That made Elias laugh. The contagious chuckle spread to their host, and Rachim grinned. “You looked like you could use the laugh.”
“Appreciate it,” Elias said. His own voice was cracked and hoarse. “But what I actually need is apparently an outfit. I’ve got a coat, but little else.”
Rachim sized him up, considering. “Well, you’re damn near a head taller than me, so I somehow doubt you’ll fit anything that I own, but I think we can figure something out for you. Your shipmates up yet?”
“Bjorn guards Harkon,” Elias said, “if that’s what you mean. My time is my own.”
“Good,” Rachim said with a nod. “Come on, kid, I’ll take you to a proper tailor.”
By the time they came back, both the villa and Elysium were buzzing with activity. It took Elias a few moments of glancing around the main foyer just inside from the landing platform where the skyship rested to realize that workers were furiously cleaning ink stains off the exterior doors. There was the sound of a loud bang, and Bjorn and Rachim’s seneschal rushed past the doorway holding large nets. “That way,” the big warrior yelled. “No, no, the fat one! It went that way!”
A loud curse exploded from outside, and Elias – still standing and observing with a sort of morbid fascination – watched as Vant stormed after the seneschal and Bjorn, completely covered in ink. “CLUTCH!” he screamed. “WHEREVER YOU ARE, THIS ISN’T FUCKING FUNNY!”
Elias was still holding the large parchment bag that held the results of his excursion to the tailor with Rachim. Despite the door between himself and the complete mess outside, he reflexively held the bag a little closer. “Perhaps it’s best I wait before going back,” he mused out loud.
“Oh by all means.” The voice that spoke next was Clutch’s, and turning, Elias caught sight of the pilot sitting – more sprawling, really – in one of Rachim’s large leather chairs, a bottle of something red and expensive open in her hand as she refilled her glass and sniffed the rim. “These are the best seats to enjoy the show.”
Rachim flashed a small, amused smile. “Do I want to know how the squittens got loose again?”
Clutch shook her head. “You do not,” she said, an indulgent, wicked smirk on her face. “I hear that a number of them may have been surreptitiously placed in Vant’s bed and closet while he was napping.”
Elias and Rachim both reflexively winced at the same time. Clutch’s grin only widened as she held up her cup. “Gentlemen, a toast to me: the queen bitch of the heavens. Cross me and I will destroy you.”
“I don’t want to know the year of that bottle, do I?” Rachim deadpanned.
“I mean, I can tell you,” Clutch chuckled. “But that won’t make it less than half drunk. Hark pays me well, I’ll repay you.”
Elias watched for another moment as the others ran past the door. A squitten shot past, larger than the last time he’d seen any of the ones from the litter. Bjorn and the seneschal charged after it. Vant rushed on their heels. The servants kept up their furious scrubbing.
For once, it seemed as though getting involved was… not a good idea. “…Got any more glasses?” Elias asked.
And that caught the pilot off guard. She blinked at him twice, then shrugged. “Fuck, why not? Pull up a seat, pretty boy. You drinking too, one-eye?”
“Might as well,” Rachim said.
They sat in a trio of chairs, drinking a dizzying red, while the chaos continued outside. Elias had never been much of a drinker – his drunken near-suicide in Ishtier aside. During his time with the order he was loath to compromise his senses or cloud his mind. A head that wasn’t clear got you killed. If not on the field, then by a rival who knew your drinking habits and your poison of pleasure.
And that was how Aimee and Vlana found them a short time later, as Elias was realizing that his tolerance for alcohol was downright abysmal. He looked up as the sorceress and the quartermaster emerged, carrying bags of their own. The two women stopped just short of the doorway and – like Rachim and Elias before them – took their time assessing the even more chaotic progression happening outside the doors.
It was Aimee who spoke up first. “Well, that didn’t take long.”
Elias was the first one to start laughing. He hadn’t expected that, nor did he expect the explosive force of the full-body cackle ripping out of him to knock him out of his chair, but all at once, his ass was on the floor. Through the haze of his vision, he saw Aimee and Vlana staring at him as if he’d sprouted a second, tentacled head. Their expressions just made the absurdity of it funnier, and his laughter louder.
“Oh my gods,” Aimee said. “Are you drunk?”
“That is the most disturbing thing I have ever seen,” Vlana said, almost to herself.
“Yes,” Elias heard Clutch say with smug satisfaction. “Yes, he is.”
Rachim let out a snicker, far from sober himself. “Fucking lightweight. If I threw you off the ship you’d float away. How come Hark’s bodyguard can’t hold his port?”
Elias planted a hand on the table, pushing himself up into a standing position. “Excuse you,” he said, “but this body is a finely tuned combative machine that subsists on self-loathing. There are costs to being this beautiful, one-eye. Piss off.”
Clutch burst out into a mad eruption of laughter, nearly falling out of her chair herself. “The dam is broken!” she declared. “He started cursing! You may now all hail your queen and bow.”
“What did you do?” Vlana demanded, not entirely able to keep the amusement from her own face.
“I don’t actually know,” Rachim said around a chuckle. “And since it so far hasn’t meant a bigger mess for my house, I basically don’t care. Cheers.” He drank again. Elias considered his glass, then put it down.
“No!” Clutch snapped at him. “Noooooo. You cannot chicken out on us now! The performance isn’t done yet!”
“You put the squittens in his closet,” Vlana guessed.
“Someone did,” Clutch said. “But I have no idea who.”
At Vlana’s expression of widening horror, Clutch mouthed, “Less talking. More bowing.”
A whoop of victory erupted from outside, and they heard Vant start making vindictive cheering noises before he and Bjorn made their way back into Elysium with the squitten in question in a net.
“Give us another few moments,” Aimee said, “and we should be good to go back.”
“I will be remaining here,” Clutch replied to this, raising her glass. “Until this bottle is finished. I started it, and like so many other things in my life, I have a moral obligation to end it.”
“Yeah,” Elias answered with a shake of his head. “Best I… not. I’ll head back to the ship.”
“And still my fantastic charity is ignored,” Rachim replied. “I promise, the beds in my estate won’t bite you.”
Aimee laughed as she walked towards the door beside Vlana, her boots clicking audibly on the stone floor. Elias smiled despite himself as he followed. “Not going to bed, Rachim. I sleep more comfortably on the floor anyway.”
The two women he was walking behind both flashed him an odd look. He let it go. Neither of them knew about how Azrael had never been comfortable, not even in the bed of a king. Not since Elias was broken the first time by sleeping on a cold stone floor.
As they crossed the landing platform, he took stock of the people frantically cleaning up the mess, simply absorbing the sensation of having his mind addled. He didn’t much enjoy it. “What’s in the bag?” Aimee asked as they approached the ramp.
Elias glanced down at the wrapped parchment paper around his new acquisitions. “Goodwill from Rachim.”
“That sounds ominous,” Vlana said.
“Mostly just expensive,” Elias replied with a small smile. “Though it looks like you made similar outings.”
“Yes, well,” Aimee replied, in a tone that was at once mildly irritated and oddly self-satisfied, “I’ve never once shown up at a grand ball and failed to impress, I’m not about to st
art now.”
It was as they ascended the ramp that Elias saw Harkon for the first time that day. The old portalmage looked tired, as if he hadn’t slept well the previous night. There were dark circles under his eyes, and he fixed his gaze on the black knight walking behind the two women. “Elias,” he said. “We need to talk.”
The old mage took a few moments to assess the state of affairs – the blankets on the floor, the broken mirror – and said, “Is this typical?”
Elias dropped his parcel on the mattress and gave a candid shrug. “Not to sound flippant, sir,” he answered, “but it hasn’t been long enough to establish what typical is.”
Harkon flashed a small, wry smile. “Fair enough. But now the heart of the question: how much of this state of affairs is because of your visions?”
Elias appreciated the blunt honesty of the question. “I started sleeping on the floor again after the fight against the dead. Tried the bed before, but it didn’t take.”
“And the mirror?” Harkon asked.
“Saw my old self the other day,” Elias answered. “It was hard not to punch him.”
Harkon cocked his head to the side. “Are they getting worse?”
And if he told the truth, what would be the consequence? Yaresh’s paranoid, angry face floated before Elias’s eyes. The implications of what the truth might do, if the trust so carefully cultivated this past month evaporated, hung pendulum-like over his soul.
But if he lied about it… Azrael’s smirk rippled through his thoughts.
“Yes,” he said. His voice sounded dull, coming out of his mouth. Far away and detached. “Perhaps one night out of every three, now, I see it. The face changes every now and again, though it seems particularly fond of mine.”
“What does it demand of you?” Harkon asked. “Or does it say nothing?”
“Mockery, mostly,” Elias answered. “If there’s a plot at work other than to make me lose sleep, I can’t suss it out. No orders. No imploring. It seems content to chip away at my sense of calm, not that there was much of that to begin with.”
Harkon nodded slowly, then looked him in the eyes. “I have been remiss,” he said. “And distant, and I am sorry.”
Elias looked down. “Sir, with respect, you don’t have to apologize–”
“But I do,” the older portalmage said. “I took you on – yes, at my apprentice’s insistence – but also because you earned it, and I have hardly spoken with you since. I gave you a second chance, yet no guidance in helping you find what you must do with it. I told you I knew your mother, yet I have told you nothing of her since you came to live on my ship. And as you have been targeted by this echo of some horror deep within Iseult, I have, again, done nothing.”
The old mage’s eyes looked haunted as he spoke. Elias had never seen him appear so tired. “I am in no position,” he said, “to ask for more than what you have given.”
“But that’s just it,” Harkon said. “Becoming a whole person, learning who you are, that can’t happen so long as you live in this shadow of guilt that tells you you’re worth less than normal people simply because you have blood on your hands. Aimee told me of what happened with the Oracle, and your training with Belit has given your soul a new lease on life, but I would be no friend to you if I didn’t tell you that whatever path you’re on, whatever destiny is calling you, you don’t have to follow it. And if you do, make sure it’s for the right reasons, not because you believe that destroying yourself will somehow atone.”
Elias was silent, momentarily unable to muster an answer. When at last he had one, it was in a voice cracking from alcohol and tiredness. “Why are you telling me this now?”
Harkon took a long, deep sigh, and the wave of his own pain seemed to recede slightly. “Because you chose to be on this ship, but that is not the same as choosing to leap headfirst and eyes open into the dangers we face, as the rest of my crew, and my apprentice, have done. I want you to understand that becoming the person you wish to be, recovering yourself… it shouldn’t be the justification by which anyone manipulates you into becoming their weapon or tool. You can be good only when you are free.”
The words rolled over him, even as Pentus’s offer replayed again in his mind discordantly with Roland’s one-time benediction when the slap of a sword upon his shoulder had rendered him Lord Azrael. He remembered one of the first kind things Aimee had said to him, as he’d faced a final choice within the Axiom Diamond’s vision not so long ago.
“The truth will set you free.”
Make sure your lessons are the right ones.
After a long moment, Elias breathed in, trying to think clearly through the muddying haze of the wine, and answered. “Don’t compare yourself to Lord Roland, sir,” he said finally. “Not even by implication. You are nothing alike. My answer, sir, is that ever since I first encountered the Axiom, everything I have done has been my choice. That has… carried its own difficulties. I don’t always know which way is right, or whether I am making a terrible mistake, but even those choices are mine. I am not your unthinking weapon.”
Harkon watched him quietly. Then he slowly nodded his head. “Thank you, Elias,” he said. “My conscience needed desperately to hear that.”
“I understand,” Elias answered.
“I am afraid,” Harkon said then, “that something is coming that will catch us all off-guard. My suspicions are as yet indistinct. I will tell Aimee of them soon… but in the event that something happens that separates us…” His eyes suddenly seized Elias’s own with their frighteningly intense stare. “Protect them. All of them. Especially her.”
Elias was suddenly worried. He turned his head slightly, narrowing his eyes. “Sir?”
Harkon shook his head, seeming to master himself. “Don’t overthink it, Elias. I simply… needed to know the truth, and now that I have it, I can rest easier, and return to work. Remember what I said, and be always mindful. Thank you, my boy.”
The gentle click of Elias’s door behind him echoed in the room after the portalmage departed. Glancing at the fractured mirror, he breathed out a sigh that felt almost normal. Then he dropped his satchel on the bed and opened it to examine the custom-tailored clothing within. Green and black edged with a hint of gold thread stared back at him. It was dissonant, to find joy in something as simple as this, when he’d once commanded vast wealth.
But, of course, it hadn’t really been his. This was Elias Leblanc’s, not Azrael’s.
It was such a small difference.
It was everything.
Chapter Fourteen
Beneath the Landless Stars
Getting ready for a ball had once been such an act of rote repetition that Aimee could have gone through the motions completely without thought. Years being educated in the finer points of Havensreach’s high society by her mother; years of charm school after that, in the effort to placate familial sensibilities enough to get her access to the Academy of Mystic Sciences. She’d learned to dance, speak well, walk right, and when wearing a proper gown, turn heads with just the right look.
None of that was helping her cope with the fact that she was monstrously, deeply nervous. She stood in her cabin, considering the minutiae of her appearance, and everything seemed just off by such amounts that the whole picture failed to satisfy. And that annoyed her. She raised a hand to check how she’d done up her hair. Wrong? No, it fit with the way the gown fit – not immodest, but very figure-hugging. Something else. Some tiny critical piece was missing that would have ordinarily tied the whole ensemble together. She shouldn’t have cared, but whenever this happened, a thousand suggestions from her mother rippled through her head and threatened to make her insane.
Straightening from finishing her makeup, she turned around, examining the flowing folds of form-flattering blue silk that matched her eyes. Apprentice’s chain about her neck, with the badge just above a neckline neither immodest nor conservative, gold hair up, and something… something. What?
The knock at her cabi
n door nearly made her jump out of her skin. She took a moment to calm nerves that really shouldn’t have been so ravaged, then fetched her things as Bjorn spoke without. “Hark says it’s time to go. Best hurry up.”
Just Bjorn then. The nerves lessened a little, and once she’d fetched her things, and stepped out the door, she paused in the hallway. A lot of things were riding on tonight: peace between political factions, information that could be divined by knowing or impressing the right people. Yet some part of her didn’t respond to those stakes. She’d faced demons and armies and come out the other side. It made no sense for her to feel the butterflies tonight. Ignoring it dutifully, then, she made her way down the hall to the cargo bay where Vlana and Clutch were waiting, the two having bargained themselves out of ship duty, the former by way of a deal with Bjorn, the latter by way of a promise of food without the cost of having to be excessively social.
Clutch was dressed in the long slacks and buttondown uniform of her guild dress-blacks. Vlana wore the burnt copper gown she’d acquired on their earlier outing. The former let out a whistle as Aimee appeared at the top of the stairs, the latter waved excitedly. Just beyond them, Harkon waited, dressed in his gray and purple robes. Ever the sorcerer, teacher, and portalmage, even on the most formal of nights. His magister’s chain hung around his neck, a reminder of what Aimee would one day attain herself. Someday, she thought, with optimism.
Elias was nowhere to be seen. She spent a few moments glancing about for him, before Harkon spoke up. “He went ahead.”
“Hmm?” Aimee said, a little wrong-footed. “Oh, no, I was just–” just what? “–just curious.”
“It was on Rachim’s request,” Harkon said. “Something about his presence lending weight to Yaresh’s arrival.”
“Poor man,” Aimee said.
“You look stunning, Miss Laurent,” her teacher said, then, smiling at the others, looked past them to Bjorn and said, “We’ll see you soon.”
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