Ezra was growing accustomed to Castle Blackfyre.

  From the outside, it looked less like a fortress and more like a statement. White stone walls rose in a smooth, unbroken curve, bright under the sun like polished bone. The towers lacked jagged battlements and iron studs; they were engineered lines of pale stone—clean cylinders capped with blue slate, the kind of roof you’d expect on an estate built to impress, not a keep built to repel.

  It was a lie.

  The “gardens” cascading down the slopes in layered terraces were structured, not ornamental. From above, they formed interlocking arcs and funnels—kill zones dressed as landscaping. Hedges forced any advance into narrow channels, perfect for concentrating arrows or spellfire. The ornamental pond on the eastern side ran deep enough to drown armored cavalry, its stones slick with algae. The moat stayed decorative until it didn’t.

  Castle Blackfyre was a fortress masquerading as a palace, built by men who had survived too many battlefields to trust honest architecture. It was designed to make enemies underestimate it—and to keep everyone else inside.

  The interior matched the deception. Instead of soot-dark rafters and drafty halls, the corridors were bright—cream plaster and simple molding, arched passages with clean lines and no defensive clutter. Tall leaded windows ran along the outer wall, some panes set with stained crests; daylight washed the corridor from end to end, and the pale flagstones threw it back up. The floors were kept scrubbed, every scuff standing out, every footprint.

  A red runner cut the center line, pinned straight and replaced when it frayed. Wall sconces sat at regular intervals between rows of mounted heraldic shields—family colors, campaign marks, and house words stamped along the rim. Benches and small tables filled the gaps like the place expected visitors, each staged with a dark urn, a brass bowl, or a vase that never held real flowers.

  It looked like a palace corridor. It worked like a controlled space: long sightlines, bright corners, predictable places to stand, and nowhere to hide without being noticed.

  House colors—deep crimson and obsidian—stayed in the soft things: drapes, runners, trim. Everything else was pale stone and light in clean blocks. Order and control, disguised as comfort. Ezra’s world was a small slice of it: the nursery, the attached playroom, and the sun-drenched inner courtyard ringed by columns and watched by a rotating roster of guards that Aerwyna tried very hard to pretend were just taking their meals there. He wasn’t fooled.

  A week had passed since Reitz returned from the canyon. Seven days of hushed voices and tight routines; Aerwyna’s fear setting into rules the way mortar set between stones: no leaving the inner ring, no servants alone with the young Lord, no unvetted staff in the nursery.

  Back on Earth, a perforated kidney and internal hemorrhaging would have kept a man down for weeks. Here, he was on his feet in three days, and by day seven he was pacing the grounds with a limp while Grimfire stalked beside him, muttering and threatening to dose him with something that sounded unpleasant.

  It’s absurd, Ezra thought, watching his father cross the nursery, shirt half-unbuttoned, bandage peeking out.

  This world’s air held something that made recovery too fast, too eager. Bodies didn’t merely heal—they lunged toward wholeness.

  The repair still left a price.

  When Reitz lifted his shirt so Grimfire could change the dressing, Ezra saw it: a jagged crescent under the right rib, skin puckered and discolored. Less a scar than wax melted and hardened mid-drip. The flesh around it held a faint, unnatural sheen, as if the burn refused to leave.

  The artifact dagger had done its work well. Even in a world drenched in mana, some marks stayed.

  “Don’t look so worried, Ez,” Reitz grinned, catching Ezra’s stare. He flexed his abdomen deliberately, making the scar twitch. “It adds character. Women love scars. Right, Aerwyna?”

  Aerwyna didn’t smile. She scowled and pulled the fresh bandage tight enough that Reitz hissed.

  “Hold still,” she said flatly.

  Grimfire’s eyes narrowed, as if he could personally will the man into obedience.

  Reitz turned his grin back toward Ezra, quick as a stage magician hiding a mistake.

  “Don’t worry too much,” he said, softer. “This is normal. It’ll all be perfect in a few weeks. Your dad got careless.”

  Ezra stared at him.

  Careless, he thought. You probably charged straight into the enemy without checking your flanks.

  He lacked specifics—his parents’ voices dropped when they thought he slept, words smearing into murmurs and careful euphemisms. Reitz’s temperament still read clear.

  Reitz reached down and ruffled Ezra’s hair. Ezra’s body answered before his mind could argue: pulse easing, shoulders loosening, the room losing its edge.

  He didn’t like the lack of permission. Nothing about his situation had improved—six months old, weak, stuck inside rules he hadn’t mapped—yet his system kept taking comfort where it found it.

  He sat slightly off-center inside his own skull. A full life poured into a smaller vessel, the edges sloshing into the walls at random.

  Most of the time, his thoughts ran sharp and clean. He watched, compared, remembered. He counted steps in corridors, tracked guard shifts, listened to two conversations at once and marked the names that returned.

  Other times, the infant wiring got there first. A laugh before anything was funny. That warm lurch when Reitz called him “Ez” in that casual, rough way. Eyes stinging when Aerwyna pressed her forehead to his and held it a fraction too long. By the time he noticed, the reaction had already contaminated the read.

  And then there were the gaps—the blackouts.

  They came without warning. One moment he’d be staring at the veining in the marble floor, tracking it like a map; the next, the world jumped—no fade-out, no drowsy slide, just a hard cut.

  He came back minutes—or hours—later in a different position than he remembered. Sometimes it was obvious: tucked back into the crib, blanket smoothed, bottle near. Other times, he was slumped over the rail with one arm dangling and fingers numb, or face-down on the rug like he’d crawled there on purpose. The ceiling spun. His stomach lurched like he’d been dropped. Pressure throbbed behind his eyes, his skull suddenly too small.

  He blinked, once, twice, trying to reconstruct the last second before the cut.

  Sometimes he caught a fading thread.

  I was counting footsteps… I was listening to three voices at once… I was—

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  Then nothing.

  Too much, he’d decided after one blackout left him sprawled on the nursery floor, drool dampening his sleeve. Something about what he was doing—stacking inputs, pushing too hard—tripped a limit in this body and dumped him offline.

  He reached for a word anyway. Something from his old vocabulary—some neat term for a mind trapped in an ill-fitting body.

  The space came up blank.

  That was the other failure mode. Selective loss: technical terms, old names, anything stored far back and rarely used. He still had the concept; the label wouldn’t come when he needed it. The harder he pulled, the more resistance he met, and pushing past that resistance had bought him the last blackout.

  It was happening less often over time. The boundary was still unclear.

  So he adjusted. Shorter analysis. Less reaching for distant memory. Fewer variables at once. He stopped trying to rebuild entire fields of knowledge while tracking mana flow and listening for footsteps.

  He forced himself to let thoughts die half-formed.

  When he wasn’t recovering from a blackout, he turned inward.

  Even though he couldn’t cast, mana answered thought with an obedience his muscles lacked—an invisible lattice wrapping his infant body from the inside out. A thread down his forearm stayed aligned, tendon by tendon, joint by joint, like sliding a hand into a glove that already knew the shape of his bones.

  His fingers closed with adult intent. A measured clamp, tendons standing out on his tiny wrist.

  A thinner filament went toward his ears. The castle’s murmur separated into layers, as if someone had brought a lens into focus. Footsteps became individual cadences. Voices unstacked into distinct threads behind the nursery door.

  “…they say the canyon is still warm where he fought…”

  Words came and went; tone stayed—fear braided with awe, all of it worn down by exhaustion.

  A thin thread across his eyes sharpened the sunlit dust motes into spinning points, each one tracing arcs through the air.

  No formulae yet, no quantifiable model.

  A system—push and pull, response.

  I can at least tune this, he thought, flexing his fingers again. If I can’t rewrite the rules outside, I can strengthen what I’m stuck inside.

  Strengthening his body still wasn’t enough.

  He needed data—more than if I push this, does that happen, more than rote outcomes. He needed the accumulated knowledge of this place: history, doctrine, what people believed about the world’s mechanics, what had been tried, and what got people killed.

  He needed books.

  The problem was the person between him and the shelves.

  Aerwyna spent two hours a day with him. An appointment carved in stone, guarded more fiercely than some council meetings. In those hours she wasn’t the Lady who sparred verbally with magistrates or dictated supply orders.

  She was Mother.

  She brought carved toys. She told stories, mostly moral ones about clever foxes and foolish noblemen. She fussed over blankets and argued with unseen staff about whether the room was too warm or too cold.

  Ezra tolerated the coddling because those hours were also his sanctioned interrogation window. They were quiet, predictable, low-stimulus—his best odds of staying conscious long enough to push for something risky without his brain cutting out mid-sentence.

  One afternoon, Aerwyna sat by the crib with a ledger, lips moving as she tallied. Ezra watched, then spoke.

  “Mother,” he asked.

  Her quill paused mid-scratch.

  “Yes, sweetling?”

  “Why is fire hot?”

  Aerwyna blinked, quill suspended.

  She turned, as if checking whether the question had come from the crib or from some lurking maester.

  “What was that?”

  Ezra hesitated—then seated mana along his tongue and jaw. He didn’t cast. He braced. Stabilized the small muscles that normally betrayed him when the body got tired or distracted.

  Breath. Palate. Consonants.

  “Why is fire hot?” he repeated, each word crisp. “What makes heat happen?”

  Aerwyna set the quill down and wiped her fingers on a cloth, buying time. Her gaze flicked up, then down, then to the window.

  “Because…” she began slowly, brows knitting. “Because it burns, little one. Fire creates heat. That is just the nature of the element.”

  Ezra stared at her.

  A circle drawn around the question.

  “Mother,” Ezra tried again. “Why do things fall? Why doesn’t the moon fall?”

  Aerwyna opened her mouth, then closed it.

  Her eyes went to the ceiling, then the floor, then the window—sky a flat, indifferent blue.

  “Because… things are heavy?” she said at last, sounding like she was asking him. “Heavy things go down. The moon… well, the moon is up in the sky. It stays there because that is where it belongs.”

  Ezra kept his face still.

  Ignorance wasn’t the problem. He’d seen her reorder three caravans in a single conversation, each adjustment rippling through taxes, warehouse storage, seasonal demand. She handled ledgers the way he handled tension.

  Here, in the space of why, she ran on habit—stories and inherited explanations that got people through the day.

  They had names for outcomes. They had instructions for making things happen. They didn’t look beneath.

  He wouldn’t get what he needed from her explanations.

  He needed raw material: books behind her shoulders, scrolls in Grimfire’s study, codices in the Blackfyre archives. He needed to see what this world thought it knew so he could map where it was wrong.

  The ask carried risk. If she decided he was unnatural—possessed, cursed, something—he wouldn’t get more access. He’d get more locks.

  But without literacy, he stayed blind.

  “Mother,” Ezra said, shifting on his back, fixing her with the steadiest look his neck allowed.

  Aerwyna’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “Yes?”

  “Teach,” Ezra said.

  The single word landed heavier than it should have.

  Aerwyna blinked, wary. “Teach you what, sweetling?”

  “Read,” Ezra said at once.

  He lifted one hand—clumsy on purpose, fingers wobbling with the exaggerated uncertainty of an infant who wasn’t routing mana—and pointed at the ledger she’d left on the low table.

  “I want… letters.”

  Aerwyna laughed, small and incredulous.

  “Ezra, you are barely six months old,” she said. “You can barely hold a spoon.”

  Ezra scowled.

  He could have made the next words land clean—mana on throat, diaphragm locked, adult diction behind an infant face.

  He didn’t. Not in front of her, not when she was already measuring him. She’d heard him speak clearly before—short bursts, odd questions—but he’d learned the boundary: the more adult he sounded, the faster her fear turned into policy.

  “I know,” he said instead, letting the sentence break where a baby’s breath would break it. “But… questions. I have questions.”

  He looked at her and let the frustration show.

  “You cannot answer,” he said. “Books can.”

  Aerwyna’s smile faltered.

  For a moment, Mother slipped, and Lady Blackfyre surfaced—the woman who stared down envoys and made them look away first.

  She watched him.

  Calculation, but not cold. Risk weighed against something she couldn’t name yet.

  “You are like your father,” she sighed at last, weariness and worry left uncovered. “Always rushing. Always wanting more.”

  “Not more,” Ezra said. “Know. I want to… know.”

  “Maester Grimfire is supposed to teach the young lords when they turn five…” Aerwyna murmured, almost to herself, reciting a rule from an invisible handbook.

  Ezra used the only countermeasure he had that wasn’t logic.

  He pouted. Jaw relaxed. Eyes widened. Lower lip wobbled—just enough to promise a storm. He held tears back. Tears were a resource.

  Aerwyna lasted three heartbeats.

  Then her shoulders slumped.

  “Oh, fine,” she relented, scooping him up with a resigned huff and settling him on her lap. “But only the alphabet. And absolutely no magic books. Not yet.”

  Ezra took the concession, then pushed once—careful, quick, a probe to see where the hard lines actually were.

  “Crystals?” he asked. “Cores?”

  Aerwyna’s eyes sharpened.

  Warmth cooled.

  “No,” she said, voice slipping into the tone guards obeyed without question. “Those are dangerous. You are forbidden from touching them until you are older. Do you understand?”

  Ezra nodded.

  He didn’t agree. He understood the line—and the speed of the response. That word set had history attached to it. Not abstract safety. Specific fear.

  “Thank you, Mama,” he said.

  The word came easier than it had a month ago.

  Her body relaxed under it. Arms tightened around him—steady now, not alarmed. His own chest answered with the same unasked ease as before.

  His head settled into the hollow between her shoulder and neck. He hadn’t chosen the spot; his body found it like muscle memory.

  Warmth rolled over him. Slow, heavy, seeping into the spaces between his ribs.

  It didn’t fit any label he trusted.

  Nothing about his situation had improved: he still lacked the rules, the blackouts still waited, and he still didn’t know who wanted his father dead.

  Pressed against her like this, urgency eased anyway. Unreasonable—so he stored the reaction and stayed on task.

  Aerwyna shifted him to free one hand, then reached for the ledger.

  “Look here,” she said gently.

  She opened it to a blank page and, with her other hand, sketched a simple glyph.

  “This is ‘A’,” she said. “Ah. Can you say it, Ezra?”

  Ezra’s world narrowed.

  Two angled strokes meeting at a point, crossbar in the middle. Familiar bones in unfamiliar clothing. The script was a cousin to ones he’d seen before—curved differently, ornamented in places—but phonetic.

  He memorized it.

  Stroke order. Angle. Proportion. The tiny variation in thickness where the quill paused and pressed.

  “Ah,” he echoed.

  He traced the shape in the air with one chubby finger, wobbling on purpose. The motion felt wrong—too imprecise—while the shape in his mind stayed perfect.

  He smiled—small, genuine.

  Finally, he thought, holding the glyph in his mind like a stolen key.

  The first step out.