Adom stayed on the balcony a while, turning it over. Then he folded his hand shut on the small sun in his palm, set the rest of it aside for later, and went back in to the others.

The room had gone soft while he was gone.

Someone had lit the lamps against the dark and drawn the curtains back, so the last of the evening came in blue over the rooftops. 

Celene was sitting up now, propped against a bank of pillows, a cup of water held to her lips by Elena, who would not let anyone else do it. She was still terribly thin. But her eyes were open and clear, and they moved from face to face, slow, taking each one in and holding it a moment before letting it go.

She kept coming back to Sam.

That was the thing Adom watched for, and it was worth watching. She would speak to Elena, or to her husband, and then her gaze would drift back to her son, seemingly unable to make the man at her bedside line up with the boy she'd last seen.

"You were this tall." Her hand lifted, unsteady, to somewhere near her own elbow. Her voice was a rasp, long unused. "You came up to about here."

"I grew."

"You grew." She gave a thin laugh. "Look at you. Who said you could go and do that?"

It was a while before anyone thought to tell her who the young man by the window was. When they did, when Sam said it was Adom who'd done this, who'd brought her back, she reached for his hand with both of hers, frail and cool, and held on, unable to find the words, and then found far too many of them. Adom told her it was nothing, which was a lie, and let her hold his hand until she was done.

"He's a magus, Mother," Sam said, brimming. "The youngest there's ever been. Famous across the whole of Sundar. People call him the Ghost of Arkhos."

Celene looked at Adom a long moment, taking him in properly.

"...He looks like a nerd," she said. "The good kind."

Adom and Sam's heads turned to each other at the exact same instant.

"Did you tell her?"

"I swear to God I didn't!"

They lost it. The rest of the room watched them dissolve into helpless laughter for no reason anyone present could name, and went on not understanding it, which somehow only made it worse.

The friends and family came through the evening after that. Eren, Karion and Damus arrived together, having heard. Adom's mother and father came, Maria going straight to Celene with a healer's quiet questions and a friend's hand on her arm, Arthur hanging back with the ease he carried into every room. 

Ada came barrelling in ahead of them, and Bennu after her at his own stately pace. Zuni rode asleep in the curve of Ada's arm. Even Mia came, who was never anywhere now, and that said something on its own.

The room filled with them and other people close to Sam’s family, and stayed full, because nobody wanted to be the one to leave it.

Adom kept to the window through most of it. He was glad. The gladness was real, and it ran deep. But under it sat the thing from the balcony.

Ten years, nine months, eleven days. The World Dungeon, named at last, with a number hung on it. Three months to unseat an emperor and a circle he had no notion how to reach in the time he'd been handed. 

He turned it all over while the room laughed around him, and let none of it onto his face, because tonight was not the night, and these people had waited far too long for this evening to have a shadow laid across it by anything of his.

The rest would keep until morning, he supposed. 

They left at last, well into the night.

The walk home was cold but good. Maria went on ahead with Ada, Bennu and Zuni, their voices carrying back down the empty street, while Arthur fell into step beside Adom and let the others draw a little ahead.

"You look tired," he said.

"Yeah." Adom rolled out his shoulders. "It's been a day."

Arthur nodded. Up the street, Maria said something that set Ada laughing, and Bennu's laugh chimed in after hers.

"I'm going into one of the dungeons tomorrow," Arthur said. "Nothing serious. Just to hunt. Clear my head, stretch the legs. I've been cooped up too long." He glanced over. "Come with me. If you've nothing better on."

Adom thought his new problems, and all the work that began the moment he let it begin. Then he thought the work would still be there the day after tomorrow.

"Yeah," he said. "Sure. I'd like that."

A day off. He thought, maybe, he'd earned one.

*****

One day later…

Here, in the green half-dark of a low-tier forest dungeon, lives one of the rarer creatures a hunter may ever hope to meet.

The cocorel is, by the standards of its kind, something close to a miracle. Of all the things a dungeon will grow and send shuffling, slithering, or shrieking toward the unwary, the overwhelming majority share a single ambition, which is to kill you, and a single quality in death, which is to be wholly inedible, frequently poisonous, and on occasion still trying. 

The cocorel is the great exception. It is small. It is harmless. And, almost alone among its peers, it is delicious.

It stands about knee-high: a long-legged, round-bodied bird with stub wings it has never once troubled to fly with, and a crest that lifts when it is alarmed, which is always. Its meat is tender and rich and much sought after. A single one will feed a family.

There is, naturally, a catch.

The cocorel is fast. "Fast" is the wrong word, but the language has yet to produce the right one. It has exactly one defense and it has perfected it, which is to run, faster than anything its size has the slightest right to, faster than the eye holds cleanly, and to keep at it tirelessly for as long as it finds the situation amusing. Predators have hunted it for ten thousand years. The cocorel remains, statistically, very nearly impossible to catch.

Which brings us to our two hunters.

Arthur saw it first, went still, and put a flat hand up without looking back. Adom froze behind him.

Thirty paces on, in a patch of broken light, a cocorel was not, as Adom first took it, working at the dirt. It was dancing.

A second cocorel stood off to one side, smaller and plainly unmoved, and the first was performing for her. It had stamped itself a little stage clear in the leaf litter, and now it crossed and recrossed it, crest up to full height, stub wings held stiffly out, bowing and turning and bobbing its round body to a rhythm audible to no one else present. Every few passes it drew itself up tall and held very still, waiting on a verdict.

The female considered him. Then she considered the trees, with markedly greater interest.

The male tried harder. He fetched a twig and laid it at her feet. He puffed himself to roughly twice his size. He attempted a finale, a furious shuffling spin that flung leaf litter in a wide circle, and held the last pose, trembling, magnificent.

The female yawned.

"There," Arthur breathed. "Dinner."

He laid the plan out in a few low words. He'd swing round the left and drive it toward the rocks, where the ground pinched in and there was nowhere to break past. Adom would take the right and close the trap. Simple enough. 

So they moved. But alas, the cocorel, mid-courtship, noticed them at once.

The crest went up.

"CORNER IT, ADOM!"

What happened next happened very fast, and Adom would spend a while afterward trying to reconstruct it.

The cocorel did not run toward the rocks. It abandoned its bride, its twig, and its stage in a single instant and ran straight at Adom, which no part of the plan had allowed for, and then at the last instant it wasn't where his hands were closing. 

He lunged, but it was already past his elbow. He pivoted, quicker than most men could move at all, got a hand down, and caught a fistful of air and one drifting feather. 

He spun the other way, but it was gone again.

Mana rose to his hand on reflex, a binding already half-shaped for the patch of ground where the thing had to come down—

"NO SPELLS!" Arthur bellowed across the clearing.

Adom let it die. Which left him exactly one option, the same one the bird had and was vastly better at. He ran it down on his own two legs, both hands out, fully committed.

Until his boot found a wet root.

The dungeon floor suddenly came up and caught him across the face and he lay there a moment, cheek in the loam, a single feather drifting down to settle on the back of his head. 

When he pushed up onto his elbows, the male was already a small shape at the far end of the clearing, a line of bent grass and a thinning haze of dust going off into the green, and then nothing at all.

The female had not moved. She stood where she'd stood through the entire performance, and she turned her head now to regard Adom, flat on his face in the dirt of her clearing, with precisely the same look she'd given her suitor.

She was not impressed by him either.

Behind him, Arthur was not helping. He had given up helping some seconds ago and was bent double with his hands on his knees, laughing helplessly, tears starting.

"The Fraud of Arkhos," he wheezed. "Bested by lunch."

Adom spat a bit of loam out of his mouth. "Tsskk."

"Aaah." Arthur wiped his eyes. "The Fraud of Arkhos. That one's good. I'm keeping that one."

"I'd have had it." Adom pushed himself up to sitting, a leaf stuck to his cheek. "If you'd let me use magic. Or even just Axis. One time, and that bird is mine."

"And what fun would that be?" Arthur came over and put a hand down to him. "Any fool with a core can point a finger and stop a thing dead. Catching it on the two legs God gave you, now. That's hunting."

Adom took the hand and let himself be hauled up. He set about brushing the dungeon off himself, loam and leaf litter and one stubborn feather still clinging to his collar, while Arthur watched, grinning, plainly having the time of his life.

"So." Arthur clapped him on the shoulder, knocking loose a fresh puff of dust. "Shall we go after him again?"

Adom looked off down the clearing, to the green gap where the cocorel had vanished. A slow smile started on him.

"Yeah." He rolled his shoulders, settling back into himself. "We've got a score to settle."

The female they left to her opinions. Other cocorels crossed their path through the afternoon, but they let every one of them go. This had stopped being about dinner some time ago. There was a particular bird in this dungeon that had made a particular fool of Adom, and a thing like that could not be allowed to stand.

They made three more attempts.

Each was worse than the one before it. The first ended much as the original had, Adom on the ground and the cocorel a good distance from it. 

The second put him waist-deep in a stream he hadn't known was there until he was in it. 

The third, which he would decline to discuss in any detail for several years afterward, involved a slope, a great deal of downward speed, and the bird coming to a neat stop at the top of the rise to watch him arrive, at length, at the bottom of it.

By then even Arthur had to call a halt.

"All right. All right." He dropped onto a flat rock, breathing hard, still grinning. "Truce. Pause. Look where we've wound up, anyway."

Adom looked.

In chasing the thing they'd wandered somewhere worth having wandered into. A river ran through a wide green hollow, clear over smooth stones, a fresh breeze coming down it off no source either of them could name. Both banks stood thick with trees in full blossom, pale and faintly pink, the dungeon's own answer to plum, every branch heavy with it and the petals coming loose in ones and twos to drift down onto the water.

And it smelled, against all odds, wonderful.

That was the remarkable part. Dungeons did not, as a rule, smell wonderful. They smelled of the things that lived, died and relieved themselves in them, of dung and old blood and rot. But here the blossom had simply won. The whole hollow was thick and sweet with it, and whatever reeked underneath had been thoroughly outnumbered.

Arthur leaned back on his hands and took a long breath of the place.

"I'm bringing your mother here," he said. "Someday. A blanket, something cold, the two of us and an afternoon to do nothing in." He looked around. "It's too romantic by half not to. Be a crime to find a place like this and only ever spill blood in it."

He patted the rock beside him.

"In the meantime. Come sit with your old man a while. We've earned the rest, and I want to know if this spot's as good as it's pretending to be."

Adom sat down beside his father.

Arthur twisted the ring on his finger, and their lunch came out of it. He'd come prepared. Sandwiches, a good stack of them, wrapped in cloth and cut into neat triangles, the way Maria did them. A flask of tea. Bottles of juice and water, still beaded with cold. A twist of paper with nuts and dried fruit, and another with something sweet folded inside.

"Your mother packed it this morning," Arthur said, handing a sandwich across. "Before either of us was properly up. So mind you finish it, or I'm the one who hears about it."

They ate.

For a while neither of them said much. The river went by. The breeze moved through the blossom and shook a little more of it loose onto the water. It was, Adom had to admit, a very good sandwich, and a very good place to be eating it, and when Arthur poured the tea it came out still hot, the ring having kept it exactly the way it went in.

It was over the tea that Arthur came to it.

"So." He turned his cup slowly in his hands, looking out at the water rather than at his son. "What's been eating at you so badly that you went and missed one of the best days of Sam's whole life, standing right there in the middle of it?"

Adom looked over at him.

"...You noticed."

"Course I noticed." Arthur took a sip. "You were at that window the whole evening with your mind three streets away. Smiling in all the right places and not in the room for a single one of them." He said it plainly, with no edge in it. "I'd have asked you right then. But your mother got to me first. Pulled me aside and told me to leave it be. To bring you down here instead, and give you a day, before I went poking at whatever it is."

"...Ah," Adom said.

He'd been awake with it most of the night, and busy with it all the morning before they came down here. The deciding was long finished.

He'd taken it to the Archmage at first light. Gaius had listened, and gone very still, and then the two of them had spent the grey hours pulling apart a plan they'd believed they had years left to build, and laying it back down to fit the months they suddenly didn't. 

Word had already gone to Morgana by the fastest means Adom had. The whole shape of the thing was moving now, quicker than any of them had ever wanted it to.

Because three months meant something. The system didn't hand out deadlines for sport. If it had set three months against the Emperor's throne, then Rayhan and Mephtilem were already moving toward whatever they'd been building toward all along, and the years Adom had quietly assumed he still had were years he'd never really had.

So when his father asked, he answered him straight.

"The Archmage and I are going to take down the Emperor," he said. "Soon."

Arthur didn't look at him. He kept his eyes on the river, and lifted his cup, and took a slow sip of his tea.

When Arthur spoke again, it was a single word.

"Why?"

"We believe he had his own brother killed," Adom said. "General Soren. The man you served under, when you were young."

Arthur said nothing to that. 

And then Adom told him the rest of it: what Rayhan had done and was still doing, Mephtilem and his exactions, Soren's murder, and Morgana, alive all these years and moving now against the throne. By the time he was done, the tea had gone cold in both their cups.

After he finished, neither of them said anything for a long while.

Arthur sat with his eyes on the river, the cup resting forgotten on his knee. Petals came down off the trees and rode the current away. He didn't look round or speak, and Adom let him have the quiet as long as he wanted it, then a good while past that.

"You're not going to say anything?" Adom said at last.

"I am." Arthur didn't turn. "I'm sorting it. Give me a moment to put it where it goes."

So Adom waited.

It was a long time before his father spoke again, and when he did it wasn't any of the parts Adom had braced for.

"This proof you keep coming back to." He turned the cup a slow half-circle. "Are you certain you can bring it?"

"No. I'm not certain." Adom thought of the recording runes, and the long careful work still ahead of them. "But I'm going to try, and I think I can. The runes can do the work, if I lay them right. It's a matter of getting them where they need to be."

"I see." Arthur nodded slowly, and took another sip. "Then I expect I'll have to be active again soon."

Adom looked at him. "...What?"

"The Iron Wolves." He said it as if it answered the question, and when Adom's face told him it didn't, he went on. "You never asked much about what I did before you were old enough to remember it. I was glad of that, mostly." 

He set the cup down on the rock. "I was one of them. Still am, by every oath that counts. And the Wolves don't serve the man on the throne, son. They serve the right to it."

Adom let him continue.

"You know the law as well as I do. Rayhan came to the crown clean, no one will argue that. But the night he had his brother killed, if he did it, then he forfeited it, and the throne's not been his since, whatever chair he's gone on sitting in." 

His eyes stayed on the water. "The Wolves are bound to put down anyone holding it without the right. They just can't move on suspicion. It has to be proven. That's the only reason Rayhan's still drawing breath."

He glanced over.

"So bring me your proof, and you needn't unseat him at all. He saw to that himself, years ago. You'll only be showing it done. And every Iron Wolf still living will be bound, that same hour, to see him gone."

Arthur went quiet a moment, then back further than the throne.

"You know I grew up as an orphan, yes?"

"...Yeah."

"Soren raised me. Not in so many words, and never alone, but he was the nearest thing to a father I had. Me and my brother both." A pause. "The brother you're named for. Your uncle."

He turned the cup again without drinking from it.

"When he died, the way of it never sat right with me. The story came down whole and clean, a great man gone in a single night, and not a soul was permitted to put one question to it. No investigation. No inquest. The matter was shut before the bodies had cooled. I knew something was wrong in it. Knew it for years. But knowing isn't proving, and I had nothing to lay on any table, so in the end I rested my sword and held my tongue."

The river went past.

"They call that night the Red Night now, those who call it anything at all. And in the years after, the men who'd stood closest to Soren had a way of dying. Accidents. Fevers. Bad luck met on quiet roads. The louder a man had been about wanting it looked into, the sooner his luck seemed to turn." 

He set the cup down for good. "I was one of the loud ones, at the start. By rights I should have gone the way the rest of them went."

"Instead they pulled me out of the main army and gave me the Wolves. Sent me to range the borders and hold them, the way Soren used to. A kindness, to look at it plainly. An honour, even." 

His mouth thinned. "I've long believed it was your grandfather's doing. Your mother's father. Lord Howl Lionheart. I think he quietly laid a hand over me, where I'd never see it, and that's the only reason I'm sat on this rock today instead of under one of those quiet roads myself."

On and on the water went.

In all the years he'd had with his father in this life, Arthur had never once spoken ill of the Emperor. Never cursed him over a hard tax or a bad season the way half the realm did at supper. He spoke little of his past at all, less of the wars, and least of anything of the brother he'd lost. Adom had always taken it for a quiet man being quiet.

It had never once occurred to him that his father had been carrying all of this the whole time. Folded it down small and carried it, year on year, and let no one feel the weight of it. 

Arthur stirred, and when he spoke again the heaviness had gone out of his voice, set down for now.

"You said you met Sir Bedivere?"

"Ah." Adom came back to the moment. "Yes. I did."

And all at once he remembered the thing he'd been carrying since that dock, and never yet found the moment to give.

"He told me to pass something on, actually. If ever the moment sat right for it." Adom was already smiling. "He said to tell you the Papa's still above the ground. That you'd know the name."

Arthur chuckled lightly at that.

"And that you turned out better than he ever beat you into expecting. He said you'd know well enough what that meant."

Arthur laughed then, shaking his head at the river.

"That's him, all right. That's him to the life."

"Why 'the Papa'?" Adom asked. "Where did that come from?"

"Ah." Arthur's grin went sideways and young. "He had a glove. Stiff old riding thing. And when one of us stepped out of line, or mouthed off, or just wore through the last of his patience, he'd give us a clip round the head with it. Made a sound like nothing else on earth. Pah." 

He swung a lazy hand through the air to show it. "And never the once, mind. Always twice. Every time, no matter the crime. Pah. Pah."

He let the cup rest, looking at nothing, probably somewhere thirty years gone.

"So that was that. Papa. He pretended to hate it for years." His smile tilted. "Loved it more than he'd ever once admit."

He exhaled.

"It's good the old bastard's still breathing. I've wanted to beat him senseless since I was twelve. Never once managed it, in all those years Maybe I'll get my chance yet. Spar with him again one day, when all this is behind us. Just like old times."

Adom watched his father a moment.

"Father."

"Hm?"

"Will you tell me the story of your life?" Adom said. "All of it. From the start, right up to now."

Arthur looked round at him, and a slow grin came up.

"That's no small ask. We'd be at it a good while."

"I mean, we've got the scenery for it." Adom nodded out at everything around them "Drinks still in the ring, food left over. There won't be a better moment than this one."

Arthur looked out at the place, and at his son beside him, then settled back against the rock.

"Very well." He took up the cold cup again, out of habit more than thirst. "Where to begin..."

He was quiet a moment, gathering it.

"My earliest memory," he said, "was of me and your uncle Adom, stealing bread in the streets of Daxor..."

Chapter 48. Official Visit

Five days had passed since the afternoon in the dungeon with Arthur. Six since the night the system had woken back up and set its number running, and that number now stood at two months, twenty-nine days, and eighteen hours.

The preparations had been moving ever since. Castle White was the target, and getting Adom inside it with the runes laid where they needed to be was no small undertaking. Valiant had the whole of it in hand, his network feeling out the approaches, the guard rotations, the supply lines, the names of men who might be bought or bent or simply gone around. It would take what it took. But they meant to move the moment the way was clear, and not a day past it.

In the meantime, Adom had gone on living.

There was no sense in doing otherwise, and a great deal of sense in not looking like a man with a coup folded in his pocket. So he kept his hours. He taught. He sat his duties at the Magisterium, graded the work his students handed in, worked with Prof Kim on their many projects and trained with Beth.

Unsurprisingly, the runes hadn't faded. The sun still sat in his palm, banked and quiet, and the enhancement rune still marked his forearm, and neither was the sort of thing a man could walk the city wearing in plain sight. So he wore gloves now. Fine ones, soft leather, the left to cover the palm. And because one gloved hand and one bare one would have drawn every eye in any room, he wore two, and let people put it down to a new affectation of the Ghost of Arkhos, who had always been allowed his oddities.

What he hadn't counted on was the rest of the city agreeing with him; within the week he'd started spotting the same soft leather, worn in matching pairs, on students and clerks all over Arkhos, having set a fashion while trying to hide something.

It was on the fifth day, just as he finished a class, that the summons found him.

He'd sent the last of his students off with their reading and was wiping down the board when a Magisterium runner came in with a folded note. A special summit. His presence required. No subject named, no agenda, nothing but a time, a hall, and the Archmage's seal pressed into the wax.

Adom had not liked the feel of the week.

He'd spent it turning the same questions over and getting nowhere with them. What were Rayhan and Mephtilem building toward, that the system had set three months against it? What did they know, what were they moving, where would it break the surface first? He'd put Valiant onto pieces of it and chased others himself, and turned up fragments that pointed everywhere and nowhere at once. But beneath all of it, all week long, sat a low and steady unease he could not talk himself out of.

He'd mentioned it to Beth, in passing, between drills.

She hadn't been surprised. An after-effect of the training, she'd said. He was growing sensitive enough to the currents now that trouble announced itself a little ahead of arriving, the world leaning faintly toward what was coming before it came. She'd seemed almost pleased about it.

But Adom was not pleased about it. The last thing he wanted was to go through his days with a permanent weight in his gut, feeling the future tilt toward him before he could see what it carried. It was one more thing to hold, and he held enough already.

He was still turning all of that over, the note folded in his gloved hand, when he came up the long approach to the Magisterium and saw the carriage at the main gates.

It was a beautiful thing. He registered that first, before the rest of it caught up to him. Black and silver, lacquered to a mirror shine, drawn by a pair of pegasi that stood folding and refolding their great white wings, their breath steaming faintly in the afternoon air of early fall.

Then he saw the crest worked into the door. The imperial crest.

For a long moment Adom stood very still on the approach, and regretted, deeply and specifically, every bad feeling he'd had all week, and the training that had given those feelings teeth, and the whole art of divination, root and branch.

"...Fuuuuck," he said.

He did not go in right away.

He stood on the approach a moment longer and let himself feel exactly as bad about it as the thing deserved, because there was no good version of this. 

The imperial crest did not roll up to the Magisterium to deliver glad tidings. It came because the Emperor wanted something, or wanted to look at something, or wanted to remind a hall full of mages whose Empire they served. 

And Adom, who had burned the whole week on the question of what Rayhan and Mephtilem were preparing, did not love it landing on his doorstep the very afternoon his bad feeling came due.

He made himself walk in anyway. There was nothing else to do. Bolting from an imperial carriage would have raised more questions than facing whatever sat behind it.

The entrance hall was too quiet for the hour. He went up the steps and through the great doors into the long sunlit corridor beyond, and with every stride the unease wound a notch tighter, because he still had no idea what he was walking toward. 

If this was a move, if they had come for him here, in the open, then they had come knowing exactly what he was. A first-circle mage, in his own seat, ringed by his own people. Nobody opened a fight on those terms without being very sure how it ended.

Which meant, if it came to a fight, Adom wanted Biggins.

The thought stopped him mid-stride. The dragon had told him to call the moment it came to that, and a corridor full of imperial steel might be exactly the moment he'd meant. Better early and wrong than late and dead. Adom half-turned, the call already shaping itself in his mind—

"Magus Adom Sylla!"

A big, deep voice rolled down the corridor, far too cheerful for an ambush. Adom turned back and found a man coming toward him down the length of the sunlit hall. He was tall, well past two meters, broad to match, blond hair cropped short over a clean-shaven jaw, a stride that ate the floor. 

A red cape swung from steel pauldrons at his shoulders, and a sword rode at his hip.

Everything about him was built to a scale that made the corridor look modest. He was, by any honest reckoning, magnificent. He knew it, too, and carried it without a shred of arrogance.

Adom stopped where he stood.

"Oh, for God's sake," he said, under his breath.

Then he put on a smile and went to meet him.

"General. What a surprise."

Magnus Strong. The name had always struck Adom as almost unfairly on the nose, and the man did nothing whatsoever to soften it. 

Supreme General of the Imperial forces. Every sword, every shield, every standing army the Empire could put into a field answered, in the end, to him. After the Emperor, the Archmage, and the Chancellor, no man in the whole of the realm stood higher than Magnus Strong.

The General's hand came out, and Adom took it.

He'd forgotten about the handshake until their palms met, and then he remembered all at once, because Magnus Strong had a habit, and the habit was this: every handshake was a quiet contest. A slow, steady tightening, a small testing pull, the whole of it conducted in silence behind a pleasant face, to see whether the other man would give. 

Most men gave. Adom usually did too, because he'd never had a reason worth the bother of doing otherwise.

But today was different.

He didn't know what Magnus had come for. And if it turned out the General had come to put him in the ground, Adom decided he was not about to spend the last minutes before it losing a handshake. So when the pull came, he met it, held, and pulled back.

A flicker crossed Magnus's eyes. Interest, perhaps.

"The last time I laid eyes on you," the General said warmly, his grip firming a degree, "was your nomination. The day they put the title on you. Youngest magus the order's ever named." He gave a small, companionable tug. "You looked half terrified, if you don't mind my saying so."

"I was, a little." Adom kept his voice easy and his smile where it was, but did not yield a finger's width. "It's a lot to be handed all at once."

"And how do you find it now? The work?"

They were both pulling in earnest, hands locked, knuckles paling, neither face giving away a thing of it. This was a bit ridiculous, to be honest. 

How old was this man, anyway? Supreme general of the realm, and still turning a handshake into a contest over whose was bigger.

"Busy," Adom said pleasantly. "Endlessly busy. But noble work, and gratifying, when it goes well. I wouldn't trade it."

Magnus laughed, and for a moment the pressure on Adom's hand eased, and then it came back twice as hard.

"Good. Good man." 

He clapped his free hand over the back of Adom's, trapping it, while smiling. "That's the spirit of the thing. A man ought to do his work whether he loves it or no. That's duty." 

His eyes stayed warm. "But loving it, now. My father always said loving the work was the whole difference between a long life and a short one. He was right about most things, the old man. Rest him."

"Speaking of which," Magnus went on, easy as ever, "how is your father? It's been too long. I don't think I've laid eyes on Arthur since he hung up his sword."

Adom couldn't have said whether it was the heat of the moment that did it, the blood up, every nerve reading the room for a knife. Maybe he was seeing threats in shadows. But the General had just spoken of his own father in the past tense, rest him, and turned in the same breath to Adom's, who was very much alive.

There was a message in that. Adom was nearly sure of it. And he did not like it one bit.

So he stopped being polite about the handshake.

[Primordial Body] had remade him years ago, well past the limits of ordinary flesh. His bare strength alone ran orders of magnitude beyond anything a normal man could bring to a grip, and he had never once needed a spell to prove it. 

"He's well," Adom said, warm as anything. "Restless, you know how he is. Took me hunting last week. In fine form."

Magnus's smile held for exactly as long as it took him to understand he was losing.

Then it began, very slightly, to wither at the corners. His arm tensed. He pulled back, a real pull now, the friendliness gone out of it and a soldier's full strength behind it, and for the first time the contest was honest. Adom met it without effort. And then, because the man had gone and brought up his father, he drew the General's hand around and held it where he wanted it, still and beaten, and kept it there.

Guess I've got the bigger one, he thought, and went on smiling.

"Good," Magnus said. The friendliness had gone out of his voice. "That's... good. Glad to hear it."

He wasn't thinking about the conversation anymore. Neither of them was. Their hands were locked just like their eyes and the pleasant words had gone hollow, a courtesy neither man was paying the slightest attention to.

And then Adom felt it. Just a touch, a stirring deep under the General's skin. Fluid, beginning to move. Instinct, most likely. A fighting man's body reaching for its weapon, the same way Adom's own reached for mana when the hair went up on his neck.

His heart picked up.

Is this it, he thought. Are we really doing this? Here? Now? In the hall?

He was already past the question. The first spell sat half-woven in his mind, the thing he'd loose the instant it started, and the shape of the second was waiting behind that when he heard footsteps.

They came from somewhere behind Magnus, ordinary boots on stone, and just like that the moment came apart. Whatever had been winding tight between the two of them folded itself away in the space of a breath. The Fluid under the General's skin went still and the grip eased.

They let go of each other.

The footsteps belonged to Merlin. He came round the corner unhurried, and his eyes passed over the two of them once, taking in more than he let on.

"Adom." A nod. "General Strong."

"Magus Merlin." Magnus turned back to easy warmth in an instant. "Good to see you."

So they knew each other. Of course they did.

"And you." Merlin stopped beside them. "I had a missive just now. A summit, off the calendar, no subject named. We don't convene outside the monthly councils without good reason, so I knew this one mattered." 

His eyes went to Magnus. "And the Supreme General waiting in the hall tells me it matters a great deal. Is everything all right?"

"Oh, yes… yes." Magnus was already turning toward the far end of the hall, toward the doors of the council chamber. "The rest are inside, I'm told. The whole of the Ten but you two. They're waiting on the three of us."

He gestured them ahead, the picture of good cheer again, as if the last minute had never happened.

"Shall we?"