Who Owns You?

The palace had always been silent.

That was not what frightened Sori.

Silence had been his first country.

He had known its shape before he knew the shape of his father’s face. People arrived for him first as motion. His mother’s bracelets flashing when she crossed a room. Barek’s shoulders creeping upward before he lied. Servants stepping into the edge of Sori’s vision before they approached. Tutors laying two fingers against the table to ask for his attention. Guards touching fist to chest, then opening the hand when they needed him to stop.

People who wanted something from the prince learned to stand where he could see them.

People who forgot learned quickly.

The palace had therefore never seemed quiet. It moved constantly. Hands. Cloth. Eyes. Fans. Birds hopping along parapets. Smoke leaning under a roof beam. Servants sliding screens. Ministers arranging their bodies before asking for money.

The world had always been full.

What frightened him now was how little of it moved for him.

Sori stood in the morning road beneath the eastern walls and watched people pretend not to see him.

A woman selling red onions turned her whole basket until her back faced him. A boy carrying two sloshing jars stopped so abruptly that the wooden yoke bounced against his shoulders. A donkey hauled sideways at its rope, eyes wide, mouth open.

Whatever sound it made belonged to everyone else.

Sori raised one hand.

The onion seller flinched. Sori stopped.

His hand was too large.

He had known that already. He had made it himself.

Five fingers now.

There had been six when he left Master Demba’s tower.

The sixth had fallen off somewhere near the dye market.

Sori looked down the road behind him. Red dust. Indigo runoff in the gutter. A cart axle leaving paired grooves through the damp. Two market boys pretending very badly not to watch him.

No finger. Good. Let somebody find it. Let the whole city wake to pieces of him.

The five that remained were not much better. Thick red-brown clay wrapped around reed and shaved wood. The smallest finger had been attached at a bad angle and leaned too far from the hand. One middle joint had split during the walk. His thumb sat slightly too high because he had shaped the palm in darkness and realized the error only after binding it.

He had considered fixing it.

Then his left knee began to crack.

Priorities.

Sori turned toward the eastern gate.

The palace wall rose pale gold above the road, thick at the base, smooth where generations of plasterers had repaired the rains. Indigo sun cloths stretched between the outer towers. Beneath them waited petitioners, scribes, guards, messengers, carts, two covered litters, and a line of people seeking permits for something Sori did not care about.

He had passed through that gate most days of his life.

Usually nobody stopped him.

Usually they saw him before he reached it.

A guard would straighten. Someone would clear the center path. An attendant would move half a pace ahead and make sure nobody approached from the wrong side. If Sori lifted one finger, the procession slowed. If he rolled two fingers inward, someone came near enough to read his hands. If he flattened his palm, mouths were supposed to stop moving at him, although hearing people forgot that instruction with remarkable persistence.

He had liked making them wait. He had liked the courtyard arranging itself around his attention even more.

Now no one arranged anything.

He stepped into the queue.

Three people immediately stepped out of it.

Sori watched them go.

Then he moved forward.

The man in front of him kept glancing back. His mouth moved. Sori ignored it.

He had ignored mouths his entire life. Why would anyone expect him to begin reading them now?

The man pointed toward the side of the road. Sori looked. Nothing.

The man pointed again, harder. Leave.

Sori lifted his chin.

The man stopped pointing.

That, at least, still worked sometimes. The line advanced.

His left knee shifted. Sori froze.

A hairline fracture opened across the outer edge of the joint. Fine clay dust whispered down his shin. He could not hear the fall, but he watched the powder collect on his foot.

He bent carefully and clamped both hands around the knee.

The clay was drying too quickly.

Of course it was.

He had mixed it in darkness with water from Demba’s washing basin and whatever straw he could tear from packing mats. He had used lamp oil where the binding wanted resin. He had taken two iron pins from a rack of unfinished hinges and hammered them through the joint with a stone because the real hammer had fallen beneath Demba’s desk and the body he had just built could not kneel far enough to reach it.

He had worked badly. The result had walked this far.

Sori pressed the crack closed and sent a pulse of magic downward.

The binding lines beneath the surface tightened. The knee held. Poorly.

A child in the queue stared.

Sori looked at him.

The child’s mother pulled him behind her skirts.

Monster.

Nobody signed the word. Nobody needed to. Sori straightened.

The gate was closer now.

And beneath the shade stood Captain Fado.

Relief struck so hard that Sori’s vision blurred. Fado.

Not a stranger. Not a market woman. Not some boy who knew only that a clay thing had walked out of the morning road.

Fado had guarded the palace since Sori was a child. Part of his left ear was missing from Manna Ford. He had a daughter who used to hide behind the prayer wall because the king’s beard frightened her. He limped when the weather changed, although Sori had never understood why anyone needed pain to predict rain when clouds were plainly visible. Fado knew him.

Sori stepped out of the queue.

A young guard crossed into his path.

Sori knew the face. He did not know the name.

That had rarely mattered before.

The guard lifted one hand.

Stop. Sori almost laughed.

He answered with the old household sign for move aside. Two fingers down. Wrist turned. Palm out.

The guard stared at his crude clay hand. Nothing. Sori repeated it. Still nothing.

Outer watch.

Of course.

Not all of them knew the household signs.

Sori pointed past him.

Fado had already seen.

Everything in the captain’s body changed.

His shoulders squared. His weight shifted off the bad leg. One hand moved two inches toward the spear at his side, stopped, then closed around it.

Sori’s relief died before Fado even drew the weapon.

The captain might have shouted. Sori would not have known. What mattered was the body: Fado began issuing commands before anyone else decided what to do.

Two guards moved the petitioners back.

A scribe scooped up his writing table and dragged it out of the center path.

One runner vanished beneath the gate.

The young guard in front of Sori lowered his spear point from vertical to ready. Fado approached alone. The other guards stayed where he had put them.

Sori held still.

Fado stopped several paces away and studied him from feet to face.

Sori had not made the face well.

That embarrassed him more than the broken knee.

The cheeks were uneven. The nose too broad because shaping cartilage from clay had seemed ridiculous when he had been working on the tower floor with no breath, no skin, no certainty that dawn would find him alive. He had believed he would need the body for an hour or two. Enough to reach the palace, put hands on Demba, and make the old man undo what he had done.

The eyes were polished black stones from a teaching tray. They worked.

Sori did not know why.

The mouth was a cut line.

He had added it last.

He had stared down at the unfinished clay head and realized with a kind of horror that people expected faces to have mouths.

So he had given himself one. It did nothing.

Fado’s gaze lingered on it.

Then the captain shifted the spear to one hand and signed.

His household signs were old-fashioned and too large, the way hearing adults signed to deaf children before learning better.

Who owns you?

Sori stared.

Fado’s eyes flicked over his face, checking comprehension.

He repeated the question more plainly.

Owner. Who?

Rage arrived cleanly.

Not the hot, useless kind that had carried Sori out of Demba’s tower.

This one had edges. Sori signed back.

Open the gate.

Fado stopped. His eyes narrowed. He glanced once toward the gate, then back at Sori.

Not the hand itself. That thing was an insult. Sori stepped closer.

The young guard leveled his spear.

Fado flicked two fingers without looking away from Sori.

The spear lowered half an inch.

Not enough. Sori signed again.

Open. Gate.

Fado watched him.

The captain’s expression shifted from alarm to something Sori knew much better.

Calculation.

Ministers wore that face when someone brought them a problem no office wanted jurisdiction over. Fado signed carefully.

Name?

Sori almost struck him.

Instead he pointed at himself and made the household sign for the heir. Closed fist at the heart. Thumb rising under the chin. Two fingers outward.

It was not ceremonial. It was practical, invented when Sori had been small enough that half the palace staff still called him Little Sun behind his back. Fado went still.

The young guard looked between them.

Sori signed his name.

Sori.

The movement hurt. His right wrist was beginning to split. Fado’s mouth moved. Sori ignored it.

The captain turned and issued a command. Sori saw its effect rather than heard it.

The petition line broke apart.

Two more guards came forward.

A second runner vanished inside.

A clerk who had been pretending to write turned his whole desk sideways so he could watch without seeming to.

Fado looked back at Sori. Sori signed.

Father.

No answer.

Take me to my father.

Fado glanced through the gate, then shook his head. Sori stepped forward.

All three spears lowered.

The points aimed at his chest. He stopped.

It took several seconds for the fact to become real.

Weapons.

At him.

His father’s guards.

At him.

Sori had seen palace guards threaten nobles. Petitioners. Drunks. A foreign envoy once, although everyone later pretended that had not happened.

Never him.

He looked at Fado and lifted both hands slowly.

Then he signed the captain’s daughter’s name.

Yani.

Fado’s eyes widened. Sori continued.

Prayer wall.

Beard.

He mimed a small child hiding.

Fado’s face lost color.

The young guard’s mouth moved rapidly.

Fado did not look at him.

Sori pointed toward Fado’s damaged leg and signed Manna Ford. Then he raised three fingers, folded two, and raised one. Three days requested. One granted.

He pointed to himself.

I changed it.

Fado stared.

Sori remembered the incident because he needed it. Yesterday he might not have remembered it at all.

Fado’s mother had died. Or his aunt. No. Mother. The petition had somehow reached Sori’s breakfast table, and Sori had overturned the leave refusal because the commander who denied it annoyed him. He had not done it for Fado.

Fado stepped backward. He did not look convinced. He looked more afraid.

The memories had not made the clay thing familiar. They had made it intimate. A monster with private memories.

Home stood twenty paces away under the gate shadow. Sori moved.

The spear point entered his chest.

Only half an inch. A warning thrust. Still.

Iron disappeared into his body.

Sori looked down at it. Pressure. No pain.

That was new too.

The young guard pulled back.

Sori looked at him.

The guard’s mouth opened.

Sori raised one hand.

The man recoiled so violently that Sori nearly forgot his rage.

He had meant enough.

His hand no longer meant what it used to. Nothing did. Sori lowered it.

Fado touched two fingers to his own eyes, then pointed at Sori.

Wait.

Sori hated waiting. He waited.

Fado did not relax. He shifted one guard to Sori’s left, another to his right. The center of Sori’s vision stayed open.

He still remembered that much.

That hurt more than the spear.

The gate remained open.

Beyond it lay the first courtyard. Bright plaster. Narrow water channels. Indigo shade cloth. The old tamarind tree leaning over the eastern walk.

Someone had moved the bench beneath it.

Sori stared at the tree.

He tried to smell breakfast. Nothing.

The realization arrived late.

His new body had no nose worth having.

Memory supplied the morning anyway. Millet porridge. Charred onion. Sesame oil. Bread warm enough to tear with fingertips. The bitter herb tea his father drank because the physicians said it was good for his liver.

For one moment, Sori stood at his own gate and remembered home so precisely that the world almost returned.

A runner came out of the palace.

He went directly to Fado and handed him a wax tablet. Fado read.

Then looked at Sori. The captain signed.

The prince is inside.

Sori stared.

Fado repeated it, slower.

Prince. Inside.

Sori’s hands fell to his sides.

The market moved around him. Cloth shifted. Sandals struck dust. A cart wheel jolted over a stone. A bird lifted from the wall. No sound.

Silence had never been empty before.

Now it was.

Fado signed again.

Returned before sunrise.

Then:

Master Demba dead.

There. The tower. The black floor. The circle.

His body standing upright while he lay nowhere. Demba’s hands shaking.

The old man’s face gray with effort.

Sori’s own face looking down at him. His own eyes. Not frightened. Not confused.

Old.

That had been the worst part.

His own face had looked old. Not in skin. In stillness.

The body had turned toward Demba. Demba had collapsed.

Sori had tried to move.

He had discovered he had no hands. No limbs. No breath. No skin.

Only awareness pressed into something unfinished on the teaching floor. A clay torso. A demonstration shell.

One of Demba’s practice forms.

The old magician had been teaching him with them for years.

Sori closed his stone eyes.

He remembered the first one.

He had been twelve.

He had hated clay.

Master Demba’s tower had no servants above the second floor.

That was the first reason Sori disliked it.

The second was that Demba made him carry his own materials.

At twelve, Sori considered both facts evidence that the royal magician had lost his mind.

He stood in the training room wearing a white tunic that had cost more than Demba’s entire wardrobe and looked down at a bucket of clay. Then at Demba.

Then at the bucket again.

Sori raised one finger.

An attendant stepped forward immediately.

Sori pointed at the bucket. The attendant bent.

Demba struck the floor with his staff. The attendant stopped.

Sori looked at Demba.

Demba pointed toward the stairs. The attendant hesitated.

Sori flicked two fingers.

Stay.

Demba pointed again.

Go.

The attendant looked miserable.

Sori stared at Demba. Demba stared back. Neither moved.

This was one of the few pleasures of lessons with the royal magician.

Demba did not fill silence simply because it existed.

Most hearing people did.

They moved their mouths endlessly and expected the world to accommodate the movement.

Demba had learned early that Sori did not care.

So the old magician used his hands.

Not palace signs exactly. Demba’s gestures were larger and sharper, stripped of court softness. Over years the two of them had built a private efficiency between household signs, workshop signals, fingerspelling, and inventions that made sense only because both of them remembered how they had begun.

Conversation with Demba felt less like translation than fencing.

Demba lifted one finger.

Your servant leaves.

Sori answered.

No.

Demba pointed to the bucket.

Then lesson ends.

Sori smiled.

He turned toward the attendant and signed Father, then complaint.

Demba raised his eyebrows.

Sori pointed at him.

Dismissed.

Demba nodded thoughtfully. Then sat down.

He folded his hands over his belly. And waited. Sori waited too. The attendant waited.

Sunlight shifted across the floor. Sori’s irritation rose.

He looked at the attendant.

The man immediately lowered his eyes.

Sori snapped his fingers.

He could not hear the sound, but the servant reacted. Good enough.

Sori pointed toward the stairs. Go. The attendant vanished. Demba smiled.

Sori hated the smile.

The old man pointed at the bucket.

Sori picked it up. Clay water spilled over his wrist. His face twisted. Demba’s shoulders shook with laughter.

Sori set the bucket down hard enough to splash his sandals. Demba laughed harder.

Sori pointed at him.

When I am king, you die first.

Demba wiped one eye and answered.

When you are king, I will already be dead.

Sori looked at the white beard. Fair.

He pointed to the clay.

Why?

Demba stood and drew a human shape in dust with the end of his staff. Head. Torso. Limbs.

Then he tapped Sori’s chest.

Body.

He pointed to the drawing.

Body.

A spiral inside the drawn chest.

Magic.

A second spiral above it.

Will.

He connected them.

Sori looked from the spiral in the drawn chest to the one above it and scowled.

I know anatomy.

Demba shook his head.

You know diagrams.

Sori narrowed his eyes.

Demba kicked the bucket gently toward him.

Build.

Sori looked at the clay. Then at Demba.

Servants build.

Demba’s expression flattened. Sori almost smiled.

Then Demba tapped Sori’s chest, pointed to the clay, and signed slowly enough that there could be no mistake.

Your rank cannot move either body for you.

Sori rolled his eyes.

Demba pointed at the clay again.

Build.

Sori knelt. He worked badly.

He resented every minute.

The legs were uneven. One arm drooped. The head leaned forward. When Sori tried to bind the structure, the thing stood for perhaps three heartbeats before collapsing sideways.

Sori glared at it. Demba watched him.

Sori pointed to the clay.

Bad material.

Demba’s mouth opened in another laugh Sori could not hear.

Then the old man crouched and pressed two fingers into the knee.

Too much clay behind the joint. He removed some.

Sori added it back.

Demba removed it again.

Sori slapped his hand away.

Demba slapped the back of Sori’s head. The prince froze. Demba waited. Sori turned slowly.

His attendants were gone.

No one had seen.

That somehow made it worse.

Sori lifted one hand.

Again and I tell Father.

Demba answered.

Tell him.

Sori stared.

Demba pointed at the construct.

Again.

Sori rebuilt the knee.

Demba adjusted his wrist and pressed Sori’s thumb into the joint, moving it through the intended bend. Weight. Movement. Resistance. Not strength alone. Sori understood.

He hated that too.

He thinned one side of the brace. Packed the other. Changed the angle of the inner reed. Pressed magic through the spiral Demba had made him carve into the chest. The construct stood.

Crooked.

Ugly.

Standing.

Sori forgot to be bored.

He moved one finger.

The clay figure raised its arm. Two fingers. It turned.

Sori looked at Demba.

The old magician nodded once.

Approval from Demba was irritatingly rare.

Sori looked back at the figure.

He improved the shoulders. Then the neck. Then the hands.

Demba tapped the blank head.

Enough.

Sori shook his head.

He began shaping a face. Eyes. Nose. Mouth. Demba signed.

Why?

Sori stared at him.

Because it was obvious.

He pointed to the construct.

Person.

Demba shook his head.

Tool.

Sori pressed the mouth deeper.

People have faces.

Demba’s hands stopped.

For several seconds the old man only looked at him.

Then he reached forward and smoothed one clay cheek with his thumb.

His expression had changed.

Sori did not understand it. Demba signed.

Again.

At the eastern gate ten years later, Sori opened his eyes.

Fado was still watching him.

The captain had no idea where Sori had gone.

Nobody ever did when memory took him.

In the old days an attendant would have touched Sori’s elbow to return his attention.

No one touched him now.

Fado pointed toward the gate and signed come.

Sori looked past him. The palace waited. He stepped forward.

The young guard raised his spear again.

Fado shoved it down.

The correction was so fast and irritated that Sori almost smiled. Not recognition. Not yet.

But the gate opened wider. That would do.

Inside the gate, everything became worse.

The courtyard had always belonged to Sori.

Not legally. Not symbolically. It had simply organized itself around him so consistently that he had mistaken habit for ownership.

Gardeners paused when he passed. Servants stepped to the edges of the walk. Petitioners looked up, lowered their eyes, then looked again once they thought he had gone by. A cook crossing between kitchens shifted a tray to one shoulder and bowed without stopping. Stable boys straightened. Clerks tucked loose papers beneath ledgers. Guards widened paths.

Sori had thought this was what palaces did.

Now the courtyard did nothing.

A gardener looked up, saw the clay figure, and left his shears in the dirt.

A kitchen boy flattened himself against a wall.

Two women carrying folded linen turned around entirely and took another corridor.

Nobody lowered their eyes out of respect.

They avoided looking because looking invited attention.

Sori understood that behavior too.

He had looked at dangerous dogs the same way.

Fado did not escort him farther than the gate. Of course not. A captain had a gate to run.

Instead he handed Sori to a broad-shouldered deputy from the inner watch. Sori recognized her face. Lieutenant Kessi’s deputy.

He could not remember her name.

That was becoming a pattern. Faces came easily. Names did not.

He had never needed names as often as other people did. One gesture toward an attendant and somebody else supplied them. If a petitioner mattered, the chamberlain knew who he was. If a servant deserved punishment or praise, the household steward handled it. If a guard annoyed him, Sori pointed.

He knew the important people.

Everyone else existed in roles.

Now roles looked back at him with fear.

The deputy positioned herself where Sori could see her and kept her hands chest-high.

Follow.

Then:

Do not touch.

Sori answered with a flat palm.

Where?

She pointed south. Registry.

Sori understood from direction before she finished. His anger returned, and he stopped walking.

The guards behind him almost collided. The deputy turned.

Sori pointed toward the royal residence.

Father.

She shook her head. He pointed again.

She shook her head again.

Sori drew himself taller.

The movement loosened clay beneath his left arm.

A strip fell to the paving stones.

Everyone looked at it. Sori looked too.

The deputy’s expression changed almost imperceptibly. Not amusement. Pity. Intolerable.

Sori bent, picked up the fallen clay, pressed it back beneath his arm, and continued south without looking at her.

The southern registry occupied a long low building beside the old equipment court. Sori had entered it twice in twenty-two years.

The first time he had been eight and hiding from a tutor.

The second had been last year, when Chancellor Saran forced him to spend an afternoon observing property disputes because Sori had referred to a boundary case as peasant nonsense.

The room had seemed small then.

It seemed smaller now.

Shelves climbed every wall. Bundles of tied documents filled them. Reed pens stood in jars. Seals hung from pegs. Three clerks sat behind low counters.

All three stopped working.

One dropped a pen. Sori saw it bounce and almost imagined the click. That happened sometimes.

His mind supplied sounds it had never known directly. He understood thunder as pressure and light and everyone else’s reaction, yet dreams occasionally gave it a voice. Doors slammed in dreams. People shouted. Horses screamed.

He never knew whether those sounds were remotely correct.

It did not matter.

Dreams belonged to him.

The deputy pointed toward a marked square on the floor.

Sori looked at it. Then at her. She pointed again.

He stayed where he was.

One clerk approached with a slate. He moved carefully and held it where Sori could read without turning.

Good.

The clerk wrote:

NAME OF CONSTRUCT.

Sori stared at the words.

Then at the clerk.

The man’s throat moved.

Sori took the chalk.

His fingers crushed it.

White powder spilled across his palm. The clerk flinched.

Sori held out his hand. Another.

The clerk supplied a second piece. Sori tried again.

His handwriting had once been elegant enough that calligraphers praised it in front of his father.

Now the clay fingers barely held chalk.

He wrote in thick broken letters.

SORI.

The clerk read it. Looked up.

Then wrote beneath it.

OWNER.

Sori drew a line through the word so hard the slate cracked.

The clerk stepped backward.

Sori put down the chalk.

The deputy came forward. She took the damaged slate without comment and wrote a new question below the crack.

WHO MADE THE BODY?

Sori considered lying.

He did not know why.

I DID.

The deputy read it twice.

WHO PLACED THE MEMORY?

Sori’s hand stopped.

Memory. There it was again, a category the registry knew how to tolerate. Not soul. Not self.

A book carried memory. A witness carried memory. A spell vessel carried memory.

Memory did not make a prince. Sori wrote:

I AM NOT MEMORY.

The deputy’s mouth moved. Sori ignored it.

She erased part of the slate and wrote again.

WHO PLACED YOU IN THE BODY?

Sori pressed the chalk until it snapped.

He wrote with the broken half.

MASTER DEMBA.

The room changed.

The word Demba moved faster than Sori could. A guard left. Records came off shelves. Another clerk brought a fresh slate. Nobody asked whether Sori wanted any of it to happen. The palace had found a category it recognized, and procedure rushed in to fill it.

Sori had once found that reassuring. Today it felt like being digested.

A clerk placed a shallow brass disk on the counter. Sori knew it. Registry seal-reader.

Used for magical goods. Contracts. Bonded constructs. Restricted tools.

The clerk gestured toward Sori’s hand.

Sori stared at him.

The clerk demonstrated by touching his own fingers to the disk. Sori nearly laughed.

They wanted to register him.

He signed toward the deputy.

No.

She wrote:

NECESSARY.

Sori signed again.

No.

She wrote:

THEN WAIT UNDER GUARD UNTIL AUTHORITY ARRIVES.

Sori looked at the disk.

Then placed one clay hand on it.

The brass warmed beneath him.

He could not feel heat in the ordinary way, but magic moved through the contact. The disk searched. An old sensation. Recognition magic.

Royal seals. Treasury doors. Private archives. Ancestral wards.

Those systems knew his blood.

This body had none.

The disk remained dull.

The clerk entered the result in a ledger.

Sori looked over his shoulder.

The words made him colder than the spear had.

Unknown. Not Prince Sori.

Not even stolen memory. Unknown construct.

He reached for the ledger.

The clerk yanked it back.

Sori’s hand stopped in the air.

For a moment he saw himself reflected in the man’s face.

A thing reaching. The room waited.

Sori slowly lowered his hand.

The clerk did not relax.

A runner entered carrying a folded strip sealed in green wax. His seal.

Not the royal seal of the crown prince’s office.

His personal household seal.

A sunburst split by a river line.

Sori had chosen it at sixteen because his mother said his first design looked too much like his father’s.

His body carried the ring.

Of course it did.

The deputy broke the wax, read, then looked at Sori.

Her face became carefully blank.

She handed the note to the clerk.

He read it and looked at Sori too.

Sori held out his hand. Neither moved.

He held it farther.

The deputy folded the note and put it away.

Magic surged through Sori’s chest binding.

A crack opened beneath his throat. Every guard reacted. Weapons shifted. Sori looked down.

Light moved under the fracture like sun behind old plaster.

He pressed a hand against it until the glow dimmed. The deputy watched.

Then signed more gently than before.

Wait.

Sori pointed at the note.

She shook her head. He pointed again.

She shook her head again. So Sori sat.

Not because she told him to.

Because his left knee had begun to sag.

There was a bench beneath the wall.

He lowered himself onto it. The wood split.

Every person in the room jumped.

Sori remained seated for half a heartbeat inside the broken frame. Then he stood.

The clerk looked at the bench.

Sori looked at the clerk.

The clerk immediately looked away.

Sori stepped into the marked square.

Fine.

They waited.

That was when he discovered how lonely a palace could be.

People came and went through the registry.

Nobody spoke to him. Some stared.

Some pretended not to.

The deputy stayed nearby, but her eyes tracked his hands and chest rather than his face. That was not nothing. She had already learned which parts of him could change the room fastest.

A servant brought water for the clerks.

The servant looked at Sori, hesitated, then carried the pitcher away without offering any.

Sori almost raised a hand. Then stopped.

He did not drink.

Of course.

He did not need water.

He did not know whether he would ever need water again.

The thought should have been useful.

Instead it gave him mango juice running down his wrist when he was nine.

Roasted goat with pepper paste. Honey cakes.

Cold water from a clay jar after riding.

A bitter medicine Demba had forced him to swallow every morning for three years because the old magician said his heart rhythm was wrong after exertion.

Sori had hated that medicine.

He would have swallowed a bowl of it now.

He touched the cut line of his mouth. No tongue. No throat.

Nothing behind it but packed darkness and binding reeds.

His fingers dented the clay around the mouth. He removed them.

Across the room, a clerk watched.

Sori stared back until the man returned to his ledger.

At fifteen, Sori stopped bringing attendants into Demba’s tower.

Not because Demba won.

Sori would have rejected that interpretation violently.

He stopped because the attendants became annoying.

By then Demba had developed enough shared signs with him that other people slowed the lesson. They interrupted to interpret things Sori already understood. They anticipated needs he had not expressed. They moved tools before he reached for them. They treated inconvenience like an illness that must be cured before it touched the prince.

Demba increasingly sent them away.

Sori increasingly allowed it.

The tower became one of the only places in the palace where objects stayed where they were until Sori moved them himself.

That afternoon Demba had him running stairs.

Sori hated running more than clay.

He came into the workroom sweating, threw himself onto the floor, and signed a word Demba considered vulgar.

Demba offered him water. Sori drank.

Then Demba pointed toward the stairs.

Again.

Sori threw the cup at him. Demba ducked.

The cup shattered against the wall. Sori smiled.

Demba walked over, picked up a shard, put it into Sori’s hand, then pointed toward the broom.

Sori stared at him. Demba pointed again. Sori signed:

Servant.

Demba answered:

You broke it.

Sori signed:

I am the prince.

Demba stared for a moment.

Then he walked to the door, opened it, and pointed out. Lesson over. Sori’s smile vanished.

He looked at the broom. Then at Demba. Demba waited.

Sori swept the cup. Poorly, but he swept it.

Demba corrected how he held the broom.

Sori nearly hit him with it.

The old man laughed.

Later, after Sori had run the stairs twice more and threatened Demba’s life four times, they sat beneath the narrow western windows while Demba examined Sori’s pulse.

The old magician’s fingers rested against the inside of Sori’s wrist.

Demba watched the second hand of a water clock. Sori watched Demba.

The concern irritated him.

Sori pulled his wrist away.

What?

Demba signed:

Too fast.

Sori shrugged.

Running.

Demba shook his head.

Too fast after.

He touched Sori’s chest.

Sori slapped the hand away.

Demba did it again. Sori allowed it. Magic entered gently.

Warm pressure spread beneath Sori’s ribs.

He watched Demba’s face.

That was how Sori had learned medicine. Not through explanations. Through attention.

Demba’s eyebrows when something surprised him. His mouth tightening when he found an injury. The way the old man became absolutely still when a spell behaved differently than expected.

Today he became still. Sori signed:

What?

Demba traced a line down Sori’s sternum. Then along one side of his ribs.

Channels narrow here.

Sori shrugged.

Demba shook his head.

We change them.

Sori looked at him.

Can?

Demba nodded.

Years.

Sori rolled his eyes.

Demba smiled, then drew a diagram on the floor. Sori’s body. Magic channels. Heart. Lungs. Muscle. Bone.

He marked each one. Then changed them. Not today. Over time.

Diet. Exercise. Controlled spell exposure. Potions. Heat. Cold. Breath training Sori could perform by pressure and timing rather than sound. Sleep schedules. Recovery.

Sori looked at the diagram. Then at Demba.

Why?

The old magician pointed to him.

Then made the sign for crown. Sori understood.

A king needed a body that lasted.

He liked the idea. He sat straighter. Demba’s expression changed. Amusement.

Sori pointed at him.

Do not.

Demba signed:

Vanity useful sometimes.

Sori kicked dirt over the diagram.

For the next seven years, Master Demba rebuilt him.

Slowly enough that nobody called it rebuilding.

The registry door opened. Sori looked up.

His younger brother entered first.

Barek had forgotten one sandal strap.

That was the first thing Sori noticed. Not his face. Not the shock. The strap.

Loose leather dragged behind Barek’s heel.

Barek never appeared in public unfinished. He had once sent a servant across half the palace because the embroidery on his cuffs did not match.

He had come quickly. For Sori.

Hope hurt more than fear.

Sori stepped out of the marked square. The guards moved. He stopped. Barek stopped too.

The deputy slid sideways, not between them, but near enough to intervene. She kept her body turned so both brothers remained in her sight.

Sori would have resented the precaution less under other circumstances.

He lifted one hand.

The old childhood sign came without thought.

Two fingers crooked inward. Thumb against palm.

Little goat.

Barek’s face collapsed. Not belief. Recognition.

For one second, perfect recognition.

Sori saw his brother.

His brother saw him.

Then Barek looked behind himself.

Sori knew before the second figure entered.

His body walked through the door. Everything else disappeared. White robe.

Green stitching at the cuffs.

Gold ring on the left hand.

His shoulders, broader than they had been at seventeen because Demba had insisted on strength work even after Sori complained it made formal coats fit badly. His face. Clean. Recently washed.

A faint line of exhaustion beneath the eyes.

The scar beside the eyebrow.

The mouth Sori had watched in mirrors but rarely thought about because mouths mattered less to him than everyone else seemed to believe. The body stopped.

Sori watched the eyes.

Old.

Again.

There was Master Demba. Not in resemblance. In attention.

Demba had always looked at a room as if identifying where every object belonged.

Sori’s body did that now. Door. Guards. Barek. Clerks. Construct. Sori.

The stolen body lifted one hand. The motion was too economical for Sori and painfully familiar from someone else.

Brother.

Barek turned toward him.

Something inside Sori’s chest fractured that was not clay.

Of course Demba knew the signs.

Demba had spent ten years using them.

He did not need to imitate Sori’s voice.

He did not need to learn how Sori sounded when angry, tired, or afraid.

The prince had barely used his voice in court.

A hand had always been enough.

Sori had thought silence protected him from the stupidity of other people’s speech.

Instead he had given the thief fewer things to counterfeit.

Demba wore his deaf body.

Demba wore his hands.

And Demba already knew the language.

Barek looked back at the clay figure.

The hope on his face had become terror. Sori signed quickly.

It is me.

Barek flinched.

Demba took me.

The stolen prince watched.

Then raised his hands.

It has memories.

Barek looked at him. Demba continued.

From the tower.

Sori stepped forward.

The guards blocked him.

He tried to sign around them.

He is Demba.

One guard caught his wrist.

Sori tore free too hard.

The man’s entire body spun sideways and struck a shelf.

Bundles of documents burst across the floor. Everyone recoiled. Sori froze.

The guard lay among broken reeds and paper, staring up at him.

Sori had not meant to hurt him.

He had forgotten the strength of the construct.

No.

He had never known it.

He looked at his hand. Five crude fingers. One crooked. One split.

All of them strong enough to throw a man.

Barek backed toward the stolen prince.

That movement hurt more than any weapon could have.

Sori lowered both hands. Slowly.

The room settled by degrees.

Demba signed to the deputy.

No destruction.

She nodded once. Demba continued.

Contain. Examine. Determine source.

The deputy answered with a short nod. Guards shifted. A clerk reached for a fresh board. The room took Demba’s instructions as if they belonged there.

Sori hated that more than shouting.

Then Demba looked directly at him.

Something tightened around Sori’s eyes. Demba’s eyes now. It vanished before Sori could decide whether it had been regret, exhaustion, or only strain.

Demba signed only to Sori. Small movements. Private.

You built it badly.

Sori stopped breathing.

He did not breathe.

Still, the old reflex seized his chest.

Seven years earlier, after Sori produced a training construct with one arm too long and a neck that rotated backward, Demba had looked at it and signed those exact words.

You built it badly.

Confirmation should have helped.

Instead it removed the last place hope could hide.

Master Demba was in his body. His teacher.

The man who knew his medicine, his magic, his gestures, his silences.

The man who had shaped him for ten years.

Sori had believed Demba was preparing a king.

Ten years of training refused to become only one thing now. King. Vessel. Care. Preparation. Sori could no longer see where one ended and another began.

He lunged.

The first guard never had a chance.

Sori hit him with one shoulder and sent him into the counter.

The second drove a spear shaft across Sori’s chest. The wood bowed.

Sori barely felt it.

He had spent the walk from the tower terrified that the clay body would fail him.

He had not considered the opposite.

Crude.

Ugly.

Strong.

He reached for Demba.

His own body stepped back. Only one pace. Demba’s eyes widened.

There.

Fear. Sori saw it. And loved it.

Barek moved between them.

Sori stopped so hard his right heel broke apart.

His brother stood with both arms spread. No weapon. No authority. Just flesh. Soft. Breakable. Sori stared.

Barek’s hands shook as he signed.

Stop.

Sori pointed past him.

Move.

Barek shook his head.

Magic surged through the damaged clay chest. A bright line opened down Sori’s torso.

Barek’s eyes dropped to it.

Then returned to Sori’s face.

Please.

Sori had almost never seen his brother sign that word to him. Barek asked servants.

He demanded from siblings.

He negotiated with Father.

Please belonged to childhood.

A nine-year-old boy outside Sori’s bedroom with a blanket around his shoulders. Sori stopped moving.

Demba watched from behind Barek.

Sori wanted him dead.

The thought was clean enough to live inside. Not justice. Not restoration. Not law.

Dead.

He pictured clay fingers closing around his own throat.

Bones breaking beneath hands he had made in darkness.

His face changing shape beneath pressure.

The life leaving it.

The image satisfied something raw in him.

Then another thought arrived.

His body would be dead too. Not Demba’s body. His.

The shoulders Demba had trained.

The hands Sori knew.

The lungs that had burned on tower stairs.

The scar under the eyebrow.

The body that tasted mango, felt rain, tired after riding, sweated beneath formal cloth, woke cold in the dry season, ached after training, softened in sleep.

His body.

If he killed Demba, he killed the road home.

The realization did not weaken his hatred. It trapped it.

Sori lowered his hands. Barek sagged. Demba did not.

The old magician understood immediately.

Sori saw it in his own face.

Demba knew exactly what choice had stopped him. That was unbearable.

Sori signed over Barek’s shoulder.

Coward.

Demba answered with almost no expression.

Alive.

Sori lunged again. Barek struck him. Not hard.

A palm against the clay chest.

It would not have moved him at all. But Sori stopped.

Tears stood in Barek’s eyes.

Sori had not seen them come.

He saw only that they were there now.

Barek signed with both hands held close to his chest.

I don’t know.

Then again.

I don’t know.

Sori looked at him.

That was worse than rejection.

If Barek had called him a monster, Sori could have hated him.

If Barek had chosen Demba, Sori could have remembered it forever.

But Barek did not know.

His gaze moved from Demba’s face to Sori’s clay hands, then to the guard among the broken shelving, then back again. Two claimants. One wore the face Barek had known since infancy. One was wet clay around wood and reeds. Both knew private things. Both signed correctly.

Only one had just thrown a guard across a room.

Sori followed Barek’s eyes to the broken shelving.

At the man sitting against it, one hand pressed to his shoulder.

Shame cut through rage. Sori stepped backward.

The guards moved between them immediately.

Demba signed something to the deputy.

Sori did not watch.

He was looking at Barek.

His brother kept looking back.

Then, very slowly, Barek made the childhood sign again.

Little goat.

Sori almost moved toward him.

Barek dropped his hand.

Demba touched Barek’s shoulder. Barek turned.

Sori watched his own hand resting on his brother.

That nearly undid him.

He had touched Barek that way thousands of times without remembering any of them.

Now someone else did it with his fingers.

The gesture became theft too.

Demba led Barek toward the door. Sori stepped forward. Spears shifted. He stopped.

Barek looked back once. Then left.

Sori remained inside the registry with strangers.

That was the first moment he understood he might never be alone with his brother again. Not safely. Not as himself.

Everyone he loved had been within ten steps. Sori had never felt farther from them.

The deputy approached with another slate.

Sori did not look at it. She waited. He looked eventually.

YOU WILL BE MOVED.

Sori took the chalk.

He wrote:

PRISON.

The deputy hesitated. Then wrote:

CONTAINMENT.

Sori looked at her.

She had the decency to look embarrassed.

He handed back the slate.

Then went where they told him.

The southern storage court had once held siege engines.

Sori knew this because an old mural in the western hall showed his great-grandfather inspecting catapults there before the Uru War.

By Sori’s lifetime the court held broken carts, retired festival frames, cracked water jars too large to discard, bundles of timber, old tent poles, and everything else the palace had not decided whether to repair or forget.

A good place for him.

Someone had cleared one room. No bed. No chair. No need.

A mat had been placed in one corner, then removed after somebody apparently realized the construct would not sleep on it. A pale rectangle on the floor showed where it had been.

A barred wooden gate closed across the front instead of a door.

They wanted to watch him. Sori stepped inside.

The guard shut the gate.

A metal pin slid into place.

Sori stared at it.

He could break the gate. Probably.

He could break the wall if he struck it long enough. Probably.

He could kill the two guards outside. Certainly.

Sori sat on the floor.

The guards relaxed by degrees.

He leaned his back against the wall.

The plaster cracked beneath his weight. He shifted forward. The day moved.

He knew because the rectangle of sunlight crossed the courtyard. People came.

The construct master arrived first.

She was an older woman with silver braided through black hair and forearms corded from years of work. No court colors. No household badge. Her apron carried picks, brushes, wire, knives, measuring sticks, binding hooks, and three different wedges Sori could not identify.

She stopped outside the bars.

Sori looked at her.

She looked at him. Not his face. Everything. Feet. Knees. Chest. Shoulders. Neck. Hands. Then she laughed.

Sori knew laughter from bodies.

Shoulders. Eyes. Open mouth. He glared. She laughed harder.

One guard looked uncomfortable.

The woman pointed at Sori’s left foot.

Only three toes remained.

Then his right hand.

The thumb sat too high.

Then the outer edge, where the sixth finger had torn away and left a crude pinched scar in the clay. Then his neck.

She mimed a wobble.

Sori folded his arms.

A piece of his elbow fell off.

The woman covered her mouth.

Sori wanted her executed.

The reflex came so quickly he almost admired it.

She took out a slate.

YOU MADE THIS?

Sori held out his hand.

She passed the slate through the bars.

Sori frowned.

FIRST THAT MATTERED.

She read that twice. Her amusement faded.

She crouched and studied the glowing crack in his chest. Then wrote:

YOU ARE LEAKING.

Sori looked down.

He took the slate.

FIX IT.

The woman’s eyebrows rose. There he was. Prince again.

Command issued. Problem solved.

She held out her hand for the slate. Sori returned it.

She wrote one word.

ASK.

Sori stared. Then at her. She waited.

He looked toward the guards.

They found the courtyard fascinating.

Sori took the slate.

FIX IT.

She shook her head.

NOW.

She shook her head again.

Sori almost crushed the slate.

Instead he erased the words with the side of his hand. Clay smeared across the wax. He wrote slowly.

PLEASE FIX IT.

The construct master smiled.

Not mockery this time.

She unlocked the gate herself. Both guards objected. She ignored them.

Sori liked her slightly more.

She entered carrying a leather tool roll and pointed to the center of the floor. Sit. Sori sat.

She circled him once, then reached toward his shoulder.

Sori caught her wrist.

Weapons came free outside the gate.

The woman did not flinch.

She looked at Sori’s hand around her arm. Then at him. Sori let go.

She tapped her own chest. Mara. A name. Sori nodded.

He pointed to himself. Sori.

Mara’s expression did not change. That irritated him.

He made the royal heir sign. She watched. Then shrugged. Sori stared.

Mara pointed at the crack in his chest. Then at herself.

Fix?

Sori nodded. Mara set the slate aside and unrolled her tools.

Her hands were quick and not gentle. Before forcing a loose shoulder through its full range, she warned him. Dry clay she scraped away without ceremony. When her fingers reached the chest seam, she stopped with the binding hook poised and waited until Sori nodded before opening it farther.

Mara scraped dry clay from the fracture and exposed the reed lattice beneath. Her expression tightened.

She traced one binding line with a metal pick. Then again.

She looked at Sori.

Mara looked toward the palace.

Then back at him.

Mara’s pick stopped inside the open chest. She looked from the binding pattern to Sori, then toward the palace, and back to the pattern.

She pointed inside his chest and wrote:

THIS IS NOT A WORK GOLEM PATTERN.

Sori waited.

IT IS A TEACHING BODY.

He nodded.

FOR WHAT?

Sori looked at the exposed lattice.

Years of bodies returned to him. Clay torsos. Wooden limbs. Binding circles.

Demba forcing him to build joints, channels, eyes, hands. Sori wrote:

ME.

Mara frowned. He erased it.

HE USED THEM TO TEACH ME HOW BODIES HOLD MAGIC.

Mara read.

Then looked at him for a long time.

WHY TEACH A PRINCE THIS?

Sori’s hand stopped.

He had never asked. Not really.

Demba taught him things nobody expected princes to know. Construct binding. Medical channel work. Metallurgy. Breath control. Poison resistance. Spell lattices. Physical conditioning.

Sori had assumed Demba was eccentric.

His father had encouraged it.

A king should know more than ceremony.

Sori had liked being unusually educated. He liked the moment somebody underestimated him and discovered the prince understood their craft well enough to embarrass them.

He had never asked why Demba chose those crafts.

Now the lessons held his ribs together.

His chalk hovered over the slate.

I DON’T KNOW.

Mara read.

Something softened in her face.

Sori hated that too.

She repaired the chest. Not perfectly.

There was not enough proper clay in the storage court, so Mara sent a guard for red building earth from the plaster yard. She mixed it with chopped fiber, resin, and something black from a jar that made everyone else wrinkle their noses. Sori smelled nothing.

She reinforced the fractured sternum with a narrow wooden crosspiece.

Then she reached his right knee.

She stared at the iron pins. Looked at Sori.

Looked back at the pins.

Her shoulders began shaking again.

Sori signed a rude word. Mara laughed harder. She wrote:

Mara stopped laughing.

She read the word again.

Stand. Sori looked away.

That had been the whole plan. Stand. Walk. Reach the palace. After that, everyone else was supposed to know how to fix the rest.

Mara touched one iron pin.

Then, very gently, patted the side of his knee.

Sori almost struck her for the tenderness of it.

Instead he let her work. Hours passed.

By late afternoon he had five toes on each foot again.

Mara rebuilt the missing finger, leaving the hand with five fingers and a rough scar where the sixth had torn away. She corrected the thumb angle. Added proper rotational braces to the shoulders. Carved channels beneath the clay so magic could move without cracking the surface every time Sori became angry.

That last part annoyed him.

She also removed his mouth.

Sori caught her wrist before the smoothing tool completed the first pass.

Mara looked at him.

He pointed at his face. She pointed back. Then wrote:

DO YOU USE IT?

Sori stared.

No. He did not. Still.

He took the slate.

FACE.

Mara read. Sori added:

PEOPLE HAVE MOUTHS.

Her expression became strange. Sori remembered Demba. Twelve years old.

Clay under his nails. People have faces. Demba: Tool.

Mara handed him the smoothing knife.

Then pointed to his own mouth. Do it yourself. He did. Carefully this time. Not a slit. A shape. Upper lip. Lower.

A small line between.

He knew his mouth from mirrors.

He tried to copy it.

Mara watched without interfering.

When he finished, Sori looked toward a polished brass tray leaning against the wall.

His reflection stared back. Still monstrous. But less accidental.

That made it worse somehow.

Mara packed her tools.

Before leaving she wrote one final question.

DO YOU FEEL PAIN?

Sori considered.

NOT LIKE BEFORE.

Mara wrote:

FEAR?

Sori looked at her.

Then erased the question.

Mara did not write it again. She left.

The guards closed the gate. Sori sat alone.

The repaired body felt better. That frightened him.

Each improvement made it easier to remain inside it.

He did not want easier. He wanted temporary.

He wanted every crack to prove this was wrong.

He wanted the body to reject him so completely that the kingdom would have no choice but to put him back where he belonged.

Instead the clay held.

His knee bent properly. His hands closed.

The chest binding no longer leaked.

Mara had made the prison more comfortable.

Sori hated her a little for it.

Dusk reached the courtyard.

Lamps appeared along the walls.

One by one, windows in the palace brightened.

Sori knew the rooms. Kitchen office. Guard clerk. Southern archive. Upper guest rooms.

Farther away above the tiled roofline, one high western window caught light. His bedroom. Sori stared. Someone was inside. Demba, perhaps. Wearing Sori’s body.

Sitting in Sori’s chair. Removing Sori’s rings. Touching Sori’s books.

Sleeping in Sori’s bed.

No. Probably not sleeping.

Demba was old in every way except the body now.

What did an old man do with youth returned all at once?

Sori imagined him standing naked before the mirror.

He rose so quickly the guards startled.

His hands closed around the bars. Wood creaked.

The guards backed away.

Sori forced his fingers open.

Returned to the floor.

He watched the window until the lamp went dark. Sori remained awake.

He did not know whether the golem could sleep. He tried once. Closed his eyes. Waited. Nothing. No drifting.

No soft loss of time.

Only darkness and himself.

He opened his eyes again.

This, more than the clay, felt monstrous.

A human day ended. His did not.

The guards changed shifts. One pair left. Another came.

Sori watched people enter sleep one building at a time. The palace dimmed. The world withdrew. He remained.

Silence had once been full because everyone around him moved inside it.

At night behind bars, there was almost nothing to see.

Sori sat with revenge because revenge still moved.

He could plan it. Shape it. Imagine Demba afraid.

That was company of a kind.

He began with what he knew.

Demba lived in the body Sori wanted back. Killing him would solve the wrong problem. Worse, it would destroy the thing Sori meant to recover.

Demba had spent years teaching him the difference between a constraint and a solution. Apparently the lesson had survived the theft.

Sori looked at Mara’s repairs.

His clay hand closed. Opened. Closed again.

If he could not kill Demba yet, he would do something worse.

He would make the old man afraid to sleep in stolen skin.

The thought stayed with him until dawn.

Dawn arrived without waking him.

That was going to take time to understand.

Sori knew morning only because the sky changed color above the courtyard and the first servants crossed the far passage carrying brooms and baskets.

One guard was eating flatbread folded around something dark and oily.

Sori watched him chew. The guard noticed. Stopped. Sori looked away.

He hated hunger less than the memory of hunger.

A clerk arrived carrying a board, three documents, and a brass token on a cord. Mara followed. Sori stood.

Mara examined yesterday’s repairs before acknowledging him. Chest seam. Shoulders. Knee. Hand.

She pressed one thumb into the scar where the sixth finger had once been. The repair held.

Only then did she look at his face.

The clerk held out the board.

Sori read it twice.

The words remained stupid.

He took the chalk.

I AM NOT A CONSTRUCT.

The clerk waited. Sori added:

I AM THE CROWN PRINCE.

The clerk nodded with the patient expression of a man recording a statement rather than believing it. Then wrote:

YOUR CLAIM IS ENTERED.

The brass token hung from his fingers. Sori took it.

A stamped Crown number. Inventory. Custody.

He pressed the thin brass plate into the soft outer clay of his left forearm. Hard.

The edges vanished halfway beneath the surface.

Mara grabbed his wrist. Sori ignored her.

He pushed until the tag sat flush. Crown custody. The clerk stared.

Sori held out his arm. Done.

Mara looked furious. She pried around the edges to make sure he had not damaged a binding line. Sori watched her.

A prince wearing his own inventory mark.

There was something so obscene about it that it became useful.

He wanted to remember this. Not as humiliation. As evidence.

One day, if he had a body capable of feeling heat again, he wanted to remember how cold this morning had been.

The clerk handed him another document.

HEARING TO DETERMINE PERSONHOOD REQUIRES PETITION.

Sori’s eyes stopped on one word.

Personhood. He looked up.

The clerk seemed uncomfortable. Sori wrote:

I AM ALREADY A PERSON.

The clerk answered:

THE COURT MUST DETERMINE WHETHER A CONSTRUCT MAY HOLD LEGAL PERSONHOOD.

Sori almost broke the board.

Mara put one hand on it first.

He looked at her.

She shook her head. Not worth it.

Sori forced his fingers open. The clerk continued.

IF PERSONHOOD IS GRANTED, IDENTITY CLAIM MAY THEN BE HEARD.

Sori read the sentence three times.

First he had to prove he was a person.

Then he could attempt to prove which person.

He looked toward the palace roofline.

Demba was somewhere beyond it.

Alive.

Prince.

The royal wards recognized Sori’s body.

The family knew Sori’s face.

The law knew Sori’s blood.

Sori had mud.

And a petition.

His anger became so complete that it passed through rage and emerged almost calm. He wrote:

FILE IT.

The clerk blinked.

Sori underlined the words.

FILE IT TODAY.

The clerk nodded and tucked the petition board beneath his arm.

Something moved at the far end of the courtyard. Mara looked first. Then the guards.

Sori followed their eyes.

Four men entered carrying a covered bier. White cloth.

Bare feet visible beneath it. Old feet. Thin ankles. Sori knew them.

He stood so quickly Mara stepped back.

The procession crossed the courtyard.

A priest walked ahead.

Two palace servants followed.

Behind them came Demba.

Sori’s body wore mourning white.

Barek walked beside him.

Sori gripped the bars.

The bier came closer.

Wind lifted one edge of the cloth.

Master Demba’s face appeared.

Dead.

Actually dead.

The skin dull. Jaw tied closed with linen. Beard washed and combed straight.

Sori stared at the corpse of the man standing twenty paces behind it.

For one impossible moment, the world became symmetrical.

Demba’s body was dead. Demba lived. Sori’s body lived. Sori did not. Not legally. Not socially.

Not anywhere that mattered yet.

The priest paused beside the storage court.

Perhaps only because the path narrowed.

Perhaps because the dead deserved witness.

Sori remembered the burial custom from childhood lessons.

The dead were named before leaving the household. Named before burial.

Named so debts could close.

Named so inheritance could move.

Named so the living knew exactly who had departed.

The priest raised one hand.

Every head in the courtyard bowed. Sori did not. He watched Demba.

Demba watched his own corpse.

For the first time since the theft, Demba’s composure broke. His gaze stayed on the dead face beneath the lifted cloth.

Sori’s fingers found the brass custody tag embedded in his arm.

Demba had lost a body too. He had chosen the act that cost it. Sori had not.

The old magician looked up.

Their eyes met across the bier.

Sori touched the brass ownership tag embedded in his arm. Who owns you?

The question came back with Fado’s hands.

Sori smiled with the mouth Mara had let him rebuild. No sound. No need. Demba’s expression changed. He understood.

Sori pointed at the corpse.

Then at Demba wearing Sori’s body. Then at himself.

Three positions.

Dead man.

Stolen prince.

Clay thing.

Sori slowly closed his fist. Demba went still.

Barek looked between them and did not understand.

This was not for Barek.

It belonged to the two of them.

The bier moved on. Demba followed it.

He did not look back. Sori did.

He watched until his teacher’s corpse disappeared beneath the southern arch.

Then he looked at the gate of his cell.

He could break it. Mara knew it.

The guards knew it now too.

Escape would be easy compared with everything else.

He could leave before noon.

Hide in the city.

Build a better body. Find allies. Return later.

The thought lasted only a moment.

No.

Outside, he was a monster with stolen memories.

Inside, he was Crown property with a case number. Inside meant records. Hearings. Experts. Access.

Inside meant Demba had to keep looking at him.

Sori sat back down. Mara watched him.

She pointed toward the wooden gate.

Then mimed breaking it. Sori nodded. Yes.

She pointed toward the open courtyard. Go?

Sori shook his head. Mara frowned.

He took the clerk’s board one last time.

HE STOLE TEN YEARS MAKING MY BODY HIS.

Mara read. Sori erased it. Then wrote:

I CAN GIVE HIM A FEW DAYS.

Mara looked up.

Sori handed the board back.

The clerk left to file the petition that would determine whether the crown prince was a person.

Mara left to find better clay.

The guards returned to their posts.

Sori remained behind the bars.

The palace moved around him. People worked.

A cart crossed the far passage.

Servants carried breakfast toward rooms where he had once eaten.

Stable boys dragged a broken harness toward the repair yard.

Nobody looked at him for long.

He had spent his entire life surrounded by people trained to notice the smallest movement of his hand. Now a cart passed without slowing. A servant crossed the far walk without checking his posture. The guards looked away when nothing moved.

Sori lowered his hands into his lap. No one hurried to interpret them.

Above the clay wrist, the Crown’s brass number caught the morning sun.

His face still sat on the throne’s side of the palace.

His name still opened doors.

His blood still answered the wards.

His brother still followed the man wearing him.

His father had not come.

Sori let that fact remain where it hurt.

He did not excuse it.

He did not explain it. He stored it.

There would be time.

That was the one thing the clay body seemed to have too much of.

Time.

Sori looked toward the roofline where his bedroom waited beyond sight.

Then at the bars.

Then at his repaired five-fingered hand, still uneven, still scarred where the sixth had torn away.

Master Demba had spent ten years building a vessel. He had succeeded.

Sori had spent one night building a monster. It stood.

For now, that would have to be enough.