The East Wing
SEVRIN
The dining room at Kelsey Castle was smaller than the one at Rathmor Palace. Older. The table was dark wood, the chairs heavy, the candles already lit when he arrived.
He stopped in the doorway.
He did not recognize a single face in the room.
His body went cold. His eyes moved over the staff, the servers, the attendants at the walls, the woman pouring wine at the sideboard, and found nothing familiar. Not one of his people. Not one face he had placed or approved or seen before this moment.
Nox looked up from her seat. She read his expression and rolled her eyes.
"Do not worry," she said. "I am not attempting to kill you or usurp you.
Not yet, anyway. My plans still remain." She reached for her goblet of blood.
"But for them to be effective no one can see how weak you are.
Your staff cannot be trusted with that information. Mine can."
He came to Kelsey Castle so rarely that in truth he was unsure of the loyalty of the staff. So he nodded just slightly, then he sat down.
Aviaryn was already seated across from him, barefoot, examining her plate with the focused attention she applied to most things.
The food arrived. Steak, simply prepared. A decanter of blood beside each setting. A human stood near the wall.
Aviaryn looked at the decanter. Then at the human. Then back at the decanter.
"I would like mine poured," she said. “I do not wish to eat directly from the human.”
The human walked in front of Nox and held out his wrist. Nox bit delicately, a trickle of blood sliding down her chin.
It was an attractive sight, Sevrin had to admit. Though not as attractive as that time he had seen Asharin drink blood for the first time, the night of the Baron’s ball. It felt like just yesterday. Something in him went warm at the thought.
"Drink it as it is," Nox said, pulling him back to the present.
"I would like mine poured,” Aviaryn said, voice terse.
"I am aware of what you prefer."
"Then you are aware that I would like it poured. I do not like the smell of humans directly under my nose.”
Nox set down her fork. "Aviaryn—"
Sevrin lifted the decanter and poured his portion into the empty cup beside his plate. He drank it without comment.
Nox looked at him sharply. "It is less nutritious that way."
"Perhaps," he said. "But it is even less nutritious to starve."
Aviaryn looked at him. Something moved in her expression that was not quite approval but adjacent to it.
Nox said nothing further. The staff poured Aviaryn's blood without being asked again.
They ate. The steak was good, Sevrin noted to himself. Perhaps her kitchen staff could stay whenever all of this…ended.
He was not sure when that would be.
Aviaryn cut her steak carefully, then set down her knife.
"The tax levies in Slurvina require attention," she said. "The third district has been underreporting yield for the better part of two seasons and the discrepancy—"
"Did you wear shoes?" Nox said.
Aviaryn looked at her. "What?"
"When you went to Slurvina today. Did you wear shoes?”
"Flagsar does not wear shoes."
"Flagsar is a creature."
Aviaryn's fork hit the table.
Sevrin looked at her. "Have you ever heard the story of the thorn and the shoe?"
She turned to him. "I thought you did not know any stories."
"That does not mean I cannot make one up."
Nox stared at him.
Aviaryn got up from her chair, crossed to his side of the table, and sat in the empty seat beside him. She reached into her pocket and produced a sweet and placed it in her mouth.
"I am listening," she said.
He told her a story. He made it up as he went, which was not something he had done before, and it was not a particularly good story, but it had a thorn and a shoe and a creature who refused to wear one and eventually understood why it mattered.
It took longer than he expected. She did not interrupt once.
When he finished she was quiet for a moment.
Then she got up and went back to her seat and picked up her fork and continued eating.
Nox was still looking at him.
He reached for his goblet of blood. He wished it were wine. His staff would have known he preferred wine.
The days began to blend together after that.
He worked on his strength in the mornings, pushing further each day than the day before, his recovery admittedly slow but there was progress. Each day his chest seemed to hurt just a little less, and his gait became just a little stronger.
Ivernet came intermittently with news. She arrived without announcement, which was her way, and stood near the window and gave her report. Most recently, she had told him that the castle was under Axar's care, her sources had told her. The Darkway held. The creatures were manageable.
Fine. He had known no harm would come to the Morrath throne with Axar in it. He had also known Axar would not bother keeping it. The man found little value in kingship. Sevrin had noticed that from the beginning.
He dismissed Ivernet and sat with the quiet for a while.
After, he went below to the library himself, moving through the shelves with the attention Aviaryn had shown him, looking for the ones with illustrations.
In the evenings he would meet her in the sitting area in the east wing that had two comfortable chairs and a warm fire.
He had not ever remembered using it, but he had remembered it recently and thought it a good place for the reading to take place.
Aviaryn met him there each evening with whatever she had found in the library that day and he would show her what he had found and they would decide which story she would read to him.
She would sit in the chair beside the fire with the book held at an angle that suggested she was still learning how to hold one properly.
Her reading was careful and precise and she did not look up when she turned pages.
One evening she set the book down and said, "There is a story I have heard about. Someone told me of it." A pause. "A friend, I think is the correct word."
"What is it called?"
She told him.
He said he would look into it.
His strength was still not what it needed to be. What little he had he spent carefully.
Admittedly, calling for his Morraks spent a great deal of strength in his current condition. Yet he did it, as they had an important assignment. He called them quietly, the way he called all things quietly now. "Find it. Check them all."
It took three days.
When the book arrived he felt a strange satisfaction he could not entirely account for.
He looked at it, as well as for the newer books he had requested without knowing their names, only that the ones in Kelsey castle had faded illustrations and appeared old, and he suspected Aviaryn would enjoy new ones.
He brought them to the east wing that evening. She looked at the stack. Then at him.
"Is it for me to keep?" Her mouth opened slightly.
"Yes," he said. "And the others. You said that one was for a friend, so I found you a few of your own."
He felt strange giving them to her. Almost shy, which was not a word he had ever applied to himself and did not intend to start now.
He did not know much about children. He did not know why he wished to please her at all.
He only knew that he had and that the wanting had arrived without his permission.
She looked at the books. Her expression did not change. She took the one for her friend first, then looked at the others.
He had gotten it wrong.
Then she looked up at him and did something he had never seen her do before.
She smiled. A full, unguarded smile, and when she did he saw the gap where an upper tooth had recently been. Small and ordinary and entirely human. The kind of thing that happened to children her age everywhere in the world and nowhere in Morrath.
It pleased him more than he knew what to do with.
She looked at the remaining pile and carefully selected three more books, setting them apart from the others.
He frowned. “Are you not interested in the other three?"
She looked at them. Then at him. "I believe," she said, "that friends sometimes read together." A pause. "I would like to read those with you."
Sevrin looked at her for a moment.
He could not help it. He smiled.
"I would like that," he said.
As he walked back to his room, he thought of Asharin.
She would like Aviaryn, he decided. He would find her interesting the way that she did.
And endearing. And in need of something that she had given him, and that he was giving her, and that was so foreign to him that the exchange of it sometimes made everything in his chest go warm.
Reciprocity.