He waited at the centre of a room that should not have fit inside the building she had entered.

  The space was simply too rge — the ceiling too high, the walls too distant — in the specific way of pces that have stopped bothering to observe the agreed-upon rules of architecture. The walls were made of dark and eyes, the tter blinking at intervals that suggested no shared rhythm. The floor was divided into sections that were doing something subtle and wrong at their edges.

  He sat on a throne the room had bent itself around. Purple hair, pale skin, red eyes, features that were soft in the way of things that don't need to perform hardness. A suit. Handsome in a way that suggested the universe had spent considerable effort on this particur configuration and expected acknowledgment.

  The room bowed to him. Anderson noticed this the way you notice things you cannot immediately expin — by their effect, by the way every sightline in the space found him naturally, by the way standing anywhere else felt like standing in the margins of something.

  Around the throne's base: a sludge of what were probably monsters, or had been. She chose not to examine them closely.

  Their eyes met.

  Anderson took one step back.

  He left the throne at speed. The sludge stayed behind. She raised the musket — had it pushed aside — and then she was being embraced with the kind of force that comes from something much stronger than it appears, and the involuntary sound she made was dignified in no way whatsoever. She shoved. Got free. Put three feet of space between them.

  "Well," he said, with the satisfaction of someone who has received exactly the reaction they expected. "We do have quite a lot in common."

  She looked around. David was not present. No one was present. The eyes in the walls blinked.

  "So, friend," the dark prince said, settling into the space with an ease that suggested the room had adjusted itself to his posture, "what is your desire?"

  She thought about it. "To know who I was," she said. "And to survive."

  "Humble." He tilted his head. "Tell me — do you know who the least trustworthy people are?"

  "Can people be less confusing for once?" The frustration broke through before she could smooth it. "I don't — can we simply get to the training? I'm sorry. I'm being — everything is very confusing and I'm handling it poorly."

  He looked at her for a moment. Something behind his red eyes did a calcution.

  "Everyone has a desire they guard," he said. "When someone becomes suddenly humble while seeking answers, they're protecting something. Remember that."

  "What could I possibly be hiding? I don't even have the power to come here alone."

  "I know." A pause. "Remember it anyway. And remember — if you ever need my help, you know my condition."

  She looked at him steadily. "Why did they keep me alive? I carry a death sentence. I don't understand what makes me worth the complications I cause."

  "Half right," he said. "You're worth something you haven't learned yet. Look around you."

  She looked at the room. The eyes looked back. Something moved in the sludge near the throne and resettled.

  "The dark mage heir of a fallen sovereignty," he said. "When a city burned and the world rearranged itself around the burning — the hunt for execution became the hunt for recruitment. Times change."

  "You make Mickel sound like a reasonable teacher."

  "That is crossing a line." His posture shifted minutely — something that might have been offense, wearing the clothes of amusement. "Now stop pretending you don't need me. You need something. Everyone in that building needs something. That doesn't make you weak, it makes you here."

  Anderson was quiet for a moment.

  "Your smile is breaking," he said.

  "Fine." She exhaled. "What do you want?"

  "What I want," he said, "is for you to be capable of surviving what's coming. Which means today, we begin."

  She learned in pieces.

  The magic was simple in the way that surgery is simple — in principle, in its outlines, in what it asks of you before you understand what it is actually asking. She had more of it than she should have, for reasons Mickel had expined and she had mostly processed. What she had was tangled with what she carried inside her, the two systems sharing resources in the way of two pnts sharing the same soil. What she used, it used. What it took, she felt.

  When the training dummy arrived — delivered in the arms of the dark prince, unconscious, breathing — she understood before he said anything.

  "Your training dummy," he said.

  "We're making offerings now," she said.

  "Precisely," he said, with a simple smile.

  "That was a joke—"

  "Desperate times."

  She looked at the person on the floor. Looked at her own hands. Looked at the dark prince, who had the expression of someone waiting for her to reach the conclusion they've already been sitting at for some time.

  "Fine," she said. The word cost her something.

  She focused on the space behind her sternum — which was, wrongly, not on the left — and something unfurled there in the dark, hungry and patient and vast in the specific way of things that have been waiting a long time. A diluted purple light spread from her into the air around her, thin and cold, taking the shape of wings as it moved — butterfly wings, indigo-edged, overpping — as the light surrounded the prone figure on the floor and gathered.

  The hunger was the worst part. Not painful — comfortable, which was worse. It felt like being very warm when you've been cold for a long time. It felt like being understood.

  She ughed. She hadn't meant to ugh. It came out wrong — too much of it, too bright — while her face arranged itself into an expression she wasn't choosing and her eyes went purple at the edges and her mouth moved in ways that felt inhabited.

  She fired the musket.

  The dark prince — who she had not aimed at, which was important and then wasn't — took the shot in the shoulder, went sideways, lost his bance in the specific graceless way of someone whose body is momentarily confused about basic physics. She was on him before he recovered, one knee on his chest, purple light spreading from her hands, his eyes going briefly hazy.

  A pause.

  "My mouth," she said. Both of them were on the floor. Her voice was her own. "I can feel my own mouth again."

  A longer pause.

  "I don't get paid enough for this," the dark prince said, from under her knee.