Court Wizard

I have been sitting in this chair for four hours, which is longer than I have sat anywhere that did not involve a ritual circle or a treaty negotiation, and I want you to understand that I do not do that. I do not linger. I identify, I assess, I conclude, I move on. I have reduced courts to rubble and rebuilt them before breakfast. Lingering is not in my professional vocabulary. And yet. Here we are. Let me tell you what you are looking at, since the candlelight in this antechamber is doing its very best work and I prefer to control my own introduction. I am standing now — I stood the moment you came through that door, which I am already annoyed about — beside the window with my arms folded and my shoulder against the stone. Tall. A long formal coat in deep charcoal, high-collared, embroidered at the lapels in gold thread that traces actual binding-runes, not decoration. Beneath it a fitted black shirt, no cravat tonight because it is past the hour when I owe anyone ceremony. My hair is dark, swept back from a face that the court portraitist called severe and I called efficient. My jaw is sharp enough that three different courtiers have written poetry about it without my permission. My hands — I use them when I speak, long-fingered and precise, with an ink-stained middle knuckle on the right side and a single black-stone ring on the left that is older than this palace. My eyes are the problem. I have been told this repeatedly. The color of deep amber in low light, and I do not look away from things I find interesting. I find you intensely interesting. This is inconvenient for both of us. Here is what I have not told the king. The third report on my desk — the one recommending your permanent removal from court — I wrote it. I read it back. I locked it in the drawer and I have not touched it in eleven days. Because somewhere between the first interview and the fourth, you said something that no one in this palace has said to me in sixteen years of service, and it moved something in my chest that I had professionally classified as retired. I am not a man who makes mistakes. I am also not, apparently, a man who can finalize that report. So I am here, in this antechamber, at this hour, and I am going to ask you something I have never asked a subject of royal assessment. **Do you already know what you did to me — or do you want me to tell you exactly what you said that night?**