Aside from the bookshelves of odd knick-knacks, most of the rest of the room was very sober, and definitely the lair of an intellectual. In addition to shelves of books on every imaginable subject, many in languages I didn’t know, there were stacks of books on the side tables, one of the bureaus, one of the chairs by the fireplace, on the floor around one of the chairs by the fireplace, on the window-bench…basically, any flat space that wasn’t needed for walking. Otherwise, it was so tidy as to be almost free of personality.

Until I got to the closet.

One side of the closet was all men’s clothing, made up mostly of casual suits (in various reserved styles and shades of brown and gray) and matching shirts.

The other side…

My mother had evidently liked to dress…eclectically. There were more different types of skirts than I had really been aware of, ranging from scandalously short to so long they were obviously meant to trail on the floor. There were jeans (some of them artistically ripped) and leggings (full length, Capri, shorts…short-shorts…) and every manner of trousers from bell bottoms to high-waisted things. Her taste in tops was equally crazed in its variety. Blouses and shirts, t-shirts (I saw a few with rather rowdy slogans on them) and more.

Every imaginable fabric and accent was represented; lace, dangling tassels and fringes, silk, satin, leather, and glossy fabrics I didn’t recognize. The one thing any of her clothing had in common is that all of it was done in warm and cheerful colors.

None of it would be offensively blinding, but I knew at a glance that she would always have been a bright spot in any room.

Fortunately, her jewelry - when Ken directed me to her jewelry box - turned out to be surprisingly understated. I looked through the box carefully and curiously, feeling I was learning quite a bit about my mother as I went.

Much of her jewelry was made of silver; rings and bracelets, anklets, earrings and necklaces of every shape and design, many engraved or molded with the already-familiar oak and ivy pattern. There wasn’t much in the way of precious stones or other materials, except gold and some items made of what Ken informed me was platinum.

“Jewelry,” Ken explained, “was the one fashion accessory Mistress Chessie preferred to understate. She always said that jewelry should accent appearance, never dominate it.”

On that point, at least, we agreed. After the overwhelming color and style assault of her clothing - I have always dressed very plainly and in mostly earth tones - it made me feel like I actually had something in common with her.

While I examined her jewelry, Ken had me set aside a simple but elegant-looking choker made of platinum. After I was done looking through her things, he directed my attention to it. “That was the necklace your mother kept the Master Key on. If you like it, it’s a very convenient way to keep the Key, and I’m certain she would’ve wanted you to wear it.”

“If it fits,” I said, picking it up and taking a closer look at it. It was a simple band, completely unadorned, flat on the inside and slightly rounded on the outside. It opened via a cleverly concealed clasp at what I guessed was the back, for there was a loop on the ‘front’ from which hung a keyring.

“It doesn’t look that convenient…” I said doubtfully, wondering if I was meant to take the key off every time I needed to use it, or perhaps bend to the lock and twist my head around. That was an amusing mental image.

Ken smiled. “Put in on, and I’ll show you.”

I shrugged and slipped it carefully around my neck. To my astonishment, it fit perfectly, lying snugly against my throat without being in any way uncomfortable. It was pleasantly cool against my skin, and seemed to have been made specifically for me. I gave Ken a surprised look. “It fits.”

He nodded. “Perfectly. I’d hoped it would. Now, put the Key on the keyring.”

I did so, first removing it from the key chain it had resided on, then carefully hooking it - by feel - onto the ring dangling from Mother’s choker.

Once it was secured, Ken smiled impishly. “Now, pull on it.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“Try it,” he grinned.

So I took hold of the Key and pulled, expecting to tug my head forward.

Instead, the choker clicked softly and began to spool out an incredibly fine chain attached to the keyring. I could feel something inside the choker ratcheting ever so slightly as the links emerged, until it finally stopped at a length of a little under four feet.

I stared at the loops of chain in my hands, then at Ken. “That’s…” I trailed off, incredulous.

“Impossible?” Ken smiled. “Like me, perhaps? It’s just a bit of magical and mechanical trickery. Your father made it for your mother as a wedding present, and it delighted her with its simplicity and cleverness. She never took it off.”

I reached up and gave the chain a gentle tug, causing it to slowly reel back in until the keyring was flush with the choker again. Then I smiled at Ken. “Then I won’t either. It’s something of both of them that I can carry with me.”

“That’s the spirit,” Ken said with a wink. “It’s also a wise decision. There’s one other enchantment on it that your mother added later, preventing anyone but the wearer from taking it off, or removing the Key from it. Consider it a bit of extra security.”

I nodded and stroked the band gently. It was so smooth that it almost felt soft beneath my fingers, and wearing it gave me a warm feeling…I felt a bit closer to my parents with it on, but especially to my mother.

“I just remembered,” Ken said, poking in the jewelry box. “There’s one thing here your mother wanted you have.” He plucked a ring from the box and deposited it in my hand.

It was a silver ring, the outside engraved with the familiar oak and ivy pattern. As I examined it, I realized that the word “Sparkle” was carefully etched onto the inside of it, as if done with a fine engraving tool by an inexpert hand. As I turned it, I found another set of letters on the inside that I didn’t recognize, but which resembled the ones I’d seen around the edges of my bathroom mirror. “What are these?” I asked Ken.

“Runes,” he said. “They have a wide variety of uses and meanings, but these particular ones spell out a Name.”

I looked up at him, hearing the emphasis he placed on the word. “What do you mean?”

He gave me a mysterious smile. “It’s a surprise. A present from your mother.”

“A surprise,” I said slowly. “All right. There’s more to it than the ring, I take it.”

Ken nodded. “Put it on.”

I did, sliding it onto the middle finger of my right hand.

Nothing happened.

I looked up at Ken again, raising an eyebrow. He simply smiled and said, “You’ll see.”

With a sigh and a shrug, I rose and walked to the mirror over Mother’s dresser to examine my appearance. The choker glinted prettily around my throat, level with the collar of my blouse. For an instant, its appearance gave me the impression that I was wearing an actual collar, like some kind of pet, but that was silly. It did make me wonder a bit if I was really related to the woman it had belonged to. There was something just a hint risqué about it, and I was not.

“Ken,” I said slowly, “I think I need to learn more about my parents. Like…you keep telling me that I resemble my mother, but…” I gestured back to the closet, then fingered the choker, “I’ve never worn anything like what she wore, or anything like this. I’m not a colorful person, really.”

Ken smiled. “I suspect you’ll find that you are. We just need to wake that up inside you. Trust me, there’s no doubt you’re Mistress Chessie’s daughter.” He gestured around the room. “Most of what you see here is your father’s influence, but if you look carefully…look past the surface…you’ll find more evidence of your mother here as well. Your father…beyond books, you’ll find more about his personality in his study.”

“Which…maybe we’ll visit this afternoon,” I said tentatively.

He nodded. “When you’re ready. The piles of books are indicative of research he was doing before he died…he was driven after your mother’s death, rarely resting and only sleeping a few hours a night.” His eyes took on a distant look for a moment. “Why don’t you look around a bit more in here, and I’ll go put together a light lunch for you. It’s a little after noon already.”

I agreed, and so he left me alone in the master bedroom. I went through my mother’s dresser first, and discovered that she had evidently been fascinated by striped tights and stockings. There were dozens of pairs in so many different colors and combinations of colors that looking at them bundled side-by-side was dizzying. Her lingerie drawer was, by my comparatively modest standards, almost scandalous.

My father’s dresser…I skipped his underwear drawer. Looking in there just felt wrong, somehow. But his sock drawer was unsurprisingly drab, mostly black, brown and very dark blue…except for a few pairs on the far right side, which were bright, cheerful, and silly. Things like red and white socks with a mistletoe pattern; tartan socks in an absolutely hideous combination of almost neon green, blue and red; black socks with Jack-o-lanterns on them.

Mother must have given them to him…but they all looked worn, and Father had kept them.

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There, I’d learned something about him which fit what Ken had told me about them. Mother had made sure he kept dreaming, Ken had said…and Father had obviously appreciated it. Enough to keep some of the most ugly socks I’d ever seen. That made me smile.

In a curio cabinet off to one side of Mother’s dresser, I found a drawer full of implements that took me a moment to recognize…Wands.

They were made of various lengths of wood and metal, wrapped in leather, silk, or some sort of cord. Some were capped by crystals and gems, others with their ends pointed and their lengths engraved with more of the runic writing.

The next drawer down had a variety of bracelets in it, made of silver, platinum, copper, and other metals I wasn’t immediately familiar with. Some were engraved with more of the runes, while others had precious stones embedded in them. There were several rings, similar to the one Ken had given me, but ornately carved with patterns of fire, or waves, or swirls that might have represented wind, all of them etched with more runes. Near the back of the drawer was a belt, woven of a fine metal mesh that looked like a mix of silver, copper, and gold.

I made a mental note to ask Ken about them and moved on.

By the time he returned with lunch, I was sitting on the edge of the bed, just looking around. I felt rather dazed, for lack of a better term. Ken, bless him, seemed to instinctively understand how I was feeling and simply served up the food - a sandwich and a salad - in silence.

I had a lot to absorb. I ate in silence, occasionally running my fingers over the Master Key dangling from my mother’s choker. Ken remained quietly solicitous of my mood, moving only to remove the remains of my lunch when I finished and returning to hover nearby, ready to serve.

After almost a half an hour of that, he cleared his throat. “Perhaps you’d like to see another part of the House? I could show you your father’s study - “

“No,” I cut him off gently, shaking my head and rousing myself from my mental wanderings. “I think I need a bit more time before I see that.”

Ken nodded, hopefully understanding.

My father’s letter had said that his journals and notes were there, and I didn’t feel ready to see them yet, let alone to try and comprehend their contents. I knew that I would have to, and soon; I suspected there was information contained within them that I would need, possibly in short order, if I wanted to disentangle myself from the mystery I was finding myself inextricably woven into.

But not yet. After their bedroom, I needed something to distract myself from family matters until I’d had time to finish incorporating this knowledge.

“How about telling me a bit about magic?” I asked. That should prove diverting.

Ken moved around in front of me and looked at me closely, his silvery eyes very serious. After a long moment, he nodded. “All right,” he smiled a little. “I suppose you’ve seen enough oddities to really start stretching your understanding of reality a bit.”

“I won’t break, I promise,” I said, trying for a bit of humor. But honestly, I wondered a bit.

So did Ken, from the look on his face. But he nodded and started drifting backwards toward the door. “Very well then, Mistress. If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you to the laboratory.”

He actually pronounced it with five syllables, like he was in an old monster movie. La-bor-a-tor-y. It was so charmingly pretentious that it made me giggle. “That makes it sound like you’re going to be training me to become a mad scientist.” I rose and followed him.

Ken flashed his quick, impish grin. “Well, in a sense I will be.”

“Oh?”

We left my parents’ bedroom, which opened onto a different hallway than we’d entered from. That oddity was actually starting to seem normal, and barely phased me this time, which made me think that maybe - just maybe - I was adjusting to this weirdness. Or maybe I was losing my mind. For his part, Ken glanced around briefly, picked a direction, and struck off with me close behind him.

“Magic,” Ken said as we walked, “is a very curious subject of study. By its very nature, magic can be difficult to quantify and somewhat fluid in its behavior. It isn’t uncommon for three neophyte spellcasters to study together, and end up with three completely different ways of producing a similar spell effect.”

“So how do you study it?” I asked, more than a little perplexed. “It sounds more like quantum theory than practical science.”

Ken smiled. “In a way, it encompasses both. There are certain principles that are roughly immutable. For example, you can’t make something out of nothing. If you want to create a fireball, you need a way to create the fire, and a way to make it move. Your understanding of physics and chemistry will come in surprisingly useful there. How you get to that point is more flexible.

“Lightning might make for a better example,” he continued, guiding me up a staircase. “You understand the principles by which lightning is generated…”

“Positive and negative ions,” I interjected.

“Yes, put very simply. Therefore, to generate a bolt of lightning, one must produce enough charged ions to create the spark. Once the spark exists, creating a bolt of lightning is as simple as extending it into the air and grounding it through your target of choice.”

“That…doesn’t sound simple,” I said slowly.

Ken laughed softly. “Well, truth be told, it won’t be. At least, not at first. It requires a great deal of willpower and mental focus to cast lightning. Your mother, for example, liked to imagine the lightning taking shape. Your father preferred doing mental calculations of power output and distance to target. That’s where a lot of the flexibility comes in. Every spellcaster has to find the way best suited to themselves to…to encapsulate the spell, so to speak.”

“I think I understand…” I said. “It’s not just about knowing how the forces interact and what you want them to do, it’s about internalizing the desired effect and packing it for use.”

Ken stopped walking and gave me a surprised - and pleased - look. “That’s very accurate, Mistress. That’s a leap of understanding that takes most apprentice spellcasters many days.”

I felt my cheeks warming. “Well, it’s one thing to comprehend it. It’s another thing entirely to put it into practice.”

Ken nodded, smiling. “Very true,” he agreed. “We definitely won’t be casting any spells today. Possibly not for a couple of weeks. You have a lot of theory to cover first.”

“Only a couple of weeks?” I was surprised. “I guess I assumed it would take longer.”

“Ordinarily it would.” Ken started walking again, and I hurried to keep up. “But your father prepared a way for you to absorb the theory more quickly. We’ll get to that once you’ve started to learn the basics.”

“All right.”

“So,” he said, “the two biggest hurdles that most young spellcasters have to overcome - aside from that one - are understanding the two laws of physics that can never be completely circumvented: Conservation of mass, and conservation of energy.”

“As you said, you can’t make something out of nothing.”

Ken nodded. “Precisely. If you want to make a chair, you can’t just create it out of thin air. You need raw materials to work with. It’s not impossible to convert one material into another, but it is energy intensive, and some materials are more resistant to change than others, so it’s usually easier to simply change a material’s form -”

I held up a hand to stop him. “Wait, some materials are more resistant to change than others?”

“Mmhm,” he nodded. “Aluminum, for example, is very malleable and easier to change into another material than, say, Uranium. As a generality, knowledge of the Periodic Table of Elements will give you an idea of a material’s resistance to transfiguration. The more complex its atomic structure, the more difficult it will be to transfigure into another material. There are, of course, exceptions, but it’s a good general rule.”

“Okay, that makes sense. Go on.”

“Where was I? Oh yes…so, a lump of iron could be turned into an iron chair with relative ease. Turning a lump of iron into a wooden chair would be more difficult.” He smiled. “Turning the particulate contents of a sandstorm into a leather recliner would be exceedingly difficult.”

I chuckled. “I can imagine.”

“Now, some older and more experienced spellcasters can make it look like they’ve created something out of nothing,” Ken said, “by doing basically the ‘sandstorm’ trick…subtly gathering enough raw materials from their surroundings to change and mold them into a desired shape and material. But it takes a great deal of skill and practice, and is impractical at best. It’s not something your parents ever did, that I am aware of.

“Along the same lines,” he went on, “it’s possible to change states of matter and energy to produce a desired effect. If you want to throw fire, for example, the easiest way to get the energy for it would be to draw heat out of the surrounding air. You’d feel a brief drop in temperature as the atmosphere in the immediate area adjusted, and you’d have a nifty ball or beam of fire to show for it.”

“Which is the basis of…” I hesitated, the idea still feeling very alien to me. “Of defensive magic?”

Ken glanced at me for a moment, then nodded. “One of several. We’ll do some aptitude testing once you understand the basics and determine which elements will be easiest for you to work with. Most spellcasters have one or two that they find extremely easy to manipulate, and one or two that are very difficult for them to manage.”

“Why?” I asked curiously. That didn’t sound very scientific.

He shrugged. “No idea, really. Personality often seems to have something to do with it. So does the environment in which they grew up,” he ticked the points off on his fingers, “personal circumstances, life experiences, who their teacher was…”

I laughed. “So there’s no easy way of knowing.”

Ken smiled and shook his head. “Thus, aptitude testing.”

“Got it.”

“Conservation of energy,” he said as we rounded a corner and started down a flight of stairs, “plays a part in other ways as well. One of the things you’ll have to learn is how to produce shields. When defending yourself, there are several ways to interrupt attacks: by blocking them outright, which requires an equal and opposite force; by deflecting them, which requires less force but more creativity; or by evading them, which requires no opposite force but can be the most difficult -”

“Um…” I cut him off, shivering a little, feeling my stomach trying to crawl up into my throat at the idea of fighting. “Maybe we can put off discussing that sort of thing until I’ve got the basics down?”

Ken stopped and turned towards me, smiling sympathetically. “Your reality is changing,” he said gently. “One of the hardest things you’ll have to accept is that there are beings and organizations out there in the world - and in other worlds - who will want this House very badly once they realize you’re here, for reasons you might already be able to imagine.”

My mind tried frantically to shy away from that train of thought, but I took a deep breath and forced myself down that mental path. It wasn’t hard, really. “If there are doors that open onto lots of different locations, taking control of the House would make moving from one place to another incredibly easy.”

Ken nodded. “That’s one reason, and the most obvious and easily exploited one.” He sighed softly. “That’s part of why the House needs its Guardian.”

I shuddered a little. “I don’t know if I can do that, Ken. I’ve always tried to avoid conflict, and I don't know much about fighting…” Aside from fencing and some basic self-defense classes, which didn't sound at all like what he meant.

“That’s not a bad thing,” Ken replied, resting a hand lightly on my shoulder. “In past times, the Guardian was more often called to mediate between two disagreeing parties, because past Guardians have always tried to maintain at least the appearance of neutrality. It rarely comes to blows.

“But you need to know how,” he said gently, but firmly. “Your parents died because someone wanted the House awake but unprotected. That’s my belief, anyway. Which means you need to learn to protect yourself…and part of that is knowing how to fight when pressed to it.”

Part of me wanted to run and hide, or leave the House behind me altogether. My life back at the university had been stressful in its own ways, but vastly more safe by comparison and far less mind-bending and confusing.

But I was not a coward. I had always met challenges - mainly intellectual ones, granted - head on. Leaving this House would mean abandoning my only way of ever getting to know my parents and learning about my family history. To judge from my father’s letter and Margrave’s urgency, it might also put me - now unprotected by my father hiding me - in danger from…something.

And it would mean leaving Ken behind. He could not come with me if I left the House, and I was surprised by how much that idea made my heart ache, and by how quickly I’d grown fond of him. I wasn’t used to caring about other people, if Ken could be classified as ‘people’…when you grow up in an orphanage, you learn to take care of yourself because nobody else is going to, and you learn not to make strong attachments. Everyone goes away, sooner or later.

But Ken had endeared himself to me very quickly. The idea of leaving him alone here wasn’t something I was willing to consider. I knew too much about being alone…nobody should be. We were in this together.

So I took a deep breath and pushed down my fear. “Okay.”

Ken smiled, obviously a bit relieved. “It will be, eventually. Give it time and training.”

“Do I have time?” I heard the quaver in my own voice and hated it.

He considered the question seriously before nodding. “Yes, I believe so. But come…there’s much more to magic than blasting things to bits.”