Lord Chavilon of the Voyax clan had married into a throne, not been born to one, and in the seven years since, he had never once been allowed to forget the difference.
It was a small thing, mostly. A pause before servants called him "my lord," half a breath too long, as though they were checking their math. A seating arrangement at council that placed him correctly beside the Queen and yet somehow always slightly lower. Nothing a man could point at and call an insult. Just enough sand in the boot to remind him, every single day, that Manachy's throne belonged to Sentel by blood and to him by paperwork, and paperwork — he had learned — commanded considerably less respect than blood did.
So when a baby arrived on the manor steps in a vegetable basket and his wife decided, within the Years he was away, to love it like her own, Chavilon did the only thing a man in his position could reasonably do.
He counted.
He counted the years until Sabrina would be of age to marry, and the years until a foundling boy of unknown blood would be old enough to become inconvenient competition for her hand, her inheritance, or — gods forbid — her affections. He counted the political cost of a neutral region quietly raising a child who might, for all anyone actually knew, belong to one of the two warring kingdoms on either side of them.
And he counted, above all, the cost of saying any of this out loud to his wife, who had a way of looking at him when he was being political that made him feel like a ledger she'd already audited and found wanting.
He said it anyway. Chavilon had many flaws, but cowardice in his own dining hall was not historically one of them.
"He needs to go to the Temple of Eyes."
Lady Sentel did not look up from the letter she was reading, which Chavilon found almost more insulting than if she'd shouted. "Good morning to you too."
"Sentel!."
"Lord Chavilon." She finally set the letter down, folding her hands with the particular patience of a woman who had been Queen considerably longer than he had been anything at all. "You'll have to forgive me. I assumed, when you stormed in here at this hour, that Hizosshu had finally declared war, or Migard had burned something, or — at minimum — that we'd run out of good wine. Instead you want to discuss the temple schooling of a five-year-old."
"He's not just any five-year-old, and you know it."
"He's a child, Chavilon."
"He's a child with no name, no clan, no family that's come forward in five years to claim him, and a habit of doing things children his age shouldn't be able to do." Chavilon leaned both hands on the table, the way he did when he wanted a point to land like furniture being dropped. "Do you know what the stable hands are saying about him? That he put out a fire with his bare hand last month and didn't so much as blister."
"Boys exaggerate."
"Boys exaggerate about frogs and sword fights, not about fire." He straightened, dragging a hand through hair that had gone considerably greyer than his thirty-four years strictly accounted for — a fact he privately blamed entirely on this household. "The Watchers exist for exactly this reason, Sentel. To look at children like him and tell us what he is before the rest of the continent finds out the hard way. The Temple of Eyes isn't a punishment. It's a diagnosis."
"It's also two hundred miles north, in Hizosshu territory, run by men who answer to a prophecy and not to me." Sentel's voice had cooled several degrees, which Chavilon had long ago learned was considerably more dangerous than if she'd raised it. "I will not hand a child I have raised since he was small enough to fit in a vegetable basket over to strangers because the stable hands have a story to tell over supper."
"He is not your child."
The silence that followed had weight to it.
"No," Sentel agreed, quiet now, and somehow that was worse than the cold voice had been. "He isn't. But Sabrina decided he was her brother before she'd finished learning her letters, and I have buried enough of my own family, Chavilon, that I am not in the habit of giving away the ones who are left simply because they were inconvenient to acquire."
Chavilon opened his mouth. Closed it. There was, he had discovered early in this marriage, a version of arguing with Sentel where you won the logic and lost the room entirely, and he recognized the shape of it now settling over the table like fog.
He tried a different angle.
"Look at his face, Sentel."
Something in her stilled.
"You've looked at it. I've watched you do it — at supper, in the garden, whenever you think no one's paying attention. You're not looking at a stranger's child. You're looking for someone." He said it gently, which cost him more than the shouting had. "Who is he, Sentel? Truly?"
For a long moment she didn't answer, and Chavilon watched something cross her face that he'd seen only once before, years ago, in the months after word came of the Battle of the Sixty Thousand — a grief that had never quite finished arriving.
"There was a man," she said finally, "who used to visit my father's court, before the battle. Quiet. Kind, in the careful way men are kind when they're carrying something they don't want you to ask about." She looked toward the window, toward nothing in particular. "I haven't seen him in six years. I don't know if he's alive. But Ragna has his eyes, Chavilon. His exact eyes. And every time that boy laughs, I hear a man I thought the war had taken."
Chavilon said nothing for a moment, because for once in his marriage he had genuinely not known any of this, and a small, unkind part of him filed the information away as useful before the larger, less unkind part of him caught up and felt, briefly, ashamed of himself for it.
"Then all the more reason to know what he is," he said eventually. "Before someone else finds out first, and decides for you."
"That sounded almost like concern."
"Don't let it go to your head."
He did not win that conversation. Chavilon was self-aware enough to recognize a loss when his wife walked out of a room having said the last word, the second-to-last word, and most of the words in between. But he was also, whatever else might be said of him, not a man who treated a closed door as a finished argument.
So he sent for the elders.
The Six were not, strictly speaking, his. They were Manachy's, ancient and stubborn and selected by clans that had been quietly running the region's actual business since long before Sentel's father had sat the throne, let alone Sentel herself. But Chavilon had spent seven patient years learning precisely which elder owed which favor to which Voyqzy cousin, and he called in every single one of them inside of three days.
They arrived at the manor in a procession that managed to look both ceremonial and faintly put-upon, six old men and women who had clearly been pulled from six separate and far more comfortable activities, and were arranged around the council table with the kind of theatrical solemnity that Chavilon privately suspected they'd practiced.
"The boy," said Elder Voss, who had the distinction of being older than the building they were sitting in, "is becoming a liability to Manachy's neutrality, Lord Chavilon. We are agreed on this."
"You're agreed on this because I told you to be," Chavilon thought, and did not say, because diplomacy required a man to keep at least one true thought to himself at all times.
"The Queen," he said instead, with the careful weight of a man laying the first stone of a wall, "loves the boy. Understandably. But love is not policy, and Manachy has survived this long because it has never let love dictate policy. I am asking the Six to remind her of that. Together. As one voice." He let that sit. "Not as a threat. As — counsel."
It was, of course, a threat. Six elders sitting across from a queen, speaking in careful unison about the kingdom's survival, was as close to a threat as politics in Manachy ever bothered to dress itself up as. Chavilon had simply learned, in seven years of being slightly lower than everyone at the table, exactly how to make a threat sound like wisdom.
Elder Voss studied him for a long moment, the way old men study younger ones they suspect of being cleverer than is strictly comfortable.
"You want him gone."
"I want him known," Chavilon corrected. "Whether that turns out to be the same thing as 'gone' isn't up to me. It's up to whatever the Watchers see when they finally look at him properly."
He did not say the rest of it — that some quiet, ledger-keeping part of him had already done the arithmetic on a foundling boy with a stranger's eyes and a fire he couldn't be burned by, and that the sum, whichever way Chavilon turned it, never once came out in his daughter's favor if the boy stayed.
***
Outside the council room, down the hall and up two flights of stairs, Sabrina sat cross-legged on Ragna's bedroom floor, watching him very seriously stack wooden blocks into a tower that kept catching fire at the corners and not, somehow, ever quite burning down.
"You're doing it again," she informed him.
"Doing what?"
"The fire thing. Mother says not to do the fire thing where Father can see."
Ragna looked at his own hands, small and a little singed at the fingertips, with the mild curiosity of a boy who had never once been told that what he could do was strange, only that it should, for reasons nobody had bothered to explain to him yet, be kept quiet.
"Okay," he said, and went back to his blocks, entirely unaware that two floors below him, his future had just been put to a vote.