Dawn came the way a question enters a quiet room: carefully, then everywhere.
The chapel doors stood open to fog and unspent cold. Candles crowded the nave, stairstepped along the walls, each flame cupped by glass chimneys etched with prayers from a century that had not expected to be overheard. The bell did not ring. Someone had decided judgment needed no accompaniment.
Nobles gathered in thoughtful colors—winter blues of Aldery, white-gold like clean steel from House Gold, the hawk-sigil threaded through half a dozen collars that called themselves neutral. Students pressed into the side aisles, breathing shallow, whispering commentary that wanted to be history.
At the crossing, the Inquisition waited: three officials in black, cuffs stitched in night. The center Inquisitor—the woman with the ledger eyes—read the silence as if it were testimony already. To her left stood the old priest, winter-lashed, hands serene on his staff. Halvern kept to the right, spectacles clouded, chalk on his thumb like a defiant sacrament. Serren leaned against a pillar as though a building could remember what a spine is for.
Team Two entered without herald.
Rowan's hair was still damp from water that had decided to be honest about being cold. Mikel carried nothing but a coil of string in his pocket and composure on his face. Celina wore white linen under a dark dress; the ribbon at her wrist lay quiet over a warmth that belonged to her. Ernest walked last, not behind but after, as if courtesy had become his shadow.
The pews shifted around them—the small creak of wood that had learned, recently, how to say Listen without burning for it. The Inquisitor lifted a palm; the room obeyed its own hush.
"Ernest Aldery," she said. "Interpreter, by rumor. Heretic, by speculation. Student, by record. We require your account."
Ernest inclined his head. "You'll have it."
"We prefer prose to poetry," said the man to her right, the one who smiled only at clean columns of figures.
"You will get neither," Halvern muttered, not softly enough.
The old priest made a gentle gesture that smoothed nothing and claimed everything. "We begin with demonstration. Speak to the room."
Ernest regarded the chapel as if it were a person who could be offended. He did not raise his hand. He did not let his voice swell. He spoke the word that had taught them all how to breathe again.
"Listen."
The candles did not bend. The air did not shiver. Yet the chapel's cracks, the old inscriptions around the apse, the kneelers scarred by piety—all of it went a degree stiller, the way a mind goes still when comprehension arrives. Even the nobles felt the weight redistribute across their bones: not heavier, not lighter—owned.
The Inquisitor's quill hovered. "Parlor trick," the hawk-sigiled heir called from the aisle, eager to be kicked out by the history he was spoiling.
"Observation," Halvern corrected, eyes bright. "Of consent."
"Consent?" The heir scoffed.
"Rooms are made of people," Mikel said, and the simple truth of it sounded like blasphemy.
The center Inquisitor dipped her quill. "Describe the entity beneath Kareth."
"A listener," Ernest said. "Not a king. Not a god."
"What did it ask you?"
"What comes after obedience."
A ripple passed through the students: the kind of murmur that wants to be an oath. The Inquisitor's quill scratched: after obedience… choice (claimed).
"What did you answer?"
"Choice," Ernest said. "Then responsibility."
"And what did it answer?"
"Listen."
"Circular," the quill-man said, pleased to find a flaw. "Self-referential."
"Foundational," Celina answered, voice carrying without needing to harden. "Breath is circular. It does not invalidate lungs."
Some nobles blinked; the Countess Gold did not. She watched her daughter with the softness of a drawn bow.
"Enough catechism," the old priest said calmly. "The Church requires proof."
He nodded; a young acolyte stepped forward with a lectern and parchment. The sheet gleamed with a faint oil-shine; it had been blessed to be stubborn. The acolyte set it before Ernest and took one neat step back.
"Write," the priest said.
"With ink or intent?" Ernest asked.
"Whichever weapon you admit to wielding," the priest purred.
Halvern nearly choked on a laugh he didn't make. Serren's hand closed on his staff.
Ernest picked up the quill. He wrote in a hand so precise it looked like a rumor of machine. The letters said:
We stand by choice.
The Inquisitor read it aloud. "And what if we stand you elsewhere?"
She gestured. Four warders in gray stepped forward with a chain as decorative as duty allows in public. They did not touch him. They held the chain out, suggestion made iron.
Ernest looked at the links the way mathematicians look at bridges. He did not speak. He shook his head.
The chain didn't clatter. It acquired hesitation. The warders blinked, baffled, then irritated at their fingers for being the wrong tools. Metal remained metal. Meaning declined to cooperate.
Rowan's grin arrived quick and boyish and unhelpful; he buried it in his knuckles.
"Words," the Inquisitor said, tamping annoyance flat with practice. "Only words."
"Only grammar," Ernest said. "Which is the shape of what obeys. Ask the parchment."
The old priest's lashes lowered. "Yes. Ask the parchment."
He signaled. A second sheet—anonymous, blessed, blank—was laid on the lectern. The center Inquisitor dipped her quill in a pot that had known no hands but priests' and wrote with brisk authority:
The subject will submit to confinement and to all questions posed by the Holy Office.
Her clerks murmured approval at the line's cleanliness. She lifted the sheet for witnesses.
Very slowly, in a hand not hers and not his, the second half of the sentence softened, broke into polite dissent, and rejoined itself as:
…will submit to conversation and to all questions posed by listeners.
A breath left the room. Not awe—recognition. The parchment had learned the new etiquette.
The Inquisitor's jaw tightened. "Trick parchment," the hawk-heir muttered, relieved to find conspiracy kinder than change.
"Trick world," Halvern said. "It always was."
The Inquisitor placed the sheet back on the lectern, palm heavy. "Explain."
Ernest didn't move. "You used will as if you own it," he said. "The surface has begun to correct its manners."
Lady Aldery's mouth thinned, disliking the fact that the sentence pleased her. Lord Aldery's eyes tracked the change like a battlefield adjustment.
Countess Mara Gold glanced at the Inquisitor without blinking. "Demonstrate again," she said—not to Ernest, to her opponent. "Write command in a line that keeps its dignity."
The Inquisitor didn't take the bait. She looked at Celina instead. "Miss Gold. You are rumored to have been cursed. You now seem… decorous."
Celina raised her wrist. The ribbon warmed in the chill. Beneath it, gold tinged green like dawn tinting evergreen. "I was tithed," she said evenly. "The tithe is called back when the temple learns humility."
The old priest smiled in real pleasure, and that made it difficult to hate him correctly. "The gods do not bargain."
"They do not listen," Celina said. "We found something that does."
A murmur of scandal—that delicious cousin of hope—ran through the side aisles. The Inquisitor turned a little, letting it pass her like a current carries debris.
"You defend him," she said to Celina without looking at Ernest. "Why?"
Celina's eyes did not leave the Inquisitor's. "Because I know the shape of a leash. This is not one."
"You are a noble's daughter," the Inquisitor observed. "You were raised to prefer leashes—when they are yours to hold."
"I was raised to prefer balance," Celina said, and half the women in the room—laundry, lady, clerk—straightened by a hair.
The Inquisitor looked back to Ernest. "What else did the listener ask?"
"What follows choice." He didn't add You are living the answer. He didn't have to; she heard it.
"And?"
"Consequence," Mikel said, voice even, unafraid of interjecting. "Ownership. Price."
"Price," Serren echoed. "A word you trust more than faith."
The old priest's fingers tightened indiscernibly on his staff. "And what price do you demand, Interpreter, for teaching the world to make up its own mind?"
"I do not demand," Ernest said. "I refuse when flattered."
Across the nave, Celina's ribbon warmed; she lowered her eyes to hide an involuntary smile.
"Enough," the Inquisitor said, not angrily. She was measuring and did not like surprises she did not spring. "We will reconvene at Prime with formal writs. Until then—house arrest in your dormitory. Warded. No demonstrations. No audiences."
Rowan exhaled like a man whose fist had been told it was a hand. "We're not animals," he said.
"Correct," she replied. "Animals require fewer clerks."
She turned to the old priest. "And you, Father—your testimony at Prime."
He inclined his head, serene. "I will bring the hymn."
Halvern made a noise that wanted to be rude and settled for bone-tired. "Bring honesty."
The nobles filed out in the way nobles do when they smell a war: dignified, eager, exchanging sentences that mean I will betray you later but with panache. Countess Gold brushed a fingertip along her daughter's sleeve as she passed; Lord Aldery withheld touch like a coin too useful to spend. Lady Aldery paused a breath longer than her husband and almost bowed—to whom, it was impossible to say.
Students poured into the nave once the powerful were gone, like water into a shape it had been denied. Questions shone in their faces like fever. Serren barred them with the staff lightly and said the gentlest command he had learned to use.
"Later."
The chapel took a long breath. The candles steadied. The parchment on the lectern dried with a crisp sound like a page turning.
Ernest stood still until stillness felt like answer, then looked at his three.
"Bread," Rowan suggested, hopeful.
"Water," Mikel corrected.
"Sleep," Celina advised, and they all heard kindness instead of order.
They moved as one toward the side door. The Inquisitor stepped aside. As Ernest passed, she spoke under her breath, not for intimidation but for accuracy.
"You have made my work harder."
"You will enjoy it more," he said.
"Perhaps," she admitted, which was the most dangerous concession a city had heard all year.
Outside, daylight sat differently on stone. Lines that had once been merely cracks now read as punctuation. A laundry girl watched them pass, bit her lip, and whispered to the lintel above her: "Listen." The lintel, being made of things that had learned its manners, did.
At the dormitory stair, a sheet of paper waited, nailed eye-level, warded in green wax. The seal bore the Inquisition's mark. The text was clean, severe:
By order of the Holy Office: The subject will remain confined to quarters until Prime. No demonstrations. No audiences. No—
The last line blurred like breath on glass and reformed:
—no performances. Conversation under supervision permitted.
Rowan barked a laugh and covered it with a cough. Mikel only nodded, a scholar on the far side of proof. Celina reached out, pressed two fingers to the amended word, and felt the ward courtesy to her touch.
Ernest traced the air an inch from the parchment—no command, only acknowledgment.
"Prime," he said.
"Prime," they echoed.
They climbed. Behind them, the paper dried into law as polite as grammar.
In the courtyard, boys tried the word Listen on pebbles, on doorframes, on each other. Some failures were comic. Some worked.
In the chapel, the old priest stood alone a moment at the lectern, reading the line he had not written and loving it the way a man loves the blade that will one day take his head: for its balance.
He smiled and closed his eyes and memorized the feel of the sentence. He would bring a hymn at Prime. He would bring a chain. He did not yet know which would fit his own throat.
On the north terrace, nobles argued in voices like lace stretched to tearing. The tower bell tested itself—two notes, nearer now, almost willing to agree.
In a small room under the eaves, Ernest opened his notebook and wrote nothing. He put his hand on the sill and let the stone under his palm practice being a listener.
"The forest bent," Rowan said from the bed, lazy, ritual a toy he had decided to keep.
"The nobles bowed," Mikel offered, deadpan as prayer.
"The beast knelt," Celina said softly, and the ribbon warmed.
"The chain obeyed," Rowan finished. "The mirrors cracked. The heirs knelt. The priests hungered. Light bent. Silence held. Stone listened."
Ernest closed his eyes. Prime would bring writ and ward and theater. Language would bring something harder.
"Now," he murmured, "they will ask the wrong question."
He smiled, thin and honest.
"We will answer the right one."