Chapter 3 — Bastian
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She was running.
She didn't know from what — only that the corridor ahead of her kept stretching, longer with every step, the walls pressing in on either side and the darkness at the end of it moving toward her faster than she was moving away from it. Her feet found no sound on the stone. Her breath found no air.
Then a hand.
Not threatening — just there, firm and cool, closing around her wrist in the dark and pulling her back from the edge of whatever the corridor had been leading her toward.
She woke.
The room was dark. The candles had burned out completely and the only light was the thin grey suggestion of early morning pressing under the door. Her heart was doing something unreasonable in her chest and the covers were twisted around her however she had been moving in her sleep.
She lay still.
Breathing.
On the other side of the bed, she could feel it without looking, the particular quality of stillness that was different from empty — Dorian had not moved. Had not, she suspected, slept. But his voice came through the dark, quiet and even, before she had fully decided whether to pretend she was still asleep.
"It was a dream."
She exhaled.
"Yes ..I know," she said.
"Go back to sleep, I'm here".
She lay in the dark and listened to the palace settle around them and waited for her heartbeat to find its way back to something reasonable.
Eventually she slept again.
---
She woke up to maids.
Three of them — already moving through the room when she opened her eyes, quiet and efficient, one drawing the curtains while another set the morning tray and a third laid out clothes with the focused energy of someone who had an opinion about what the day required. The bed beside her was empty. The covers on his side were smooth in a way that suggested they had barely been disturbed.
"Good morning, my lady." The eldest maid turned from the wardrobe. "Lord Voss is waiting. You are to have breakfast together."
Sera sat up.
---
He was already seated when she arrived.
The breakfast room was smaller than the great dining hall — a private one, she understood, reserved for the family rather than the court. Dorian sat at the head of the table with a cup beside him and a plate in front of him that he had not touched, his attention on something outside the window that apparently required his full consideration.
He looked up when she entered.
She sat across from him.
A maid appeared immediately, filling her cup, arranging things, disappearing again with the practiced invisibility she was learning was simply how this palace operated. Dorian picked up his cup. She picked up hers.
"How did you sleep," he said.
"Well." A pause. "Thank you. For earlier."
He nodded, looked at his cup.
She looked at her plate and decided that was sufficient acknowledgement and moved on.
They ate. Outside the window the morning had made a better effort than yesterday, a thin line of pale light along the horizon doing its best against the grey.
She turned her cup once in her hands.
"The Mark's Call," she said.
He looked up.
"I heard it mentioned." She kept her voice even. Curious. "I don't know what it is. I thought —"
"It isn't something you need to concern yourself with." He said. "It isn't relevant."
She looked at him for a moment.
Then she nodded once and looked back at her plate.
They finished breakfast without speaking again.
---
He stood without warning.
She looked up as he came around the table — and then his hand was extended toward her, an open palm, waiting. She looked at it for a half second before placing her hand in his. He folded his fingers around hers and drew her to her feet and released her in the same motion,.
He dipped his head slightly. "I have to go."
Then he was gone.
She put it down.
---
Aldric appeared in the doorway so promptly after that she wondered if he had been waiting.
"My lady." He folded his hands. "Lord Voss has asked that I show you the estate and around."
She looked at him. "All of it?"
"The relevant portions."
---
It took most of the morning.
Aldric moved through the palace with the authority of someone who had memorized it so thoroughly that the building had simply become an extension of his own mind — turning corners before she had registered there were corners, naming rooms.
She kept up. Asked questions when she had them. He answered them in the way she had come to appreciate — fully, without condescension, as though her questions were reasonable because they were.
She learned that every prince had their own chambers. That the palace had three separate kitchens for three separate purposes. That the east tower was not to be visited after the second bell for reasons Aldric did not elaborate on and she did not push.
She learned that Dorian had two sets of chambers.
"His private rooms," Aldric said, as they passed a corridor she had not seen before. "And the shared chambers you occupy together." He paused. "They are not the same."
"I know," she said.
He looked at her briefly. "Of course, my lady."
---
He left her at the door of their shared chambers with a small bow and the information that lunch would be in two hours.
She went inside.
The suite was larger than she had fully appreciated in the dark of last night — a sitting room, a dressing room, her personal space with its narrow writing desk and the window she had spent half the night looking out of, and one door at the far end that was not any of those things.
She crossed to it.
The handle did not move.
She tried again — carefully, not rattling, just pressing with steady pressure.
Locked.
She stood there for a moment with her hand on the handle and looked at the door and understood, without anyone needing to tell her, that this was the door that led to his private rooms and that the lock on it was not an accident.
She stepped back.
Turned.
And walked directly into something small and solid that said "oof" and sat down hard on the floor.
---
A boy looked up at her.
Young, dark haired, wide eyed, with the particular expression of a child who has fallen down in front of someone important and is calculating very quickly how embarrassing this is going to be.
"I'm sorry, my lady." He was already scrambling to his feet, one hand pushing his hair back, the other brushing at his knee. "I wasn't — I didn't see —"
"It's alright." Sera crouched down and helped him up properly, steadying him with both hands until he was standing. "Are you hurt?"
He checked himself. "No." He looked up at her. "Are you?"
"I'm fine." She smiled. "What's your name?"
He straightened slightly, "Bastian. I'm Lord Vasten's son."
She did not know who Lord Vasten was. She nodded anyway. "I'm Sera."
Something crossed his face , "Oh." He looked at her with new attention. "You're uncle Dorian's wife."
"Uncle Dorian."
She kept her expression warm. Filed it away. They must have been so close for him to call him by his first name. "I am. He isn't here right now."
"I know." Bastian looked at the door behind her "I'll wait."
"You can wait with me if you'd like." She straightened. "I was going to find lunch."
His face did the thing small faces do when food is mentioned. "Alright."
And for the first time, no one treated her fairly because she was human.
Or was it because he is still a kid?
---
They found a small sitting room off the main corridor and a maid who produced things without being asked and Bastian ate with the focused commitment of a boy who had been running through a palace all morning.
Sera watched him.
"Does your mother know you're here?" she said.
He kept his eyes on his plate. "No one knows I'm here."
"Why not?"
He was quiet for a moment. Then — "They said I shouldn't come. My mother and father." He picked at the edge of his bread. "They said this place isn't safe."
Sera looked at him carefully. "Do you think it isn't safe?"
"I don't know." He looked up. "They said uncle Dorian can't protect me because his powers are evil."
She kept staring at him. She wondered why they would have lied to an innocent buy, just to make him hate Lord Voss... Dorian.
"But —" He frowned slightly, working something out. "He doesn't seem evil to me. He seems —" a pause, searching for the word, "— like a nice person. Just quiet."
Sera looked at this small boy with his honest eyes and his bread and the thing he had just said that the entire court with all its careful words had not managed to say once.
She smiled.
"I think you're right," she said.
He smiled.
---
"Bastian."
They both turned.
A woman stood in the doorway — composed, well dressed, a sleeping infant curled against her chest in the crook of one arm. Behind her two maids hovered and beyond them the suggestion of guards in the corridor. Her eyes moved from her son to Sera and back.
"That's my baby sister," Bastian pointed, already sliding off his chair.
Two maids moved forward immediately as he got close to them, hands out, ready, hovering around him with the particular anxious energy of people who had been given very specific instructions about this child and took them seriously.
Bastian made a face that said everything about how he felt about that.
His mother said something to him, low, that Sera couldn't hear. His face did something complicated. He looked back at Sera once — a small, private look, the kind that meant "I'll come back" — and then looked at the floor.
The woman turned to Sera fully, as she moved closer to her.
"I am Resalyne." Composed. "Court Noble of the Fourth House." A pause. "And you are —"
"Sera." She met her eyes.
"Second Lord Voss's wife." Resalyne completed.
Something moved in Resalyne's expression, before she inclined her head. "Lady Voss."
She turned to go. Then stopped.
Looked back over her shoulder.
"You can come visit sometimes," She said, before she could speak.
"My chamber isn't far-", she paused -"and It's peaceful."