We continue, her pace unbroken. The torches along the wall bend subtly as we pass, their flames drawn sideways by something I cannot see but can feel pressing through the space.
“Hold them.”
I reach again, not to push but to contain, letting the light move outward in a thin, controlled line that steadies the distortion and returns the flames to their natural rise. It strains, but it holds long enough to matter.
Petunis lowers her hand, releasing whatever influence she had set in motion. “It answers you,” she says. “Imperfectly. But it answers.”
I am unsure if I should be pleased or insulted, so I say nothing.
We approach the final stair, the great doors of the throne hall just beyond.
“For now,” she adds, “that will suffice.”
Her mouth does not quite smile, but I begin to understand that something in her is pleased.
We walk on.
At the next stair she stops so abruptly I nearly collide with her.
“Power is useless without judgment,” she says. “Judgment is useless without restraint. Restraint is useless without the will to act when action becomes necessary. You have much to learn in all three.”
I fold my arms. “You do not waste much time being encouraging.”
“Encouragement is for children learning to sit upright.”
“I am learning I may have preferred ignorance.”
“No,” she says. “You preferred freedom from consequence. That is not the same thing.”
I start to answer, then stop. She is already moving again.
“What exactly are you training me for?” I ask as I follow her down the last stretch toward the great doors of the throne hall. “A throne I did not know was mine? A court that wants me dead by breakfast? A bond I do not intend to make?"
“All of it,” she says.
The doors open before us. Morning has transformed the throne room. There is sheer, bright brilliance pouring down from the glass above. The floor gleams. The pillars rise like trees. At the far end of the hall the dais waits in perfect stillness, the throne at its center.
I stop at the threshold.
Petunis walks ahead as though the room belongs to neither reverence nor fear, only use. “Well,” she says, turning at the foot of the dais. “Are you coming?"
I climb the steps slowly.
The throne looks different from above. Less like an object. More like a fact.
Petunis gestures toward it. “Sit.”
I look at her. “You could try sounding less delighted by the possibility of humiliating me.”
“If I wished to humiliate you, the court would be present. Patience, my dear, the court will arrive soon and with it either your humiliation or success."
That, somehow, is reassurance.
I turn and lower myself onto the throne. It is colder than I expected. Heavier too, though perhaps that is only the room pressing differently around me once I am seated there. The arms of the chair curve beneath my hands. The hall stretches before me in straight, merciless lines.
I think I should feel changed at once.
Instead I feel seen. Seen by the room. By the palace. By every absence that built itself into this place long before I was born.
