The next day.
Sabrina announced her fourth circle the way some people announced wars — loudly, at breakfast, and with absolutely no regard for whether anyone present had finished chewing.
"Fourth circle," she said, sliding into her seat with the particular glow of someone who had clearly been waiting all night for the sun to rise specifically so she could share this information. "As of yesterday evening. My tutor actually gasped, Ragna. A grown man. Gasped."
"Congratulations," Ragna said, around a mouthful of bread, entirely unsurprised, since he'd heard approximately the same announcement delivered through her bedroom door at midnight, then again through the hallway on the way to breakfast, then once more, for emphasis, while she was still finding her chair.
"You don't sound impressed."
"I'm extremely impressed. I've simply already expressed it three separate times since you woke up the entire east wing celebrating."
"That's not impressed, that's exhausted. There's a difference." She turned to Sentel, who was watching the entire exchange over the rim of her tea with the long-suffering patience of a woman who had raised both of these children and loved them anyway, somehow. "Tell him, Mother. Fourth circle at thirteen is practically unheard of."
"It's very impressive, darling," Sentel said, in the same warm, faintly amused tone she'd no doubt used for every one of Sabrina's circle announcements going back to the first, "and Ragna's quite right that you've already told us, several times, with admirable consistency."
Sabrina opened her mouth to protest this characterization, decided against it, and settled for buttering her toast with somewhat more force than the toast had strictly earned.
It was, by any honest measure, a perfectly ordinary morning — which was precisely what made the empty seat at the head of the table so noticeable.
"Your father sends his regrets," Sentel said, before either of them could ask, in the careful, even tone she reserved specifically for sentences she didn't entirely believe herself. "An urgent meeting with the local chiefs. Harvest concerns."
"In the middle of summer?" Sabrina asked, with the blunt skepticism of a thirteen-year-old who had inherited considerably more of her mother's instincts than she'd inherited her mother's patience for diplomacy.
"Apparently the chiefs felt it couldn't wait."
Ragna said nothing, which was, in its own way, the loudest possible response available to him. He'd long since stopped expecting Chavilon's chair to be filled on mornings he happened to be present, and had equally long since stopped pointing it out, because pointing it out only ever made Sentel's face do the same careful, even thing her voice had just done, and he'd decided some time ago that he'd rather eat a quiet breakfast than watch that happen twice in one morning.
***
He spent the rest of the morning in the manor library, which had become, somewhere over the last five years, less a room he visited and more a second home he occasionally remembered to leave.
It was Sentel's collection originally, inherited from her father and expanded steadily since, shelves stretching two full stories with a narrow iron staircase connecting them, the kind of library that smelled permanently of old leather and dust and the particular quiet that only comes from a room nobody had ever once raised their voice in.
Ragna had spent half his childhood here, more out of habit than discipline at first, reading whatever Sentel happened to leave open on the study table for him to find — a habit she'd cultivated, he suspected, quite deliberately.
Today, with a full week stretching ahead of him and no laps or pull-up bars demanding his attention before dawn, he found himself drawn, almost without deciding to be, toward the section of shelving he usually skipped past: the maps.
He pulled down the largest one he could find without help — an enormous, much-handled chart of the world, its corners soft and rounded from generations of hands tracing the same coastlines — and spread it across the study table with the particular reverence of someone unfolding something considerably older than he was.
The Broken Continent, as the old maps called the whole sprawling mass of land and sea, was not, strictly, one continent at all, but seven, fractured apart and scattered across the chart like pieces of something that had once been whole and had never quite managed to put itself back together.
Den-never sat largest among them, sprawling and pale gold on the map, home to three nations whose borders Ragna traced with a careful finger, each one apparently old enough and stable enough that the map hadn't needed to redraw their lines in at least a generation.
Challinton came second in size but clearly not in complexity — eight separate nations packed into a landmass barely two-thirds the size of Den-never, their borders a tangled, overlapping mess of color that made Ragna's eyes water slightly just trying to follow them. He made a private note to ask Sentel, later, how anyone managed diplomacy in a place with eight separate governments crammed shoulder to shoulder.
Nahozi held three nations of its own, smaller and more compact, tucked into the southern curve of the map like an afterthought the world had decided, eventually, to take seriously.
And then, smaller still, sandwiched between larger and considerably louder neighbors, sat Kasvas — three nations, and Ragna's finger slowed without his quite meaning it to, recognizing the shapes before he'd consciously placed the names. Hizosshu to the north, sprawling and shaded a deep, proud red. Migard to the south, smaller, its borders drawn with the particular faintness of a nation that had, for most of recent memory, not entirely been allowed to govern itself. And between them, barely larger than a smudge of ink, Manachy — his home, the entirety of his world for ten years, occupying a space on the continent's actual map so small he could have covered it entirely with his thumb.
He sat with that for a moment longer than he expected to.
Targon held four nations, Mazios five, sprawling untidily across the map's eastern edge in colors that suggested a region perpetually in the process of redrawing itself.
And finally, alone and entirely self-contained, Trazunga — a single nation occupying an entire continent by itself, its borders drawn clean and unbroken, the only landmass on the whole chart that didn't appear to be sharing space with anyone.
Seven continents. Twenty-seven nations between them, by Ragna's careful, finger-traced count. And his entire life, every loss, every draw, every hard-won point on a board that had felt, yesterday, like the whole of his world — all of it had happened inside a smudge of ink small enough to hide under a thumbnail.
It was, he decided, an extremely humbling way to spend a morning.
He found the book almost by accident, tucked sideways into a gap on the lower shelf where it had clearly been reshelved incorrectly at some point and simply left there, spine facing the wrong way, easy to miss unless you happened to be running a finger along the row the way Ragna was, restless and still turning the map over in his mind.
He pulled it out mostly out of curiosity.
It was old — older than most of the other histories on that shelf, its leather cover cracked along the spine in a way that suggested it had been opened, and closed, and opened again, many times over many years, by hands that had cared about it considerably more than the careless reshelving suggested.
The title was embossed in faded gold lettering, half-worn-away in places, and Ragna had to angle the book toward the window light to read it properly.
He sat very still, the morning's maps forgotten entirely, the weight of the book oddly heavy in his hands for something so slim, and read the title a second time, just to be certain the light hadn't tricked him.
The Wars of the Broken Continent
And beneath it, smaller, in the particular weary, deliberate lettering of someone who had chosen each word with care:
"We're the Source of Pain."