The summons came at midday.
Not through Gerhard, not through the household steward — through Mikayla directly, which told Jonas something about how the Duke had categorized the morning's events before he had even crossed the threshold of the study. Routine disciplinary matters went through the chain. Matters that required the Duke's personal read on the situation went through Mikayla. The distinction was informative.
He had been expecting the summons. He had been expecting it since approximately the moment Ernst Heller's arm had separated, which meant he had spent the intervening hours in the library not reading but preparing, the book open in front of him as cover for a thought process running at full capacity in a different direction entirely.
He had one asset in this meeting that he had not had at any previous point in his six weeks in Munich. Not the ability — the ability was a liability in the wrong circumstances, and the Duke's study was potentially the wrong circumstances. Not the physical capacity he had been building, which was irrelevant here. What he had was a piece of paper, folded twice, that he had been carrying in his coat for eleven days, waiting for a moment when its deployment would produce maximum return.
The moment had arrived approximately four hours ahead of his most optimistic estimate. He adjusted accordingly.
The study was different in the afternoon light than he had imagined it from the outside. Larger than the impression the corridor gave of it, with the particular density of a room that had accumulated significant use over a long time — documents in organized stacks that were not disarray but active work, maps on one wall with annotations in two different hands indicating the Duke used them in consultation, a desk that had the settled quality of furniture that had been in one position long enough to have made peace with the floor.
Mikayla was standing to the left of the desk. She looked at him when he entered with the focused attention she had given him since the carriage, the expression of someone who was continuing an assessment rather than beginning one.
The Duke was behind the desk. He looked up from the document he had been reading when Jonas entered, set it aside with the unhurried precision of a man who finished his current action before beginning the next one, and regarded him with an expression that was doing very little.
Jonas had learned, in six weeks, that the Duke's face doing very little was not the same as the Duke thinking very little.
He closed the door behind him.
He had mapped this moment against multiple scenarios and the scenario that had resolved with the highest probability was one in which the Duke opened, establishing the terms of the conversation from a position of institutional authority, and Jonas responded within those terms. The scenario produced acceptable outcomes. It did not produce the outcome he needed.
So he spoke first.
"I know, your grace, that I have robbed your house of a valuable asset." His voice was level, carrying neither apology nor defiance — the register of a professional acknowledging a professional fact. "For that I make restitution."
He reached into his coat and produced the folded paper. Crossed the room. Set it on the desk.
The Duke looked at him for a moment before he looked at the paper. The look was the kind that recalibrated an expectation, brief and controlled, the adjustment of a man who had prepared for one kind of conversation and received the opening move of a different one. Then he unfolded the paper.
He looked at it.
"What am I looking at," he said.
The diagram was precise without being a technical blueprint — Jonas had made a deliberate decision about that distinction. A blueprint gave everything away immediately and created no reason for further conversation. A diagram gave enough to demonstrate that the thing was real and coherent and thought through, while leaving the operational detail as something to be negotiated rather than simply received. The image showed a closed vessel, a heat source beneath it, a piston assembly, the general relationship between the components rendered with enough accuracy that anyone with mechanical intelligence could identify the logic.
"A steam engine, your grace." Jonas remained standing, his hands at his sides. "That is the key that will usher Bavaria — and with it, the empire — into a new world."
The Duke looked up from the paper.
Jonas did not wait for the question. He had prepared this the way he had prepared everything — not as a speech but as a sequence of propositions, each one following from the last with the kind of internal logic that moved a listener forward rather than asking them to make a conceptual leap. He kept it direct. He kept it concrete. He used examples the Duke would find immediately legible.
Water, first — the most obvious application in a territory that had mining operations and the perennial drainage problem that all deep mining operations shared. A steam-driven pump could clear water from a mine shaft faster and more consistently than any current method, without depleting a water-mage's reserves, without requiring a mage at all. The labor reduction alone justified the construction cost within a calculable timeframe.
Construction second — the movement of heavy materials across terrain, the mechanical advantage that converted heat into sustained force and sustained force into the kind of output that currently required either earth-mage assistance or impractical quantities of human labor. Roads. Bridges. Fortifications built at a speed that did not depend on the availability of mages.
Transportation third — here he was careful, sketching the concept without committing to a timeline, because the infrastructure requirements for meaningful transportation application were not short-term and promising the Duke something with a twenty-year development horizon without flagging the horizon was the kind of overclaiming that destroyed credibility faster than silence would have. He noted the potential. He did not present it as immediate.
Mining fourth — deeper extraction, more consistent output, the implications for the magic stone supply chain which he had read enough about to understand was the single most strategically sensitive economic variable in the entire empire.
He stopped there. He had more and he did not deploy more, because the Duke's expression had moved from careful neutrality to the specific quality of attention that indicated the information had landed with sufficient weight and additional weight would not improve the landing.
"All I ask, your grace, is fifteen percent of all proceeds generated by this engine and its applications." He held the Duke's gaze. "And the manpower to build it."
He was sent away.
Not dismissed — sent away with the particular brevity of a man who needed to think without an audience, the closed door of a study that was no longer available for the conversation to continue in. Jonas walked back toward his room at the same pace he had walked to the study, which was to say unhurriedly, because urgency in the corridor communicated information he had no interest in communicating.
In the library he sat down, opened his notes, and waited.
In the study, the Duke held the diagram at the angle that caught the afternoon light most clearly and said nothing for a long time.
Mikayla stood where she had been standing and said nothing either, which was one of the things the Duke found most professionally useful about her — she understood that his silence was a working state rather than an invitation to fill.
"That boy," the Duke said finally, "is dangerous."
Mikayla looked at him.
"Not the arm." He set the diagram down. "Any sufficiently powerful mage with poor impulse control can take an arm. That is not what I mean." He tapped the edge of the paper once, a gesture that was not quite pointing but indicated. "He came into this room expecting a reprimand. He walked out with a negotiation in progress. He did not ask permission to change the terms of the conversation. He simply changed them." He picked up the diagram again and held it at a different angle. "Watch him. Not supervision — watch him the way you watch something you haven't fully classified yet. Make sure Wallenstein and the others don't get wind of him until I understand what I'm dealing with."
"Yes, your grace."
"And find out—" He stopped.
He was looking at the diagram with the attention that had served him well for thirty years of managing the most complex political territory in the German Empire, the attention that noticed the details that did not fit the expected pattern and treated those details as the most important information available.
The lines were too consistent.
Not in the sense of talent — he had seen talented draughtsmen, and talented draughtsmen showed variation in line weight, the natural micro-inconsistencies of a hand responding to the organic demands of drawing. These lines did not. They maintained their weight with a regularity that was almost mechanical, and the curves had a precision that quillwork, even excellent quillwork, did not produce. The ink flow was even in a way that suggested an instrument with a different delivery mechanism than a standard quill or a charcoal — something that regulated pressure independently of the hand holding it.
He had seen the pen on the boy's desk, three weeks ago, during the brief review of the guest quarters that had followed the incident he was not officially acknowledging. He had noted it as an unusual object and moved on because there had been more pressing matters.
He looked at the diagram for a long moment longer.
The steam engine was not the first thing the boy had made.
"Find out," he said, "what he is writing with."
Mikayla looked at the diagram, looked at the Duke, and arrived at the same conclusion he had arrived at two seconds prior.
"Yes, your grace," she said.
The Duke set the diagram down in the center of his desk, in the position he reserved for active matters, and returned to the correspondence he had set aside when Jonas entered.
He read the first three lines of the document in front of him.
Then he set it aside again and looked at the diagram.