Chapter 1: The Spare.
The mirror was the only place Elian allowed himself to be honest.
It was small—cracked in one corner from an accident he’d never bothered explaining to anyone—propped against the windowsill where the morning light hit it best.
He’d angled it there years ago and never moved it since, the way you never move furniture that’s finally in the right place.
He’d been up since before the servants, which wasn’t unusual.
What was unusual, what he’d never admit to a living soul, was what he did with the extra hour.
Today it was his hair—he’d been growing it out in secret for months, hiding the length under a tie and a collar that rode a little higher than fashion strictly demanded, and this morning he’d finally let it down to see what it looked like loose.
It was longer than he’d expected. He turned his head, watched the glossy black strands catch the light, and felt something in his chest unclench that he hadn’t realized was clenched.
He looked, for lack of a better word, right.
Like himself.
Which was exactly the problem, because a knock landed on his door four seconds later and he nearly broke his own wrist shoving a hairpin back in.
"Elian." Roderic’s voice, muffled through the wood, entirely too cheerful for this hour.
"You up?"
"No."
He was already retying his collar when he answered, higher, tighter, the version of himself that didn’t invite questions.
By the time the door opened he looked like exactly what he was supposed to look like—unremarkable, tidy, forgettable.
The kind of face nobody wrote sonnets or poems about, which was, in Valcourt terms, a compliment.
Roderic leaned against the doorframe with the easy confidence of a man who’d never once had to wonder what he was allowed to be. Golden hair, straight spine, the sort of jaw that looked deliberate even though he’d done nothing to earn it besides being born first.
"Father wants us both at breakfast. Full formal."
"It’s Tuesday."
"It’s the Tuesday."
Roderic said it like that explained anything.
When Elian’s face stayed blank, he sighed with the specific patience of an older brother explaining something for the third time.
"The Attempt, El. It’s this week. Father wants to go over the arrangements before the relatives descend."
Right.
That.
Elian had known it was coming, everyone in the house had known for a month, ever since the invitations started going out to cousins nobody liked.
But knowing a thing was coming and being emotionally prepared for it were... he was learning, two entirely separate skills, and he only seemed to be possession of one of them.
"I could break my arm," he offered with a nervous smile. "Accidentally. This morning... Very tragic."
"You say that every year." Roderick sighed, still smiling.
"And every year it’s still on the table."
Roderic laughed, and it wasn’t unkind, which somehow made it worse.
His brother didn’t tease him out of cruelty. He teased him the way you’d tease someone you genuinely liked and didn’t think needed protecting—which translated to the fact that he had no idea there was anything to protect against.
As far as Roderic was concerned, the Attempt was a formality his little brother found mildly embarrassing, the way some people didn’t like public speaking.
It was not a six-generation family tradition that was about to, once again, very publicly document exactly how little Elian had to offer.
"You’ll be fine,"
Roderic said, straightening off the doorframe.
"Nobody actually expects anything. It’s tradition, not a test."
"It’s absolutely a test." Elian insisted.
"It’s a test everyone already knows the answer to. That’s different."
He said it kindly.
It did not feel kind.
"Fifteen minutes. Father’s counting the silverware himself, so don’t be late."
The door shut.
And Elian sat very still for a long moment, then looked back at the mirror, at the collar he’d tightened, at the pin holding back a length of hair nobody in this house had ever seen.
He thought, not for the first time, that there ought to be a word for the specific exhaustion of performing ’fine’ for people who loved you and would never once think to ask if you were.
There wasn’t. He got dressed anyway.
Breakfast was, as promised, formal. Which in the Valcourt household meant the good chairs came out and nobody was allowed to actually enjoy the food, since it was all about the politics and not about the eating.
Lord Edric Valcourt sat at the head of the table reviewing a ledger for the function with a specific kind of grim focus that you could only see from military generals looking at battle plans.
Because to him, this essentially was one.
The Attempt drew extended family, minor nobility, and the occasional academic scouts looking to spot talent early.
Every guest was, in his father’s words, a unknown variable.
And every variable was potential threat, boon, embarrassment, and so on to things that Elian couldn’t bother remembering..
"Roderic, you will demonstrate a sequence beforehand, to open the evening properly,"
His father was saying, mostly to himself.
"You’ll be doing something impressive, but not so impressive it looks like showing off. Elian—"
His eyes flicked up, brief, assessing, already moving on before they’d finished landing.
"You’ll simply need to be presentable. No one expects the Attempt itself to go anywhere. It never has, so don’t waste your energy worrying about it."
"Comforting," Elian said, to his eggs mostly.
"It’s not meant as an insult."
His father actually looked at him then.
"It’s six generations of precedent, not a judgment on you specifically Elian. The Attempt has never once worked in two hundred years, no one expects it to work now either."
That was, Elian had come to understand, the particular cruelty of it.
Nobody in this house had ever judged him for failing to open the Everbloom Staff, because nobody expected him to succeed in the first place.
He’d been quietly written off before he’d even had the chance to disappoint anyone, filed under the same shelf as his great-uncle and his great-great-grandmother and every other Valcourt who’d stood in that vault, touched that staff, and felt nothing happen.
It should have been a relief, having the bar set so low nobody would notice if he tripped over it.
It was not a relief somehow.
And with each passing day, it only felt more like so.
He could not have explained why, not even to himself, not fully anyways.
Except the fact that some small, quiet, deeply inconvenient part of him kept wondering what it would feel like to hold something and have it actually see him, rather than the collar and the careful haircut and the version of his face he’d built specifically to be forgettable.
He shoved the thought down along with a mouthful of eggs, knowing that thoughts like that didn’t survive contact with the breakfast table, especially when his father was sitting with him.
"I’ve asked Magistrate Fenwick to officiate,"
His father continued, back to the ledger,
"Given the family’s history with the relic, best to keep the actual attempt brief. In and out, no one needs to watch you stand there for ten minutes."
"Wonderful," Elian said. "A vote of confidence."
"It’s a mercy," his father said, without looking up, and did not seem to register that those were, in this particular case, the same thing.
He spent the afternoon in the east practice yard, mostly because it was the one place in the house nobody bothered watching him.
He closed his eyes and tried to conjure a simple elemental discharge.
Conventional casting had never come easily to him—not because he lacked the aptitude, his tutors had assured him of that much, but because every drill demanded a kind of forceful, declarative willing that never quite sat right in his hands.
Hold the shape, he recalled.
Push the intent. Command the working, shape it into your goal with your will.
He could do it, technically.
It simply came out muted every time, like a voice speaking through a wall, and no one—least of all Elian—had ever quite worked out why.
He tried it now, a simple flame-form, hands cupped, will pushed forward the way six different tutors had drilled into him.
The spark caught, guttered, and died before it found any real shape, same as always.
He didn’t even feel disappointed anymore.
It was just exhaustion, tired in the specific way of doing a thing badly so many times that the badness stopped surprising you.
"You’re forcing it again."
He didn’t need to turn around to know it was Nessa—the only member of the household staff who’d stopped calling him ’young master’ around age twelve and never gone back.
She was older than his mother would have been now, sharp-eyed, currently elbow-deep in the herb boxes that lined the yard’s east wall, not even looking at him.
"I’m doing it exactly the way I was taught."
"Mm." She didn’t glance up. "How’s that working out for you?"
"Wonderfully. Can’t you tell."
He let the dead spark fizzle out entirely and sat down hard on the low wall, suddenly aware of how tight his collar felt against his throat.
"It’s this week, you know. The Attempt."
"I know." Something in her voice softened, just slightly, just enough that he noticed.
"You nervous?"
He thought about the mirror. The hairpin. The version of his face he’d have to wear in front of forty or more relatives and several academy scouts and a Magistrate brought in specifically to make his inevitable failure go quickly.
"No,"
He said, in the tone of someone who very much was, and Nessa—wisely, kindly—let him have the lie.
***
The vault smelled the way it always had; old stone, older wood, a faint mineral note he’d never been able to place.
Family portraits lined the stairwell down, generations of Valcourts painted mid-triumph in whatever field they’d actually excelled at, none of them anywhere near this room.
This room was reserved for the one Valcourt tradition nobody painted portraits of anymore.
The hall above was full—he could hear it through the floor, the low murmuring hum of forty relatives making polite conversation over wine while they waited to watch him fail politely.
Roderic had already gone and come back, his perfomance drawing the appreciative applause it was always going to draw.
After all, it was only to polite to celebrate the genius of the actual heir.
Now it was simply a matter of the Magistrate’s dry, formal voice calling the next name, and the next, working down the list of eligible Valcourt sons toward the one nobody particularly expected anything from.
Which was Elian, because there were only two Valcourt children in the main family.
"Elian Valcourt," the Magistrate said, and the room’s murmur didn’t even fully quiet before he said it, because why would it need to.
He walked down into the vault.
The staff was already out, already resting on its dark velvet stand, exactly the way it looked every single year of his life—the same wood so black it seemed to eat the vault’s low light, the same shut cluster of pale crystal petals at its head, closed tight as a fist, closed the way they’d been closed for six generations, closed the way absolutely everyone present in this house had already decided they would remain.
Elian looked at it.
It did not, on the surface, look at him back.
Just get through it, he told himself, the same thing he told himself every year.
In, fail, out. Ten minutes at max, Father said. Less if you’re lucky.
He reached out, fingers closing around the old dark wood—and for one full second, nothing happened at all, exactly the way it never did.
Then something did.