Chapter 36
CHAPTER
Azrian
The first morning in his own house as a remarried man, Azrian woke to the sound of strangers moving through his corridors. The noise did not resemble the muted ballet of well-trained staff. Instead, it was the percussive, ill-mannered rattle of outsiders.
His entry hall, once a study in muted order, stood transformed into a holding pen. Luggage, more than he’d anticipated, exploded in every corner. Three Registry officials stood by the door, holding polite but cold conversation with his butler and Sabine’s maid.
Of the clerks, it was a gangly man with a bald head who bowed and spoke. “Lord Vaelros. An honor.”
Azrian did not return the bow. “You are quite early.”
“Our instructions required a full survey of the premises before the transfer of Lady Vaelros’s effects.” The man’s voice was dry, almost defensive.
“I assure you, my staff and I are plenty capable of managing my wife’s move.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “I have handled far more delicate matters for the Empire. A few luggages won’t be my demise.”
The clerk shuffled on his feet. “We do not doubt it, my lord; it is simply protocol. You will forgive us.”
He recognized said protocol . The true goal was to record and report, to see that the Empire’s precious investments did not diverge from the expected trajectory.
He forced himself to unclench his jaw. “Then please make haste. I trust you will require little of me.”
The Registry officer bowed again and withdrew to a corner, murmuring in low tones with his subordinates. A clock ticked somewhere down the corridor. Azrian retreated to his study, in hopes paperwork could somehow drown out the noise of meddling intruders.
It did not.
Especially when said paperwork included particularly vexing correspondence bearing the Corven seal…
“What is that?” Sabine’s words broke through the fog of his thoughts like morning sunlight.
“A letter from my brother. He congratulates us on our union.” Azrian did his best to keep the distaste from dripping in his voice. Truly, he did.
It was simply a lost cause when it came to his family.
He pushed his chair back, putting distance between himself and the letter, and extended a hand to Sabine, cataloguing the changes since yesterday’s ceremony as she approached.
Her posture was stiffer, as if expecting some blow.
Her hands were folded in front of her, fingers twined, and dark circles marred the skin under her eyes.
She stopped perhaps a foot short of his knees and reached for the correspondence to trace the now broken wax seal. “I did not realize… did you not wish to invite your family to our blood vow?”
Wish. How could he explain that his relationship with his family had never revolved around his own wishes?
As a child, his older brother had been Azrian’s hero. Then Azrian was Weighed, and Lirael had simply watched as Azrian was dragged away to be sold to the Emperor.
He’d never asked another thing of his brother since, and he never planned ever to do so again, no matter how many half-built bridges Lirael attempted to construct.
However, because he could not contain all those feelings in one sentence, he simply responded: “They didn’t come to the first. I had no reason to believe they would attend the second.”
Sabine chewed on her lip, as though his answer was a dissatisfying meal that had left her hungry. “They are still your family.”
“They stopped behaving like one cycles ago.” He grasped her hand, still on the wood of his desk, and brought it to his mouth, kissing the Star of Corven before letting his lips drift lower, to her knuckles. “ You are my family now, Lady Vaelros.”
Sabine’s lips parted, tracking each of his movements. Azrian’s gaze snapped to her. He did not let her go. He did not remove his lips from her skin.
From somewhere deeper in the house came the clatter of dropped porcelain and an embarrassed yelp from Sabine’s maid.
Sabine straightened and slipped back, her composure snapping into place. “I should see that she is all right.”
They found the maid in the kitchen, bent over the remnants of a pot of tea.
With no hesitation, Sabine knelt to the ground to help gather the broken shards.
The Registry clerk remained motionless in the corner, but her pencil scratched furiously against parchment, the sound raising the hair on Azrian’s neck.
“Leave it,” he said to the two women.
“No, my lord, I apologize, I—”
“I said leave it.”
Azrian summoned a thin thread of Destruction and wove it into a simple pattern of over-under weaves, turning the shards of porcelain into ash.
The maid gasped. Sabine, to her credit, simply tapped her foot twice.
“Impressive,” she said. “Whatever for would you need staff, when you can do that? ”
Azrian huffed a sound dangerously close to a laugh. “I can manage well enough when it comes to tidying, but don’t ask me to mend a tear or prepare a meal. You’d be cold, hungry, and very likely cross with me.”
The smile that spread on her lips could have thawed snow. It certainly thawed him.
She scooped the ash into one hand and wove a bow around it with the other. The magic was imprecise; her movements were too wide, unconfined, too fluid. But her affinity did not seem to care that she had not received formal instruction in Registry-approved weaving techniques.
The ash bubbled, turning to clay, then followed the pattern of her movements, reforming itself into the teapot it’d been. In the spots where it’d first cracked, Sabine’s Creation affinity threads found perch, solidifying into a web of iridescent gold.
By the time it was reformed, the teapot looked a hundred times more spectacular than it had before. Sabine handed it to him, her chest puffed like a proud teacher, even if the pallor of her face betrayed the effort the weaving took from her.
Azrian looked from his wife to the teapot and back again. “Who’s showing off, now?”
The Registry official scribbled the entire exchange without missing a single syllable.
Azrian should have felt more violated by the intrusion, but the way Sabine let their presence shrug off her back like droplets of rain filled Azrian with a reluctant admiration, and drove him to attempt the same approach.
Throughout the afternoon, the charade continued.
Every corridor seemed to contain a new inspection, a new justification for the clerks’ presence.
At one point, the woman cornered Sabine in her rooms. Azrian lingered just beyond the threshold.
Though he could not catch the topic of their conversation, the two volleyed statements back and forth, the clerk’s hesitant and clipped, Sabine’s forceful and grounded.
In the end, the Registry woman emerged, her lips pinched in annoyance.
Sabine followed, expression unperturbed.
“Everything satisfactory?” he asked.
Sabine lifted a shoulder. “She wished to know our plans for our honeymoon in… precise details. I told her it was absolutely none of her—or anyone else’s but my and my husband’s—business.”
“You are a dangerous rebel.”
Sabine’s eyes danced, bright and wicked. “And you are an awful accomplice. You failed to intervene.”
He stepped closer. “If I intervened every time you outmaneuvered someone, I’d have no time for anything else.”
For the first time since the blood vow, he saw the real Sabine: fierce, unbowed, alive. He wanted to touch her, to seal the moment with something more substantial, but the movement of a Registry clerk at the end of the hall burst the moment.
“I believe it is nearly time for supper,” he offered instead. “Should we finally bid goodbye to our unwelcome guests?”
He extended his arm to her, which she accepted with a smirk. “I thought you’d never ask.”