The room they brought her to was trying very hard.

  It managed elegant in the same way someone manages a difficult accent — the bones of it were right, the painting on the wall suggesting long heritage and refined taste, the table masterfully carved, the tea steaming in a cup that had no business being in a situation this specific. The door behind the two guarding soldiers was the room's one honest statement. It didn't try to suggest she could leave.

  She sat in the chair. Or rather the chair contained her — it was too rge, and she had the appearance of someone pced in it rather than someone who had chosen to sit.

  The man with gsses — David, she would learn — poured his own tea and let the silence run. The beautiful man sat on the other side of the room and looked at the paintings with the attitude of someone who finds them personally insulting. The guards stood very still. The room's careful elegance held everything in suspension.

  "I apologise for how we first met," David said. His voice kept the room's rhythm — unhurried, careful, leaving space. "It might have gone better with fewer elements present." He set the pot down. "We've moved her."

  She held the white box with the doll. She looked at it and then at him. "Okay."

  The word had no weight, but it held the shape of patience.

  "If it wouldn't put you in any discomfort," he said, "I'd like to ask you some questions."

  She looked around the room once — measuring, not decorating — then looked back at him and her hands moved in her p, slow. "I suppose."

  The tone was a different thing from what her words were doing. Underneath the neutral sylble, something was listening very carefully.

  "Do you know which city you were born in?" David asked, and lifted his tea.

  "No."

  "Do you know what a city is?"

  She sat up slightly. A thread of something — not quite amusement, but its working parts — moved briefly in her expression. "Yes."

  "Her brain isn't entirely dead," the beautiful man said from across the room. "Marginally more promising than her predecessors."

  She looked at him. Her expression did nothing.

  "How old are you?" David continued.

  "Not certain. Twenty-two to twenty-five, I think."

  David set down his cup. "Could you eborate?"

  "I looked in a mirror."

  David's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile. "Not the most precise method."

  "It was avaible."

  He looked at her for a moment with the assessing attention of someone recalibrating. "Not perfect," he said, quietly, to himself. "But workable."

  The beautiful man made a sound. Then: "This is madness. That is your threshold for recognition? In Machite, this wouldn't—"

  The temperature in the room changed.

  David's composure ran out.

  It didn't shatter — it cracked, a hairline fracture, running from his jaw down through the controlled evenness of his voice as it came out louder than anything he'd said before, propelled by the specific velocity of someone whose exhaustion has reached critical pressure.

  "We are in Carnelian," he said. "I am a Carnelian Inquisitor. It has been decades since your kind held any authority here. Accept it."

  The beautiful man's features went strange. His edges went soft in a way that had nothing to do with the light, and for a moment what he was — what he actually was — was visible around the lines of what he was presenting as. Purple scales. The room's air turned foggy and thick and wrong in the lungs.

  The guards raised their weapons. Their hands shook, but they raised them.

  The beautiful man looked at the situation he was standing in — the dust, the destroyed door, the armed guards, the measured disapproval of a man who had apparently calcuted how much authority he possessed and decided it was enough — and he sighed.

  "You win," he said. He closed his eyes.

  Then: "But I am staying."

  The silver dagger cleared its sheath and cut a guard's rifle in half in the same motion, then left a red line across David's cheek that would become a scar, then buried itself in the wall behind him. The echo of metal against floor filled the room like a bell. David's hand was on his musket. He did not fire.

  "You will not monitor her alone," the beautiful man said. "That is the best offer you will receive."

  Both of them breathed.

  "Fine," David said.

  The dust settled. The beautiful man sat down against the wall. The guards rearranged themselves with studied dignity. Someone started picking up pieces of rifle.

  A voice came from the chair — quiet, somewhat remote, as if arriving from a distance.

  "May I ask a question?"

  Two days ter, David sat across from her with the dark coat and the unhidden bags under his eyes, his gsses catching the light precisely, and he opened a folder.

  "Your name is Anderson," he said. "Single. Wealthy. A lover of art, with ambitions in the theatre. Dead parents. A collector of antiques." He looked at this information for a moment with the expression of a man who has found something exactly where he expected it and is disappointed the hiding pce wasn't more creative. "That is what the neighbours know."

  He turned a page.

  "What your house knows is different. Beyond a very rge collection of antiques and art of widely varying quality — we found hidden rooms, Anderson. The Inquisition had no knowledge of them. Secret altars. Books that have no business existing in a home belonging to someone we can't sense mana from." He set the folder down. "I had my doubts. You survived something that should have killed anyone. We assumed exceptional willpower." He paused. "Our beautiful friend crified things, eventually."

  She had taken a step back without appearing to decide to. Her eyes went to the wall behind him — measuring the gap, the route, the avaible objects. Found nothing useful. Came back.

  "You are a dark mage," David said. He leaned forward and his grin was the first fully genuine thing his face had done in the entire conversation. "Two decades ago, this would have cost you your head. But—" He made a gesture, two fingers across his own neck. "We are in the present."

  Anderson looked at him.

  "Carnelian is willing to resolve your difficulties," he said. "In exchange for your service." The genuine warmth in his voice was complicated by the fact that he clearly meant every word of it. "Marvellous, isn't it."

  She was quiet for a moment. Her hands were ft on the table, not quite pressed down — hovering, the way hands hover when their owner is deciding whether to run.

  "What choice do I have," she said. It wasn't inflected as a question.

  David's smile faded. Something more tired took its pce. "I'm sorry," he said. "I think I was a bit much. The whole thing — the seal, a dark mage—" He exhaled. "We both grew up above the same soil. I know how it feels to stand in front of something that doesn't ask."

  She opened her mouth.

  And then what had been inside her for all of it — every room, every fall, every smile that wasn't hers, the cave and the darkness and the nothing she remembered before it — all of it came through the gap.

  "I am lost," she said, and her voice was not steady. "All I hear is demands. All I see are people looking at me like I am something to be arranged." Her hands had come off the table. She didn't know when. "I don't even know who I am and everyone else is very confident about what I'm for—"

  David sat back. He didn't interrupt. He didn't make notes. He didn't try to have an expression that would manage her.

  He just listened.

  She ran down eventually. Looked at him.

  "One moment," he said, and gestured to the guard, and turned back to her. "Go on. I was unfair. The least I can do is listen."

  Anderson looked at him for a moment longer. Something shifted slightly — not trust exactly, but its smallest possible precursor.

  "I was going to say," she said, "that I don't know what to say."