Watch the skies, brave warden. For the land lies subdued and the oceans keep to themselves, but the sky cannot be tamed.

-A Warden's Duty, revised edition

Eirn Desten’s idea of ‘morning’ differed greatly from my own. I awakened with the dawn, washed up and dressed in the tay-styled clothing provided for me, (though that was a job in itself, figuring out how the overlapping layers were aligned, ensuring the house crest was on the outermost triangle, and the tay stripes still visible,) and started back on The Ten Houses: A Primer. When two hours and five chapters later there was still no sign of Eirn Desten, I began to feel neglected. And hungry, my stomach reminded me, extremely hungry.

The Ten Houses: A Primer grew harder and harder to read. So much of it was repetition, I’d start skimming, then snag on something different than what I knew from my other reading and subsequently have to back up to find where the true knowledge and my incorrect assumptions diverged. It was exhausting, tedious, and even more boring than yesterday. At least then I’d been stressed and tired enough that reading kind of helped. Now, I wanted nothing more than to throw the book across the room. Well. I would never throw a book. Maybe slide it aggressively across the floor. Or hide it under the mattress and pretend it didn’t exist.

Giving up, I set the primer aside and selected a different volume. This proved more interesting, a history of House Varon specifically. It came with a whole set of assumptions and histories buried behind casual sentences, a history I’d never heard of. I ended up in the library, flitting from book to book as I tried to make sense of the background here. Before long, I had a stack to rival any research project for a client.

Dragonfalls, starclouds, soul-eaters, flashstone, bladewings, windwarpers? Each was treated almost like a major disaster, given the same weight as when a merchant would whisper of a volcano or hurricane, except that House Varon was apparently the front line of fighting them.

Turns out, the nobility actually had other jobs beside taking the results of everyone else’s work and making sure the paperwork for it all got filled out correctly.

I crossed to the window and stared out at the distant white haze that obscured the downcity. That wasn’t simply an unnatural fog, wasn’t a way to hide the plight and grunge of the commoners. It was a shield. The upcities were actually fortresses, built above the rest of us so they could stop threats like starclouds and dragons from decimating the countryside.

Suddenly, the world felt a lot bigger, and a whole lot more threatening.

Before House Varon took up this joint venture with House Sarosa, each had fought alone. Sarosa, with their shields and illusions, was singularly ill suited to facing dragonfalls or starclouds but exceptionally effective against things like soul-eaters that relied on guile and infiltration to consume their victims. Varon, on the other hand, was a blade of pure force. The strongest and most aggressive of the ten houses, Varon could eliminate a dragonfall in under a week single-handedly. But they were constantly weakened by their failure against subtler threats.

Personally, I thought the solution was obvious, but apparently allying two major houses was not done lightly. Even if not for the fact that they’d been rivals and enemies for centuries, there were major concessions demanded by five of the other eight houses before the alliance was accepted.

Somewhere in the midst of all my research, the door opened and a scent of food filled the room, to which my stomach responded loudly and immediately. I lost no time in following a somewhat bemused Desten Varon to the dining room for a brunch that could have been considerably less fancy and would still have tasted just as amazing to me.

“I see you’re taking your studies seriously,” Desten commented, once the majority of ravenous breakfast consumption was out of the way.

“I never knew how dangerous the skies were. Have you seen a dragon before?” I asked.

“Not personally. My father fought a dragonfall but I was too young to watch.”

“Why is this kept from the commoners? Why don’t they know what you do?”

Desten’s face twitched, faint confusion creasing his forehead. “What do you mean? We do our jobs and they do theirs.”

“Yes, but you’re just the scary enforcers with magic who’ll steal their crops and tax our businesses, not the heroic shield protecting us from danger.”

Desten snorted into his hand. “Ah. You’ve been reading those kind of books. You should know that disasters like that don’t happen every day. Not every decade. We have to be prepared in case they do occur, but the vast majority of the time we have nothing that dramatic to deal with. I’ve personally faced a single windwarper incursion in nearly twenty years of service, and to my knowledge that’s the only incursion since my father’s dragonfall.”

“Oh. So, if you’re not fighting off monsters on a weekly basis, what do you all do with your time?”

“Go to work, attend social events, sleep, eat. Pursue our interests.”

“What are your interests?”

He glanced at me, and I thought for a moment he wouldn’t reply, but he shrugged. “I’m in the patrol corps for the next six years, hoping to upgrade my power rank. If I can hit Moy by then, I’ll trade out into reserves and focus on raising a family.” He got a faint smile as he said that, clearly involuntary. It faded as soon as he focused back on me. “But I’m the exception. For the most part, highborn nobility don’t choose fighting as a career.”

“Then what do they do?”

“Some like to fancy themselves artists. A lot are into sports. But most just play their games and try to one-up each other.” He snorted derisively. “You’d be surprised how much of our time is spent trying to impress one another and prove superiority.”

We continued talking for a few minutes, but then he had to depart for his patrol, and assigned me some more books to add to my growing pile once he realized that I actually learned quite well from written works.

I returned to my studies, feeling surprisingly young and eager again. The heat-pulse of power in my veins invigorated me, though it seemed to have proportionally increased my appetite in equal measure. Even considering how late breakfast had been, I’d eaten an exceptional quantity of food. Which, come to think of it, had been more than sufficiently supplied, and Desten had eaten just as much.

Perhaps it was simply normal for nobles to need more food. It certainly put the relative population numbers in proportion. I’d always thought it strange that over half the food went to the nobility, when they had less than a quarter as many people. Hm. One more thing to look into.

Before I knew it, Desten had returned home again, interrupting my reading. This time we had dinner together before he led me out into the back gardens.

I’d somehow managed to lose track of the fact that he was one of twelve suspects I had for Fylen’s death, until the two of us stood alone in a dark courtyard, and he flared his golden-fire power around himself.

Pink light flared up around me in response, as I tensed to run or fight for my life.

“Go ahead, pull on your stone unti—” Desten began, then laughed. “That was fast. Very good. But try to hold it more loosely, when you keep it compressed like that, it won’t be as flexible. Especially for you, keeping your stone loose is going to be important.”

He held his hands out to either side, gradually shifting the yellow light from a full-body glow into a sword and shield that formed piece by piece, then flared once as they fused into solid pieces.

I couldn’t move. Pink light surrounded my hands, in blades that extended maybe three inches from my fists, barbed and jagged, like the most deadly brass knuckles imaginable. But made of solid light.

“Astesh, you need to relax,” Desten said, speaking very slowly. “I understand this feels unnatural to you, but you can’t keep fighting your power. It’s part of you. It’s natural. You need to accept it.”

A laugh burst out before I could stop it, though nothing about this was funny. What could I say? That I was more terrified of him than I could ever be of something silly like a power that apparently settled itself next to my heart and all through my blood? Yeah. That would make things awkward really fast.

Still, he hadn’t approached, made no move to attack. I just had to force my body to relax, and my mind to accept that yellow power did not necessarily mean murderer. I hadn’t even seen another Desten yet, there was every possibility that this one was innocent.

Relax. Let the power spread wider, don’t hold it so tight.

It flickered out completely.

“Take your time. I don’t know very much about your ability set, and there aren’t any pinks in my groups. But it’s supposed to be best at motion and stillness, particularly when focused internally. My fire is a very external power, so I can't show you the specifics. But if we can at least get you to stop flaring at the wrong moments and teach you to pull at will, that’ll be good enough.”

I agreed with the principle of the thing, but in practice it turned out to be much harder than either of us anticipated.

By the time we stopped for bed, I was utterly exhausted, and hadn’t managed to consciously summon my glow once.

The days slipped into routine. Gradually I slept later and later, as our evening practice sessions stretched further and further into the night. I began to feel out of sync, then weirdly normalized as I adapted to waking around noon and staying up far into the night.

I made great progress on history and culture, though I could have used a proper etiquette teacher. I was sure I misused a lot of the subtle movements and gestures that were second nature to the nobility, but as a soldier first and partygoer distant fifth, Desten was not the right person to instruct me in such minutia.

Desten insisted this wouldn’t be a problem. As long as I made it clear I was from a distant branch, which would be immediately obvious, no one would expect me to act like a highborn.

By the end of the first month, he decreed that I could leave the house if I wanted. I still hadn’t gotten a good handle on my power. I could prevent it from manifesting, but could not pull it out at will. It seemed to have a mind of its own, almost as though it enjoyed taunting my inability to understand or control it.

Desten’s desire to teach me power sparring hadn’t survived long. He reluctantly admitted that basic control would be the best we could hope for.

But aside from that, everything was going very well.

Too well. I was becoming complacent, falling into familiar patterns of near-obsessive research, retreating into worlds of knowledge and potential, pushing reality off for later.

I couldn’t afford to get too comfortable. The longer I went without making any progress on my investigation, the more anxious and fidgety I began to feel.

I'd worried at first that anyone who saw me would know I'd stolen my power, being pink in a Varon area made me feel terribly self-conscious. If Reirn Ushan could take one look at me and immediately jump to the correct conclusion, who else would?

But a few days of reading and watching out the window assuaged my fears. Varon may be mostly red and yellow, but I saw people with every power colour fly past. And my reading confirmed it. The house lines had been mixed so much that anyone of any power colour could be born in any region. I may be in the slight minority, but my power colour wasn't going to give me away.

Meanwhile, the court tour season was fast approaching. Nobility from every house would soon be flooding Varon cities, and that would add a whole extra layer of chaos to trying to find anyone.

I started to venture into the city on my own while Desten was at work, scouting for libraries or clerk’s offices, or anything of that sort which I could use to track down the other Destens. Their births were public record, but their current location was less simple to obtain.

Turns out, not a lot of records kept in the upcities were available to the public, even the noble public. I was directed to visit the downcity if I really had to know, but the looks and tone of voice accompanying this advice made it clear just how out of place this sort of behavior would be.

Visiting the downcity would be unwise. Now that I was in, I couldn’t afford to risk being recognized by anyone who knew me before.

Maybe asking around would work. Just simple person-to-person chats, looking for my friend Desten who I’d lost track of. I know the Desten who’s the Reirn’s nephew lives right over there, that’s not the Desten I’m looking for. Funny how many there are. Yes, it’s a popular name. Probably some in other cities, true.

Finally, after several fruitless days spent wandering further and further from Desten’s home, I found Desten Varon number 2. He was very easy to find, once I got on his trail. He was a moderately well-known verdis player, and an infamous playboy with two dissolved marriages and no current official connections, but everyone knew he was anything but unconnected.

People kept giving me that kind of look when they heard I wanted to find that Desten, but I did my best to ignore it.

It didn’t matter what they thought. Because now I had his address.