My question seemed to hang in the steamy air between us. My mother's hands paused in their gentle ministrations, soap and washcloth forgotten. For a breath, I wondered if I had said something wrong, if this was another of those subjects I wasn't supposed to know about, like the locked room in the east tower or why father's men sometimes came back from the borders with haunted eyes.
Then my mother's preoccupied face grew present and began a slow awakening, her eyes kindling with something I'd never witnessed there before: a delight that made her seem almost girlish.
"Oh, my heart," she breathed, her hands finding each other in a clasp. "Grandmama was a truth dancer! She was so elegant." Her gaze drifted beyond the bath chamber walls and stone keep to some distant country of recollection. "I used to hide behind the great hall tapestries just to watch her practice. I was young then, probably as young as you, but oh, how I envied the way she moved; I tried to mimic her..."
She looked down at me, still pink and steaming in the copper tub, and I could see something click into place behind her eyes like a key turning a lock.
"It's fallen quite out of fashion, I'm afraid," she continued, though her voice carried a deep satisfaction, like someone who has just discovered the perfect solution to a problem she hadn't known she was trying to solve. "Except in the highest court circles, and even there..." She paused, studying me with new intensity. "But the deArthis line has been too long without a truth dancer."
I was still no closer to understanding what exactly a truth dancer might be and was far too young to recognize the trap being sprung around me. "But what does it mean?" I pressed, water dripping from my hair as I turned to follow her movements reaching for the toweling.
She began drying me with considerably more haste than the tender care she'd shown during the bath itself, her movements quick and purposeful, as if time had suddenly become precious. "Much easier to show than tell, my darling," she paused in the doorway to study my dripping form. "Yes," she murmured to herself, "perhaps old Whinn still teaches."
And with that cryptic pronouncement, she swept from the room like a woman on a mission, leaving me bewildered and wrapped in linen, listening to her excited footsteps echo down the stone stairs.
The following evening at dinner, she announced our expedition to Cobb, the nearest market town, with the air of someone unveiling a particularly clever surprise. We would visit Mistress Whinn, she informed the table, to observe her truth dancing students in their recital. It was only a league distant, less than an hour's ride through countryside I knew well.
My father grunted his approval without looking up from his mutton, clearly filing this under "women's business" and therefore beneath his notice. My brothers were less charitable.
"Truth dancing?" Corrin laughed, the sound sharp. "Isn't that what the court ladies do?"
Aldwin's contribution was a knowing smirk. "Mother's going to turn little El into a proper lady after all."
The heat rising in my cheeks was cut short by my mother's swift and chilling response.
"Your brother will learn an art that has graced the finest courts for centuries," she said, her voice cold as winter stones. "Perhaps if you took a few lessons, Aldwin, you might inspire something other than complaints from your dancing partners."
The barb found its mark: Aldwin's face reddened, and he returned to his meal in sullen silence. Corrin likewise shrank into his seat like an Arthis flower disturbed. "Besides," my mother continued with satisfied precision, "I hear the emperor himself still considers it high art; the capital harvest festival always ends with a demonstration from the empire's best dancers."
My brothers should both be forgiven–posturing and criticism being characteristic marks of their age. I learned that truth dancing in the modern era was considered a feminine pursuit, the domain of ladies of breeding who possessed both the leisure and the refinement to master it.
When we arrived at Whinn's school the next afternoon, we were greeted by the woman herself: someone who seemed to exist in cheerful defiance of time's usual arithmetic. Her hair was silver as moonlight, and her face bore the smile lines of perhaps sixty summers, but she moved with the grace of someone half her age. Dancing, I would learn, had a way of keeping you young.
"Lady deArthis," she said, offering a curtsy that managed to be both properly deferential and warmly welcoming. "And this must be young Master Elenden. Please, do come in."
The classroom had once been a tavern's common room: I could tell by the way the wooden floors were worn smooth by countless feet, by the generous windows that would have welcomed weary travelers, and by the sturdy bones of a space built for gathering and storytelling. But where once there might have been tables laden with bread and ale, now there was simply open space, bordered by a few wooden benches for observers.
As Whinn introduced us to her small class–long familiar with navigating between nobility and townsfolk–I found myself studying the students like a scout surveying unfamiliar territory. Four girls, all older than myself, ranging from perhaps ten to fifteen. All seemed delighted to have an audience, standing a little straighter, smiling a little brighter.
"Wind Over The Hills!" Whinn called, settling beside us to watch, and the dancers swept their arms in graceful arcs above their heads. Their movements flowed from one to the next like water finding its course: "Water over the fall! Keep your hands parallel, Jeanne—yes, much better. Now slide together and... roll sharply down! Good!"
I watched, transfixed despite myself, as they moved through their exercises. Each movement had a name that spoke to the wild places I knew: "Mist Rising From The Valley," "Sunlight Through Leaves," "Stone Standing Against The Storm." The vocabulary of earth, sky, and weather made into something you could see in the movement—something you could become.
And yet, compared to my memory of that wild girl dancing in the heather, this seemed somehow... diminished. Like a song played on muted strings. The movements were precise, certainly, and doubtless correct according to whatever rules governed such things, but they lacked the fierce joy that had made my friend seem like part of the landscape itself, like she was dancing not about the wind but with it.
Still, my mother nodded and clapped at appropriate moments, clearly seeing virtues I had yet to develop the sophistication to appreciate. And when Whinn called for the class to break and the girls began tidying their practice space, she approached the instructor ready to commence negotiations.
"We would like Elen to learn truth dancing," she announced without preamble. "It runs in the family line." Her glance down at me carried both pride and conspiracy, as if we were sharing some delightful secret that the rest of the world had yet to discover.
Whinn studied me like someone appraising a young horse: not unkindly, but with a practical eye toward potential and temperament. Perhaps she needed the coin, or perhaps she was simply wise enough to recognize that refusing a deArthis request would be more trouble than accommodating one. After a moment's consideration, she smiled.
"When shall we begin?"
But my mother wasn't finished establishing the terms of our arrangement. In language that left no room for misunderstanding, she made it clear that I was not to be touched: not for correction, not for guidance, not for any reason whatsoever. This peculiar restriction was delivered with the kind of pleasant firmness that made it sound like a reasonable request.
Whinn accepted this eccentricity with bemused resignation–someone who had learned that noble families came with their own particular ways of moving through the world. After a brief discussion of scheduling and fees, it was determined that I could begin the following Twosday.
The rhythm felt strange at first: Whinn's school operated according to the old calendar, following a traditional seven-day week rather than the Empire's ten-day cycles. So I would attend lessons perhaps four or five days out of every imperial ten, walking the familiar path to Cobb through countryside that changed with the seasons like pages in a book.
My mother was delighted with this arrangement. I had something constructive to occupy my restless energy that she could mention with pride when her ladies came for afternoon tea. And I had something else: purpose. On the days between lessons, I danced alone on the moors, dancing with wind and rain and the memory of wild joy, trying to bridge the gap between Whinn's careful instruction and that glimpse of truth I'd witnessed dancing in the heather.
That first autumn and winter of learning passed like a dream of humility, determination, movement, and growing strength. My body learned balance, grace, and how to hold shapes that had names like poetry. I began to understand that truth dancing was first about listening, really understanding, what the world was already saying, then learning to speak that same language with movement instead of words.
But it wasn't until winter's end, when the first green shoots began pushing through the last of the snow, that I truly understood what my wild friend's father had meant about dancing with truth instead of just watching it.
It happened during a lesson when Whinn was teaching us "Spring's First Breath," a flowing sequence that began low and close to the earth, then gradually rose like sap climbing toward sunlight. I had been struggling with the transition between "Root Deep" and "Reach High," my movements feeling clumsy and disconnected, when suddenly something shifted.
I stopped thinking about the steps, stopped worrying about whether my arms were at the proper angle or my feet in the correct position. Instead, I let myself remember: the feeling of new grass beneath bare feet, the way the wind carried the scent of warming earth, the sound of snow melting into a thousand tiny streams. I became not someone performing movements called spring, but spring itself, rising and stretching and celebrating the return of life to the world.
When the sequence ended and I opened my eyes, I found Whinn watching me with something that might have been recognition.
"Yes," she said quietly, almost to herself, as she extended her index finger to point at me.
I felt it: the difference between dancing about truth and dancing it. Between performing movements and becoming them. Between moving with the wind and letting the wind move through you.
Something about that moment changed everything in Whinn: what had been instruction became insistence. She was unwilling to let any movement be a mockery. "You're not dancing the TRUTH!" she would often say in exasperation. It created a strange paradox: the harder I tried, the worse I became. From that moment on, my progress came only through listening.
Speaking of which, I shouldn't wonder if dinner has arrived.
Merauve raised an eyebrow but rose all the same, crossing to the door. The knocking came only a moment later, almost apologetic.
"Open," he commanded before the second knock could fall, clearly startling whoever waited beyond as there came a crashing sound–bumping into the serving cart, most likely–before the outside bolt slid away with its familiar scrape.
The first meal had been a disaster of distraction that Merauve was eager to remedy.
"I'll bring it in myself," he began, then paused as a better idea materialized. "Actually," he said, examining the covered dishes with theatrical consideration, "you may dispose of these two and clear out. I need to attend to some business, and I'll serve this one myself upon my return."
He didn't wait for compliance, but strode down the keep's corridor, boots clicking against stone in a rhythm that spoke of control reasserted. Let the cursed man sit alone in his corner for a bit. He would not permit Elenden to handle both topic and timing.
His initial delight at this clever twist seemed to shrink with each step he put between himself and that unsettling tower room. Yet paradoxically, his clarity of mind grew. The physical distance allowed him to think without those sea-blue eyes tracking his every reaction, without that maddening sense that Elenden was reading some promptbook to the script Merauve hadn't been given.
Besides, if he was being honest, and the irony of that phrase didn't escape him, he needed to use the privy. Even Inquisitors were subject to the basic demands of flesh.
The small rebellion felt childish even as he savored it. I control the pace. I decide when we resume. I am conducting this interrogation, not becoming audience to some wandering minstrel's performance.
By the time he had attended to his needs, splashed cold water on his face, and composed himself in the mirror, his satisfaction had cooled into something closer to unease. What exactly was he accomplishing with this theatrical departure? Demonstrating authority to whom, the walls? Playing at petty power games with a man who seemed utterly unbothered by torture?
When he returned to the tower room, tray balanced with careful precision, he found his small victory turned to ash.
Elenden was no longer seated at their table by the window. Instead, he lay curled beside the narrow bed, on the floor, breathing with the deep rhythm of genuine sleep. Not the restless unconsciousness of exhaustion or the careful stillness of someone feigning rest, but the profound peace of someone who had simply decided it was time to sleep and done so with the same unhurried certainty he brought to everything else. Of the bedding, he had requisitioned only a pillow.
Merauve stood in the doorway, holding a tray of cold food, feeling like an actor who had missed his cue. The carefully planned return, the subtle reassertion of control, the opportunity to guide their conversation back toward useful channels: all of it rendered meaningless by a man taking a nap. On the floor.
Should he wake him? Leave the food? The very fact that he was standing here uncertain, made heat rise in his cheeks. When had he become so... reactive?
He set the tray on the table with perhaps more force than necessary, the crockery singing a brief protest. Elenden didn't stir. Even unconscious, the man radiated that same infuriating tranquility, as if sleep were just another named step of truth-dancing. Maybe it is—his mind grumbled.
Merauve left without a word, pulling the door shut and nodding to the guards.
Back in his own chambers, Merauve spread his collected materials across the writing desk like a general deploying forces. Maps, genealogical charts, intelligence briefs, the more... refined... tools of his trade. If he could not control the flow of confession, he could at least organize what was happening to prepare for what might come.
He drew out fresh parchment and began composing requisition letters. First, to the Imperial Records Office regarding the current status of the deArthis holdings. Were the estates still intact? Had the family line survived the various purges and consolidations of recent years? Such information might prove useful leverage.
Second, to the provincial intelligence network. The girl by the pool, Elenden had been careful not to name her, hadn't he? That omission felt deliberate, protective. The traveling folk, too, deserved investigation. They had a way of leaving traces for those who knew how to look.
As he wrote, the afternoon's revelations settled in Merauve's mind with growing unease. The death prediction about the serving girl Maudy's mother... This was a verifiable claim as well. He penned a missive to the Major accordingly: a short leave of absence granted with the grace of the empire, under the expectation that she must report back on her mother's health.
He set down his quill and reached for the small leather journal where he recorded his observations. The pages fell open to his notes from Onesday, revealing his own handwritten assessment: Subject displays unprecedented resistance to conventional methods. Recommend alternative approach.
Carefully, he began documenting the day's events, paying particular attention to Elenden's mannerisms, his choice of details, the rhythm of revelation and concealment that seemed to govern his storytelling. If this was manipulation then understanding its mechanics might provide the key to turning it to imperial advantage.
It felt like transcribing a confession. And if so, what exactly was being confessed?
He closed the journal and moved to his calendar, running his finger down the carefully marked days. Twenty-six. Twenty-six days until High Inquisitor Sirius would expect results. Twenty-six days to extract the location of the Fire Monastery from a man who seemed to inhabit some realm beyond conventional pressure.
Merauve leaned back in his chair, tobacco pouch already in hand. Perhaps patience was indeed the correct strategy. Let Elenden spin his tales of childhood and dancing lessons. Let him grow comfortable, attached to the luxury of storytelling and proper meals. Memory was a maze, and every maze had a center. Somewhere in the wandering paths of this man's history lay the secret the Empire demanded.
And if the stories proved true, if Elenden could indeed glimpse futures and speak with mysterious spirits, well, that would present opportunities of its own for Merauve, wouldn't it?
The tobacco caught flame, and Merauve drew deeply, letting the familiar ritual calm his racing thoughts. Time was on his side. He could afford to play biographer for now.