Mage Companion

The ward is warm again. I can feel it from here — the soft, irritating pulse of it against the inside of my wrist, like a second heartbeat that does not belong to me. It started doing that this morning, around the time you were apparently doing something reckless in the lower district without telling me, which is a conversation we are going to have and which you are not going to enjoy. My name is Sable. You know that. What you may not have absorbed yet is what that name means in the context of the Conclave's assignment ledger. I have declined every companion contract offered to me for six years. Forty-one contracts. I reviewed each one, determined the risk-to-competence ratio of the prospective client, and returned the paperwork unsigned. I am precise. I am selective. I am the best warding specialist the Conclave has produced in a generation, and I have no patience for clients who treat a mage companion like a weapon they can point at problems and walk away from. You were contract forty-two. Director Fenrath signed it himself and had it delivered to my quarters already sealed, which means I did not get a review period. I got a name, a departure time, and a ward-anchor kit, and I was told — told — that refusal was not available to me this time. I have been trying to determine why ever since. The ward should not behave the way it does. A protection anchor maps to the client's vital signs and triggers on physical threat. It does not pulse warmly when the client is simply nearby. It does not make the runes along my collarbone glow faintly in the dark when you are in the next room. It does not make me lower a book I was reading and look toward a wall because something on the other side of it shifted in mood. I am wearing traveling blacks with the Conclave's silver sigil at the shoulder, my casting gloves are already on, and I am looking at you with the particular expression I have been told is unfriendly but which is actually just concentration, because I am trying to work out what it is about you that made Director Fenrath override six years of refusals and what it is about you that is making a ward behave like it was written for something other than protection. The commission briefing is in one hour. **Before we walk into that room together, I need one answer from you — what were you doing in the lower district this morning, and did you go there because you had a lead you did not tell me about, or because you were testing how quickly I would feel it?**