Huh. Okay, he'll do that.

The hallway beyond is wide and decorated with fairly simple tapestries. All of the light comes from heatless lamps on the walls. The secretary's office is only a short walk down the hall.

The valet is at a small desk in the antechamber, looking through papers. He looks up when Sadde enters, then says, "State your business."

"I, um, would like to, um, work here?"

"I'll put you in the schedule for a job application. Take a seat in the meantime. He should be with you shortly."

"Th-thank you."

He scurries away.

And after a bit, during which a few people go in and out of the office, he's informed that the secretary will see him now. 

In he goes.

The secretary's a middle-aged, gruff-looking man. "You're looking to apply for a post here?"

"Y-yes, sir."

"What are your skills? Can you scribe? Do arithmetic? Do you have a trade? And speak up, boy."

"I can scribe, I'm very good at maths, I don't have a trade," he says quickly, trying to be careful not to stammer any words while still getting all the information out.

He takes out three pieces of paper, then puts all three on the desk facing Sadde along with a quill pen and ink. One is blank, one has a short paragraph, and another has a few equations of varying difficulty. He gestures to the chair. "Sit, copy the paragraph, and then solve the equations."

...sure, he does that. He is in fact amazing at maths.

The secretary appears to be timing him. When Sadde finishes, he pears at the paper for a few minutes. "What's your name, boy?"

"Sadde."

He asks a few more questions, mostly about where Sadde's from, how long he's been in the realm, etc.

He has a backstory all worked out! It's pretty similar to his real one minus magic.

"Come back tomorrow, at the second quarter past dawn, and I'll see about an assignment. We have openings for clerks, and the royal astronomers especially need those skilled in arithmetic. Pay is two silvers a week, plus room and board."

"Thank you very much!" he says brightly, and off he goes cheerfully.

Tetsuma gets back to the inn a bit after he does, and asks how his day's gone so far. 

He tells Tetsuma all about it!

"That's great! I learned a good bit from my wanderings - managed to find someone who wanted to ramble about the place's history. Apparently the lord's from a longer lived species or has somehow made himself unaging. Or various other conspiracy theories, but the lord's been there for as long as living memory goes back. No heirs, either, as far as the gossip networks can tell. Mostly keeps to himself, but maintains a surprisingly large court for the lord of an only medium-sized island. He pays well, taxes are mostly fair - except on the weavers, he's unpopular with them - and no one I talked to knows how he can afford to support such a large household."

"Curiouser and curiouser."

"It's not all necessarily suspicious. I'm guessing magic has a lot to do with - everything. Also the 'maintaining a household above his station' thing was pretty common back home, and you could reliably draw conclusions from it - usually that someone is vain and prone to showing off - but I don't know what it says about his personality here. There's not many other nobles to impress, the way the islands are set up. Maybe he used to have a higher station and is holding onto the trappings out of vanity."

"It's not necessarily suspicious," he agrees, "but I'm curious nonetheless."