Five years is long enough to turn a vegetable basket into a half-forgotten story servants told new staff over supper, and long enough to turn the boy who'd once slept in one into something Manachy had started, quietly and without quite meaning to, calling the Queen's other child.
It was also, as it turned out, exactly long enough for Sabrina to become insufferable about it.
"Third circle," she announced for what Ragna was fairly sure was the fourth time that week, draping herself across the windowsill of the tower library with the specific theatrical exhaustion of someone who had absolutely not earned the right to be tired yet. "Do you know how many thirteen-year-olds in Manachy are third circle, Ragna?"
"You've told me. Several times. It's one."
"It's one." She said it again anyway, because apparently the number improved with repetition. "Old Maro's granddaughter is twelve and she's barely scraped second circle, and her tutor charges triple what mine does. People stop me in the market now. Actual grown adults. Stop. And talk to me. Like I'm someone worth stopping for."
"You are someone worth stopping for," Ragna said, not looking up from the scroll he was very deliberately failing to read. "You're loud enough to hear from the next street over. I imagine stopping is mostly self-defense.Not what I expected from a princess."
Sabrina threw a cushion at his head. He let it hit him, because dodging would have required looking up, and looking up would have required acknowledging that she'd successfully baited him into a conversation, which was a victory he wasn't prepared to hand her twice in one afternoon.
It would have been easy, watching the two of them like this, to assume Sabrina was the prodigy of the household and Ragna was simply the foundling boy who'd been lucky enough to be raised in a magic tower instead of a gutter. The town certainly assumed it. Sabrina's name got said in the market with a particular bright, proud lilt — the Lady Sabrina, third circle already, can you imagine — while Ragna's, when it came up at all, got said quieter, with the careful, slightly uncertain warmth people reserve for things they've decided to be fond of without entirely understanding.
Which was, by Lady Sentel's very deliberate design, exactly backward from the truth.
"Five circles," she'd told him privately, just the two of them in the tower's upper study, on the evening his fourth had quietly become his fifth without much fanfare beyond a candle he'd accidentally turned into a small, embarrassed bonfire. "Do you understand what that means, at ten years old?"
"That I'm better at magic than Sabrina," Ragna had said, with the blunt, faintly hopeful honesty of a child checking whether a fact he suspected was also a fact he was allowed to say out loud.
"It means," Sentel had corrected, not unkindly, "that you are going to keep this to yourself."
"That doesn't seem fair to me."
"Fairness," she'd said, "is for children with the luxury of not being watched by two kingdoms that are both still arguing about which one of them you belong to. Sabrina is seen, Ragna. Praised in markets, fussed over by elders, written about in letters her cousins send asking whether the rumors are true. That visibility is a kind of armor for her — and it's one you don't have, and won't, until you're old enough to wear it without it getting you killed instead." She'd held his gaze, steady. "Let her have the praise. It costs you nothing real, and it costs her — and you — a great deal less than the alternative."
He hadn't fully understood it then. He understood it a little better now, sitting in the library while Sabrina catalogued her own genius for the fourth time that week, that the quiet, unannounced fact of five circles sat in his chest like a stone he wasn't allowed to show anyone, and that some part of him — small, mean, easy to feel guilty about — resented that more than he let on.
He didn't say any of that. He threw the cushion back instead, slightly harder than necessary, and let her shriek about it be the end of the conversation.
That evening, Lady Sentel gathered them both in the study with the look of a woman about to assign homework neither of them had asked for, which was, in fact, precisely what was happening.
"Today we talk about Wills," she said, settling into her chair with the worn, familiar patience of someone who had given this exact lecture to exactly one other student, decades ago, under circumstances she did not elaborate on. "Not spells. Not circles. Wills. Pay attention, both of you, because this is the part every overconfident young mage skips and every overconfident dead mage skipped first."
Sabrina, to her credit, sat up properly. Ragna set his scroll down without being asked, which Sentel noted with the small private satisfaction of a tutor who'd long since learned which of her two students required threats and which simply required the implication of one.
"There are four Wills that matter to anyone who fights — mage or swordsman, doesn't matter," Sentel began. "The Will of Fire. The Will of Wind. The Will of Water. The Will of Lightning. Every soldier who's ever survived long enough to grow old has bent toward one of them, whether they knew the word for it or not. Circles tell you how much power a mage can hold. A Will tells you what that power agrees to become in your hands. You can be ten circles strong and still die to a third-circle mage who understands his Will and you don't. I've seen it happen. It is not a pleasant way to learn the lesson."
"Which one do you have?" Sabrina asked.
"Wind, primarily. Manachy's always leaned that direction — it's why half this region's mages can clear a battlefield's worth of arrows out of the air before they'd even consider learning to throw fire of their own. It's a defensible Will. A patient one." Sentel's gaze slid, deliberately, to Ragna. "You don't have that luxury, I'm afraid. You lean toward Fire so hard it's practically rude to the other three."
"Is that bad?"
"It's honest," Sentel said. "Fire doesn't wait politely for a battlefield to develop. It commits. That'll serve you well someday and get you in trouble every day before that someday arrives, in roughly equal measure." She turned to Sabrina. "You, on the other hand, are doing something I don't see often — Fire and Wind both, evenly enough that neither one's decided to win yet. That's either going to make you remarkably flexible in a fight, or remarkably indecisive at the worst possible moment. We'll find out which over the next several years, presumably the hard way, as is tradition."
Sabrina beamed at the first half of that sentence and chose, wisely, to ignore the second.
***
It was on the walk back from the study, dusk settling thin and gold over the manor grounds, that Ragna stopped.
Past the tower's east wall, on the open training yard Sabrina liked to claim she found "beneath her" and absolutely did not, eight or nine boys roughly his own age were running drills under the bored, watchful eyes of two sword instructors — wooden practice blades, footwork patterns, the rhythmic clack-clack-clack of training that had clearly been going on for years without him noticing it was there.
He stood and watched longer than was strictly polite.
"You're staring," Sabrina said, nudging him.
"They've got swords."
"They've got sticks, Ragna, it's a training yard, nobody's handing ten-year-olds actual—"
"I know what it is." He was quiet for a moment, watching one boy get swept off his feet by an instructor twice his size and bounce back up grinning anyway, like the fall had been worth something. "I want to learn that."
"You're a five circle mage," Sabrina said, lowering her voice on the number out of months of careful habit, "who's going to be a Watcher-trained archmage in a few years. Why would you need a stick?"
Ragna didn't have a clever answer ready, which was unusual for him, so he gave her the honest one instead.
"Because magic runs out. Or gets countered, or sealed, or you're tired, or someone's faster than your spell. I don't know. I just keep thinking — what happens the one time it isn't enough?" He shrugged, suddenly a little self-conscious about saying it out loud. "You can never be too sure that magic alone can protect you."
Sabrina, despite herself, didn't have a comeback for that one either.
He asked Lady Sentel that same night, catching her before she retired, the question arriving in the same blunt, unhesitating way most of Ragna's important questions tended to.
"I want to learn the sword."
Sentel set down the letter she'd been reading and studied him for a long moment — the kind of look that weighed a request not for what it asked, but for what had clearly been sitting underneath it for longer than the asking had taken.
"And here I thought I'd raised a mage," she said, "not a soldier."
"I can be both."
"That," Sentel said, with the faint, tired fondness of a woman who recognized stubbornness because she'd been accused of it herself more than once, "is precisely what I'm afraid of." She was quiet for a moment, turning the letter over in her hands without reading it. "Give me your reason. The real one, not the practical-sounding one you gave Sabrina in the yard — yes, she told me, she tells me everything within the hour, you'd think she was on my payroll."
Ragna considered lying. He decided, on balance, that it wasn't worth the effort it would take to make the lie convincing.
"I don't ever want to be standing somewhere, with someone I care about behind me, and find out the only thing I know how to do is cast a spell that's already run out."
Sentel looked at him for a long moment, and something in her expression — old grief, maybe, or the particular ache of recognizing a sentence she might have said herself once, about a man with the same eyes — softened just slightly at the edges.
"Tomorrow," she said finally. "Talk to Instructor Hale at the yard. Tell him I sent you. And Ragna—" she added, as he turned to go, already half-grinning in a way he was clearly trying not to show her, "—five circles or not, you will start exactly where every other boy on that field starts. Flat on your back, most likely, within the first hour."
"I can live with that."
"We'll see," Sentel said, and went back to her letter, though she did not, for some time afterward, actually read another word of it.