On her left walked Lady Valerius, hair swept back, navy and immaculate, her sharp eyes finding Zaeryn at the chamber door before she had finished crossing the distance to him.

The three of them stopped a few paces away.

Lysara’s sharp, analytical eyes swept across the room, locking onto Zaeryn the instant she spotted him. A faint, almost imperceptible nod of approval crossed her features.

"You’re here. Good," Lysara said, her voice carrying that effortless, unquestioned military authority. She paused before the threshold, her gaze shifting to the two women who had escorted him. "Arya, Mireille. Thank you. You are dismissed to your postings."

"Understood, High Commander," Mireille responded. Without another word, the two turned on their heels and walked back down the corridor, their duties fulfilled.

Lysara turned to Zaeryn and didn’t linger. She stepped toward the grand entrance of her office, the biometric scanner flashing green before the massive doors slid apart, and strode directly inside.

Daphne crossed to him before the doors had finished opening. She slid a hand to the side of his neck and kissed him, brief and unhurried at the same time, certain of itself the way most things she did were certain.

When she drew back her hand stayed where it was a moment longer.

"Don’t keep the High Commander waiting," she said.

Zaeryn nodded. "What’s this about? Why did she call for me?"

"I can’t tell you that." She let her hand fall. "But, It’s nothing to worry about. You’ll see." Her eyes moved over his face once. "Come find me after you’re done with this and whatever else Lysara wants you to do."

"Sure," Zaeryn said.

They held each other’s gazes for a second longer. Satisfied with that, Zaeryn stepped back. He turned and walked through the open doors into the chamber.

Daphne watched him go, then turned and fell into step beside Lady Valerius, the two of them heading back the way they’d come.

They walked a few paces in silence before Valerius spoke.

"It hasn’t been very long since you met him," she said. Her eyes stayed ahead, on the corridor. "A matter of weeks. And yet, watching the two of you just now, a person could be forgiven for thinking you’d known each other half your lives."

Daphne looked at her and said nothing.

Valerius let the silence sit for a moment, then inclined her head slightly. "It’s only an observation."

★★★

Inside, the high commander’s chamber was wide and spare. The far wall was a single sheet of reinforced glass that looked out over the lower levels of the Citadel, the light through it the flat gray of late afternoon. Lysara had taken up position behind a broad desk of dark stone.

"Sit," she said to him.

Zaeryn took the chair across from her. She lowered herself into her own seat only after he had,, her hands folding on the desk.

She observed him.

She didn’t smile. But neither was her expression carved from stone or carry any type of look that would make him uneasy. She was just neutral and didn’t make him feel like she thought of him as a threat. It was something Zaeryn had noticed already but never thought of.

Out of everyone in the Citadel, Lysara was the only one who didn’t make him feel like an invasive species or a ticking time bomb.

Even Daphne hadn’t always been like that. She would never do anything to harm him now, but it hadn’t started that way. In the beginning she’d stood with Commander Thorne, both of them against him, both wanting him classified and contained.

Her change of heart had come later. With Lysara there had never been a turn to make. She had been the same from the first day to this one.

"How is the academy treating you," Lysara said.

"Better than I expected, honestly." He meant it. "It’s good."

"Good." She let that sit for a moment. "It’s reached me that you’ve already formed a bond. More than one, by what I’ve been told."

Zaeryn nodded. And he wasn’t surprised that she knew about his bonds. Of course it had reached her. Very little about him didn’t reach her, now that he was at the lyceum under her watch.

"Yes," Zaeryn said. "I have."

Lysara nodded, the way someone confirms a thing they’d already accounted for rather than learning it new. Her gray eyes stayed on him.

"Ingrid," she said. "Maelis’s daughter. She’s one of them."

"She is." Zaeryn said.

"What do you make of her?"

It wasn’t an idle question. Underneath the flat delivery she was measuring something. She wanted to know if Zaeryn actually saw his bondmates as more than just powerups. And Zaeryn took a moment before he answered.

"She’s difficult," he said. "In a way that’s a good thing. She won’t agree with you just to make a conversation easier, and she’d take a hit before she lets you see she was rattled." He thought about it. "But there’s nothing false in her. With Ingrid you always know where you stand, even when it’s on her bad side. That’s rarer here than it should be."

Lysara held his gaze. Whatever she made of the answer didn’t show.

"And Genevieve," she said.

Zaeryn answered that one, and Lysara listened the same way she listened to everything, taking it in without giving anything back. When he’d finished she sat with it a moment longer, then folded the subject away as cleanly as she’d opened it.

"That’s enough of that," she said, and the slight shift in her posture told him they’d reached the actual reason he was here. "I called you in to tell you what’s been decided. After speaking with princess Athea. Between us, we have concluded that the Lyceum and your estates poolside are no longer sufficient for your development."

Zaeryn waited. With Lysara there was always a second half.

"You already train at the academy, and I’m aware Mireille has been working with you," she went on. "That continues. But it isn’t enough for your situation, so you’ll have maximum-level clearance to the Citadel’s deep-ground training halls. You will no longer rely solely on general combat drills. You are being assigned a rotating roster of specialized, personal instructors. One master-level expert for every distinct ability you absorb. If you pull a new signature, we find a new specialist. We are going to isolate every piece of your mimicry and forge it into something lethal."

Zaeryn nodded. He liked this.

"You understand why," she said. It wasn’t quite a question. "A Warlady in training has one tier, and a single instructor can carry her from the bottom of her discipline to the top of it. That doesn’t hold for you. The signatures you’ve taken sit at different tiers and run on entirely different principles, and no one instructor has ever held all of them, because no one was ever meant to. Handing you to a single trainer would mean asking her to teach disciplines she’s never walked herself." She shook her head once. "A waste of your time and hers."

It made sense. More than that, it was the first time anyone in authority had treated his mimicry as a thing to be developed properly rather than a problem to be contained, and the difference landed somewhere he didn’t entirely expect.

"That’s good," he said, and meant it. Then something caught up with him. "Athea thought of that?"

"She did."

Zaeryn thought of that.