Chapter 13
IT’S NOT THE ABSENCE OF FEAR
Azrion
Azrion was having such a good workday at the scholar’s hall that he didn’t even mind listening to Zelvax prattle on in the tea alcove while his durock root and sytron balm steeped.
He leaned against the wall and cradled his cup, warmth pervading his palms almost like another’s skin would, and he took a deep breath of the earthy steam.
Thank all the stars Burgritz had sold him the last of the season’s blend.
It would only be better if he had someone to share it with.
Well, someone who wasn’t Zelvax. He liked the orange demon about as much as he liked that abysmal painting in the council chambers, but his fellow scholar had just brought up Azrion’s new favorite topic.
“So you’ve observed the humans too?” Zelvax asked, stirring his own tea and tapping off the spoon three too many times on his cup’s rim.
Azrion waited for the clinking to stop but maintained his friendly countenance. Observing was one way to describe it. Holding a human in his arms and pressing his lips to her cheek was another, but no one deserved to share in that sentimental detail. “Moderately.”
“They’re powerful, aren’t they?”
Azrion immediately agreed then shook his head. “Wait, what?”
Zelvax’s gaze darted about as if he could see runes painting themselves on the floor.
“They seem unable to use whatever’s inside them, but there’s something untapped there.
A sort of raw vitality. Could be used to fuel spells if harnessed, but there’s the problem of their signatures.
You have to devise marks for them, and if you don’t get them exact, things go wrong. ”
Oh, gods, what the fuck was he going on about? “Interesting. Say, is that Itcheran calling for you?”
“Huh?” When Zelvax turned, Azrion fled in the opposing direction, calling a friendly farewell over his shoulder and accepting an imaginary apology on Zelvax’s behalf for cutting their conversation short.
Magic did all sorts of things to demons: made them brilliant, obsessive, considerate, cruel, and sometimes it convinced them they could play at godhood.
It helped, Azrion supposed, when one’s magic was of the creation variety, though he wasn’t entirely convinced orange demons weren’t just tapping into a different well than the rest of them.
But a sip of his tea as he turned the corner for his office’s corridor washed all that away.
By the time this last cup was drained, he would be ready to head home, and maybe he would swing by the post on his way.
He should probably bring Katarina a gift, though.
Something small so he didn’t look too eager, but a sincere token of his gratitude for accompanying him to Fioran’s wedding.
Maybe a hairpin? One encrusted with jewels and flecked with—
“Son, a word.”
Azrion stopped on the threshold and leaned back out into the hall to check he’d gone the right way. Yes, this was his office, so what the fuck was his father doing inside it? “That was three words actually.”
“Sit.”
“Four,” he mumbled, trudging to the chair opposite his own where his father had taken it upon himself to get comfortable behind Azrion’s desk. Maybe he should start following scholar’s hall protocol and lock his door even when he was just going for tea. “Care to make it five?”
With a flick of his wrist, Valinerath cast on the chamber door so that it slammed shut. Runes assisted with those kinds of spells, but not to the point of slamming—Azrion’s father added that flourish all on his own.
Azrion covered his wince by throwing his feet up on the desk and sinking casually into his seat. “Did you catch Elder Cranerath nodding off during Itcheran’s meeting yester—”
“You’re not fucking a human.”
Tea sloshed onto Azrion’s shirt as he lurched at his father’s words.
You’re right, I’m not, he wanted to say, but I wish I were.
None of that came out, though, only a glower of contempt mirrored back at the one his father was already giving him as he used the sleeve of his coat to sop up the stinging liquid.
“There are nearly five thousand demons in this city to sow your wild oats in: why in the blazes would you choose a human?”
Azrion wanted to say the only place his oats had been sown as of late was into his own hand, but his father wouldn’t have believed that.
“Realistically, if you remove demons from the population on account of age, partnership, willingness, and taste, the number’s probably a lot closer to only one, maybe two thousand, and I don’t know how you expect me to work with that. ”
“This isn’t a joke, Azrion.” Valinerath’s jaw never loosened as he sat forward, voice sharp if low. “You’ve been given every opportunity in this life, and yet you’re squandering it.”
Azrion put his feet back on the ground to maintain space between the two but leaned casually on the arm of the chair, gesturing with his tea.
“Actually, you’re squandering my life at the moment.
I need to finish designing that rune by day’s end for Maritmoch or else she’s not going to give me the name of her new jeweler, and—”
“Marry the Thiemos heir and be done with it.”
Azrion pinched the bridge of his nose. He should have known his father would find out, but he didn’t expect it to happen so soon. “Never thought I’d see the day my father engaged in frivolous gossip.”
“There is nothing frivolous about your future except the way you treat it. You’re lucky any noble has taken an interest in you at all with your idiocy and slovenliness, let alone the daughter of the Horn of Rudiments.
” Valinerath grabbed a stack of loose parchment, admittedly messy but Azrion knew exactly what was in the pile, and he brandished it over his head.
Azrion winced as his stomach dropped, but he didn’t entirely cower. He was too big for that now, but he still sat up straight just in case.
His father let the tense moment fill up the office, let the threat crawl over every inch of the chamber and chase away anything like safety, then finally dropped the stack.
Pages littered the desk and floor, but Valinerath didn’t give the worse mess he’d made a second look.
“Your mother and I have had to force you back on track with your studies, your job, your courtship. If it weren’t for the two of us, where do you think you’d be? ”
“Passed out drunk under one of the tables at the Fallen Priest,” he answered, the words as dull as the idea after being told it so many times.
Azrion didn’t even drink all that often, but his father’s idea of a useless demon was a drunkard, and so the fabricated life his son would lead without his helpful guidance often ended up at the bottom of an ale barrel.
“No, you’d be dead out in the Dreadmoor,” Valinerath snapped, surprising Azrion enough to look up at him instead of the floor. “The guard would take your talent in a tail flick, but you don’t have scouting in you. You’d get yourself killed on the first fucking day.”
Azrion’s throat went thick. “I’m not Valromotch.”
“No, you’re certainly not.”
It was only when his father was especially angry that his delusions of Azrion’s unlived life evolved beyond the tavern and followed in the footsteps of his other son. The good one. The strong one. The dead one.
“What do you expect to come of these escapades?” his father asked as he stood to pace behind the chair. “Those women aren’t dangerous, but they’re still human. Demons and humans don’t mingle, not like this. They’re traitors to our kind.”
Azrion swallowed, gaze falling to what was left of his tea still clutched in both hands. “Humans didn’t kill Valromotch, dad.”
“They may as well have,” his father roared, and Azrion braced himself, squeezing his eyes shut.
“They brought us here, didn’t they? They tore a scar in the earth, they cursed these lands, and they made it possible for those monsters that killed your brother to plague us unendingly. So whose fault is it?”
“I don’t know,” Azrion said quietly. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
Silence hung in the office as heavily as innards from branches in the Dreadmoor after a sarthisci tore through a scouting party.
He didn’t want to remember his brother like that, but it was just as difficult to remember him alive because he had been so good to Azrion, and then he’d gone and died and taken everything with him.
“If I had a vote on the council,” his father said, the rage in his voice tempered to an uncanny softness, “I would propose that those women be made comfortable and welcome.”
Azrion snapped his head up, eyeing the lavender demon who looked so like how Valromotch might have some day if he’d been allowed to grow older. “You would?” It was all his father wanted, to be on the council, but Azrion hadn’t considered how he might wield that power.
Valinerath nodded. “But my son has a future, and he’s not throwing it away on one of them.”
With a deep, grounding breath, Azrion considered telling him everything—the contract, the coin, the plan to win back Melora.
His father would think it was stupid, certainly, but maybe he would understand since he thought everyone under the age of forty was stupid anyway.
“I’m not throwing anything away,” he said carefully.
“Then what the fuck were you doing flaunting one of them around the Vumheri wedding?”
“Katarina agreed to come with me so that I could—”
“Oh, it has a name.” His father snorted, as dismissive as he was disgusted.
Azrion swallowed back the truth, and it sat sourly in his stomach. “Yes, Katarina.” He waited for the next pithy remark, but it didn’t come. “She agreed to escort me as a…a friend. And I hoped she might—”
“You do not need a friend. You need a wife.”
But I want to love whomever I commit myself to. He almost said it, the truth that had been churning in his mind and heart for years now, but instead he just shook his head.