Millie uses another teleport to get back to the second floor without making noise on the stairs. While her original and highly petty idea sends a thrill through her mind, and absolutely will be enacted, there is the matter of trying to truly gauge Zoe’s character. There is one, quick test that will help.

  So, Millie treads quietly to the library window. Once she can see the grass outside the front door, Millie resummons Evie down there and gives her the instruction to go into the ground floor and see Zoe. Then, Millie gets in place behind the door to the library. She lets her gaze go into Evie as the dog trots into the workshop.

  “Oh!” Zoe, who had been busy examining the forge instruments lining the walls that hadn’t interested Millie in the slightest, looks over when Evie barks. The high noble smiles, more genuine, showing off perfect teeth. “And who are you?”

  Evie approaches, and Zoe scoops her up to give her a cuddle, murmuring about what an adorable and good dog she is. Then, Zoe tilts her head, then glances up through the ceiling. She sniffs the dog.

  “Ah. I imagine you belong to her. You smell like dirt and bitchiness,” she says. “Let me express my condolences that you ended up with such an unfortunate mistress.”

  Millie leaves Evie’s vision and mentally tells the dog to relieve herself on Zoe’s shoe. There is a beat, and then a shriek, and Millie claps her hands over her mouth to keep herself silent as she laughs hard enough to hurt her stomach. When she quickly checks into Evie’s vision, the dog is back on the floor, watching Zoe through the doorway as the noble wipes her shoe on the grass outside. Perfect. Millie sends Evie back to her pocket plane in case a quick reentry is useful later. Then, she waits.

  After some time, creaking stairs herald Zoe’s ascent to the second floor. Millie keeps dead quiet in her hiding spot. The door opens.

  “Boo!”

  Zoe screams. Millie is halfway through a cackle when knuckles greet her nose and send her backwards into the wall. Pain blasts through Millie’s skull, and she tastes blood. Zoe, planted in a full stance of self-defence, stares at Millie with wide eyes, her alarm fast morphing into frustration.

  Millie touches her fingertips to under her nose and they come away crimson. With Zoe’s arm still lifted close to her, Millie grabs it and wipes her face on one of Zoe’s wrist ruffles so her own, beloved, purple coat sleeve doesn’t have to suffer

  “Urgh,” Zoe says, shaking her off. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Millie shrugs. “You’re faster than I expected, I’ll give you that. Are you any good with magical doors?”

  “Sometimes,” Zoe replies, with a warily raised eyebrow. “Why?”

  Millie shows her the door upstairs and demonstrates how it physically pushes her lockpicks back out of the lock with an incredibly specific force.

  “I could probably open it,” Zoe says. “But I won’t.”

  “Why not?” Millie demands.

  “Because that would help you. So on principle, I won’t.”

  Millie rolls her eyes, even though it is exactly what she would say if the roles were reversed. “But then you don’t get to see what’s inside either. What happened to your whole thing being curiosity?”

  Zoe smirks. “I don’t need to win. I just need you to lose. Or wait for you to get tired and leave.”

  Millie sits down on the stair and crosses her arms. Zoe leans back against the stairwell’s window. The noble takes out something made of metal wires, twisting and shaping it with deft hands that catch Millie’s attention against her will. What is it? Art, like the thing in her hair that resembles a butterfly now that Millie’s seen it from a few different angles? Or something else?

  “I’ve got enough to keep me busy all day,” Zoe says.

  “I’m fine,” Millie retorts, and so of course her stomach chooses that moment to grumble with ferocity.

  She usually has breakfast after her morning walk. In all the excitement, she’d gone straight to the dive bar and then to Claude, and finally here. It must be getting closer to lunchtime by now.

  Zoe lifts another infuriating eyebrow. Millie has to bite her tongue to stop herself from making an absurd, hateful comment about how Zoe has probably never gone hungry in her life. While it might be true, even Millie grew up in fortunate enough circumstances to always have a belly full, and such a mockery would feel ingenuine. She’s never had enough for food to be anything indulgent, but she only needs money because magical material costs are so exorbitant.

  But some people in the Greenlands are not so lucky, and something about being audibly ravenous in a high noble’s presence sets her teeth on edge on principle alone.

  It is impossible to know how long Millie and Zoe stay there. The impasse is so much more physical and petty than the one of the wider situation, and yet it feels essential. When Zoe catches on to the fact that her tinkering with the metal in her hands is keeping Millie’s attention from going stagnant, she tucks it away and keeps her hands in her pockets.

  Millie is ready to scream. Her time is too precious for this, every moment of every hour, always. She could be doing anything else, but anything locked will be the most valuable. She cannot let Zoe have it.

  But she also cannot keep sitting here. She can’t. Fuck. Is she really going to lose this? She’s going to lose this. Damnit.

  “You’re boring,” Zoe says, and she heads down the stairs.

  Millie blinks, and only lets herself gape once Zoe is out of line of sight. That was fucking lucky.

  Summoning Evie to her side, the one idea Millie has landed on during this dull standoff is now possible. “Evie, find Axel and do everything you can to bring them here.”

  Evie barks and heads off down the stairs. Millie takes out her spellbook to weave another casting of her comprehension spell, as its tingling in the back of her head has faded somewhere amidst all the nonsense with Zoe. By the time she is finished, less than a minute passes before thundering steps sound below, and another thirty seconds bring Axel to the bottom of the last flight of stairs. They are comically large in the space, their head almost reaching the ceiling and their shoulders broad enough they are perhaps half an inch from scraping the sides of the stairwell.

  “I assume the dog’s attentions were a summons,” Axel says.

  “Yes, thank you,” Millie says. “Well done, Evie.” Evie’s tail wags. “I wanted to know about this door. Do you have a key?”

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  “Oh, that’s the arcane part of the workshop, the true workshop,” Axel says. “And no, I do not have a key. Only the last caretaker had one.”

  “I hadn’t asked what happened to them,” Millie says. “Do you know?”

  Axel shakes their head. “I only know that one day, he did not come back. And then... no one did.”

  “... and you’ve tended the garden all this time,” Millie says, trying to imagine doing such a thing for six hundred years without seeing anyone, without ever knowing if anyone would come to see the work.

  “And changed the bedding in all the bedrooms in the Caretaker’s house, and in the inn,” Axel adds, their tone still neutral.

  “In the what?!” Millie asks.

  “Those are the remaining buildings in the hub,” Axel says. “We passed the inn; it lies between the central spire and the communication tower.”

  Millie hurries to the window, looks out towards the central spire and the communication tower, and sure enough sees another three-storey building similar to the one they’re in now. How had she missed that? Selective focus is a hell of a thing.

  “Wait,” Millie says, looking from there to her left, where another building sits. The Caretaker’s home? “You... you’ve been changing bedding here for six hundred years even though no one has come?”

  “The beds must be ready in case of visitors,” Axel says. “The house bedding and inn bedding are to be washed on alternate days, and changed. Always.”

  “Every day?” Millie turns back to look at Axel, horrified at how tears prick her eyes at this bizarre revelation. “You’ve done washing here every day for people that never came?”

  “That is my function,” Axel says. Their voice is unchanged. “You are saddened by this? Your eyes are leaking.”

  “Axel, you’re doing a very good job,” Millie says, voice coming out thicker than expected. “I suppose it is my job to tell you that, now. You’ve done an amazing job in a caretaker’s absence.”

  Axel’s orbs glow a fraction brighter. “Thank you, Caretaker. Your praise is noted and appreciated.”

  Millie wipes at her eyes, relieved that Zoe is nowhere to be seen. (Perhaps she should be more worried about that. But right now, her absence is also the absence of a headache.)

  “So you don’t have a key to the workshop,” Millie repeats, to get herself back on track. “Do you know how else it could be opened?”

  Axel’s head swivels to look behind them without the rest of their body turning around. It had been eerie when Millie was behind them, and it is no better to observe now.

  “We could attempt force,” Axel suggests. “Shall I attempt it?”

  “Sure,” Millie says, relieved they’ve got any idea.

  Axel’s body turns to match the head, then they match up the remaining steps. They raise one of their hands and slam it into the wood. There is a crack, a flash of red magic, and a groan of metal.

  As Axel’s arm pulls back, it is mangled beyond belief, and the automaton looks at it with a blink of their orbs.

  “Interesting,” they say. “It would seem close-range offensive is ill-advised.”

  Millie covers her mouth, as surely it would be inappropriate to laugh, but it is tempting when Axel seems so unconcerned. “Are you okay?”

  “I may need some assistance repairing my arm,” Axel says. “But I am otherwise functional. I would recommend distanced magical blasts, if you have any at your disposal.”

  Oh. Right.

  “I can do that,” Millie says. “Thank you, Axel.”

  Axel nods, and makes their way back down the stairs to return to their work. Millie gets out her wand, twirls it in her hand, and summons raw magic from the ring to blast at the door. The sheer force rips through the door, leaving a circular hole behind. With relief, Millie blasts it again, and again, until there is a big enough gap for her to get through.

  This room is as dusty as the communications tower, with no window to ventilate it. Something cold settles over Millie’s skin in the space, some feeling of wrongness she cannot identify nor shake. With a bookshelf on one side, and an absolute arsenal of wands and spell staves on the other, Millie tells Evie to stand guard outside the door and sits down to refresh her detection spell.

  Metal groans behind her. When Millie glances back, the door is knitting itself back together, the metal growing to reduce the gap. Huh.

  She finishes the spell, and every single wand and stave lights up in her arcane vision, along with a single book on a desk near the end of the room. Millie’s jaw drops. There are also remnants on the floor, where she’d seen markings as she’d come in but cannot make out in the darkness now that the door is completely remade. With a quick light spell, Millie notes the large, runic circle in the center of the room. It shimmers like heat in the air in the detection magic, more remnant than anything active.

  First, Millie tests the wands. Pointing one at the door, ice blasts out of it. As she moves along, each wand fires a different element from it. The staves are the same.

  Millie has not dealt in the trade of magical arms with the criminal underground, but she knows that each of these must be worth at least a hundred gold. There are seven wands and seven staves.

  Fourteen hundred gold. More money than Millie has ever earned in her life, or thought she’d ever see. Millie takes the wands and shoves them into her bag. The staves will not fit, as her dimensional enchantment can only handle objects a square foot or smaller as her budget had strained affording even that. The staves she’ll figure out another way to get to Ms More, but the wands are a hell of a start. That’s another two or three spell parchments she can afford, with any luck. The sheer thought makes her giddy.

  But the book is what really interests her, and Millie hurries over to it.

  The words are gibberish, and some of the markings are not letters at all but partial rune elements. A cyphered spellbook? A possible treasure trove of knowledge. Millie shoves it into her bag to go through later and kneels by the markings in the floor.

  Holding her lit ring to the etchings, she spends some time making notes to decipher what the sigil could mean. It’s a mixture of two different magics--the teleportation she identifies quickly, but the second is trickier. There is a heated feel to it. Destructive magic.

  A teleport intended to harm? Or to break something?

  Millie copies the entire sigil down in her book. Then, she blasts her way back through the door.

  “We should probably find where Her High Ladyship Tempete went,” Millie says to Evie, who sits patiently at the base of the stairs. “Come on.”

  They walk out of the workshop building and around the paths to the large house that must be what Axel described as the ‘Caretaker’s Home’.

  Millie stares at it as they approach, trying to marry the title with the knowledge that she is the Caretaker now. Her tiny room in Claude’s apartment is all she has needed in the last few years, a place to lay her head down and feel safe.

  But that’s because her childhood home was sold.

  “You can’t!” Millie had screamed at her mother. “You can’t sell it, it’s home!”

  “Millie, we’ll have a new home. In the cliffs. Majorie’s hard work has paid off, we’re moving up in the world, we can have everything—”

  “We’ll never be good enough for them. Not now, not ever, she’s just a shiny singing bauble to them and you and I are nothing!”

  But it didn’t matter what Millie wanted. The house was put up for sale. And the next time Millie’s mother and sister went to the White Cliffs for one of Majorie’s concerts for some nobles, Millie packed everything she cared about into a backpack, cut out a section of her bedroom wall to take with her, and left a note next to the sawed wooden boards with a short goodbye and stiffest of well wishes.

  The wooden boards from the wall, bearing old etchings of tally scores of Millie’s competitions with her father, now rest on her dresser at Claude’s in a place of honour.

  “She’s not happy about that wall,” Millie was told a few weeks later, by one of the other schoolteachers who’d worked with her parents for all of Millie’s life.

  Millie had simply shrugged. “I was unhappy about the whole house. She’ll live. She’s moving on to better things.”

  And she’d walked away, before they could ask any more questions, and after that she changed her route to avoid passing too close to the school. To avoid running into her mother or anyone who knew her well.

  Millie feels a lump in her throat now. It’s all a bit much, this entire day. Too many impossible things, too many changes there are no ways to process reasonably.

  And now, a high noble she has to talk to. Like that wasn’t the whole reason she threw a fit and refused to move to the White Cliffs in the first place.

  Millie walks into the house only to be bombarded by the smell of toasted bread and charred vegetables. Zoe is in the corner kitchen space, arranging food onto two plates.

  “Oh, there you are,” Zoe says. “Here.”

  She puts one of the plates on the table. Millie stares at it.

  “I heard your stomach, you need to eat,” Zoe says. “Go on.”

  “Why the fuck would you care?” Millie manages to ask, trying to get her voice to work properly and finding it a struggle.

  Zoe shakes her head. “I’m not a monster who thinks people should starve. Just eat the food. We need to talk.”

  Millie, knowing she is right, falls into the chair and begins to eat even as dread tries to fill her empty stomach instead.