Chairs were brought out, high stools so we could see each other better. The window is set kind of high, and I'm short enough that sitting down nobody can see much below the chin.

  I think Taeril understood that if they left my brother and I alone right now I might actually disintegrate, so she quietly signaled Yheta and Geland to take seats, hang out, and smile. Nathan kept things light and fun, and after a half-hour I started recovering myself.

  Geland was the first of those three to bring it up. "So, when did you start dyeing your hair?" he asked, perching on top of the stool.

  Nathan burst out laughing, but covered it up fast. "Sorry, I know it's probably not funny," my twin said. "That's not any coloring, that's her hair now. She got that rescuing our parents."

  Geland and Taeril looked at me with new eyes. "What happened?" she said, with morbid fascination. She clasped her hands in front of her. She was wearing a gown with very puffy sleeves- I had seen Baroness Grancine wearing something similar, I think that's what's fashionable this year. I'm gonna be five seasons out of date by the time I get out.

  "Not much to say," I shrugged. "I tried to put out the fire but it didn't work, so instead I started grabbing people and whisked them out. I tried too much at once, and my magic punished me for it. The healers got to me and most of the trouble was cured, but they couldn't get my hair and skin color back how they had been."

  When I started telling the story, I noticed Nathan's eyes slowly tracking to fixate on my arm, just below the elbow. The same spot that Father would stare at when he thought I wasn't looking.

  More like one and a half, Sir Maspers had called it. I shuddered.

  "What's it like being a sorceress?" Taeril asked, lacing her fingers over her knees. "You've always been so low-key about it, like it barely matters. I've got sorcerers in some of my classes and they never shut up about it, like it's the only thing they've got to talk about. What's it like for someone that actually has a personality of her own?"

  Yheta's turn to laugh now. "She was always so low-key about it because she was using it constantly in ways you weren't supposed to notice. She's told me about this: she was constantly manipulating her hair, jewelry and clothes every time there was a party. Used up so much mana she couldn't spare any for big showy things."

  Taeril looked horrified. "What?! Oh my gods girl you ... you were cheating! For years I absolutely had a complex about that! How is this ten-year-old so much more styled and poised and graceful than me? Oh, it turns out you can use magic for useful stuff like that, and my classmates who just make knives out of acid are all idiots!"

  "These days I'm not nearly so low-key about it," I admitted. "I've really gotten used to relying on it. Y'know, except when the shock-collar kicks in and takes all my magic away."

  "What?"

  I rolled my eyes, sighing, and reached up to my neck. I caught the golden torc between my thumb and forefinger, jiggled it to catch the light. "This thing. It cuts off my magic. When the cell is locked up and I'm inside, I can use my magic in ways that doesn't affect anything outside, or damages the walls or window. But if I leave, or the door is open, then I stop being a sorceress." I paused, fingers toying with the necklace. "But, weirdly, that actually helps answer your question. When my magic turns off, it takes... a few minutes for me to adjust. But then it's just.. normal. But then when my essences come back... I'm always aware of them. I can feel how my essence blends into others. How the lifeblood of other elements blends with my own. How my own inherent, elemental self starts to blend in with everything around me."

  I stared at my hand, turning it over and over. "Only ... only chance and circumstance keep me from being a serpent. Or stone. Steel. Only an accident of birth made me the daughter of a duke, and not a sheep or an owl or an oak tree." I looked up at her. "To be a sorcerer is to acknowledge all of the things that you might have been. And then from there, assume them. Become them. And then, as them, control them."

  Taeril turned in her seat towards Gedes. "is there wine? Can I not be sober for this?"

  I waved away the somber mood. "Sorry, it's just... using this magic is very different than normal experiences. But using magic, or harnessing other forces, will always change your perceptions. I try not to get all mystical about it, most of the time."

  Geland shrugged. "I don't mind it. I think the prerogative of mages is to sound a little mystical sometimes."

  Nathan was staring at the collar though. "That's what keeps your magic in check?"

  I smiled again, and turned it for him to see. "It's part of the precautions. There's scrivener-work in all the walls, ceilings, floors and windows here. From the right angle, you can see them etched in this glass right here. All those keep my magic from reaching outside the room or affecting the room itself. But if the door's opened or if I'm outside it, the collar kicks in and shuts me all the way down. So sometimes I'm fully depowered, and sometimes just somewhat restricted. It's a much kinder arrangement than they had when they brought me in the first time."

  Yheta raised a hand and shuffled forward a bit. "Put a pin there, because this has been bothering me. You got arrested, on what was definitely a spurious charge, and dragged here to the prison. And you sat here for two weeks before you escaped. Then, after you did, you came back? And got re-arrested? Put on trial?!"

  "Yes?" I said, eyebrows pinching together. "Is there a question?"

  "Hells, why?" he blurted. "If you could escape, why did you come back?"

  I looked down at my hands, turning them over again. I could feel Nathan's eyes pressing on me, as if his curiosity had pressure behind it. He was working hard, trying to figure something out. Something he did not think he could ask me. I cleared my throat and looked back to Yheta. "I left because I had to do something important. It was how I could keep everyone safe. I came back because that's the only way to get back to my life. Coming back to face the music is the only way I can move forward in my life. Just... not right away."

  Yheta scoffed. "My family's got three different company towns that we could hide fugitives in. I'm sure the duke could have found a soft landing for you somewhere."

  Nathan shook his head. "Not even for family. Not my father."

  I nodded. "Principles. If you don't have them when it's hard, you don't have them ever. My father is all about that."

  Nathan started to snap something sharp, his eyes flicking my way as if to answer me- but he stopped and the moment passed.

  Taeril was looking at the dividing glass, swaying her head side to side to try to find the etched sigils. "I have no idea what my family would do. Just none at all."

  I scoffed bitterly. "It's the kind of thing most people never have to figure out. And the rest just wish they never did." I glanced at my brother, and tried to feed an apology into that glance. I could not read his eyes in return.

  Geland spoke up again. "It's funny. Even with the coloration... half the time you two still look almost exactly alike. And then suddenly you'll look nothing alike. I can never really seem to place it exactly."

  I kept my thoughts to myself. I believed that sometimes Geland was seeing all the things that Nathan and I had shared for twelve years. And sometimes he was seeing all the things that we had carried alone for the past year. We weren't just celebrating our birthdays, tonight would be one year since the fire. The night of our celebration. I had been nearly out of mana because I had spent it all keeping up appearances. And perhaps that was why I couldn't stop things. Maybe if I'd held back, kept more magic in reserve, I could have wiped out the fire, saved everyone, kept the manor.

  Kept my hair and my skin, instead of being painted by the void.

  Taeril looked around, and concern tugged at her mouth. "I know we've enjoyed getting back together, but .. should we give you two the room? Yheta, Geland, and I... we're in the city. We can drop by, now that we're approved visitors. But I know that Nathan is expected back at home..."

  His home. I've never seen it. The place he calls home now is nowhere I've known. I only know it from gameplay, graphics on a screen. To him it's where family and security live now. To a degree.

  Me? The home I've got now is a prison cell. From now until I'm legally an adult in this setting.

  Nathan was looking at me. "I'm not sure," he said carefully. "I don't know that I have anything I couldn't say to her in a letter. Maybe sharing space is for sharing company- correspondence is private between two, but it's no way for the five of us to really bond like this."

  Taeril looked relieved. "Oh thank gods. I was really worried that we were in the way. I'd feel just awful if you two were sitting here waiting for us to get the hint and get out of here."

  Yheta patted his own knee with one hand. "No worries there, I assure you. Natalie at least has gotten well-practiced at asking for solitude when she desires."

  Taeril laughed, high and cackling again. "Yheta, did you get bounced out on your ear?"

  They bantered. I clenched my hands together in my lap.. Nathan barely replied to my letters these days. Slow to respond, and little to say. His answers were terse and he expressed no interest in my matters. That hurt, certainly. But here in this room, he had carefully coded this message in front of our friends: "I have nothing to say to you that I haven't said in letters". The little I got from his correspondence was the most I was going to get.

  It must have really hurt him when the sister he thought he knew ran away to murder people in his name.

  Then why the fuck did you ride all night to Hearstcliff to visit me and bring me asparagus like my prank-loving brother if you never had anything you wanted to say to me?!

  And then I remembered his face when he came through the door. When he found out that I had visitors already.

  I think ... I think he had some kind of plan for when he saw me. And... I think that plan changed in that moment. I think that a very important bridge burned in that moment, and I was too slow to stop it.

  Or I'm overthinking things and it's up to other people to say the things that are on their minds!

  Yeah, nice try brain. This is a visual-novel setting built around progressive romance subplots. People not saying what's on their mind makes this world go 'round.

  It took days for me to feel normal again. Seeing them was a shock, an earthquake that took the ground out from under me. It was not just that I was seeing Taeril and Nathan again, right in front of me, hearing their voices and their jokes: I was struck by how little they had changed. Geland was still just Geland, but a little older. Like he and I had not crossed paths at social events for a few months and now we're catching up. Taeril has the same unseemly unrestrained laughter, Yheta is still the same boy that looked at me and said that I was supposed to understand.

  Nathan was a little taller, his hair grown out just a bit. I was the only one whose world had been turned inside out. Nathan was adjusting, he lived in a different house and had different people but he was not fundamentally different. Nothing in him had broken like it did for me. Adapting to changes and adjusting to tragedies is a privilege reserved for people who don't feel responsible for letting it happen.

  But seeing them... it wasn't like running into old friends. It was like I had to look myself in the eye again. Not the mirror, that's easy. I had to look at my old self. The Natalie from last year. Eleven years old going on twelve, red-haired and unscarred. Spitting image of her parents. Happy and healthy and ready for the world to follow her plans. That girl was looking back at me now, and asking me if I had made the right choices.

  They were the necessary choices!

  That's not what I asked.

  All the changes from the past year. Burned, rescued, void, scarred, healed, blanched, revenge, arrested, escaped, returned, trial, imprisoned... All of those piled up around me. These things floated around and pushed away everyone that was still looking for the red-haired girl. I could feel eyes demanding to know why I couldn't be the girl they remembered.

  I couldn't feel like myself, I couldn't feel like her either. I floated, lost, for days.

  As usual, it was routine that saved me. The few things I can count on, fitted into a schedule, planned and orderly. Appointments, expectations, agreements. And, with that, music. Writing some down, and helping others write it down for me.

  Between the pages of notation I make time for during the week and the ensemble hum-along sessions with Baroness Grancine and her musicians every Saturday, I'm putting out a fair amount of music composition these days. I'm sometimes really annoyed that I can't really put any lyrics in. It's not like this place doesn't have a tradition of mixing choir into orchestra. But the language is different. And almost nothing translates cleanly. I can take the slickest, most well-executed lyrics from English and in Hearstwhile they're just.. baffling. Also, the culture is way different. It's amazing how many assumptions and foundation works are built into cultural media.

  Try explaining to another world why your music always seems to be directing romantic or flirtatious messages towards infants. "Baby" just doesn't carry over.

  There's no wide-ranging general-purpose affectionate nickname in this world that fits that same niche. Nothing here is "cool", nobody is someone's "baby", and "hit that" is nothing but what it sounds like. Also, it's completely mixed up what rhymes and what doesn't! Meter is even worse! People who translate lyrics or poetry are not paid enough, that shit is hard!

  And I'm not going to spend the ten-thousand hours to get good at it. I'm still trying to figure out how to score music for a brass section without having to sit and count out the steps on my fingers. So nobody here really understands why I insist that this song is "Toxic", and that song is "I'm Good". They just take my word for it.

  Baroness Grancine mentioned in passing once that this is particularly fun for her people. They think it's part of my disruptive process, forcing people to read the tone and story of the music, and interpreting how the title relates to that. It's funny- once you've got a reputation as an avant-garde visionary, people start making up explanations that are a lot deeper than what I intend.

  "And this one?" she asked, taking the sheets from the pass-through.

  "Seven Nation Army," I said, "Very tasty bass riff on that one, catchy. I can never predict what's going to be popular and sell well or what just gets some polite applause, but I hope this is one of the big hits."

  "As do I," she said, and folded the pages into a manilla folio. Her musicians were running late today, apparently they did not come straight from an all-night after-party like she did. Again. "A question, if I may. I understand you're also working closely with the minstrel's guild? Not just the city local but the kingdom-wide?"

  "I am," I admitted. "My understanding was that your House had no interest in those matters."

  "That's not inaccurate for what you were told," she said, tapping her knee. I've never seen anyone need a cigarette so badly in a world with no tobacco. "The minstrel's guild is affiliated with House Freckentop, but Pailser has been courting them to draw that influence. Pailser is a Lesser House affiliated with Eyellon, but they've lost some momentum lately. They're trying to reclaim their relevancy by moving into storytelling, especially now that it is growing more popular. My House is thinking about getting some hooks in, and then when Pailser and Freckentop attack each other over the guild, Tarratan sweeps in and snatches it from both. Nothing has been done or committed, but some of our leaders are looking into it."

  "Interesting," I said. "Pailser losing influence? I understand why they would make moves to compensate, but why are they in trouble now?"

  The baroness chuckled. "That is also because of you. It seems someone has greatly shaken up the world of natural philosophy. Pailser had been holding all the highest honors there, but now their top theorists are discredited, their top inventions are old hat, and their book deals are on the rocks."

  "Unfortunate for them," I said. This is how things work here: nothing ever benefits someone without hampering someone else. "I had not heard who is benefiting from this change, though. It's not me or mine, I know that."

  "Freckentop again, and Skyback," she said. "I think these inroads are part of why they're not concerned about challenges to their hold on the minstrel's guild, even with the new popularity." She glanced at me coyly. "I should not be surprised," she said slowly, "if soon I am not the only representative to court your works. It is well known at certain echelons that you are quite brilliant and innovative, and that you have been responsible for one upset after another. But now that understanding is percolating to the decision-making strata of the Houses. Well, the ones that are less nimble and responsive than Tarratan. So perhaps you will be seeing favors offered and asked, even from the Central Houses. There are not many people who can tilt the field of House disputes single-handedly, especially not while residing peacefully in a prison cell."

  "That sounds complimentary," I said. "Or even flattering. Thank you. And also thank you for the advance notice, I will perk my ears. But, if I may ask a question of you? Less formal, less official, only my own curiosity. How is it that you manage to find an all-night rager to attend every single Fiveday night, without fail?"

  "Oh, it's not easy," she admitted. "Honestly, for some time I struggled to make enough connections to get that many invitations. But eventually I cut out the middleman and started hosting my own, dancing and festival all night long, spilling exhausted celebrants into the street with each Sixthday dawning."

  "I probably should have figured that out without asking," I said.

  And shortly after, she had her musicians and we laid down the tracks for Swan Lake.