“The bond is very strong,” an old man who spent the past thirty minutes prodding the spot Aelira did something to me with a sharp rod, finally announced. “Severing it may harm Her Highness's theric’eshri.”

  “But that's impossible! She only met him ten minutes before its formation. When would he ever have had time to become her seili?” Mistress Celeri exclaimed.

  I sure wish someone would explain to me what those terms mean.

  I was picking a little bit of it up through sheer osmosis; they had been going back and forth for a while about me. But an actual lesson would impart more than guesswork and interpretation.

  “Your incredulity changes nothing. This is the reality,” the old man said, poking my chest with the sharp rod to enunciate his point. “What house is this child from? Who has Her Highness bound to herself for you to be so worried?”

  Celeri glared at me before letting out a sigh, “He is one of Matron’s boys.”

  “So you have no issue. Let them undergo the Ceremony of Freal and discover their bondkind.”

  “Her Majesty will not be happy to learn her daughter found a bound without her permission.”

  I was incredibly disappointed by the fact that my introduction to magic was from a guy holding me in place so he could poke me with a stick. Unless you counted the bond formation with the princess, but I still didn’t know what that even did.

  “You didn’t ask for permission before he was bound?” the old rabbit asked, with a flick of the rod. I floated back down to the ground. “Then you have only yourself to blame.”

  So obviously, I didn’t count the bond. All it did was make me sick and feel this weird lump of light filling a hole in my chest.

  “I didn’t have the chance! In the time between when I learned of him and when he was bound, I couldn’t arrange a meeting with Her Majesty to receive her blessing! Why would I assu—eek!” she started, only to be interrupted when the old rabbit bonked her on the head with the rod.

  Maybe whenever they did that ceremony thing, I’d finally get to start practicing magic for real… however it worked. Fuck I hope this didn’t ruin my chances of using magic, the System said I had a subservient conduit. That could mean Aelira was the one who could learn magic, while I was just her tool.

  “Stop making excuses. Explain your mistake to the Queen, accept whatever comes of it. Then do the ceremony. All you’re doing right now is delaying,” the old rabbit said with a tut, waving us away while he went back to what appeared to be an experiment of some kind.

  Celeri ushered me out and down the hall, giving me a moment to think about the implications of everything while not being stabbed repeatedly.

  I had a feeling the Matron set me up, and maybe Celeri too. The fact that she told me to meet Aelira's eyes alongside the name ‘bonded and bearer’ implied that her attachment to me was required. Seili probably meant something like ‘special person,’ but I wasn't going to use it in conversation until I confirmed that.

  So, Aelira, by making eye contact with me and being affected by my Charisma, immediately fulfilled the requirement to form a bond. She seemed like she was going to try either way, the little shit that she is, so the Matron put forward the only child that would survive her antics.

  She brought me back to the same wing that the princess lived in, and spent the whole trip explaining exactly how I was supposed to see my new position without ever actually telling me what I was supposed to do.

  Reading between the lines, I inferred that I was originally meant to be a playmate she could test her magic on, with potential for more later if she happened to bond well with me and our bondkind was one the Crown agreed on for Her Highness. Her being my ‘bearer’ was a probationary ceremonial measure, in other words.

  Which is where all the hullabaloo came from; we had never been tested because Aelira just decided fuck all that proceduralism, and that she'd do whatever she wanted. Which shouldn't have been possible, from either side, if it weren’t for oddities on both of our ends.

  Even if she overcame the initial reluctance every bearer had with sharing a part of themselves with another, I should have rejected her theric (which was what they called the light Aelira filled me with) entirely. If I had any sense of personal bodily autonomy, I probably would have, too, but for some reason, my mind just didn’t recognize myself as having that right.

  I think she just started venting at some point, because I was absolutely not supposed to hear some of that.

  After entering the princess's ward, we arrived at a door directly across from the princess's bedroom. It opened to reveal a chamber with barely enough room for a bed and a desk.

  Still larger than my room on the hovercraft.

  “You’ll be taking up the room her tutor used to use as we originally planned. For now, until we figure out what’s going to happen,” Celeri explained, her hands clung tightly to the sides of the uniform she was wearing. “Any questions?”

  “Mistress Celeri, what am I actually supposed to do?” I asked, hoping to get an answer before the woman had a nervous breakdown.

  “Starting tomorrow, you will stay near Her Highness during the day,” she says. “In lessons, in the gardens, during meals, and whenever she leaves her rooms. Perform whatever task she requests of you.”

  There were gardens? I've never seen any gardens. Though from what I could remember, I’d also never been outside. So that kind of made sense.

  “Understood,” I replied, and started to raise my arm in a mock salute. Halfway through the motion, I realized that I was leaning on the wrong set of memories, and aborted, which turned it into an awkward wave.

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  She left me there after glaring at me for a moment, and I sauntered into the room that I'd be living in for the foreseeable future. All of my belongings had been moved into this room already and were neatly stacked in the corner. Not that I had many actual possessions besides my clothes.

  There was also a mirror attached to the desk, which I took a moment to glance at myself in.

  Unlike everyone else in this world, my hair wasn’t slick with oil, which made my short copper coloured locks really stand out. The hair seemed to transition into fur where my ears met the top of my head. Those ears flopped down over my head, which made me look like I had osteochondrodysplasia.

  I was also the cutest kid I had ever laid eyes on; my face was radiant to the point it was hard to look away from. No wonder Celeri kept glaring at me. She just couldn’t get enough of this little rascal’s cuteness.

  The world seemed to spite me in particular, because I was yet again far shorter than I was pretty sure would be average at my age. The princess looked about the same age as me, but was at least a foot taller already.

  Flopping down on the bed, I didn’t even change out of my uniform; I just curled up and wrapped myself around my mantle. Now that my mind had a moment to itself, I couldn’t help but miss Aurin. Where the hell did she go? She was supposed to be here with me…

  Despite my new Resonance Stat, I didn’t sleep well that night.

  The next morning, I stood outside my room across from Aelira’s, watching the comings and goings of servants as they likely helped her with her morning routine.

  Eventually, she peeked her head out from behind her door and, upon noticing me and our eyes meeting, her face lit up. Walking across the hall, she grabbed my hand and pulled me along, completely ignoring the reactions of the servants around her who did not like me touching Her Highness.

  “Morning, sleep okay?” Aelira said to me while I tried to avoid tripping over myself.

  “No,” I replied with a yawn.

  “What?” Aelira turned to me and asked. It took me a moment to process that she hadn’t actually said anything aloud.

  I… had interpreted the way she squeezed my hand in the language Aurin and I shared. Fuck, that’s not a good sign.

  I just needed to keep telling myself that Aurin would be fine, and I would find out what happened to her. Right now, I needed to stop thinking about her and focus on real life.

  Maybe one of the others would know more when they woke up.

  “Nothing, ignore me,” I muttered under my breath.

  “Okay!” she cheerfully replied. “So you still have your head? That’s weird, Toltheric Tarin said if I didn’t listen to him, Mother would cut my bonded's head off. I didn’t believe him. Why would Mother cut my thing’s head off? It’s mine, not hers.”

  So she did, in fact, just ignore instructions to bind herself with me… I really appreciated my life being risked so that a child could rebel against her parents.

  “It turns out if they cut my head off, your uh… theric’eshri would be damaged. They didn’t want to hurt you, so I don’t think they’ll be doing that,” I said, as we made our way through a set of tall inner doors and into what was apparently her dining room.

  “That’s good, I would have had to punish Mother if she did that to one of my things,” the princess said. I decided it would be best to avoid thinking about what she meant by that. She paused to think for a moment when she entered the room before pointing at her dining table and waving to the servant next to her. “It appears you’ve forgotten to set out the tableware for my bonded. Please have that done with haste.”

  There was an awkward shuffling as the servants complied, and soon I was sitting across from her yet again. This time, there was no bitter mineral water in sight, thankfully. Not that we needed it, I could still feel that lump of light in my chest from before.

  This breakfast was the first of many over the next few months, which didn’t line up with Earth months at all, given that the length of a day was slightly longer, all of them spent waiting for the Ceremony. There was some requirement for it to happen that meant we couldn’t have it done immediately. I didn’t see Celeri much after that first night, which, given she was supposed to be Aelira’s head maid, I was pretty sure didn’t bode well for her.

  I didn’t see any other royals during that time either. Just Aelira, every day, dragging me along with her. After I got used to her eccentricities, it seemed like she was just a lonely child who’d found something new to cling to. Every time her eyes met mine, her face would light up in the same way as the first time we met.

  It felt like she noticed the Charisma Stat take effect, but could easily brush it off. I wondered if that had anything to do with why I couldn’t see her mind. Maybe she had a Stat that resisted my Aspect? The development of my Aspect was progressing over this period; I could make the servants who were already primed to obey Aelira act however I wanted.

  Half a tal later, we sat out in the garden staring out into the lower sky. Clouds expanded out in every direction; it sort of looked like we were on top of a mountain that always had a layer of cloud cover to prevent us from seeing the ground. The local culture treated the edge like it was the edge of the world, which didn’t really make sense to me.

  Just because the cliffside tapered inwards, making climbing down impossible, didn’t mean we were literally floating on islands

  In the sky above, an eye stared down at the world, and the light from it beat down on us. I tried not to look at it, though. Not after the first time.

  I wiped the side of my eye expecting to see blood, but it was just my eyes watering from the breeze blowing from over the edge. Worrying about nothing, apparently, I was fine.

  Aelira turned to me curiously, a look of concern on her face.

  “I’m alright. Didn’t look,” I interjected before she could chastise me.

  She hummed in response and leaned back against the bench we were sitting on.

  I glanced to the side at one of the servants who was attempting to be inconspicuous. It was easy to tell who those were, as their spotlights would flicker our way every few moments. Then I carefully pushed the idea into their mind that getting us water would be a good idea. They vanished, appearing as if they were sitting one moment and gone the next.

  It was still weird seeing people with Stats that allowed them to perform feats like that.

  “You’re sure you can’t make them teach me how to use you?” Aelira asked, and for the hundredth time, I regretted telling her about my Aspect.

  “Nope, like I told you, not unless you can get your Mother in front of me and she happens to be incredibly weak-minded.” Even after scanning all of the servants' minds, I couldn’t find a single person who knew anything but rumours about bondpartner magic. Which was what they referred to as the magic resulting from our bond.

  It was said to be able to do everything from allowing bond partners to switch places to allowing the bearer to forge weapons of unbelievable power. All of that was likely nonsense servant gossip.

  I had absolutely discovered the regular magic that the average person used, but I was locked out of that now that Aelira had bonded me. So learning it wouldn’t do us any good.

  “If she found out you said something like that, she could have you thrown in prison,” she grumbled in response, which was an evasive answer, and we both knew it.

  “I sent the only servant in earshot away already,” I replied. There was no way I would risk seditious speech in front of anyone but Aelira. Even if she couldn’t actually see her Mother, that didn’t mean her presence wasn’t seen in other ways.

  Now and then, a servant with a mind like a steel trap would appear for a few days before vanishing, never to be seen again. That’s where I learned how regular magic worked, by practicing slipping through their defences. They were almost all users of low-binding, which involved using a physical object as a conduit instead of another person.

  While my mind wandered, a chat window opened up in front of me.

  Aisling: Hey, Ren, I just woke up. From the timestamp, you’ve been up for a while. Any updates on your end?

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