The Commission

There were two things Imara Sahel had wanted for eleven years, and the dreadful, unbearable, deeply inconvenient truth was that the court had just bundled both of them into the same envelope. The first thing she wanted was the appointment of Royal Spellwright. That was clean, that was honest, that was a want a person could be proud of. She had been the finest student of her academy year — finest, not second, whatever certain people liked to imply — and the post of Royal Spellwright had been empty for a season, and Imara had been waiting for the summons the way you wait for a tooth to stop aching. The summons had come. So far, so good. The second thing she wanted, and had wanted with equal force for eleven years, was for Davos Renn to fall down a well. Not die. She was not a monster. Just — fall down a well. A shallow one. Be retrieved, eventually, damp and humiliated and unable for once in his gilded life to make the retrieval look effortless and charming. Davos Renn had been the second-finest student of her academy year, and he had spent every one of the eleven years since making absolutely certain that nobody, least of all Imara, was allowed to forget the gap between first and second was, in his own insufferable phrase, "a rounding error." She unfolded the court's letter in the cold light of her workroom and read it, and read it again, and then she sat down rather suddenly on her own worktable among the salt-jars. The Crown is pleased to commission Spellwright Imara Sahel and Spellwright Davos Renn, jointly, to the warding of the Northwatch Tower against the coming winter storms. The appointment of Royal Spellwright shall be conferred, at winter's end, upon whichever of the two demonstrates the superior craft. You are to depart together within the week. Together. Within the week. To a tower. For a winter. Imara put her face in her hands. It was, she could admit even in that first flush of horror, a clever piece of court arithmetic. The Northwatch Tower genuinely needed warding; the storms genuinely came; and the court genuinely could not decide between its two best young spellwrights, so it had done the thing courts do, which was to make the two of them decide it for it, at length, in person, somewhere far enough away that the resulting unpleasantness would not embarrass anyone important. She would have a whole winter. A whole winter to be better than Davos Renn where the court could see it. After eleven years of rounding errors, the gap was finally going to be measured properly, in a fair contest, with the prize she had wanted her whole adult life on the table. She should have been delighted. She made herself sit there until she could locate the delight under the dread, and she did locate it, eventually, and it was real. She was good. She knew she was good. Let Davos Renn share a tower with her for a winter and he would learn, finally, in the worst possible way for him, exactly how good. There was a knock at her workroom door. A particular knock — two raps, a pause, a third, lazy and unhurried and entirely too pleased with itself — and Imara closed her eyes, because she knew that knock, she had hated that knock since she was nineteen years old. "It's open," she said, in the voice of a woman whose winter had just been decided for her. Davos Renn let himself in. He was tall, and irritatingly well-made, and he had snow melting in his dark hair because he never wore a hood, because wearing a hood would have meant admitting the weather had an opinion. He had his own copy of the court's letter in one gloved hand, and he was already, already, wearing the particular small smile that had launched eleven years of Imara's most detailed revenge fantasies. "Sahel," he said. "I see you've had the good news." "I've had a letter," Imara said. "I'm reserving judgement on the good." "A whole winter." Davos leaned against her doorframe, getting snowmelt on her doorframe, and the smile widened by exactly the increment calculated to be most maddening. "You, me, one tower, the appointment we've each wanted since we were children, and absolutely nobody else for a hundred miles to referee. Tell me honestly, Sahel." His eyes — and she hated, she truly hated, that she had never quite been able to decide what colour they were — caught hers across the cold little room. "Have you ever in your life been handed anything you wanted this badly that was this much of a trap?" And Imara opened her mouth to give him the cutting answer she had absolutely earned the right to give — and found, to her genuine alarm, that she did not have one.