I woke to the sense of being watched by a building.
Not stared at counted. The awareness came as a faint coolness across the skin, like someone drawing a wet thread down my forearm. My small window had lost the night and traded it for the pale blue before dawn. On the sill, the river's light stropped itself thin; far below, a barge's oars dipped and rose with priestly patience. Within the House of Dominion, silence arranged itself with intent. My room had learned my breathing in the dark and now matched it, the walls exhaling when I did, inhaling when I didn't.
The crest at my throat had warmed and cooled all night, as if turning in sleep. Now it settled into a resting temperature that felt like approval withheld: not a reprimand, not a reward. Waiting.
I sat up. The bed accepted the decision without protest, the mattress remembering my shape and forgetting it in the same motion. On the little table, a carafe of water sweated in the cool air; when I reached for it, the glass knew my hand and turned its lip to mine before I lifted it. Dominion's grace always teetered on the edge of arrogance. You could drown in how easy it made obedience seem.
I washed, dressed, laced the dark shirt at my throat, and stood before the mirror that would not lie. My reflection considered me with a patience that wasn't entirely mine. I could almost see the threads: not yet lines, but shivers in the air where attention would choose to live. Zaiara's mark at my nape hummed once a cat's purr from inside the skin then went still.
A soft chime bloomed in the corner of the room, not from metal, from intent. The door opened a finger's width without knocking. A young attendant in House gray waited in the corridor with her eyes demurely down and her posture arranged in obedience that did not humiliate her.
"Initiate Idrest," she said, "Lady Serathe Valen will see you at first light. The north ambulatory. Follow the candles that bow."
"Do they bow for everyone?" I asked.
"They bow for those who listen," she said, and let the door close as gently as a promise going quiet.
I stepped into the corridor. The House had dressed itself for morning. Candles along the walls threw their small bodies forward when I approached, not bending with flame or wick, but with the light itself: a slight incline, a courtesy of radiance. The air held the scorched-orange scent of last night's wax and the greener note of fresh wicks. The carpet swore it wasn't a river and then moved like one beneath my feet.
Dominion by daylight was a different beast from Dominion at night. By night, the House was velvet and breath; by morning, it was parchment and oath. Sunlight entered with paperwork; shadows filed themselves under the correct ledgers. I passed alcoves where statues slept with their eyes open and doors of dark wood veined with sigils so faint they could have been accidents in the grain until you looked too long and the accidents arranged themselves into language.
The north ambulatory waited like a throat. Arches strode away in a long procession, and between them a narrow cloister garden exhaled cold air: wet leaves, stone washed clean of last night's talk, a moss that smelled like old coins. Patches of moss here were not decorative; they were listening posts. When you spoke, the tiny spore-caps turned to face you.
At the seventh arch she waited.
Lady Serathe Valen was not tall, not short, not young, not old. She refused the arithmetic of adjectives. What she allowed was line: the precise fall of charcoal silk from shoulder to ankle; the drawn bow of a mouth that rested in neither kindness nor disdain; the posture of a woman who had spent a thousand hours being watched and taught the attention to earn its keep. Her hair was a dark sheet combed back into a knot, pinned with a single opal that did not flash; it considered.
"Idrest," she said, speaking my name as if it were an ink she was testing for flow. "Walk."
We walked. Birds rehearsed the day on the garden side, their notes like chalk marks for a teacher who could read music with her fingers. On the corridor side, tapestries hung in a narrow palette bronze, smoke, the green of leaves seen through a cathedral window. At first glance, the woven figures were myth: queens, saints, courtesans, a god or two caught in the act of being mortal. At second glance, the scenes changed. The bodies re-arranged in their own threads, and certain eyes that had been closed now watched me without blinking. The House had put its paintings on a dimmer switch.
"What is Dominion," Serathe asked, not turning her head.
"Power earned by being wanted," I said. It felt like reciting a proverb that belonged on the cheap endpapers of a better book.
"Wrong," she said, not unkindly. "The Veil counts wanting. Dominion is not wanting. It is the discipline of presence. Desire is easy. Precision is rare."
"Precision of what?"
"Of invitation," she said. "Of refusal. Of when to be seen and when to be the room. Dominion is not seduction. That is a craft. Dominion is a grammar." She glanced at me. "You are a writer. You should understand grammar if you intend to break it."
We stopped beneath an arch that let a square of pale sun dapple the floor. She lifted two fingers and the light listened: its edges drew sharp, then softened, sharpening again until it held itself like a blade in a scabbard.
"You feel the House," she said. "Describe it."
"Alive," I said. "Opinionated. Counting."
"Adverbs," she said, which was both dismissal and lesson. "Try again."
I listened. The ambulatory breathed around us. I let the crest's warmth be background and paid attention to nothing, which is always where the interesting something lives.
"Stacked thresholds," I said. "Every doorway is also a question. Every corridor leads two ways one of stone, one of attention. The air remembers where eyes rested last."
A small assent moved in her face. "Better. The House was built with a patronage contract and a vow. The vow keeps the House from lying. The contract gives it permission to judge. You will not win arguments with architecture, Idrest. You will negotiate them."
We reached a door that knew our coming. It opened without sighing. Inside: a long practice hall with windows high enough to make light an act of worship. The floor had been polished by a century of lessons into a surface that could hold a fall without spite. Mirrors watched from three walls, dulled to oil, so they would reflect not the skin but the intention.
Four initiates were already there, arranged like punctuation around a central circle inlaid with silver. I recognized one Soren Halvek, last night's eager mistake, his crest hung correctly now and his mouth tight from learning. The others wore their beginnings in different ways: a short, broad-shouldered woman with knife-calluses on her hands and a stillness that could have been respect or threat; a delicate boy who looked like he could be knocked over by a thought and yet whose eyes kept testing the corners of the room; and a dark-haired person with a healer's touch around the mouth, the kind that could tell you news gently enough that you would thank them for it.
Serathe did not present me. Dominion did not fuss with introductions when there were better ways to learn names.
"You will practice silence," she said. "Not the absence of noise. The presence of permission. Idrest, into the circle."
The silver ring took my weight with a faint shift in temperature, a coolness like stream-water held in metal. The mirrors did not show my face. They showed a haze shaped like a man and, around that haze, the faintest ghost of threads the potential attention waiting to be chosen.
"Rule one," Serathe said, voice surgical, "you do not pull. You allow. You choose what you allow. Stand. Breathe."
I stood. I breathed. The crest warmed. The haze in the mirrors condensed, then softened, then steadied. Outside the ring, Soren's jaw flexed with a desire to be seen. The broad-shouldered woman looked at her hands. The delicate boy's attention wandered toward me and then away, shy as a stray cat. The healer's mouth ticked at a private joke.
"Now," Serathe said, "turn one head without looking at it."
It felt like she'd asked me to lift a glass with my name. But the lesson was permission. I touched the idea of myself, not the others, and granted something simple: it would not be unpleasant for one person to think of me now. The air shifted. The healer's attention landed like a hand placed gently on a fevered brow and did not move.
"Good," Serathe said. "You did not yank. You leaned."
She walked the ring's edge, the hems of her dress lifting the smallest possible amount from the polished floor. "Again. This time deny one thread that wants you."
Soren's want wasn't clean; it wasn't even want. It was an appetite for contest, for the high of humiliation delivered mutually. The broad-shouldered woman's attention stayed on her own breath. The delicate boy's curiosity reached again, timid, tender. I denied the bright, ugly thread, not with scorn, not with judgment, just with no. Soren's gaze slid off me mid-blink, as if his eyes had forgotten the sentence they were reading.
His cheeks colored. He recovered and arranged his mouth into a smirk for himself.
"Better," Serathe said. She stopped and faced me, only her eyes moving. "Now speak one word. Let the room decide what it means."
I chose, not the word, but what I gave it: the attention, the breath, the body. "Come," I said, not with command, not with plea an invitation tied to a limit.
The delicate boy took half a step and stopped himself with a wince, surprised at his own legs. The broad-shouldered woman's head lifted a fraction, like a warhorse deciding not to enter the river today. The healer's mouth's private joke became shared.
Soren laughed, too loud for the room, and then, because the House doesn't like rudeness unless it's precise, the laugh turned into a cough.
"Idrest hears grammar," Serathe said. "Good. Now let him hear grammar bite."
She lifted her right hand and made a small, almost lazy motion toward one of the mirrors. The oil-sheen rippled. The reflection of the room bled from one angle to another until the mirror showed not us but an empty version of the hall, dust motes turning in late light. It was a room without presence, a world where you could speak and never be heard.
"Dominion is a covenant with the Veil," Serathe said, voice low and smooth, the kind of voice that teaches a blade how to live in a scabbard. "We do not compel the soul. We compel the surface so the soul may choose. Watch."
Her hand traced a small figure in the air, a sigil that did not linger on the eye so much as the tongue; I could almost taste chalk and lemon. At her gesture, the mirror-room acquired a figure the idea of a woman, smudged at the edges, waiting by the door.
"Attend," Serathe said to us, and allowed our attention to go with her words. The figure sharpened. It acquired a stance, a tilt of chin, a precise mouth. It became a person.
"Withdraw," she said, and our attention obeyed. The figure smudged again, and though she remained visible, she did not feel present.
Serathe looked at me. "Your turn."
I hadn't been given a sigil. The House rarely begins at the obvious. I faced the mirror-room and let it look at me. I didn't pull. I offered the way you offer your throat to a trusted hand. See me so that I may see you.
The mirror-room took a breath. The woman sharpened enough to cast a shadow. She turned her head, the barest motion of a body acknowledging another body. I smiled, not as show, as permission. She stepped toward the door.
Soren made a small, derisive sound. "It's an illusion."
"Everything we work with is an illusion until it isn't," Serathe said without looking at him. "Do not speak, Halvek, unless your sentence has learned to pay rent."
The broad-shouldered woman let out a breath she'd been trapping and the mirror-woman glanced toward the sound, curious. I adjusted the attention the way you adjust a picture frame that's listing. The figure returned to me. Her presence fattened, from sketch to charcoal to ink.
"That," Serathe said. "Remember what it feels like in your ribs."
"What about refusal?" the healer asked, their voice gentle and clear. "When the room wants you and you must not be taken."
Serathe looked faintly pleased, the way a mathematician enjoys a well-placed question. "Refusal is the better art." She turned to me again. "Idrest. Make the figure not for you. And survive yourself wanting her to be."
It was harder than invitation. Denial always is. I held my want like a sparrow: not crushed, not released, cupped. I gave the figure a story in which she had somewhere else worth going. I watched her go there. The ache in my chest flared and clarified, bright and honest. The mirror-woman faded to the edges, then to the background, then to the ordinary ghost of rooms.
Soren exhaled something like relief. It sounded like a man not drowning after all.
"Good," Serathe said. "Now we can begin."
We began with posture. Not the theater kind. The kind that tells the air what to do. She adjusted my shoulders with a touch that did not linger and never apologized. She showed me where my breath fled when asked to stay and made me watch it return. She placed my feet, then took the floor away from beneath them by merely lifting her hand and letting the Veil deny friction. I did not fall. I learned how to walk on refusal.
The initiates rotated through the circle. The broad-shouldered woman, who later offered the name Ilyna, had the kind of still attention that tames horses and men; when she invited the mirror-figure, it came like a river finds a cut bank: slow, inevitable. The delicate boy Ren had a gift for making absence feel like an embrace. The healer Ash could refuse without making you feel refused. Soren learned with fury, as if getting each motion wrong were an insult delivered personally to his blood; sometimes fury is fuel. I kept half an eye on him and decided not to hate him yet.
We broke when the light through the high windows changed color from parchment to pale honey. A cart rolled beneath somewhere, heavy with whatever a House eats for lunch. The moss in the cloister had turned their caps toward us to listen; one of them shivered with the pleasure of overheard truth.
Serathe gestured us to the shade of the nearer arch. "Dominion is not a ladder," she said. "It is a tide. Some days you rise. Some days you learn to breathe beneath. If you cannot tell the difference between worship and quiet, you will drown and call it being adored."
"What drowns most people?" Ash asked. They had the air of a person hired to ask questions for the good of the room.
"Vanity," she said. "Then hunger. Then kindness untrained." She looked at me as if she were setting a place at a table that would someday be mine. "Idrest, you tilt toward generosity. Learn where it ends. The generous try to feed wolves by feeding themselves to them."
"And the ungenerous?" I asked.
"They mistake fear for discipline," she said. "The Veil punishes both equally."
A bell counted the hour, the sound moving through the corridors with a confident gait. Serathe turned her head as if listening for the footfalls behind the sound.
"This afternoon," she said, "the House will send you into the market for your first count. Not a performance. An observation. Walk where the river widens. Do not draw eyes. Learn how rooms behave when they do not have to behave. If the Veil leans toward you, lean elsewhere. If the Veil leans away, note who it is leaning toward instead. Bring me three truths and one lie before sundown. I will know which is the lie."
"What happens if we bring four truths?" Ren asked, with the cautious optimism of a child testing a fence.
"You won't," Serathe said. "Most truths are lies wearing better dresses."
We were dismissed. The others stepped away with that peculiar combination of relief and grief that follows a good lesson. I lingered because Serathe had not moved, and stillness is also permission.
She spoke without looking at me. "You carry a patron's rhythm."
"Zaiara," I said, the name in my mouth like heat and rain.
"I know her step," Serathe said. "She teaches appetite as a virtue. She is not wrong. Remember to teach yourself limits as an art."
"I will try."
"Try slowly," she said. "Haste offends the House."
She began to walk, and I matched her pace. The House matched ours.
"Lady Valen," I said, "last night the salon went quiet when I entered. It felt like" I stopped, searching for a word that would not sound like a boast even inside my own skull. " like gravity."
"It will," she said. "Rooms remember the weight of attention the way the sea remembers the moon. The danger is believing the tide rises because you are special. It rises because the moon pulls. Learn which moon you are."
"You think I am not a moon."
"I think you are a man who might be," she said. "But the sky is crowded, Idrest. Some lights burn only to announce their own burning."
We reached the ambulatory's end, where a smaller door wore sigils more honest about their presence. She faced me fully for the first time. The opal pin considered me with her.
"Before the market," she said, "one more demonstration. Stand there." She indicated a mark set into the floor with a nail's-width line of silver. I stepped onto it.
She raised her hand, palm up. The air above her skin warbled. It reminded me of heat over a road and of sermons delivered by water. The mirrors along the far wall cleared and then darkened, not to show us, but to show something behind us space that wasn't there filling with a second hall, a second us, thinner, older, truer.
"This is the Hidden Hall," she said softly. "The House keeps it for thresholds. Most never see it. It shows you what the Veil will do if you confuse worship with quiet."
In the mirror, my thinner self stepped into a room full of faces that admired me. I knew the look. I had written that look. My reflection expanded into it, made a home of it, breathed it like smoke. Then the faces emptied; the admiration stayed for a heartbeat without them and then went, too, as if it had been borrowed. My thinner self faltered. The room did not catch him. He fell all the way to the floor and then the floor decided it was a wall.
The image cleared. I stood feeling the sweat bead under the crest ribbon, precise as punctuation.
"How do I avoid that?" I asked.
"Pay the room," she said. "Not with performance. With attention. Your attention. Dominion is the price you pay to make others' attention worth something." She lowered her hand. The Hidden Hall went away like a tide drawing lace from the shore. "Also: keep a friend who is not charmed by you. The House cannot teach you that."
"I might manage an enemy," I said.
"Enemies are cheaper," she replied. "They tell you you're wrong for free and then send you the bill in steel. Friends present invoices in smaller coin."
The opal pin had not flashed once. It had watched every word. Serathe inclined her head the smallest degree. "Go. Learn how the market breathes when it is not beholding itself. Do not mistake noise for life."
"And if the market mistakes me for something worth watching?" I said.
She considered me long enough that the moss in the garden ached with it. "Then do what you did with the mirror-woman. Give it a better story elsewhere. If you cannot, buy a fig and pay with your name spoken softly. Names taste different to the Veil when you call them like that."
I turned to go. At the door she added, as if telling a future that had already happened, "And Idrest when the House asks you, do not go down the Seventh Stair alone."
"The Seventh"
"It will ask nicely," she said. "It always does."
I stepped back into the corridor. The candles bowed, not deeply, just enough to be certain I had seen them. The ambulatory breathed the exact breath I took. Somewhere, a bell chimed once, not for the hour, but for a small promise kept. I pressed two fingers to the crest at my throat and felt its steady, unreadable pulse.
Dominion watched me go with the patience of an ocean facing a boy who had just learned the word tide.