Closely following the luggage-carrying valet as he mounted the dusty stairs to the apartment’s top floor, Zephyrin had to admit to himself that despite his earlier cavalier assurances, the word ‘garret’ gave him a mild sense of foreboding. This apprehension was promptly dispelled by his first sight of the little room as he passed the white-cuffed arm holding open the door. Fissures ran through the stone walls, the rays filtering through the skylight were weak, and the sloping raftered ceiling was low, it was true, but the room was not as cramped as he had imagined, nor was it in a state of general neglect.

Moreover, there were benefits to his isolation from the rest of the household. After the valet had departed and he had laid down his valise on a solidly built Seaxlandish walnut chest, Zephyrin seated himself on the adjacent trestle-bed and adopted a cross-legged position. Closing his eyes and shutting out the world around him, Zephyrin began to circulate his mana.

He quickly made the unpleasant discovery that the fluidity of his mana’s flow had subtly but unquestionably diminished; weeks of negligence now made it more difficult to summon up and circulate in that ineffable manner a powerful band of mana within his core. Though still flowing freely, the current inside his heart had become slightly sluggish as a result of disuse, unrefined mana building like granular sediments on a riverbed. This wasn’t a concern just yet, but another month or two of the same carelessness and he might struggle to cast spells with the same ease and rapidity.

When was the last time I was able to train? The village? Yes, that had indeed been the last time. Pushing one’s abilities to the limit was regarded as highly singular at the academy, while practicing one’s magic outside of the designated classes and without adult supervision was simply unheard of.

But here, no one would notice. Foudris was absent and the mistress and her servants were basebloods, oblivious to his actions; Zephyrin could refine his mana to his heart’s content.

It was while he was absorbed in circulating his mana with ever-increasing intensity that a thought occurred to him.

Seaxland, speculation…

Zephyrin’s eyelids slowly parted. Seaxland… the viscount said he had business there. Could it be that Foudris’s ‘Blind Man’ and the viscount… were one and same? Rather than a physical impediment, was the mention of blindness a reference to the besotted noble’s exaggerated opinion of Mlle. Huron and his apparent indifference to her physical decline?

Zephyrin thought back to the conversation of a half hour past. ‘…we will assuredly meet again.’ If the viscount possessed knowledge of the future and the violence that would soon be visited upon the privileged classes, his choice of parting words would be quite curious. No, clearly he didn’t know, and so Zephyrin could remove ‘The Blind Man’ from consideration. That left the other titles on the list. Marquis, Thaumaturge, Pyromancer, Cardinal, Demi-Prince, Seeress… all too vague to come to any definite conclusions. For now. Renewing his determination to keep his eyes and ears open over the fortnight to come, Zephyrin allowed his eyes to close and returned to his exercises.

The days that followed saw Zephyrin settle into a curious daily routine. He did so gradually, like a bather not quite able to believe that seemingly scalding hot waters were actually cool as those of a mountain-spring. He had expected regular traffic and a drawing room packed every evening with debating intellectuals, egalitarians, and snuff-stained clerics escaping the monotony of their duties, not a picture of staid respectability and near monastic silence.

But rather than glamorous soirees abounding in declamations of poetry and hearty laughter, measured speech was what the courtesan favored in the twilight of her life. Content with a mostly secluded existence, all that punctuated the otherwise perpetual calm of the apartment was the orderly coming and going of reverential visitors—nobles come on quasi-pilgrimage to pay their respects to a living institution of the city. ‘They come to gawk at the monument before it collapses,’ Mlle. Huron had remarked with customary dry humor to Zephyrin after the departure of two awed male Exalted.

For Zephyrin was often present during these homages and able to observe the interactions at his leisure. Mlle. Huron’s personal library and parlor were one and the same, and she occasionally requested him to read extracts from her favorite voluptuary authors, whose writings she had devoured with relish in girlhood. When these readings were interrupted by a knock at the door, Zephyrin therefore found himself with a front row seat to the proceedings. He soon realized that as the city’s foremost authority when it came to good taste and manners, Mlle. Huron played an instrumental role in the formation of the next generation of nobles, whose parents directed them to her abode in order to glean precious pearls of wisdom, which the courtesan liberally scattered to all her supplicants.

When addressing women she favored self-sacrificial maxims: self-effacement and abnegation were her unspoken but implicit watch-words. One self-satisfied young lady was curtly admonished that, ‘there is nothing more ridiculous than a woman who flaunts her education, or what passes in her mind as learning,’; while a bride-to-be concerned by her fiance’s more than cordial relations with the opposite sex was empathetically told to, ‘be in nowise alarmed, and most of all not to breathe a word to the gentleman in question. Your stock will rise in his eyes in due proportion with your discretion and preparedness to refrain from inserting your nose in affairs which are of no concern to a woman, least of all one who is not yet his wife. A woman’s greatest rival is ever her own jealousy.’

But this adept in the art of love adopted a different, more confrontational line with the male progeny sent to her by their concerned noble parents. She worked to smooth out the rough edges of young Exalted gentlemen whose notions of courtship consisted of throwing a pouch of coin to a consumptive poet for a fistful of hackneyed verses, serenading the object of their desire beneath her window, before threatening the unfortunate damsel with social ruination if she did not immediately accede to their amorous imperatives. Mlle. Huron worked assiduously to moderate their advances and sublimate their ardor, urging them to mind the ‘…thousand trifles that lend graces to love, and of which women are so fond. For a man to become a woman’s everything, his love must be composed of nothings.’

Dumbstruck by the revelation that women wouldn’t fall head over heels at the mere mention of his prestigious name, thrown into confusion that, possibly for the first time in his life, a modicum of effort would be required to win the object of his desires, humiliated and not a little miffed to realize that few members of the fairer sex could be cajoled into entrusting her heart by crude unilateral demands or threats of violence, the chagrined young would then depart, suitably chastened but enlightened by the courtesan’s wise words.

Rarer were the young men who demonstrated an unmanly skittishness, but Mlle. Huron was ever prepared to model her guidance after the temperament of her pupil. She always had a couplet on her lips ready to be loosed to disconcerting effect—“Taken with but not won by visage fair / A woman’s won who’s taken by the hair.”, was her dubious counsel to one timid blueblood suitor, while another who hadn’t outgrown the male friendships of his adolescence was offered a list of young ladies, reputable or otherwise, to effectuate a cure that, as the retired courtesan laconically put it, she was ‘no longer capable of offering.’

Zephyrin was present for many these interviews, and it wasn’t long before he noticed that the courtesan’s eyes would imperceptibly seek him out whenever a particularly piquant quip was uttered, as if she was trying to gauge his reaction to her words and the exact anatomy of the principles underlying his childish countenance. Doubtless, his unflappability was a source of perplexity to her; it seemed to him that the courtesan’s aim was to puzzle out how he had acquired his knowledge of the ways of the world, a mystery which continued to elude her.

It was during one of these lessons that a disturbing thought came to him, one he could have very well done without, that had he been born female, Mlle. Huron might have set about taking Zephyrin under her wing to groom him—or rather ‘her’, as the case would have been—as the ex-courtesan’s protégé. Had he been born as ‘Zephyrine’, he thought it likely that she would have sought to live vicariously through him, cultivating his talents for—and this was the most nauseating consideration of all—the appreciation of portly middle-aged noblemen and his introduction to high society in four or five years’ time.

Though oppositeness of gender rendered that impossible, Zephyrin suspected that Mlle. Huron might opt for the far removed yet compensatory satisfaction of molding him into the sort of man whom she would have wished to be the conquest of, in order to derive a subtle, tortuously convoluted sort of pleasure from watching him attain his maturity and lay claims on the blooming maidens of the era—a not very pleasant line of thought on which to dwell, and which unnerved him to a much greater degree than the courtesan’s physical repulsiveness.

Aside from these unsettling speculations, it would be a lie to say that the time spent in Mlle. Huron’s company was wholly unpleasant. There was no shortage of similitudes between them, whether it be their humble origins, musical proficiency, facility in conversation, or familiarity with philosophy. Mlle. Huron was not widely read but had absorbed a wealth of literary knowledge from the society she frequented.

After her pedagogical sessions, starting from five in the afternoon Mlle. Huron would welcome a close-knit group of friends, never comprising more than three in number and of which two were regular fixtures in her salon. Decrepit and inoffensive specimens of femininity, frail relics of an era quickly receding from view, they had seen the Glorious Century, when in Rudolf XI’s overwrought imagination had solidified from passing fancy to manic conviction the ill-fated plan of invading Fleuria. The country had been won, then lost, then nearly won and lost again, but what endured in the minds of these ladies rather than the issue of the battles were the interesting characters who had fought them.

From the celibate and lonely marshal who was terribly fond of music and had a band playing in his foyer to cheerfully greet him in the evening—yet who hired not one ensemble of musicians but three, on account of his inability to make up his mind and choose which of his three mansions to return to for supper—to the jealous count who paid a valet to sneak into his wife’s room and lay stiff as a board all night long under her bed to ensure her fidelity in his absence (until, perceiving the potential flaw in this stratagem, he undertook to fulfill that office himself), the ladies were full of recollections about the colorful characters of that bygone epoch, so much so that Zephyrin thought he would soon know more about their era than his own.

He also perceived well enough that the courtesan found it amusing to casually reveal the identities of her friends, which seemed to grow more and more outlandish. One hunchbacked little thing was introduced as ‘The Uncrowned Queen’—the secret wife of Rudolf XI, she had been plucked off the streets by a servant specifically designated to scour the slums for candidates to fill the monarch’s ‘secondary’ apartments.

Instantly smitten by the Cambrian baseblood girl and incapable of being anything but faithful to his impetuous nature, the king had scandalized his court by openly preferring her to his obese Hercynian wife, and was only preserved from further shame by her near demise on the birthing bed at fifteen. The still-birth prematurely ended her career, but the pension for injuries received in the line of duty had been duly doled out, and to this day was maintained by the king’s grandson, inspiring more than one writer to jest that, unlike the noble offspring who all too often grow up to gamble away their fortunes, still-born infants display greater filial devotion by assuring their grateful mothers an unending stream of revenue.

Another close friend of Mlle. Huron was the concubine of that same king, who, the evidently well-fed woman assured Zephyrin with an amiable smile, had at one point possessed more power than anyone in the kingdom. Prizing her shrewd intellect and far-sightedness, Rudolf XI had sought the opinion of his mistress on all of his policy decisions, much to the consternation of his ministers. When one had protested a little too vigorously at this usurpation of his prerogatives, the king had not wasted any time in engineering a scandal, degrading the unhappy minister, and stripping him of lands and title to refashion the plain ’Rita Guéran’ into ’Madame dy Mexthenion’.

After the death of her royal patron she had expected banishment from the court and began making preparations to quietly depart, when the ascendant Rudolf XII forestalled her and simply taken the still-youthful lady as his own mistress, making her in the process the governess of his favorite bastard son, whom he later legitimized, married off to a Princess of the Blood, and ultimately allowed to found a pseudo-royal house, House d’Alarch-Kondatis. Born of an actress renowned more for her innate than practiced charms, Prince Gaius d’Alarch-Kondatis had sparked a bitter and almost fratricidal dispute by presenting himself as a legitimate successor to his father.

When another little gathering had broken up and Zephyrin found himself alone with the courtesan once more, he inquired, “So in the end, Prince Gaius and his children were removed from the line of succession?” He tried to mentally situate the prince in relation to his own family tree, only to fail miserably in the attempt.

“That is correct, mon petit blond,” replied the elderly woman, who had not taken long to assign him an affectionate nickname. “The Parlement of Lutesse convened to foil the rash upstart’s claim at the instigation of His Majesty’s brother. The Count d’Aurellis and House d’Alarch-Kondatis have been bitter rivals ever since... though I am not alone in deeming it a rather one-sided quarrel.”

Zephyrin cogitated in silence. Though there was no denying that his knowledge of the era and the relations between the aristocratic houses was growing by leaps and bounds—perhaps even to an excessive degree—thus far no progress had been made on the enigma of Foudris’s claim that knowledge of which Zephyrin thought himself the sole possessor was actually the common property of other individuals. The trickle of visitors to the courtesan’s abode was constant but so far he had nothing to show for his troubles…

Just then the footman appeared, bearing a silver platter on his gloved hand. “Mademoiselle, a letter for you. The sender is Petronilla d’Alarch-Kondatis.”

For a reason he could not explain to himself, and which went beyond the fact that the name previously discussed had been uttered once more, Zephyrin felt a tingling sensation at the appearance of the innocuous envelope. It was just a letter; just a letter among the dozens that the courtesan received over the course of a week. And yet…

Mlle. Huron accepted the letter with a liver-spotted hand, deigning to read it herself. Before long she shook her head slightly, the yellowed and sagging flesh of her formerly well-defined chin wobbling with the motion. “I have already told her that the days when I would entertain the luminaries of the age are far behind me. When will she understand that I no longer…” The courtesan trailed off, and that should have been the end of the matter.

But it was then that her hazel eyes alighted on Zephyrin. By the gleam that steadily animated them he could identify the exact moment she received the inspiration to ask him, “What say you, petit blond? Should I host one last, grand fête in honor of our good Goddess?”

He perceived at once why she chose to leave the decision to him. Were it up to her, she would decline without thinking twice, being content to live out her remaining days in relative obscurity. Having defined her epoch, what was left to her was the humble portion of quiet retirement. But if, as he believed, his presence had kindled in her a desire to see the one who would leave his mark on the era to come…

“I would very much like to meet more of mademoiselle’s acquaintances, as well as the great figures of the present day.”

No change of expression came over the elderly woman’s wrinkle-lined face at first, but when it did and the faintest hint of a mischievous sparkle flickered in her deep-set, tired eyes, Zephyrin thought that he could imagine how the gargoyle-like visage might have once belonged to a great and graceful beauty.

“Very well, petit blond. Let it be done according to your will.”