Riven could recite the palace's pulse by the shadows it cast.
Even at this hour, when the east-facing study was agleam with columned sunlight and the scent of paper-dust, the rhythm downstairs never faltered.
There, the muted wheeze of silver-servants hauling breakfast trolleys up the marble spiral. Beyond the arco-glass, the coppery klang from the dueling terrace as the twins, altered, but still hopeless, rehearsed their morning drills.
Closer: the faintest hum, not a sound but a pressure, as the Aether conduit beneath the floor modulated from its night-dull blue to the golden-white of prime morning flow.
After two years, Riven could measure time by the way the current layered itself: velvet and languid in the predawn, faintly lemon-bright at six, white-hot and razor-sharp by noon. It pleased him. It made existence mathematical.
There was a system to everything, if you shed the sentimental varnish.
He set down his stylus, gaze skipping the uneaten fruit cubes beside the inkwell. Today's lesson, revision of the Aetherion, the "ordered memory of the world", was no challenge. Even before breakfast, he'd mapped the movements of the imperial staff on his wax tablet.
Cook entered at 05:43; Lady Harrea trailed perfume at 06:11; the Emperor's youngest, Lis, always attempted a pre-lesson peek and inevitably tripped the alarm glyph at 06:18. The new steward, Quin, had arrived precisely on schedule, but Riven marked him as a variable, the man's shoes squeaked.
'Unacceptable in this environment,' Riven thought, and made a note.
The tutors called him "precocious," never to his face. The palace guards, when they thought him out of earshot, called him "the little dead-eyed accountant."
Riven disliked both titles. He preferred the geometry of precise relationships: Master and novice, truth and untruth, information and entropy. Names, like the syrupy nicknames the twins tried to conjure, Riv, Rivulet, Missive, were distractions.
The corridor outside vibrated with the neutral footfalls of Magister Corren, not the old, stoop-shouldered Latinist, but the new appointment, a man shaped by a lifetime of standing straight in cold drafty rooms. Riven measured his arrival by the way the handle twisted, never rattled, always turned to true.
"Your Highness," the Magister said, voice clean as frost, "today we are concerned with the economics of the world." He wore the same mid-grey robes as yesterday, but the neck clasp was rotated seven degrees off-center.
Riven checked it twice. Neither error nor test. Only very human asymmetry.
Corren swept into the room with a military economy that did not quite match his bookish hands. He rolled out a parchment map, weighting the corners with sticks of pale blue Lumes. The map was a masterwork: the five great continents limned in pearlescent ink. Over them, a lattice of thin gold lines, the Grand Conduit Network, wove like the neurons of a particularly ordered brain.
"Walk me through the configuration," Corren said.
Riven did, though he didn't need to look down at the map to recall it. "Elyndra, the seat of the Old Empire, central to all trade. Mournspire Range to the north, rich in raw Etherium, but resource-cursed, so they sell to the Consortium. The Free League of Almaris controls the mid-continent routes. Caelmare is a polyarchy, but they bend to whoever subsidizes their deep ports."
"Your voice is flat, Prince. You find it dull?"
"I find it… inevitable." That earned a privilege, a twitch of Corren's mouth. Riven pressed. "Trade follows the line of least resistance. Even the way the palace drains into the river, it's all the same shape. Faster, always, to go where the gradient's steeper."
Corren's hands hovered above the Lumes, skeletal and quick. "You're correct, in the technical sense. But you will learn that in the world of men, efficiency is the least of available virtues." He indicated a cluster of inlaid runes on the Mournspire peninsula. "Remind me: why does the Dominion of Dareyn refuse to pump their Aether channels through Elyndra's central banks?"
Riven recited: "Religious injunction. The Lex Priests say that only the Sleeper can judge the purity of transmuted Aether. They uphold this by burning every shipment that fails ritual inspection."
Corren smiled, really smiled, bright but thin, the expression of one who had once been a boy like Riven and remembered it with a sort of contemptuous fondness. "You left out the real reason. Control. If the Old Empire can't measure what's inside the shipment, they can't tax it. Faith is just the name we give to an especially stubborn accounting error."
'That's almost elegant,' Riven decided. He liked Corren, at least within the boundaries of the lesson, the Magister did not flinch at the reduction of ritual to arithmetic.
"The world runs on hidden variables." Corren traced the gold line from Elyndra to the southern archipelagos, then tapped the Lumes as if conducting a tiny orchestra. "Here's another: the Aether itself. What is its nature, according to the Imperial Edict?"
Riven did not hesitate. "Aether is the Breath of the First Principle, an energy that bends to the will of those who wield it. It can be measured, but never hoarded or corrupted without consequence."
"And your opinion?"
Riven looked at the board, then the map, then the glass globes on the sill, all oriented so the morning light could shatter across their meridians. "It's a currency, like any other. The rest is mythology." He punctuated it with a glance, careful not to widen his eyes, just a fractional tilt of the chin. "But I am told that's a heresy."
Corren let the word hang, then: "Good. You've learned the lesson. Never mistake the catalog for the thing itself, or the faith for the mechanism."
He moved to the window. Outside the walls, the city of Caelmare unspooled toward the horizon, seven terraces, each level more brilliant, more distant, more improbable in its symmetry. Everything in the palace mimicked that same logic: the maps, the Aether flow-conduits, even the way the staff scheduled their shifts. For an empire that prized "divine order," it was desperately reliant on the mortal version.
"Your Highness." Corren's reflection joined Riven's in the window: two pale blurs, one smudged by age, the other by youth and what the Nurse called "incipient mischief." "Do you consider yourself a living piece of this system, or are you merely its observer?"
Riven considered, then shrugged, just enough.
"In my experience," he answered, "observers always change the outcome."
He let his gaze linger on the rivers of light threading the capital. Two years had not made him content; they'd only honed the interior calculus. Curiosity tamed is simply curiosity transformed.
He was not a variable in the system. He would be the lever.