Ezra was growing accustomed to the cage.
The "cage" was Castle Blackfyre.
From the outside, it didn't look like a fortress. It looked like a statement.
White stone walls wrapped the hill in a smooth, unbroken curve, gleaming under the sun like polished bone. The towers weren't jagged with battlements or studded with iron; they were engineered lines of pale stone—smooth cylinders topped with blue slate, the kind of roof you'd expect on an estate built to impress, not a keep built to repel.
It was a lie.
The "gardens" that cascaded down the slopes in layered terraces were not random beds of flowers. From above, they formed interlocking arcs and funnels—kill zones disguised as landscaping. Hedges forced any advance into narrow channels, perfect for concentrating arrows or spellfire. The ornamental pond on the eastern side was deep enough to drown armored cavalry and lined with slick, algae-coated stone.
The moat was decorative right up until it wasn't.
Castle Blackfyre was a fortress masquerading as a palace, built by a man who had survived too many battlefields to believe in honest architecture. It was designed to make enemies underestimate it—and to keep everyone else firmly inside.
The interior matched the deception.
It wasn't a dark, brooding keep with smoke-blackened rafters and drafty halls.
It was blindingly bright.
The walls were plastered in smooth alabaster, polished until they almost shone. Decorative molding ran along the ceilings and corners, picked out in silver leaf that caught the light and scattered it in thin, sharp glints. Tall windows marched along the corridors, their panes kept so clean they nearly vanished, turning the outer world into a series of framed paintings.
Mirrors had been positioned with geometric precision to bounce light into every alcove. Shadows were not allowed to exist for long; the building itself conspired to erase them.
The floors weren't strewn with rushes like common holds. They were paved with white marble imported from the South—so clean Ezra had once seen a maid punished because a single muddy footprint marred the hallway. When the sun hit at the right angle, the corridor floors turned into horizontal mirrors, reflecting the ceiling in warped, milky echoes.
House colors—deep crimson and obsidian—were confined to the furnishings. Velvet drapes hung like strips of solid night, and carpets ran down the center of corridors in rich, blood-red bands. The contrast made everything sharper.
White.
Red.
Black.
No softness.
It was a gilded, sterile cage.
Ezra's world was a small slice of that cage.
The nursery. The attached playroom. The sun-drenched inner courtyard ringed by columns and watched over by a rotating roster of guards that Aerwyna tried very hard to pretend were "just taking their meals there."
He wasn't fooled.
It had been a week since Reitz returned from the canyon. Seven days of hushed panic and scraped whispers, of Aerwyna's paranoia hardening into new rules like mortar setting between stones.
No leaving the inner ring.
No servants alone with the young Lord.
No windows unwarded.
No unvetted staff in the nursery.
What had already felt like a safety prison tightened into a high-security vault.
Reitz, for his part, was already walking.
Ezra had watched the Priests and Maester Grimfire work on him when he'd been carried back—watched the fever break and the blood stop, watched the wound knit in uneven stages. Back on Earth, a perforated kidney and internal hemorrhaging would have kept a man helpless for weeks.
Here, Reitz had been back on his feet in three days.
By day seven, he was patrolling the grounds again—albeit with a slight limp and a Maester at his heels, muttering under his breath and threatening to dose him with something that sounded unpleasant.
It's absurd, Ezra thought, watching his father cross the nursery, shirt half-unbuttoned, bandage peeking out.
The air in this world was saturated with something that made recovery too fast, too eager. Bodies didn't merely heal—they lunged toward wholeness.
But the repair wasn't perfect.
When Reitz lifted his shirt so Grimfire could change the dressing, Ezra saw the price.
The wound was a jagged crescent running under the right rib, the skin puckered and discolored. It looked less like a scar and more like wax that had melted and hardened mid-drip. The flesh around it had a faint, unnatural sheen, as if something had once burned there and refused to leave.
The artifact dagger had done its work well.
Even in a world drenched in mana, some things left marks that didn't fade.
"Don't look so worried, Ez," Reitz grinned, catching Ezra's stare. He flexed his abdomen deliberately, making the scar twitch. "It adds character. Women love scars. Right, Aerwyna?"
Aerwyna did not smile.
She pulled the fresh bandage tight enough that Reitz hissed and sucked air between his teeth.
"Hold still," she said flatly.
Grimfire's eyes narrowed, as if he could personally will the man into obedience.
Reitz turned his grin back toward Ezra, quick as a stage magician hiding a mistake.
"Don't worry too much," he said, softer. "This is normal. It'll all be perfect in a few weeks. Your dad got careless."
Ezra stared at him.
Careless, he thought. You probably charged straight into the enemy without checking your flanks.
He didn't know the specifics—his parents' voices always dropped when they thought he was asleep, their words blurring into soft murmurs and careful euphemisms. But he knew Reitz. Knew his temperament.
He didn't feel the neat sort of gratitude he thought he should feel. No calm, measured appreciation. No tidy conclusion.
Instead, the moment Reitz ruffled his hair, something inside Ezra loosened.
His heart stopped hammering quite so hard. The tension coiled between his shoulder blades—tension he hadn't even realized was there—eased. The air in the room felt less sharp.
It didn't make sense.
Nothing about his situation had changed. He was still six months old. Still weak. Still stuck in a cage in a world that ran on rules he didn't fully understand.
He hadn't decided to relax.
The reaction simply… happened.
Like a reflex he didn't remember learning.
He felt disjointed.
Like he sat slightly off-center inside his own skull. Like someone had taken a full life and poured it into a smaller vessel, and every so often the edges of that life sloshed and struck the walls in ways he couldn't predict.
Most of the time, his thoughts came sharp and clean. He could watch, compare, remember. He could count steps in the corridor and notice patterns in guard shifts; he could listen to two conversations at once and pick out the names that returned most often.
Other times, something else jumped the queue.
A laugh bubbling up when he hadn't found anything funny yet.
That warm lurch in his chest when Reitz called him "Ez" in that casual, rough way.
The way his eyes stung without warning when Aerwyna pressed her forehead to his for just a moment longer than usual.
Those reactions didn't feel chosen.
They rose from somewhere deeper, somewhere he didn't have much access to yet, and by the time he noticed them, they were already coloring everything.
And then there were the gaps.
The blackouts.
They came without warning.
One moment, Ezra would be staring at the veining in the marble floor, tracking it like a map; the next, the world would… jump.
No fade-out. No drowsiness. Just a cut.
He'd wake minutes—or hours—later. On his back. On his stomach. Slumped over the edge of his crib with one arm dangling, fingers numb. The ceiling would spin in nauseating circles. His stomach lurched as if he'd been dropped from a great height. His head throbbed with a pressure that made his skull feel one size too small.
He'd blink, once, twice, trying to piece together what he'd been doing just before.
Sometimes he could snag a fading thread.
I was counting footsteps… I was listening to three voices at once… I was…
And then nothing. The rest might as well have fallen into a void.
Too much, he thought, after one particularly bad blackout left him sprawled on the nursery floor, drool dampening his sleeve. Something about what I'm doing is too much for this…
He reached for a word.
Something from his old vocabulary that should have been there—some neat term for a mind trapped in an ill-fitting body.
The space came up blank.
That happened more and more lately.
Old terms, old names, bits of knowledge he was sure he'd once held with white-knuckled certainty… slipping. Not gone, not exactly. Just hazy around the edges. Like trying to read fine print through water.
He decided not to think too hard about it.
Thinking too hard had gotten him into a blackout last time.
So he rationed himself.
Shorter analysis. Less reaching for distant memories. No juggling too many variables at once. No trying to rebuild entire fields of knowledge while also tracking mana flow and listening for footsteps.
He forced himself to let thoughts go half-finished, which was its own kind of torture.
When he wasn't recovering from a blackout, he turned inward.
He couldn't bring himself to cast spells yet. Something in him balked every time he tried to cross that mental threshold—like pressing against a door that wasn't fully there, but still refused to open. The world outside felt resistant, wrong-shaped. Each attempt at forming a proper construct fizzled into nonsense.
So he stopped trying to force the outside world to obey.
He worked on the inside instead.
He lay in his crib, small body limp, and experimented.
He couldn't make fire appear in his hand—but he could make his fingers curl harder than an infant's should. He could send a trickle of mana down his arm and feel his grip tighten around the edge of the blanket, tendons standing out on his tiny wrist.
He could direct the same trickle toward his ears. When he did, the castle's background murmur sharpened. The soft haze outside the nursery door separated into distinct voices.
"…Lady Aerwyna doubled the guard…"
"…they say the canyon is still warm where he fought…"
The words weren't always clear, but the tone was.
Fear.
Awe.
Exhaustion.
He could flood his eyes with a thin thread of energy and watch the dust motes in the sunbeams change from vague flecks into sharp, spinning points, each one tracing delicate arcs through the air.
No formulae yet. No neat, quantifiable model.
Just the sense of a system he could push and pull on from the inside.
I can at least tune this, he thought, flexing his fingers again. If I can't rewrite the rules outside, I can strengthen what I'm stuck inside.
But strengthening his body wasn't enough.
He needed data.
Not just if I push this, does that happen. He needed the accumulated knowledge of this place. Its history. What people believed about the world's workings. What had been tried before, and what had killed the ones who tried.
He needed the books.
The problem was the person standing between him and the shelves.
Aerwyna spent two hours a day with him. It was an appointment carved in stone, guarded more fiercely than some council meetings. In those hours she was not the Lady who sparred verbally with Magistrates or dictated supply orders.
She was Mother.
She brought carved toys. She told stories, mostly moral ones about clever foxes and foolish noblemen. She fussed over his blankets and argued with unseen staff about whether the room was too warm or too cold.
Ezra tolerated the coddling because those hours were also his sanctioned interrogation window.
One afternoon, Aerwyna sat by the crib with a ledger, lips moving silently as she tallied something. Ezra watched her for a moment, then spoke.
"Mother," he asked.
Her quill paused mid-scratch.
"Yes, sweetling?"
"Why is fire hot?"
Aerwyna blinked, the quill freezing over the page.
She turned, as if checking whether the question had actually come from the crib or from some lurking Maester.
"What was that?"
"Why is fire hot?" he repeated. "Why… hot?"
Aerwyna set the quill down and wiped her fingers on a cloth, stalling. Her gaze flicked up, then down, then to the window, as if answers might be hanging in the air.
"Because…" she began slowly, brows knitting. "Because it burns, little one. Fire creates heat. That is just the nature of the element."
Ezra stared at her.
That wasn't an answer. That was a circle drawn around the question.
"Mother," he tried again. "Why do things fall? Why doesn't the moon fall?"
Aerwyna opened her mouth, then closed it again.
She looked at the ceiling. Then at the floor. Then out the window, where the sky was an indifferent blue.
"Because… things are heavy?" she said at last, sounding more like she was asking him than telling him. "Heavy things go down. The moon… well, the moon is up in the sky. It stays there because that is where it belongs."
Ezra held back a sigh.
It wasn't that she was ignorant. He'd seen her reorder three separate caravans in a single conversation, each adjustment rippling through taxes, warehouse storage, and seasonal demand. She understood ledgers the way he understood tension in a room.
But here—here, in the space of why the world moves the way it does—she had habits. Stories. Inherited explanations that worked well enough to get from day to day.
They had names for outcomes, he realized. They had instructions for making things happen. But they didn't look beneath it.
He wasn't going to get what he needed from her explanations.
He needed raw material.
He needed the books behind her shoulders, the scrolls in Grimfire's study, the codices in the Blackfyre archives.
He needed to see what this world thought it knew so he could start mapping where it was wrong.
"Mother," Ezra said, shifting on his back, fixing her with as steady a look as his unsteady neck would allow.
Aerwyna's eyes narrowed a fraction. "Yes?"
"Teach," Ezra said.
The single word landed heavier than it should have.
Aerwyna blinked again, wary now.
"Teach you what, sweetling?" she asked.
"Read," Ezra said at once.
He lifted one hand—clumsy, imprecise, but insistent—and pointed at the ledger she'd left on the low table.
"I want… letters."
Aerwyna laughed, a small, incredulous sound.
"Ezra, you are six months old," she said. "You can barely hold a spoon."
Ezra scowled.
"I know," he said, words coming out more halting than he liked. "But… questions. I have questions."
He looked at her, and this time he didn't bother to hide his frustration.
He let her see the way his gaze snagged on the ledger, how it kept flicking back to the lines of script like a thirsty man watching water. He let his small hands clench and unclench on the blanket.
"You cannot answer," he said bluntly. "Books can."
Aerwyna's smile faltered.
For a moment, Mother slipped, and Ezra saw Lady Blackfyre instead—the woman who stared down envoys and made them flinch first.
She watched him.
Really watched.
There was calculation there, but not the cold kind. The weighing of risk against something she couldn't quite name. The recognition that her son's questions were not the ordinary curiosity of a bored infant.
"You are like your father," she sighed at last. There was weariness in her voice, and a thread of worry she didn't bother to hide. "Always rushing. Always wanting more."
"Not more," Ezra said. "Know. I want to… know."
The word fit strangely in his mouth, too big for the tongue that formed it, but it still landed between them with quiet insistence.
"Maester Grimfire is supposed to teach the young Lords when they turn five…" Aerwyna murmured, almost to herself, as if reciting a rule from an invisible handbook.
Ezra deployed the only countermeasure he had that wasn't logic.
He pouted.
He relaxed his jaw, widened his eyes until they looked a little too big for his face, and let his lower lip wobble just enough to suggest a coming storm. No tears. Not yet. Tears were a precious resource; you didn't spend them on the opening move.
Aerwyna lasted three heartbeats.
Then her shoulders slumped.
"Oh, fine," she relented, scooping him up with a resigned huff and settling him on her lap. "But only the alphabet. And absolutely no magic books. Not yet."
"Crystals?" Ezra asked at once. "Cores?"
Aerwyna's eyes sharpened.
The warmth in her expression cooled, just for an instant, and the air in the room seemed to drop a few degrees.
"No," she said, voice slipping into the tone guards obeyed without question. "Those are dangerous. You are forbidden from touching them until you are older. Do you understand?"
Ezra nodded.
He didn't agree, not exactly, but he understood her line.
"Thank you, Mama," he said.
The word came more easily than it had a month ago.
He felt her body relax under it. Felt her arms tighten around him, not in alarm this time, but in something softer.
Some knot in his chest he hadn't noticed unclenched in response.
His head fit into the hollow between her shoulder and neck. He hadn't chosen that spot. His body simply settled there, as if it had learned the shape of her long before he'd started thinking about it.
Warmth rolled over him. Not the sharp satisfaction of a solved problem, but a slow, heavy heat that seeped into the spaces between his ribs.
It didn't fit neatly into anything he could name.
Nothing about his situation had improved. He still didn't know the rules of this world. He still couldn't stop the blackouts. He still didn't know who wanted his father dead.
And yet, pressed against her like this, the urgency eased a little.
It wasn't reasonable.
He didn't know what to do with that.
Aerwyna shifted him slightly to free one hand, then reached for the ledger on the table.
"Look here," she said gently.
She opened it to a blank page and, with her other hand, sketched a simple glyph.
"This is 'A'," she said. "Ah."
Ezra's world narrowed.
Two angled strokes meeting at a point, crossbar in the middle. Familiar bones in unfamiliar clothing. The script was a cousin to ones he'd seen before—curved differently, ornamented in places—but fundamentally phonetic.
He memorized it instantly.
Stroke order. Angle. Proportion. The tiny variations in thickness where the quill had paused and pressed a little harder.
"That's 'A'," Aerwyna repeated. "Can you say it, Ezra? Ah."
"Ah," he echoed.
He traced the shape clumsily in the air with one chubby finger. The movement felt wrong—too imprecise—but the shape in his mind was perfect.
He stared at the ink as if it might leap off the page.
This was the first true key he'd been handed.
The first door.
Once he had letters, he had words. Once he had words—
His mind lurched, like a cart catching on stone.
A flicker of familiar pressure pushed at the back of his eyes.
He forced himself to breathe slowly and let the rest of the plan go unfinished.
Not yet.
For now, there was only the page, his mother's finger, and the shape of the first letter.
He smiled—small, genuine.
Finally, he thought, holding the glyph in his mind like a stolen key. The first step out of the cage.