“When does she start?” asked a voice from the top of the stairs. The young man from before looked curious. His long hair was loose, but still that odd dark cherry color, and damp; his dark yellow linen shirt had water patches on the shoulder, and he had put on his glasses, which had wire frames and sat at the bridge of his rather long, slightly hawkish nose. His voice was high for a man, and surprisingly soft in its timbre with a lilted, difficult to place accent, which Merel would not have expected given his height and presentation.
    “Kiarn, pay mind that you stay out of our business when I am not talking to you.” Ullic sighed.
    “She should learn to mind her own business!” He snorted and started walking down the stairs.“Never even heard of not walking in on people while they’re bathing. Were you raised in a barn? How backwards.”
    “And if I was?” Merel sneered at the offense.
    “I apologize, then, Miss Pig. I am well traveled and experienced in the ways of many cultures but was not aware that in yours, doors were relative. Ullic, do you have any pickled fish? I need breakfast.” He strode casually, not a shuffle but a full, lazy long-legged gait that reminded Merel of a cranefly, to the dark counters along the wall, barely discernible from any of the laboratory space. The night before, she had assumed it was an extension of his alchemy counters beside the hearth. Only now was she seeing the jam jars and bread and herbs hanging about.
    “I do not keep pickled fish,” said the man with a tone of fatigue. “Put it on the invoice, if you want it so badly.”
    “What sort of place has no pickled or smoked fish,” said Kiarn under his breath, though very audibly.
    “Kiarn Mannix here is my other assistant. He arrived the morning before you.”
    “Mannix, as in the Mannix house?” Merel’s eyes opened wide. The Mannix line was well established as overseas advisors to the king of Moras, and representatives to other nations.
    “Very same,” said Kiarn. “My father is across the seas at present, and I, their only beloved son and eldest grandson of the line, have been sent back here for a domestic affair. The air of my home country, though, does raise my appetite.”
    “There’s cheese in the dry storage,” said Ullic, and Kiarn sighed.
    “I’ll take just bread.” He sliced off a slab of it with an athame that had been lying on the counter very unceremoniously, and balanced it on his fingertips, crumbs falling as he took a bite of it and chewed thoughtfully. As quickly as Kiarn had materialized, he walked back upstairs, stretching his arms high above his head. He was very tall. Nearly nineteen hand, she’d guess, and his arms would have easily touched most ceilings stretched like that.
    “He seems very pleased with himself,” said Merel with a tinge of both fascination and disgust to her voice.
    “It is a fatal flaw of his, I think.” Ullic watched the door shut behind Kiarn. “He has good reason to be. A very well traveled and uniquely intelligent young man. You’re the same year, you know.”
    “We are?”
    “He’s only three months older than you, but has led so many studies on magical theory that the length of his curriculum is comparable to someone with decades under their belt.”
“I suppose that’s why he’s your pick?”
    “No.” Ullic half laughed, a puff of indignant breath from a crooked smile. “He is my pick, because I think if he is not properly trained soon, he will give up on all things, and lay about like a cat. I would hate to see him burn out so soon and so brightly, then go to waste.”
“Is he lazy, then?”
    “Terribly.” Ullic rose and shuffled to the kitchen, searching in irritation for something.
    “Let me,” Merel sighed. “I’ll make…um…” She glanced around. It was a mess. She didn’t know how to even begin. “I’ll toast some bread.”
    She sliced some bread, grabbed a small rack, and used prongs to set it above the fire. At the bottom of it, she noticed a seal built into it— not to go out. He must have built this before his vision went, estimating based on the wear into the stone that it was a few years old. “I’ve got my work cut out for me, I think.”
    “I don’t need you to cook,” he said gruffly. “There’s seals and a few enchantments, and easy things which I can do by feeling.”
    “But I need to eat too.” She frowned, turning the toast. “Besides, it cannot be a good thing to live on magicked sustenance alone. Food ought to be made with— with hands, with care.” She pulled out the toast slices and searched in the dry cupboard for butter, and triumphantly pulled it out, smearing some onto the bread. “Where are you getting bread?”
    “My niece Lily sends for the food invoices, and such.” That raised more questions than it answered for Merel, but she assumed that this Lily was a maid or some such thing.
    “Right. So when can I next get a few requests to her? If I’m to turn this place around, I need supplies. And more food, I haven’t seen a single vegetable in here.” Merel poked through one of the cabinets looking for jam, failing to find any.
    “She comes in the afternoons.” Ullic peered hard at the toast. “I can’t tell what you put on this.”
    “Just butter. How much can you truly see?” Merel paused. It was probably an insensitive question but Ullic did not seem fazed in the least.
    “Shapes. Blurry shapes. Not much in the light, but in the dark it’s a bit easier. I can see color, though— less vividly than I did once. I can’t really tell reds and purples apart. Letters are too fine and small for me to distinguish.” He hesitated. “It is a magical ailment, and no magic could now undo it.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I used long-seeing for many years.” He did not elaborate, and Merel knew well what it would have been. Long-seeing was a very ancient traditional art, but many of its shorthand practitioners did not do it as it was meant to be done— with lenses and telescopes that would show things impossibly far away. Many chose to use their own eyes. If that was what Ullic had done, then the strain would have damaged his eyes permanently. If he used long-seeing on his own eyes, it fell under one of the only taboos in wizardry.
    “This is why we have laws against magic of the body,” she said, almost chiding but also as a reminder to herself.
    “What about that leg of yours? Why do you have it?” Ullic asked. “I can hear its gait and its sound, I know it cannot be one of flesh.”
    “It is not an exciting story.” Merel shrugged. “I was very little. I had always been ill, and one day, when I woke, it had swollen up and turned purple. It hurt terribly, a pulsing sort of feeling, and I could barely move it. Then, when the village doctor came, he stayed for a few days, before he said, well, we ought to cut it off. Then, when I woke, it was gone.” There was an odd feeling when she recounted the story, as if she was tapping on the side of a hollow gourd. Merel often felt as though she ought to miss her leg or feel some grief for a life before, but she had been so young that most of her memories of a carefree childhood were still ones of her with a wooden leg and a cane. Her loss of it was one of her earliest memories at all. “I have a disease of the blood. My leg had already died. Most people ask hoping for some sad story or other such heroism. I once was asked by a student if I had committed the taboo and lost my leg as penitence, even. The truth disappoints them.”
    “Not much to be disappointed of.” Ullic took a bite of the toast. “Be grateful you have a boring lot. Excitement is bedfellows with suffering.”
    “I thought suffering was the human experience.” Merel chewed her own, a bit unhappy with it not being toasted enough for her.
    “Hm.” Ullic stood up and walked to his workbench. “When you’re done with that, Miss Pedler, I want you to bring all of the jars containing my insect specimens. They should be…” He gestured towards half of the room. “Somewhere. It is most imperative that they be accurately labeled.”
    “What are you doing with insect specimens?” Merel raised her brow. “They don’t have alchemical use—“
    “Experiments.” He let out a heavy sigh. “If you must honestly ask about everything then nothing will be achieved.”
    Of course, Merel knew what he meant. Even now, the earliest thing she had been reminded of all through her schooling was that she asked too many question. Watch and you’ll answer them yourself, Mebd used to say. But Merel was still prone to the habit. She sighed. This meant she would likely spend most of today shifting jars about.
    “Should we make a time table for all of this?” asked Merel. “I need to know what’s going to be ordinary, for daily schedules.”
    “Fine. It’s—“ One of the candles above them popped, and a few more little crackles sounded. “Half past eleventh hour. Today, we work until the fifth hour past noon. Whatever you do afterwards is your own business.”
    And until the fifth hour, Merel did work. It was very quiet, she realized. Whatever Kiarn was doing in his room, he did uninterrupted, and Ullic did not talk. Merel’s task was to sift through his notes on specimens, identify them, and match the labels to the proper jars, which was not easy at first, but eventually grew simpler. He had so many— from every corner of the world, every bend, that she wondered if there was any bug left in the world he had not seen. She had to find space for them too, which was a bigger problem, once they were labeled. The instant she moved something, Ullic would reprimand her for doing so at all, since he knew where things were supposed to be and moving it was going to make it difficult for him to do his work. “That’s why you asked me!” said Merel at last in frustration, and Ullic finally surrendered. Merel began working on the invoice, then, and decided this was a good time to work on a list of things to discard, too.
    Just past the fifth hour, after Merel had gotten them both a jug of dilute wine, and she sat cross legged on the floor, the leaflets of paper describing the different specimens before her, there was a knock.
    “It’s me!” said a musical feminine voice that brought to mind one of the girls at the academy.
    “Let Lily in,” said Ullic, half collapsed in his armchair. His aged, broad fingers were rubbing his temple.
    Merel stood and grabbed her cane, walking to the door and opening it cautiously. Whatever she had expected of Lily, it was not this.
    Lily was around her age, perhaps a bit younger, though it may have been that she looked very young. She was sixteen or seventeen hand tall, and looked like a sea-spirit. Her hair was like spun gold, her skin alabaster but for rosebuds on her cheeks and tiny delicate freckles, and her eyes were bright sapphires. She was slender but feminine, graceful but natural, and she was clad in luxuriant white and heather-purple. She was in every way as lovely as Merel was not.
    “Hello, your highness,” said Ullic, not quite sarcastic, but certainly in dry humor.
“I brought up the berries you asked for,” she said, an enthusiastic smile on her pink lips. “A pound and a half of raspberries— what exactly do you mean to do with them?” She pulled out a small basket and handed them to Merel, barely acknowledging her.
    “They’re good for drafting a few simple seals, you do not want to know, dear. My assistants have arrived.”
    Lily turned around, her blond hair perfectly flipping behind her, and looked Merel over. “Oh! That must be you, then? My goodness, I thought you were just one of the scullery maids. You’re terribly unassuming. I’m so very sorry, I hope that we can get back onto a better foot!”
Merel, unable to miss a good joke, leaned a bit on her cane, bent over, and unfastened her prosthetic, holding it in her hand. “Not this one, then?”
    Lily’s eyes went very wide, almost aghast in shock, before it turned to delight. “Oh, I like her, uncle! I like her plenty. Where did you find such a funny wizard?” Merel began refastening her leg.
    “A boarding school.” Ullic turned to hear her better. “Merel Pedler is a very gifted wizard and alchemist. I imagine someday you will be working very closely with her, when you are queen, Lily.”
“Well, that’s a wonderful notion!” Lily stretched and stepped gracefully over the papers carpeting the floor, as if she was tiptoeing over a meadow of flowers. “Miss Pedler— or should I say Mage Pedler— my name is Princess Delores Ita of Moras. But here, nearly everyone calls me Lily. I take care of orders and supplies for him, and in exchange, I am granted the privilege of getting to see someone who does not treat me as though the sun rises and sets on me.”
    “Oh…” Merel had not expected the delivery girl, or niece of her mentor, to be the princess. “So you really are—“
    “Mage Ullic and I have been trying very hard to set things up so that he can work, and it was my idea to hire an assistant, though, of course, I wasn’t going to foist any of my dear friends or teachers onto him. I thought it best to let him pick and contact his own old friends about the matter, and I am glad to see he has found suitable assistants. Kiarn Mannix and a fresh faced new talent. Why, I am sure you’ll be a huge help, I know my uncle needs it. He was actually very insistent that you would be one of the two new assistants, actually.”
    “Um… Thank you.” Merel had frozen up by now.
    “Of course, he might give you a difficult time with it, but we love him all the more for it! I’m sure everyone will like you plenty, though, Miss Pedler.”
    Merel just stared at her, holding the berries in her arms. “Thank you, your highness,” she said, completely befuddled.
    “Yes! Of course! Now, that invoice for today? Is there anything special on it?”
    “Pedler’s got it,” said Ullic, and Merel fished through her pocket searching for it, quite dismayed for a moment when she thought she might have lost it among the dozen other scraps of paper in her pockets. Triumphantly, though, she did find it, and silently held it out to Lily.
    “Oh, a long one! I suppose, with all of the new life around here, you must need more things. Goodness, look at it all. Detergents and glazes and inks, why, some of this might take a few days if we don’t have it in the store. And jarred fish! Ullic, I thought you didn’t like fish.”
    “I don’t. The new assistant does.”
    “Oh.” Lily wrinkled her nose. “Well, not everyone is perfect, that’s what I say.”
    “Merel, she’d have you believe that she is.” Ullic rolled his shoulder and stood up. “Just take the invoice down. Thank you for the visit, but I was busy.”
    “Ah! My most sincere apology for interrupting. Imagine, I think tomorrow my father will ask you of the progress in the studies for defense seal longevity, and if I got in the way of your work, I would be so embarrassed.”
    “Oh, the greatest of horrors, Princess Lily would be a bit embarrassed.” Bearlike, he rose from his chair, and tousled his niece’s hair before he headed back to his workbench. “Merel, you’re dismissed for the day.”