Nyxara
Courts hire the curious.
Nyxara learned that early, in rooms with painted ceilings and floors polished so bright you could read a man’s face in them while he thought you were admiring his shoes. Every court had the same problem. Too many secrets, and nobody who could be trusted to keep them.
She could. That was the first thing she was good at.
The second was light.
Not making it. Anyone with a candle could make light. Nyxara bent it. A little angle here, a little lean there, and a lamp would throw your shadow where you weren’t. A mirror would show the room a heartbeat late. A guard would look straight at her and see the tapestry behind her instead, and feel faintly that he ought to be somewhere else.
Transposition, the old books called it. The courts called it very useful, and paid accordingly.
They called her Nyx when they wanted something. Which was always.
“Nyx, darling. The duke’s letters. The ones he burns.”
“Burned letters are the easiest kind,” she said.“Everyone stops guarding the ashes.”
She collected secrets no one else could keep. She kept them beautifully. Some of them she even sold.
The talent, of course, was not hers. Not entirely.
People who could read such things — and there were a few, in the better courts, men with rings on every finger and nothing behind the eyes — would look at her across a banquet hall and go quiet. Bound, they’d whisper later. Drawing from something old. Something that made a bargain before she was born.
Nyxara let them whisper. She had read the terms. She knew exactly who she was drawing from, which was more than most of them could say about their wives.
She did not talk about him. Not to lovers, not to employers, not to the mirror. Some names are like coins: the more hands they pass through, the less they’re worth, and one day someone bites down and finds out what they’re really made of.
There was a clause about hands. She had decided, years ago, not to think about it until she had to.
The price hadn’t come due.
It would. She had made her peace with that the way you make peace with winter: by buying better clothes.
And she did buy better clothes. Silk and layered velvet and sleeves cut for ballrooms rather than roads. Impractical, everyone said. Nyxara found that people told the truth more readily to someone who looked like she couldn’t run.
She kept two coins on her. The first was plain black, heavy for its size, and she walked it across her knuckles when she was thinking. It never went into a purse and never went into a till. It was not for spending. It was for balancing things on.
The second was small and silvered on one face like a mirror. Most of the time it only showed her own violet eyes, looking back with that particular expression of a woman who already knew the answer.
Some nights it frosted over.
From the inside.
When that happened, Nyxara put down whatever she was holding — a glass, a letter, occasionally a man — and went somewhere private, and stayed there until it cleared.
She came back from those nights with her smile exactly where she’d left it. Nobody ever noticed. That was, after all, the whole trick.
The frost came more often, this last year.
Restless, she thought, turning the coin under a lamp. Patrons grow restless when old covenants stir.
So she did what she always did. She went looking for the secret everyone else had stopped guarding.
It took her into archives no one had opened in decades, and a few that had been sealed for good reason. Dust and wax and the faint mint of old vellum. She read in the dark, which was easy; she simply leaned the light where she needed it.
In the margin of a crumbling commentary on something much older, a scholar had copied out a children’s rhyme and underlined the first line twice.
Nine the arts and nine the lights.
She knew it. Every village child knew it; they skipped to it. She read it three times anyway. Then she laughed, alone in the archive, because it was so tidy.
Nine arts. Nine lights. Somebody had built something out of nines, a very long time ago, and wanted it remembered, and then everybody had politely forgotten — everybody except the children, who had no idea what they were singing. She liked it at once. Such pretty math.
She started following the sums.
Rumours of burned villages. A dragon that searched instead of feeding. Then, one night, the frost on the mirror-coin so thick it crazed the silver — and afterwards, on the far edge of her senses, a new heat in the world. Small. Bright. Moving east toward the mountains, the way a spark moves up a fuse.
She was already travelling by morning.
The Emberpeaks were not built for velvet. Nyxara went anyway, and arrived looking like she had been carried the whole way in a litter, because a woman in her line of work cannot afford to be seen being inconvenienced.
She did not chase the heat. You never chase. You work out where it has to go, and you get there first.
The trail climbed toward a narrow ledge between two wind-carved pillars — the only way up, a choke point any sensible party would have to walk single file. Nyxara studied it for a long moment. The angle of the sun. The way the stone caught it.
She moved half a step to the left, where the light fell best, and leaned.
The coin went back into her sleeve. The smile went on.
Below, footsteps. Six sets, if she counted right. A dwarf fumbling with something that ticked. A paladin’s heavy stride. Someone humming. Someone so quiet she almost missed him — and then did not miss him at all, and filed that away for later.
And one who walked warm, the heat coming off him even through the thin mountain air.
She had been tracking it all morning. She had her first line ready.
She always did.
Enters the story in Chapter 4, Act II — between two wind-carved pillars.