cassian Ashveil, and goes out, and shuts the door.

The room goes quiet.
There's a bag in the bottom of the wardrobe with a shirt in it, and inside the shirt there's a mask with a crack across the left cheek. I haven't opened it. I know exactly where it is at all times, the way you know where a tooth is.
Out the window the valley's going blue. Somewhere below me a house is getting its supper on, and there are men on the north wall, and eleven miles east a hole in the world is still open and somebody will have to do something about that eventually.
Three promises outstanding. One to a girl who'll want the whole story one day and has agreed to wait for it. One made on a roof, three years ago, to a face I haven't seen since.
And one I've never said out loud to anybody.
"Well," she says, from the end of the bed.
She's sitting on it. Not on a shelf, not on a windowsill, not behind my left ear. On the end of the bed with her feet tucked under her, the way you'd sit if somebody had said you could stay.
"Go on, then," she says. "Say it."
Say what?
"You know what."
...Half nine tomorrow.
"Half nine tomorrow," she agrees, enormously pleased with herself, and settles in.