Evelyn woke before the bells, the way she had every morning for a long time now.
The training yard behind the east wing belonged to her at that hour. The estate guards had stopped watching her practice months ago, first out of boredom, then out of something else, and the servants who crossed the yard with the morning water gave her the same wide, polite berth they gave the kennels.
Master Kurogane was already in the yard. He was always already in the yard; in a year, she had never once arrived before him.
He was a small, grey man from Sutra's southern coast, thin and straight as a drawn line, and he was said to be the finest swordsman that country had ever produced. Malthane had sent for him by name, across a border and half a continent, for a single task: to teach his daughter the sword. Whatever price had been agreed, no one in the estate spoke of it, and Kurogane himself spoke of almost nothing at all. In a year, Evelyn had learned exactly three things about the man: he drank his tea black, he despised wasted movement, and nothing on this earth impressed him.
She bowed. He answered with a short nod.
"Begin."
She stood in front of him and took a wooden sword, they always trained with wooden swords, since Kurogane wasn’t cursed himself, Evelyn had to fight him with a wooden sword and also not use her resonance, which meant the ultimate goal of this training, was to purely refine her sword’s martial art and skill.
She worked through the forms until the sky went grey, then pale. Repetitive, simple, refined movements, done ten thousand times, until they stopped belonging to the mind and belonged to the body. In her first month, Kurogane had stopped her thirty times in a single morning, his cane cracking against her wrist, her knee, her shoulder, every flaw named once in his flat, dry voice and never forgiven twice.
This morning he stopped her once.
"Third cut. Your shoulder."
She did the third cut two hundred more times, and he stood in the shade with his hands behind his back and watched the sun come up over the wall, and said nothing more, which from Kurogane was applause.
"Lady Evelyn."
Leonard stood at the edge of the yard with his ledger held against his chest, at his usual careful distance. Malthane's aide was always respectful to his lord's daughter, even though he knew her intentions.
"His Grace asks for you. After you've eaten."
"And if I don't eat?"
"Then immediately, my lady."
Evelyn turned to Kurogane and bowed, lower than she bowed to anyone else in this city, and the old man bowed in return.
The east corridor ran along the garden, and the garden was full of light at that hour. Evelyn had walked it a hundred times, past the same fountain that never stopped flowing.
This morning there was a woman in grey by the fountain, packing rolls of linen into a case. A midwife. Evelyn had seen her twice this month already; the first time, she had thought someone in the household was ill. No one was ill. Amara, stood beside her in a house robe, one hand resting low against the sash, and the robe no longer hid anything, Malthane's new wife was pregnant, well along now, and the whole estate knew it, though nothing had ever been announced.
Amara Thagirion looked up and saw her. She was nineteen, perhaps twenty, extremely young for Malthane's age, with the Thagirion darkness to her hair and a way of standing very straight when she was nervous. She stood very straight now.
"Good morning," Amara said.
"Good morning," Evelyn said, and walked on.
By spring, there would be a new child in this house, and he would be Evelyn’s younger brother.
She did not look back. She flexed her right hand, finger by finger, and by the time she reached the study doors her face was in order.
Malthane worked at a long table with his back to the window, and the window held the whole city, the canyon terraces going down and down, gold in the early sun, the auction banners already hanging over the upper district. Papers stood in squared stacks at his left hand. He did not look up at once, and she did not sit. That was the arrangement. Neither of them had ever said it aloud.
"You seem calmer this morning. I can feel your mood is on the better side," he said.
"Stop watching me," Evelyn said.
"Your training yard is under my window. That's why I chose it." He set down his pen and looked at her.
"You called me here," she said.
"I did." He rose, came around the table, and stood at the window with his hands behind his back. "The auction opens soon. Nine days, five of them active. Buyers from every kingdom that still has a name, and several that don't. Eldritch hearts, cursed objects, rare historical relics, curiosities. The greatest gathering of wealth this city has ever hosted." He said it with a calm, casual voice, not a formal one. "And there are people who intend that it fail."
"Who?"
"If I knew that fully, I would not need to say the next thing." He turned. "I am forming a small squad. Not the garrison, the garrison is useless against such a threat. They are useless against most threats during the epochs. This squad guards against the things a garrison can't stop. I want you in it."
Evelyn looked at him for a long moment.
"You want to arm me," she said. "You."
"You arm yourself every morning at dawn. I've never taken that from you." He let that sit exactly long enough. "You'll have rank for the nine days, freedom of the upper district, and a post. A real one."
"Why?"
"Because a cursed human is the only counter to a cursed human," Malthane said. "If they send anyone worth fearing, that is what they will send. My soldiers are brave men, and against such they will die in the order they stand in. And because if anyone attempts to destroy the lots rather than steal them, hearts can only be broken by cursed hands. There are a few recorded cursed humans and Eldritch holders in this city that I know of and can trust."
Her anger was slowly rising, but she kept it off her face. His reasons were good. And even if they weren't, to Evelyn, it seemed like he could always justify them with only words.
"And you're not afraid," she said, "that with rank, and freedom, and a post, and a weapon in my hands, I'll be standing behind you in a crowd some evening of those nine days."
"Afraid," Malthane repeated, as if checking the word against his ledgers. He walked back to the table and sat. "I don't believe you will try to kill me even if you get the perfect chance."
"WHY?"
"Because you want a fair death. Stabbing me in the back is not what you want. And right now, you have no chance to scratch me from the front."
Evelyn turned her face away, his words getting into her.
"You've had a year of open windows and unwatched corridors, and I sleep forty steps from your rooms, and here I am. Because you've done the calculations, and you do them again every time we meet. It isn't enough, and you know precisely how much would be." He drew a paper toward himself and took up the pen, and his voice didn't change at all. "So we'll make it simple. The day you can stand in front of me as an equal, come to me, and I will clear the room."
Evelyn's right hand closed before she could stop it.
"Until then," Malthane said, "you may as well be paid for your mornings. Your post is not with me. You'd refuse it, and I'd get no work out of either of us. You're assigned to Alphonse Graves."
"The judge."
"The next Supreme Judge, if the vote holds. And if he dies in my city during my auction, everything I have built here goes down with him. You will be his shadow for nine days. Where he goes, you go."
"Does he know what I am?"
"He knows you are my daughter." Malthane signed the paper, turned it, and slid it across the table: her name, her rank, nine days. "You'll find him at the south barracks."
She took the paper. At the door, his voice caught her once more.
"Evelyn." He had already gone back to his stacks; he said it to the papers, not to her. "Don't throw your life away. It would be devastating to lose you too."
The table was between them, and then it wasn't.
She did not remember crossing it. Papers were still falling when the Sword of Light stopped at his throat, a few millimeters from the skin, blinding in the quiet study, shaking with everything that was in her arms.
Malthane had not moved. He sat exactly as he had been sitting, the pen still resting in his fingers. He looked at her over the edge of the light the way he looked at his ledgers.
"Go on," he said calmly. "You would be doing me a great favor."
He raised his free hand, unhurried, and closed it around the blade, and pushed it closer to his neck. He held it there, bare-handed, and his hands didn’t have a single scratch.
Evelyn drew the sword back and let it go out.
She left without a word. The door slammed behind her hard enough to be heard across the estate.
She found the south barracks by the noise.
A hundred soldiers stood in the yard in double rank, and a big man walked the line in shirtsleeves, blonde, heavy through the shoulders, with a jaw like the front of a ship. He was checking straps and buckles with his own hands, one man at a time, saying a word to each. He did not look like a judge. He looked like a sergeant who had eaten well.
He saw her at the gate, finished the strap he was on, and came over.
"Alphonse Graves," he said.
"Evelyn."
"I know. They told me what you carry. I'll ask you only a few questions I care about. Can you fight?"
"Yes."
"If I was to die, and the only choice you had was to sacrifice yourself to save me, what would you do?"
"I would let you die."
"Perfect. Then you are the right choice."
He put out his hand, and after a moment she took it. His grip was like closing a door. "I'll tell you plainly, I don't like your father. I will never forgive his actions towards Athena, and I already told him that my first action as the Supreme Judge would be to put him under trial. Yet he is still supporting me."
"Why are you taking an interest in this auction? A judge should have nothing to do with this event," Evelyn asked, the question that had been bugging her since her conversation with Malthane.
"I don't like this auction, and I don't like being guarded. But there is a man coming to hijack it , perhaps he is hijacking it already, and I made a promise to someone, that when he shows himself, the law will be standing close enough to serve justice." He paused for a moment, and looked Evelyn straight in the eyes.
"Whose law?" Evelyn asked. "The city's, or yours?"
Alphonse looked at her for a moment, and then he smiled, wide and sudden.
"They told me you were Malthane's daughter," he said. "They were wrong. You're Athena's daughter."
He turned back to his hundred soldiers and raised his voice into the yard.
"We start at dawn."