CHAPTER 38
POV - Azra'il
I woke before sunrise for reasons this seven-year-old body was never consulted on.
That's how it works when you carry millennia of memory inside a freshly assembled skeleton: the habits arrive before the bones are ready for them. Checking the room's angles. Calculating emergency exits in a noble palace's guest room, where the most likely threat was a rabbit-eared servant bringing clean sheets. Survival practicality applied to a context asking for no survival whatsoever.
I sat on the edge of the bed, watching the garden through the window whilst the sky decided what it wanted to be that morning.
〈Eos.〉
[Good morning. First full day at Roa Citadel. Weather: mild. Immediate threat level: low. Deferred threat level: to be determined, depending on how the noble girl processes strangers before breakfast.]
〈You're already thinking about her.〉
[We're both thinking about her. The difference is I admit it.]
I didn't answer. Still too early to give Eos points.
The room was good, and that deserved honest acknowledgement: wide bed, solid furniture, the window at the right angle to catch morning light without throwing direct sun into a sleeper's face. Someone had thought about the room before simply furnishing it, a distinction most households don't even consider. Rudeus's room sat across the corridor, facing mine. A deliberate choice by the Boreas family: the two of us together, easy to locate, family and staff arranged for whatever the moment required.
We'd been well received. The previous night's dinner had been the kind of meal that communicates "you are expected" without ever communicating "you are needed," the most honest version of noble hospitality that exists. Philip had steered the conversation with that skill of someone who'd long since learned that putting people at ease is the most efficient way to study them. The food was good. The tea was better.
And that morning, early, we'd meet Eris.
Which was now this morning.
〈Eos, I'm fine.〉
[You checked the position of your bags twice before sleeping and woke up forty minutes early.]
〈Standard precaution in a new environment.〉
[At some point, standard precaution and productive anxiety become the same thing with different names.]
〈Philosophy at five in the morning. Much obliged.〉
[You're welcome.]
I knocked on Rudeus's door six minutes later.
He opened it with the face of someone who'd slept, but had stayed awake long enough beforehand to turn a thought into organised worry. His hair was in that particular state of someone who'd lain down one way, got up another, and decided there were bigger priorities in life than a comb.
"You didn't sleep well either," he said.
"I slept perfectly."
"You're up before sunrise."
"It's a habit."
"You're nervous about Eris."
There were several possible responses to that. Most of them technically true and strategically inconvenient.
"I'm processing the available information about the meeting," I said.
"That's nervousness with more words."
[He isn't wrong.]
〈You're on his side.〉
[I'm on the side of terminological precision. Which, in this case, happens to coincide with his side.]
We went down to breakfast. The cat-eared servant, the same one as the day before, served with the same professional rhythm I'd already catalogued as a sign of a well-run household. Rudeus ate with the appetite of someone trying to seem calmer than he was. I drank tea and watched the garden.
Philip appeared forty minutes later with that smile.
Not the host's smile. The other one, the one I'd already catalogued the night before as the smile of a father who knows exactly what's coming and finds it amusing from a safe distance.
"Eris is in the training hall," he said. "That's where she spends her mornings. I thought it would be the best place for the first meeting. She's most herself there."
〈Eos, note: he's putting us on her territory.〉
[Deliberately. Could be so she feels secure enough to act authentically. Could be to give her the initial psychological advantage. Probably both, coexisting, which is his pattern.]
Rudeus looked at me as we followed Philip down the corridor, with the face of someone who'd arrived at a conclusion and was weighing whether it was worth sharing.
"You're making the face," he said, quietly.
"What face?"
"The one you make when you're calculating something and don't want to say."
"I'm appreciating the corridor's architecture."
"The corridor is identical to yesterday's."
"The architecture merits repeated appreciation."
Rudeus opened his mouth, closed it again, and arrived at the productive conclusion that Philip was already too far ahead in the corridor for that argument to be worth continuing.
I'd already survived empires, apocalypses, and an uncatalogued number of deaths under varied circumstances. A spoiled girl wouldn't be my Waterloo.
Probably.
Philip stopped at the training hall door with the gesture of someone about to reveal something he found personally amusing.
"Brace yourselves," he said, with an enthusiasm slightly disproportionate to the situation.
He opened the door.
Eris Boreas Greyrat stood in the centre of the hall with a wooden sword in hand and the posture of someone for whom the world exists to be attacked, and she was simply waiting for the right angle.
Then came the hair. Vivid red, nearly crimson.
Then, Eos arrived, as always, with inconvenient information and commentary.
〈Eos, don't even think about it.〉
[Inventory of vibrant-tempered redheads catalogued across the cycles: pirate captains who commanded entire fleets with a pair of pistols and a smile that already warned you wouldn't enjoy what came next. Armoured warrior-mages who changed equipment mid-battle the way other people change their minds, who treated defeat as a personal affront to the universe, and had repeatedly proven the universe wrong to disagree with them. Huntresses raised chasing down dinosaur-shaped machines who one day decided riding them was perfectly reasonable. Warriors for whom fire was affection and training was a family's way of showing love. Noblewomen who ruled with the ease of someone born extraordinary who never needed to fake modesty. The list continues considerably further—]
〈ENOUGH!〉
[One hundred and forty-three catalogued entries remain.]
〈I said enough, Eos.〉
[Filing away the rest. With the technical note that the pattern is consistent, well documented, and statistically significant across more than a thousand cycles.]
〈The pattern is inconvenient and requires no statistical analysis.〉
[The statistical analysis exists regardless of whether you want it to. It's mathematics, not opinion.]
The fact remained that I had, documentably, across thousands of lives, a type. Strong-willed redheads, the kind of person who walks into a room and the room knows someone's just arrived.
The problem was I still didn't know what kind of redhead Eris Boreas Greyrat was.
I had the rumours. I had Philip's smile. I had the careful euphemism in Paul's letter. I had the fact that her own father had described his daughter's temperament with a calculated pause and that smile that hides true feelings rather well.
Insufficient information for any serious judgement. And I'd learned, long ago, that premature judgement is the kind of mistake that grows costly when you could simply wait and observe.
So I observed.
She stopped when she saw us come in. Her eyes went to Philip first, recognition with particular fondness, her version of confirming familiar presence. Then to Rudeus. Then to me.
The assessment on me lasted two seconds longer.
Philip made the introductions with that rehearsed lightness.
"Eris, these are Rudeus and Azra'il Greyrat. Paul Greyrat's children, your tutors from today."
Eris looked at Rudeus with that quick combatant's assessment, probably her default mode for processing new people: threat inventory in two seconds, immediate conclusion.
"He's younger than me," she said.
"Two years," Rudeus confirmed, with the diplomacy of someone trying to open on the most neutral register available.
"I won't be taught by someone younger!"
"Azra'il is younger too," said Rudeus, with the slightly more strained diplomacy of someone who's just realised neutrality has a geographical limit.
Eris looked at us both with that unfiltered gap between what she saw and what she concluded, the kind of look that only exists in people who never learned that showing what you think carries a social cost.
The message was clear: neither of us had passed the test.
Rudeus, who'd read the silence as an opening, made the classic mistake of confusing absence of response with receptiveness.
"But you needn't worry about that," he said, in the encouraging tone of someone who believes they're helping. "Despite our age, we're well qualified. We'll teach reading, writing, mathematics, magic, we've got experience with all of it. I'm sure you'll pick it up in no time, sometimes children tend to learn faster than—"
The fist came before the sentence finished.
Rudeus found the floor with the particular quality of someone recalibrating his relationship with gravity in an unplanned manner.
Eris stood with her fists still clenched, the expression of someone who'd done what she'd done and already expected the result, the face of someone who'd spelled out that same sentence many times and always heard the same paragraph in reply.
Philip, at the edge of the room, wore the face of a man watching an experiment he'd deliberately set up.
〈Eos, did he genuinely just do that?〉
[He said "children" to a nine-year-old noblewoman who clearly doesn't consider herself a child. Impressively precise, in the worst possible direction.]
〈Rudeus has a gift for it.〉
[Documented across seven years of direct observation.]
I raised a hand.
"As pleasurable as it is to punch Rudeus's face," I said.
"WHAT!?" Rudeus shouted, from the floor, with the indignation of someone who expected solidarity and received analysis instead.
"I'm the only one with authorisation to punch that chubby pervert."
"I AM NOT CHUBBY, AND THAT ISN'T THE POINT!"
Eris stopped looking at Rudeus.
Now she was looking at me, and the look was no different from the one she'd given him before the punch. The same barely contained irritation of someone finding one more problem in the same package and calculating whether it deserved the same treatment.
"Who are you?" she asked, in the tone of someone asking less a question and more issuing a warning.
"Azra'il." I tilted my head slightly, the minimal protocol the context demanded. "Twin sister of the chubby pervert on the floor. And, from today, one of your tutors."
"I AM NOT—"
"Rudeus," I said, without looking at him, "the adult is speaking."
He fell into indignant silence on the floor.
Eris kept looking at me with the irritation of someone who'd received an answer that wasn't the expected one, and concluded that was grounds for more irritation, not less.
The second fist came. At me, this time.
I'd already expected it. Not the movement itself, her face two seconds before, which is where the decision always lives before it becomes a decision. The hand arrived at the speed of someone who'd practised that gesture enough to develop real force, the kind of force that had put Rudeus on the floor and was presumably meant to produce the same result now.
I caught the fist.
The impact reached my palm with genuine weight, good strength for her age and training. I registered it. I closed my hand with enough pressure to hold without injuring, a distinction that requires calibration, and I had considerable practice with that, in contexts where injury would have been thoroughly counterproductive.
This was one of those contexts.
Eris pulled.
The grip didn't give.
She pulled again, with the force of someone who'd learned that more force solved most problems, because most problems had obeyed that rule up to that point.
The grip stayed firm. No tighter. No give.
There was something interesting on her face in that instant, not quite anger yet, not entirely. It was the pure register of someone encountering resistance where none had ever existed before, without yet having the vocabulary to process that information.
A rather honest moment, really.
The other fist came.
I dodged with my free hand, caught her wrist at the angle she'd left open by pulling, and used the momentum she'd created herself, no force against force, that would be inelegant and unnecessary, just simple physics applied with the efficiency of someone who knows redirecting costs less than resisting, almost always. I swept my leg past hers at the right point.
Her balance vanished.
My hand at her waist arrived before the floor did, at that angle where someone tipped that far can't right themselves without the cooperation of whoever's holding them. The pose that appears in court dances across at least four hundred different civilisations, none of which Eris Boreas Greyrat had likely attended, but whose physical weight she was now experiencing firsthand.
We stayed like that.
Eris with wide eyes, the expression of someone who'd gone from a familiar situation straight into one with no precedent at all. Me with my face inches from hers, her red hair falling to one side with the natural weight of long hair in a tipped position.
I'd already learned, in courts where that kind of observation carried real weight, the right tone for what came next, not the obligatory protocol compliment, not the calculated flattery of someone wanting something in return, but that particular gallantry that exists when someone truly sees the person in front of them and decides to say what they see without asking permission or expecting a reply.
It was the tone that had already disarmed queens, unsettled generals, and interrupted at least thirteen wars in the middle of their opening act.
"A lady so lovely," I said, in exactly that tone, "shouldn't behave with such violence."
A brief silence followed.
Eris blinked.
The blink of someone who'd received an input the system didn't know where to file. It wasn't the anger I'd expected, not yet. It was that fraction of a second where the automatic response tries to load and finds the file empty.
Nobody had probably said that to her in that context before. There must have been people who called her lovely with the performative quality of protocol obligation. People too frightened to say anything at all. People who simply answered with more violence, which was the vocabulary she knew.
This was different.
The blink lasted exactly two seconds.
Then her face went from the white of shock straight to the red of anger, at the speed of someone who'd processed the situation, concluded she'd been thrown off balance, and immediately concluded that was thoroughly unacceptable.
"LET GO OF ME!" she shouted, at a volume the hall's acoustics amplified generously.
I let go. I stepped back with the naturalness of someone who'd concluded what they'd started.
Eris righted herself with the speed of a trained body recovering position, an objectively positive sign about the work Ghislaine had been putting in. Red-faced. Fists clenched. Looking at me with the intensity of someone who'd catalogued a new problem and was already calculating the solution.
"Father!" Her voice went to Philip, invoking family authority. "Who is she!?"
"Azra'il Greyrat," said Philip, with the lightness of someone who'd anticipated this moment and was now savouring the confirmation. "Your new tutor. As I already introduced her."
"She held me down!"
"Yes."
"She said I was lovely!"
"I heard that too."
"And she called me a lady!"
"Eris." Philip tilted his head with the calibrated patience of a father who'd developed, over the years, his particular method for handling his daughter. "She's right on all three counts."
Eris stared at me.
I stared back.
From the floor, where he'd remained with the wisdom of someone who'd assessed the situation and concluded that existing vertically could wait, Rudeus finally got up. Straightened his clothes. Considered the general state of the surroundings.
"So," he said, in the tone of someone trying to establish normality in a room that had already demonstrated considerable resistance to the concept, "shall we begin?"
Eris looked back at Rudeus.
Then at me.
Then at him again.
Her expression carried the same energy as an animal that had assessed its territory, found two intruders, and was now deciding whether to bite first or bite later. A nine-year-old girl with sword training, a wild beast's temperament, and the deep conviction that the world exists to be attacked when it's irritating.
And the two of us were, clearly, irritating.
〈Eos, assessment.〉
[Eris Boreas Greyrat. Nine years old. Predatory energy with no clear direction. The kind of material that, with considerable work and the limited patience you possess, could eventually become something interesting.]
〈Eventually is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.〉
[I'm being optimistic within reasonable limits.]
Underneath it all, she was a wild thing.
The question wasn't whether there was something beneath the surface, I'd seen enough people to know there's always something beneath the surface. The question was how much work it would take to reach it without anyone losing a tooth along the way.
〈Probability of someone losing a tooth before the end of the week?〉
[Moderate to high. Mostly Rudeus.]
〈He'll need to learn to dodge faster.〉
[A useful life skill.]
I looked at Eris.
Eris looked at me with the intensity of a dog that hasn't yet decided whether to growl or bite.
I'd already survived empires, apocalypses, and an uncatalogued number of deaths under circumstances I'd rather not revisit during business hours.
I could tame a redheaded beast.
Probably.