Aya... digests this information.

She gives Berete an assessing look, and risks a little more:

"Known better, ma'am?"

Berete shrugs. "C'mon. You can stay in some corner of the servants' quarters nobody's used in twenty years."

It does prove to be the case, when she leads Aya there, that the servants' quarters have about twice as many empty rooms as occupied ones. There are plenty of available corners. She installs Aya in a tiny room just about big enough to contain a bed and a lamp, and leaves her there with the instructions, "Don't go anywhere. I'll collect you in the morning."

"Yes ma'am."

Aya inspects the room in case there are any contents besides a bed and a lamp, concludes that there are not, wonders whether she's going to get the spare supplies to do any drawing - the old lady used to think her doodles of embroidered animals and exotic plants were cute and encouraged them. The new household might not.

She sighs, flops onto the bed, and decides to catch sleep until collected.

True to her word, Berete returns the next morning.

"You awake?" she inquires through the door. "If so, come have breakfast."

"Mhm. His grace demands you get a bath before his son sees you, so don't dawdle."

But breakfast first. Extremely delicious breakfast.

Which Aya does, briskly, in case they're on a nearer deadline than she expects.

She wears the less shapeless thing, but does nothing else to render herself - "a pretty girl" for the duke's son's birthday present.

She's finished in plenty of time for Berete to collect her again. Off they go, out of the servants' area and into much nicer parts of the house - a meaningful comparison, because the servants' area was already pretty nice.

It's a big house. They take a few minutes to get where they're going.

Then: "Here she is, your grace," she reports as she brings Aya into a small sitting room. There are three people seated inside: the duke, a beautiful woman with long hair who is presumably his wife...

...and a boy of about Aya's age, presumably their son. And every bit as beautiful as his mother.

He looks blankly at Aya.

"...Thank you, Father?"

The duke's son glances from Aya to his father.

"May I go now, Father?" he says.

He hesitates, then nods.

Picking up an ornate jeweled mirror - perhaps another birthday present - he beckons to Aya and sets off through the house at a measured walk.

Aya follows him, stepping carefully.

She's going to keep her mouth shut until he says something.

Hal remains silent all the way to his rooms - in another wing of the house, up a long flight of stairs, at the end of a series of halls. There is a small front room containing a couple of soft couches and several haphazardly organized bookshelves, and two doors beyond that, one open and one closed.

He opens the closed one and says, still evenly but with a hint of tightly controlled emotion, "This can be your room. Do whatever you want with it, I don't care if you move things or break things or - whatever. I'm gonna go have a tantrum and then come back and talk to you."

Then he stalks over to the open door - which presumably leads to his bedroom - and closes it very carefully behind him, very much with the attitude of someone who would really, really like to slam a few doors and is refraining with effort.

Okay.

In many respects this is promising for her sake, even if he doesn't seem to be as reassured by the structure of the situation.

Aya doesn't want to break things, but she does move them a little, exploring the contents of the room.

She finds, mercy of mercies, a fully equipped secretary's desk, with ink and pens and paper, and sets about drawing, as fast as she can while leaving the lines "legible" to her and plausibly part of a doodle to Hal if he wants to look at it later. The last thing she needs is to drop a privacy measure that has worked for her only to find out that her new owner will look at a pidgin of Ancient Sudre, modern Esevi, and idiosyncratic symbology and hit her until she translates her inner thoughts. So embroidered animal doodle it is, some unfortunate lizard that fell into a magic and came out with extra legs and horns and spines, patches of feathers with patterns hidden in their barbs and patches of fur with information encoded in the placement of hairs. She has the thing composed to give her a place to draw smaller thoughts in a few minutes, and the basic sketch of those thoughts embedded in the drawing a little later. She adds detail at smaller and smaller levels of granularity while she waits for his attention to swing back to her.

This place will be hard to get out of. She will keep an eye out, just in case, but there are worse trajectories for the next few years than having an opportunity to ingratiate herself with the heir to Viore, so she might not even try.

She's a birthday present for a seventeen-year-old boy. She may have made a mistake, but she might not have, and she might have wound up here regardless of her behavior at the market. So that's not worth dwelling on.

The seventeen-year-old boy in question comes with a vouch from Berete, who seems nice and has no obvious motivation to lie to Aya, but you never know with freeborns. (The old lady seemed like she meant it when she talked about manumission.) Aya tentatively trusts Berete, which means she shouldn't be too jumpy around Hal, though she suspects enough jumpiness to remind him who he's dealing with and what her situation is might not be amiss.

The room is nice enough. It has paper. If he's giving her a room with a secretary's desk she might continue to have access to it. That's just about the most important thing, after avoiding punishments, and she's pretty good at that - although that might only be because the old lady and her relatives were not, actually, sadists.

She draws self-soothing circles of thought into the scales of one of the lizard's tails. Wait and see, wait and see, wait and see.

There is the occasional faint sound of something breaking from the other room, interspersed with muffled and unintelligible yelling. Well, he did announce his intention to have a tantrum.

Eventually, the noises stop. There is a period of quiet.

Then Hal emerges from his room. There are small fluffy feathers clinging to his extremely tidy and fashionable clothes, which are much less tidy than they were half an hour ago. His hair has escaped any semblance of order and turned into a nest of tangled curls. His eyes are a little red, as though he was crying.

Aya puts her pen down as soon as the door opens, and turns to look at him.

"My lord?" she asks softly.