Chapter 57: The Lord's Inquiry
The corridor outside the ballroom was a cool, dark throat. Azazel leaned against the stone wall, the sound of the music now a muffled, irritating pulse through the oak doors. He closed his eyes. Human lungs drew breath. Human blood pounded with a sluggish, unfamiliar rhythm in his temples. A headache was brewing behind his eyes—a petty, mortal affliction he despised.
The velvet doublet itched. The starch in the linen shirt was a prison. He felt like a costume stuffed with meat and bone, playing a role written by idiots.
But the role had presented an anomaly.
He saw her every time he blinked. Honey hair. Sky-cut eyes. A mouth that argued instead of simpered. A dress the color of a deep, secret wound. Anticipation, she’d called it. She’d looked at him from the stairs with pure, undiluted challenge. Not the calculated interest of a courtier, not the fearful awe some reserved for the Lord of Thrae. It was something else. It had scraped against a part of him he didn’t know was raw.
It was infuriating.
He pushed off the wall, his boots soundless on the runner. He needed information. Not the polished dossiers his advisors had prepared on Lullielle’s exports and border disputes. Something real. Something dirty.
He turned down an eastern passage, one that sloped away from the main thoroughfares. The air grew colder, dustier. The grandeur gave way to neglect; gilded trim peeled, tapestries faded into vague suggestions of battles and hunts. At the end, a shallow alcove held a statue of some forgotten queen, her stone nose chipped off.
From the deeper shadow beside it, a man detached himself. He was wiry, dressed in servants’ livery that was a shade too nondescript. His face was all angles, forgettable.
“Voss,” Azazel said, not bothering with a greeting.
“My lord.” Voss’s voice was as neutral as his appearance. He was Thraen, one of the few Azazel had brought who understood that some work happened in silence and shadow.
“The Princess Aurelia.”
Voss didn’t react. He’d expected the question. “Nineteen. Only child. Officially, the heir.”
“I didn’t ask for the court circular.”
A faint shrug. “She has a reputation. A wild streak. The court calls it ‘high-spirited.’ The guards and the kitchen staff have other words for it.”
“Such as?”
“Disappears. Regularly. Mostly at night. They find her in the palace gardens, or on the lower battlements, or once, apparently, in the royal stables talking to a sick foal at three in the morning. The headmistress, Lady Beatrice, has tried to break her of it for years. Hasn’t stuck.”
Azazel stared at a water stain on the wall shaped like a twisted crown. Nightly escapes. It fit the woman who’d called her gown ‘anticipation’ and accused him of souring the wine. A caged thing testing the bars.
“Any particular… talents? Affiliations? Scandals?”
“No formal betrothals, which is a scandal in itself. They’ve tried. Several offers. Southern lords, a prince from the Cinder Marches. She refuses them all. Quietly, then loudly if pressed.” Voss paused. “There are whispers about an affinity. For growing things. Her private terrace is supposedly a jungle. But that could just be palace gossip romanticizing a girl who likes plants.”
An affinity. The word landed with weight. In this world, it could mean anything from a gentle touch with roses to something more. Something that might explain the strange, charged feeling in the air around her, like the moment before a lightning strike.
“Vulnerabilities?” Azazel asked, the word clinical.
“Her mother. The Queen. It’s a complex tie. Strain, but deep loyalty. She is Isolade’s weak point, and Isolade is hers. The Queen shields her, but also… pushes her. Into things like tonight.”
Azazel’s mind clicked through the implications. A pawn, but a spiky one. A piece with unexpected moves.
“And the Queen’s pact? The old stories.”
“Confirmed, as far as we can tell. Made decades ago to save the kingdom from collapse. Terms unknown, but consensus is it was paid. She’s free of it. The kingdom’s current stability suggests as much.”
So the mother had dealt with demons. Or something like them. And the daughter danced under floating lanterns, looking at visiting lords as if they were puzzles she needed to break.
He needed to see her again. Outside the gilt and the performance. He needed to see if the anomaly held up in the daylight.
“I want an invitation to breakfast with the royal family,” Azazel said. “Tomorrow. Use the trade accord. Frame it as an act of good faith, informal alliance building. The usual grease.”
Voss nodded once. “It will be arranged.”
“And Voss.”
“My lord?”
“Find out which part of the gardens she favors. The exact paths. The times.”
For a heartbeat, Voss’s professional neutrality cracked with the faintest hint of curiosity. It was swiftly buried. “Of course.”
Azazel dismissed him with a glance. Voss melted back into the stone, becoming shadow again.
Alone in the alcove, Azazel reached into the inner pocket of his doublet. His fingers closed not around a weapon or a coin, but around a small, leather-bound book. It was warm to the touch. He didn’t remember picking it up in Thrae. He’d found it in his belongings, the lock on its clasp broken. Inside, the pages were filled with a tight, desperate script that was not his own. Incantations. Theories on resonance and soul-bond transference. Notes on a secondary pact, a gamble of terrifying scope.
He couldn’t remember writing a word of it.
It felt like evidence from a crime he had no memory of committing. Sometimes, in the dead of night, he’d read passages and feel a phantom ache, a void where a memory should be. It scared him. Not as a lord, but as a man. Gaps in a human life were one thing. Gaps that smelled of ozone and old magic were another.
He opened it now to a random page. The ink glowed with a faint, sullen pulse, reacting to something in the air. Or in him.
“The vessel must be emptied to be filled,” the script read. “But what if the emptiness itself becomes the prison? What if you forget the shape of the thing you’re trying to hold?”
He snapped the book shut. The glow died. The phantom ache throbbed behind his eyes, marrying the headache.
Princess Aurelia. A girl with a wild streak and a missing betrothal. An heir who walked in gardens at night. She was a problem, a variable in the tedious equation of his diplomatic visit. That was all.
So why did the thought of her feel like a key sliding toward a lock he couldn’t see?
He tucked the book away and turned back toward the noise of the ball. He wouldn’t re-enter. He’d go to the stifling rooms they’d given him and drink the sour wine until sleep claimed him. But first, he’d walk the long way. Through the halls that reportedly led to the palace gardens.
Just to understand the terrain.