Preston Avaritia had been a poor man's son who became, by the age of twenty-five, the richest man in three provinces, and the story he told about how he'd done it — patience, cleverness, the specific discipline of a man who understood the true value of things others overlooked — was not, strictly, a lie. It simply left out the part where the true value of things others overlooked included the things those others hadn't yet realized they wanted.
That had always been Preston's gift, long before the demon queen gave him a truer version of it. He looked at a person and saw, underneath whatever they said they wanted, the thing they actually wanted — the merchant who claimed he only cared about the harvest price but who, underneath it, wanted his father's old rival to watch him succeed; the widow who insisted she only needed enough to survive the winter but who, underneath it, wanted someone to finally tell her the survival had been worth the cost. Preston saw these things the way other men saw the weather, plainly, obviously, and he had spent twenty-five years learning to sell people exactly what they actually wanted while letting them believe they were buying what they'd asked for.
It made him extraordinarily good at negotiation. It also, over time, made him something worse than good at it — a man who had stopped being able to look at anyone, including himself, without immediately calculating what they secretly wanted and how much that secret want could be made to cost them.
He had a wife, in those years. Marguerite. He remembered her — the tube gave that back to him clearly, more clearly than it gave back almost anything else — with an ache that three hundred years had not managed to fully blunt, because Marguerite had been the one person whose true want he had never been able to read.
"You look at me like I'm a ledger," she told him once, early in their marriage, not unkindly, simply stating what she'd observed the way she stated most things. "Like there's a column somewhere with my real price written in it, and you're waiting for me to reveal it."
"Everyone has a real price," Preston said.
"Then you'll be waiting a long time for mine," Marguerite said, "because I don't think I have one. I think I just want to be married to a man who isn't always doing arithmetic behind his eyes."
He had tried, for a while, to stop. It had not worked. The seeing was not a habit he had built and could unbuild — it was closer to the way some men were born able to hear a wrong note in a room full of music, an involuntary perception that arrived whether he wanted it to or not, and after enough years of trying and failing to turn it off, Marguerite had stopped asking him to.
She had not left him. That was the part Preston returned to most, in the tube's long stillness — she had simply grown quieter, over the years, the way a house grows quieter when one of the people living in it has stopped expecting to be heard, and by the time the demon queen found him, Marguerite had been dead two years of a fever that had moved through their province indiscriminately, taking rich and poor alike, immune to every ledger Preston had ever kept.
He had been, at the time the demon queen found him, the richest and loneliest man in three provinces.
~
"You already have the gift I would have given you," the demon queen told him, sitting across from him in the study where he conducted most of his business, having simply appeared there one evening the way she appeared everywhere, unannounced and unstoppable. "I could only make it truer. Sharper. I could give you the ability to show a person what they want instead of merely seeing it — to put the image directly in front of their eyes, so real they can't tell it from the thing itself."
"To what end."
"To whatever end you like," the demon queen said. "Though I suspect, Preston, that a man who spent twenty-five years reading what other people secretly wanted might finally be interested in being shown what he wants himself. You've never once let yourself look, have you? Not honestly. You've spent your whole life calculating other people's ledgers and never once opened your own."
Preston had said nothing to that, which the demon queen seemed to understand was its own kind of answer.
He took the gift. He told himself, in the moment of taking it, that it was for the power — three provinces was a small stage, and a man with the demon queen's backing could have a much larger one — but he understood, even then, underneath the calculation, that some part of him had taken it because for one instant, sitting across from a woman who had seen through him more completely than he had ever managed to see through anyone else, he had wanted to know what image his own hidden want would show him, if only someone would finally hold up the mirror.
He never found out. The gift showed him everyone else's wanting, vivid and total, images so real his enemies would walk toward them with their arms already open, straight into whatever trap the wanting had been used to build. It never once showed him his own. He came to understand, over three hundred years of putting other people's deepest wants directly in front of their eyes and watching them destroy themselves reaching for it, that perhaps this was the actual price the demon queen had never mentioned — that a man who spent his gift showing everyone else the truth of themselves would never again be permitted to see the truth of his own.
~
The tube's liquid began to move.
Preston opened his eyes into gold light and the demon queen's face above him, unchanged, patient, exactly as he remembered her from the study three hundred years gone.
"Fifth of mine," she said. "Wake up. I have a use for a man who can show the world exactly what it's always wanted."
"And what is that," Preston said, his voice rough with disuse.
The demon queen smiled the way she always smiled, kindly and without a trace of kindness in it.
"You'll show them," she said. "That's rather the point of you, isn't it. You've never once had to be told."