The table was already set with pallets of starters, exotic shellfish lightly seasoned, tiny pickled meat cuts, stuffed sardines, small bite-sized delicacies Alleria didn't recognise served on soft white bread soaked in olive oil and various spiced and steamed vegetables.

"So that was the famous Maddox Barnel?" Zalee said as Alleria all but collapsed into the chair next to her. The evening had only just begun and yet she felt she was ready to retire for the night.

"Charming fellow," Zalee continued, "No wonder everyone adores him to bits."

Which was to say, Barnel was not popular within the bureaucracy, though he was powerful in a way that mere dislike couldn't hinder. There were stories about him, how he beat the old Scholars at their own political game, how he helped the emperor be a true leader and not a mere figurehead.

"Aye, well, I can't make my own mind about him," Alleria replied.

"By the way. baby, you did well. But everyone's frightened of you now."

As soon as Zalee said those words, Alleria realised it was the truth. According to ceremony, this was when the imperial court fluttered from table to table, sharing food and wine and getting acquainted with the new and upcoming minds of the scholarly world. The other four members of the Paramount were spread out about the Hall each occupying their own table. Brightly dressed nobles and royalty crowded round them, but no one came to speak with her. She sighed, right now, that was fine with her.

Later it would be a problem.

"Survive the present. Later will have to take care of itself."

She shuddered, trying to push back the memory of Cassel. But it was vibrant and golden in her mind, threaded with aching ribbons of sadness. She tapped her finger over the white satin tablecloth before her. How would this evening have looked to her if she had still been a whole person and perfectly intact?

She sensed someone approaching from behind and looked up in time to see Lord Dagen sneaking up to her table. He eased himself into a chair across from her, rolling his eyes at his own table that was still surrounded by people.

"Miss Bellencreek, do you mind if I hide here for a bit?"

Seeing Dagen now was a welcome distraction from the pain that attacked her whenever she allowed her mind to wander. "Won't you be missed, your lordship?" she asked.

"My brother, Samson, is occupying their full attention — for now." He leaned across the table, examining her in a way that was entirely inappropriate. Alleria sank back into her chair, her face flushing.

He didn't seem to care about her discomfort, his expression darkening and his lips pursing together. He pressed his knuckles to his mouth and for a very brief moment, he seemed translucently white, almost glowing. Alleria could have sworn that while her eyes saw only a man sitting before her, something else inside her saw something else besides Salem Dagen.

And whatever it was, it was big, mountainous, making the large hall around it shrink in comparison.

Reacting instinctively, Alleria slipped out from her seat and took several steps back. Dagen shot to his feet, his hand reaching out for her in a gesture that was meant to be reassuring. Aside from being flushed, his face now was normal. Whatever she had just glimpsed was safely hidden away. "I apologise, Miss Bellencreek, I didn't mean to startle you."

She blinked at him in silence. She wanted to ask him what he was. But she couldn't, not here. "Are you my friend?" she whispered the question.

"Yes," he answered immediately. His gaze flashed toward Zalee and back to her. Alleria too looked to see what her escort was doing and was surprised to find Zalee nonchalantly nibbling on a piece of bread.

"You can trust the Dagen," she said with her mouth full and without looking at Alleria. "He's harmless."

Dagen resumed his seat with very little ceremony, straightening out the jacket of his light-blue suit. "I wouldn't say I'm harmless. At least, not to my enemies."

"You mean, they can't tell on their own?" Zalee retorted.

Alleria couldn't bring herself to smile but she edged back to the table and gingerly sat down. "I would like either one of you to tell me what's going on," she said as sweetly as she could.

"This is hardly the place —" Zalee began.

"Not now." Alleria eyed Dagen. He nodded, but there was something in his brown eyes that told her she would have a hard time extorting the information out of him.

The three of them watched the hall in awkward silence. Dagen had been right to try and hide here, Alleria realised. The gathered nobility, royalty and Scholars seemed to be incapable of spotting her corner of the hall. She knew that if they so much as made eye-contact, etiquette would dictate that they were obligated to approach and make conversation. They were mortally afraid of coming across as uncouth, so they therefore ignored her entirely.

Dagen cleared his throat. "Miss Bellencreek," he said, rapping his fingers against the tabletop. "Do you need anything? Have you eaten?"

Alleria looked at the table before her laden with enough food and drink to feed her entire village for a whole month. "I beg your pardon, your lordship?"

He scratched the side of his nose and suddenly found the feathers floating overhead dreadfully fascinating. "I heard about... about... well, I was outraged to hear about... And worried too..." He trailed off, before looking at her. "Anyway, glad you're alright and that your own assessment of yourself proved to be false. I guess for the time being, between the two of us, I'm a better judge of character and was right all along."

For the smartest man to take the Exams, Dagen sure knew how to sound like a stuttering fool. She was half-tempted to point that out. "If I didn't know any better, my lord, I could have sworn you were bragging," she said innocently.

Dagen flashed his bright, white smile. "Was I? Possibly making a habit of it now that I'm top of the lot."

"You wouldn't be the first to make a habit of it, my lord."

"You should try it. It's rather fun."

"Bragging? I bet it is."

"I meant being first, being on the top." Dagen's expression grew serious and Alleria wasn't sure she liked where this conversation was going. Was this a challenge of some kind? Was Dagen yet another wolf come in a misleading guise?

Self-conscious and worried, Alleria lowered her gaze before she remembered herself and lifted her chin, looking Count Dagen's fourth and favourite son in the eye. "If I'll be first, where will you be?"

He smiled, clearly reading the things that Alleria wasn't saying. "I'll be right behind you, probably eating your dust. To have come this far, this young, you must know what it means, Miss Bellencreek."

Her heart hammered in her chest, she couldn't meet his gaze. Yes, she knew. She thought about many things, sometimes even that. She could see her mind as a tool, a thing that served her. Right now her cognitive abilities put her on par with the wisest people in the empire. But she had not reached the peak of her potential, not yet. She was still growing, and had much developing to do.

"Only a fool wouldn't see and acknowledge what you are and what you will become," he continued, lowering his voice so that it would reach only her ears. "And I often like to think that I'm not a fool."

"Aren't you worried, then? Aren't you afraid?" It was a reasonable question to ask. Now she was young, controllable. But what would happen later? She could become a force to be reckoned with.

"Worried? Afraid?" He shook his head. "I'm thrilled." Dagen's eyes gleamed and his smile widened, the dimples in his cheeks growing deeper. "What you have to understand about me, Miss Bellencreek, is that I'm a sentimentalist," he explained growing quite animated. In that sense he wasn't different from other important men. He loved talking about himself. "I grow very fond and attached to ideas when they have a certain... beauty to them. It's often my downfall and my blind-spot. But it's also why I love poetry. It's why I'm rather fond of the idea that is you."

"You're fond of me as an idea?" It was hard to decide whether this was a compliment or an insult. Dagen had just expressed a fondness towards a component of her being, but in the same instant that reduced her to nothing but that one component. "Lord Dagen, you're a flowery speaker? I never knew." Alleria surprised even herself with the touch of sarcasm in her words.

"Only when faced with a marvellous anomaly," he replied, his tone low but at the same time bright.

"I'd tell you two to get a room," Zalee butted in, "but I'm not sure what exactly you're going on about."

Alleria pressed her lips together trying not to frown. If Dagen's maybe-compliments hadn't been on the verge of being insults she would have thought that this was flirting. She was firmly of the mind that she was too young to be partaking in such a practice with a fully-grown man, even if it was dangerously easy for her.

She wondered if someday she'd become a social snake like the rest of the people that frequented these types of events. Would saying the appropriate words come to her like a second nature, so that with a few well-arranged phrases she'd be subtle and devious, obtaining her status through polite backstabbing and the gentle shaming of others?

Would she ever manage to remain Alleria, or was she going to become one with this crowd? Had she lost herself already?

"It's good to know I have a friend in you, my lord," she said earnestly but also morosely.

He knit his brow at her tone and raised his hand, hesitating for a moment before patting the back of her palm quickly and lightly and then pulling away. "I'm glad to have met you. I have no words of comfort to offer, I doubt it will be easy. But I know it will be worth it."

She knew she was blushing. Lord Dagen was, in fact, quite handsome and she was suddenly overwhelmingly conscious of this. He also had a smell that felt familiar. It was no perfume or cologne, just his natural fragrance, a little bit like the way cedar trees smell after it rains.

She looked up in time to see someone else approaching their table, a man with an angular face and wavy brown hair that was doubtlessly Salem Dagen's older brother, Samson.

"I should have known," he said, his voice was deeper and scratcher than his younger brother's. He also wore on his face a disgusted scowl. "Your next conquest, I presume? Is no child safe these days?"

"I wasn't —" Salem Dagen began defensively.

"Save it for someone who doesn't know what you're about," his brother cut him off. He then turned to Alleria, frowning. "Don't be blinded by my fool of a brother, young lady, he loses himself at the sight of a skirt and pair of legs."

Alleria rose to her feet, which in turn made Dagen spring up to his. She bowed clumsily at Samson. "I assure you, my Lord, this is a misunderstanding," she said, pronouncing the words as best she could without betraying her accent. It was surprising how clearly, she could now imitate the city dialect. She had sworn she'd never speak this way, but here she was, easily discarding her own resolutions for the sake of appealing to the person she was speaking with. "We were merely conducting a scholarly debate."

From the corner of her eye, she saw Salem Dagen shoot her a surprised look behind his brother's back. She had just lied effortlessly and convincingly. "A scholarly debate?" asked Samson. "Is that what it's called these days?"

Alleria blinked her wide eyes and then nodded, purposefully missing the sarcasm. "Oh yes, we were discussing the addition of the Helmich equations into the Calendrical Algorithm. As you know, this new development was found to have a few abstractions while tested on previous years, but regardless of that we await the next Year Day solar eclipse to witness whether it delivers the promised accuracy. This has the potential of stabilising the economy for many years to come. It's very exciting."

Samson gaped at her as Salem Dagen suddenly had to cough to hide an onslaught of laughter. "Right, right, read that in the paper this morning," Samson said trying for an air of self-importance that could hide his previous accusations. She could tell it unnerved and annoyed him to have someone so many years younger than him sound so much more sophisticated. "Very exciting development. They say that if there will be another mistake on the estimated length of the year we're likely to fall into recession."

The length of the year was the biggest crisis of the world. The four seasons could occur in a year that was anywhere between 294 to 457 days long. There was no clear consistency in year length, no logic. The only thing that marked the ending of one year and the beginning of the next was a solar eclipse that happened at the end of every summer.

Ever since the agricultural revolution thousands of years ago, the prediction of the year's length had been the prime obsession of man-kind. As the world moved into the post-modern era, science had finally yielded the Calendrical Algorithm, capable of predicting the year to the day, if not the hour.

It had held well for hundreds of years, the world flourished over the stability of the calendar. There were occasionally a number of small deviations, but in essence the system worked.

In the past decade, however, the deviations had become more and more dramatic and the economy and all of society had suffered greatly due to this. Economists predicted that one more drastic deviation and the chaos unleashed on the world would be terrible. An economic depression so severe it could lead to the collapse of all social structures bringing about anarchy.

"Did someone mention the Calendrical Algorithm?" A group of brightly-dressed nobles gravitated towards them, each one sporting more frills and colours than the next. The speaker was a woman with black hair and a long green evening dress. There were green gems woven into her hair and at her throat she wore a heavy golden pendant shaped like a six-pointed star. House of Morway, Alleria noted, richest in the empire.

The nobles that came were mostly women, all eying the two Dagens hungrily. Alleria remembered that Count Dagen refused to allow any of his sons to marry until Salem Dagen, his favourite and heir, would find an appropriate bride.

That explained much of Samson's ire.

"I never knew you were interested in science, Samson," continued the black-haired woman. "The matter of the calendar has always been such a fascination to me, ever since I was a child. You see, I was born on the 32nd of the month of Sol, so my birthday happens only when the year is longer."

"That means this year will be your third birthday even though the year you were born in was 27 years ago," Alleria said, smiling. She allowed childish wonder to appear on her face.

The noblewoman laughed delightedly. "How did you know?"

"When I saw you, I could only tell you were in your twenties. In the past thirty years there had only been one instance of a full Sol month, in year 25.Nerus.IV. Since then, four years ago you celebrated your second birthday in year 15.Tarris, and in two months would be your third."

"Oh, Lady Erna, I had no idea you were underage," teased a pretty blonde noblewoman at her side in a dress that looked like a gauzy maroon window-curtain held up by countless brass buttons.

Lady Erna Morway laughed and broke away from the group to examine Alleria closely. "You know, I can't imagine why people were saying such horrible things about you. I think you're absolutely spectacular." She took Alleria's hand. "Would it be too forward of me to invite you to my birthday, Scholar Bellencreek? I like you."

It was probably part of some game and Lady Morway was playing her for a fool. Yet Alleria was still moved by the gesture, by the daring way Lady Morway pushed forward. Whatever her will and intentions were, Alleria was now curious about this woman. "I would be delighted, my lady."

Lady Morway squeezed her hand before letting it go, she looked into Alleria's eyes from under long, dark lashes. "I'll send an invitation through your patron, then, my dear."

Laughter fluttered among the group and the talk soon moved on to birthdays and the upcoming Year-Day celebrations when the solar eclipse would take place.

Alleria met Dagen's gaze for but a moment in between bouts of conversation. He conveyed his thanks to her with the briefest of smiles before looking away. She wondered if what Samson was implying was true. Was Dagen prone to chasing skirts? She noted how he seemed to know how to sell compliments to each of the women he conversed with, looking at them as if they were the very centre of the world.

She wasn't accustomed to men like him, she had to watch herself around him.

But that was fine, Alleria had to watch herself around just about everyone.

Afterwards, dinner was served. Alleria tasted baked quail that melted on her tongue, cooked sea bream and roasted lamb. Zalee made her sample red wine, which caused her to feel like her head was filled with cotton. Then, after countless other courses and conversations, all five of the Paramount were taken to a separate room off the hall where their photo was taken, together and each one separately. A closely scrutinised reporter in a smart black suit asked them a few polite questions.

When he reached Alleria, his plastic grin broadened. "Would it be alright if I described you as 'the innocent wide-eyed prodigy'?"

"Yessir."

Breathing down his neck was the silken-haired woman in the golden dress who had greeted them earlier at the edge of the emerald carpet. She was still holding her clipboard and watched them all with an eagle's glare.

"What do you make of the imperial palace, Miss?" asked the reporter.

"It's marvellous, sir. I'm at awe from everything."

"At awe. Perfect." He wrote her answer down in his small notepad. "Have you decided on a subject for your research project for the next academic year?"

It was a reasonable question to ask. The whole purpose of the four years a Scholar spent in the High Academy was research. Of course, all Scholars were required to continue to expand their knowledge and for that there were competitive exams every half-year. But the research presented after a year and a half at the Academy was the pinnacle of a new Scholar's career — or their downfall. The ranks of Scholars weren't fixed in stone, they changed mildly with every half-year exam. But the presentation of the research was where the lower ranked Scholars could claw their way up, even into the Paramount.

Every person admitted into the Academy would be hard at work on this from the moment they dropped their pen after the Exams.

And Alleria hadn't, in fact, thought about it at all.

She was expected to. But she had been too busy being carved up by the Church. Her mind flailed, probing and latching onto the nearest subject and she pulled a blank. But then words violently pushed themselves from her mouth. "The Calendrical Algorithm, sir." What? No. She hadn't meant to say that.

Surprise rippled through the room, the other four of the Paramount turned to openly stare at her. The research subject should have beeb a safe bet, something that was not so heavily laden with direct influence on current events. It needed to be something she'd excel in enough to impress the Board of Scholars. Taking on a subject so important could be her demise.

And she couldn't back out now. She should have told him she was still considering various options. She had committed herself to her own ruin.

The reporter almostexploded with delight. "The girl tackles the dragon, who will come outvictorious?" he said as he wrote down her answer.