CHAPTER 40
POV - Azra'il
Across more than a thousand cycles of existence, I've learned that every court has its thunder.
Not the kind that genuinely frightens. The kind that exists as a permanent backdrop, a background noise so constant that the household's other sounds organise themselves around it the way planets orbit a particularly loud star. In some courts it was a general. In others, a patriarch. In at least one, memorably, a two-metre bell some king had decided to install in the middle of the throne room simply because he liked the look of it, and which nobody had ever worked up the nerve to remove in four hundred years.
At the Boreas Greyrat court, the thunder had a moustache and answered to Sauros.
〈Eos, initial assessment.〉
[Large. Loud. The sort who occupies more space in the air than he physically occupies on the floor. Speaks at battlefield volume even inside a room with decent acoustic insulation, which suggests either total unfamiliarity with the concept of "indoors," or active contempt for it. Loves his granddaughter in a way that will probably generate a considerable psychological invoice further down the line. And, most irritatingly, he's sharper than the volume would suggest.]
〈Useful summary.〉
[You've been here ten seconds and he's already completed a full inventory of the both of you. Impressive, for a man who appears to breathe through a megaphone.]
Sauros's eyes performed the sweep I already recognised, not protocol, not social, the read of someone who's spent a lifetime cataloguing threats before they finish their sentence. Rudeus received two seconds of assessment. I received four. I was, technically, winning one to nothing in some contest nobody had told me existed.
Rudeus stood beside me with the posture of someone who practises "looking confident" in the mirror every morning and still hasn't quite learnt his lines.
Eris stood beside her grandfather with her chin raised high enough that I briefly feared for her cervical spine, wearing the expression of someone who'd arrived with a rehearsed speech, extra ammunition, and the loudest relative in the house as a guaranteed audience.
Philip sat with that smile, the one worn by someone who's organised their own circus and bought a front-row ticket.
Ghislaine had already found the best angle in the room, because of course she had.
"SO THESE ARE PAUL'S CHILDREN," Sauros bellowed, as though announcing a tournament result.
"They are," Philip confirmed.
Sauros looked at Rudeus with the speed of someone solving a simple equation.
"THAT ONE'S CLEARLY PAUL'S SON. SAME FACE. SAME BONE STRUCTURE." A dramatic pause, worthy of someone remembering rather late to add the most important caveat of the whole sentence. "I HOPE NOT THE SAME CHARACTER WHERE WOMEN ARE CONCERNED."
"I'm actively working on that," said Rudeus, with a dignity I decided not to demolish in front of everyone. Yet.
Then the eyes came to me.
And stayed.
There was the mental pause of someone receiving a data point that doesn't match the spreadsheet and spends a few seconds deciding whether the error lies in the data or the spreadsheet.
"HMMM," he said, as though that were sufficient information for anyone to decode.
"Can I help with something," I said, "or would you prefer to keep cataloguing my face in silence? Both options seem equally entertaining to watch."
Sauros blinked.
Then a smile opened up the size of a barn door.
"DIRECT. I LIKE THAT." His eyes didn't leave my face. "BUT YOU DON'T LOOK LIKE PAUL'S DAUGHTER."
"An observation I hear often enough to have accepted as settled fact," I said. "The most generous theory is that the gods had a flicker of mercy and intervened before Paul's genetics could cause permanent damage to my appearance. I prefer to treat it as divine mercy rather than an insult to Paul, though technically it's both at once."
Sauros stared at me for a second, the kind of second that seems to last longer than it should.
Then the laugh came out, a genuine thunderclap, the kind that rattles furniture.
"HA! SHE JUST CALLED PAUL UGLY!"
"I'm merely observing that there are superior and inferior versions of inheriting one's father's looks," I said, in the tone of someone presenting an irrefutable academic thesis. "Rudeus got the socially approved version. I got whatever the gods judged more suitable for whatever plans they had in store for me. I don't know what those plans were, but I presume they involved some level of functional aesthetics."
"I DON'T LOOK LIKE FATHER," protested Rudeus, with the indignation of someone dragged into a debate they never signed up for.
"Close enough," I said. "Especially when you make that face."
"WHAT FACE?"
"That one. The one you're making right now. The Chubby Pervert in existential crisis face."
Rudeus opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again, like a fish deciding whether the effort was worth it. Concluded it wasn't.
Philip had his hand over his mouth, shoulders shaking in a way that had nothing to do with cold. Ghislaine's ears were tilted forward, her equivalent of a belly laugh, which, given her emotional repertoire, already counted as a full-blown celebration.
Sauros was still laughing, with the face of someone who's received a new toy and is still deciding what to do with it.
Eris wore the expression of someone who'd arrived with a detailed plan, charts, perhaps slides, and was now watching her own grandfather cackle from the wrong side of the room.
"GRANDFATHER," she said, in a tone that already warned of a storm.
"ERIS, THE GIRL HAS A SENSE OF HUMOUR."
"SHE DOESN'T HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOUR, SHE HAS—"
"PHILIP TOLD ME SHE KNOCKED YOU DOWN. WITH A RULER."
Eris's silence carried the particular weight of someone who'd hoped that detail would stay buried and has just watched it resurrected with full pomp and circumstance.
"THAT ISN'T—"
"A RULER," Sauros repeated, savouring every syllable like rare wine. "ERIS. YOU'VE TRAINED WITH A SWORD SINCE YOU WERE FIVE. YOU TRAIN WITH GHISLAINE. A SWORD KING. AND YOU GOT KNOCKED DOWN BY A SEVEN-YEAR-OLD BRAT WITH SCHOOL SUPPLIES."
"She used dishonest methods!"
"WHAT DISHONEST METHODS EXIST IN A RULER, ERIS? DID SHE ENCHANT THE OBJECT?"
[Excellent question. Awaiting a response with genuine interest.]
Eris opened her mouth with the energy of someone who'd started building a defence and realised, midway through, the defence had tripped over its own logic.
"SHE'S TOO FAST AND DOES THINGS THAT SHOULDN'T BE POSSIBLE AND—"
"GHISLAINE." Sauros turned to her with the urgency of someone wanting an eyewitness before the official version turned into legend. "IS THIS TRUE?"
"It's true," said Ghislaine, with the sparing manner of someone who only speaks when absolutely certain. "Ruler. Under a minute. Total control start to finish. Eris was never in any danger either."
"HMMM." Sauros went quiet for one whole second, which, for him, amounted to a complete session of Buddhist meditation.
Then he looked at me again, no longer the "who is this apparition" assessment, but the "I need to rebuild everything I thought I knew about this situation" one.
"PAUL NEVER TOLD ME HE HAD A DAUGHTER LIKE THIS."
"Paul has a rare talent for omitting information that would complicate matters before matters got complicated," I said. "I call it preventive expectation management. Ethically dubious. Impeccably consistent."
Sauros laughed again, with the satisfaction of someone who's discovered, without even searching for it, that he genuinely liked this particular child.
"I WANT TO SEE IT WITH MY OWN EYES," he declared.
It wasn't a request. It was the kind of sentence that arrives already stamped with a date and location.
[He wants a sparring match. And, judging by Eris's face, she wants it too, she's just been handed the chance to reclaim what she lost across the last few sessions on a silver platter.]
〈Home turf, grandfather as audience, thirst for revenge. The perfect recipe for someone to lose spectacularly.〉
[Her confidence has risen a good ten centimetres in the past thirty seconds. Literally. She's standing straighter.]
I looked at Eris.
Eris looked back with the calm certainty of someone who's already seen the ending of the film and knows she wins.
She was, objectively, quite mistaken.
But there's rarely any fun in warning someone before the time comes.
The Boreas training hall carried that smell of waxed wood and discipline that only exists in places where someone takes swordsmanship more seriously than they take their own life. Immaculate floor. Light falling at the correct angle. An arsenal of training swords arranged like a jeweller's display case.
Sauros settled into a chair brought specially for the occasion, with the pomp of someone about to watch a championship final. Philip beside him. Rudeus beside Ghislaine, with the face of someone who'd come out of curiosity and was now seriously reconsidering that life choice.
I picked up a training sword from the table. Decent weight. Acceptable balance. Not what I'd have chosen from a proper shop, but it served the purpose.
Eris picked up hers with the naturalness of someone born holding steel, or wood, in this case. There was genuine talent there, the kind that only appears when the body has real aptitude and years of competent instructors have polished it. For her age, it was, without any irony whatsoever, impressive.
It was also tragically insufficient for what she was about to encounter.
She didn't know that yet. Her posture said otherwise: shoulders straight, chin raised, the calm certainty of someone who'd brought reinforcements and badly miscalculated what "reinforcements" meant in this context.
[She's more confident than in the previous sessions. She'll open with more force than technique, because she wants to impress her grandfather.]
〈Which makes it trivially easy to predict what she'll do before she even decides to do it.〉
[It's going to be a valuable lesson. For her. And, as a bonus, for Sauros too.]
"BEGIN!" bellowed Sauros, with the timing of someone who's presided over enough duels to know the exact moment to shout.
Eris came at me like a hurricane with a name.
Sword God Style, pure momentum, the speed that had put Rudeus on the floor so many times and had clearly worked well enough against opponents her own age to become a habit.
I dodged.
No magic involved. Just the simple read of someone who's spent too long studying how bodies move before deciding to attack, the shoulder gives away the arm, the weight gives away the step, intention always arrives an instant before execution, like a poorly disguised announcement.
The strike cut through the air exactly where I no longer was.
"You lead with your right shoulder a good three centimetres before advancing," I said, as she realigned. "It happens on every attack you make from the right, Little Volcano. Anyone who knows how to read that knows where you'll be before you know yourself."
"DON'T CALL ME LITTLE VOLCANO! MY NAME IS ERIS!" she shouted, her voice climbing in an amusing way as she grew indignant over the nickname.
She attacked again, with the extra force that only the fury of missing the first strike could supply.
I dodged again, closer this time, not because I needed the proximity, but because too much distance teaches nobody anything.
"The whole weight is in the arm," I said. "Swordsmanship isn't bicep strength, it's the whole body working together. You're leaving the legs out of the conversation because you're obsessed with what's holding the sword, not what's moving whoever's holding the sword. Different things, however alike they may look."
"I DON'T NEED A LESSON!" shouted Eris, at the volume I already knew signalled maximum irritation.
"You're getting one regardless," I said, blocking the third strike at the angle that redirects rather than fights head-on. "Rudeus didn't want swordsmanship lessons from Paul when he was small either, and got them anyway. It's called education. It rarely asks permission before happening, Ginger Gremlin."
"WHAT'S A GREMLIN?! STOP MAKING UP WORDS TO INSULT ME!" she bellowed, her indignation at the terminology temporarily overtaking her anger at the tactical error.
From the corner of the room, Rudeus opened his mouth with the face of someone included in a comparison without having signed any consent form.
He considered retaliating.
Reconsidered.
Closed his mouth with the wisdom of someone who'd already lost that particular battle before it began.
"What's she doing?" he asked Ghislaine.
"Reading the movement before it happens," Ghislaine replied. "And teaching at the same time. Both together, without one interfering with the other."
"Is that even possible?"
"You're watching it happen right now."
Sauros leaned forward in his chair with the enthusiasm of a man who came to see a show and discovered the show was even better than the advertising.
Eris increased her intensity, convinced that the answer to "I'm not landing hits" was "hit even harder," precisely the error I'd pointed out two strikes earlier, which had only grown larger for having been named aloud.
It was the classic pattern of someone who's heard the correction but hasn't yet absorbed it into the body: awareness of the error arrives first, genuine change takes a little longer.
I blocked. Redirected. Held the exact distance she couldn't close, however hard she tried.
"When you get frustrated, you tighten your grip on the hilt," I said, as the sixth strike whistled near my shoulder. "The tightness locks up the force that should be coming from the whole arm. You feel stronger and fight weaker, which is the daft paradox of trying harder with exactly the tension that only works with less. Swordsmanship isn't organised anger. It's balance with intent."
"STOP TALKING AND FIGHT!" bellowed Eris.
"I'm doing both at once," I said. "You're only doing one. That's exactly where the problem lives."
Sauros leaned forward a little further in his chair, eyes shining like someone who's discovered the film has an even better sequel.
[He was waiting to see whether Philip's account had been exaggerated. He's discovering it was, in fact, the restrained version.]
Eris attempted a combination, three quick strikes with a change of angle between them, technically the most sophisticated pattern she'd shown so far, clearly the product of genuine training.
I blocked the first. Dodged the second. Redirected the third in a way that used her own force to spin her half a step past her plan, leaving her stumbling for a fraction of a second.
I didn't press the imbalance to counter-attack. A lady has her limits.
"That was better," I said. "The sequence has logic to it. It fails on the third strike because you're already thinking about the next one before finishing the current one. The body arrives where the head's already gone, and the sword arrives where the body's gone, always a step behind the plan."
Eris wore the face of someone who'd received praise and criticism in the same breath and didn't know which to process first.
"I'm saying the third strike has promise, if you treat the sequence as one thing rather than three separate ones," I said. "It isn't mockery. It's recognising the intention underneath the flawed execution."
There was something on her face that wasn't just anger. It was the face of someone who'd run into something unexpected, not the compliment itself, but the mere existence of a compliment in a conversation she'd been cataloguing, until then, as total defeat.
[She's processing two systems at once: what wants to win, and what's actually listening to how to win. Considerably more productive than anything we managed in the classroom.]
〈Because here the vocabulary is hers.〉
[Precisely. Swords, she genuinely understands. It's the right language to reach that stubborn head.]
We continued.
She attacked. I dodged, blocked, redirected, commented, not without pause, not to the point of breaking the flow, but with that timing that lands exactly at the most useful moment, and never at any other.
Her frustration had changed flavour. At first it had been the anger of simply not landing a hit. Now it was something more complicated: the frustration of someone hearing their own mistake named aloud, processing the information, and still not managing to close the gap between understanding and doing.
It was, in practice, genuine progress. The hardest kind to recognise from the inside, because it looks like it's getting worse right before it gets better.
After a few minutes of exchanges, I stopped.
Eris stopped too, not because she'd decided to, but because I'd stopped first, and that created a gap demanding something other than one more strike.
I pulled a piece of cloth from my pocket.
"What's that?" she asked, with the suspicion of someone who's already learned that things coming out of my pocket rarely end well for her.
"A cloth," I said.
"Why are you pulling out a cloth—"
I tied it over my own eyes.
The whole hall seemed to hold its breath at once. Sauros stopped rocking his chair. Rudeus froze mid-scratch at the back of his neck.
"YOU'RE—" Sauros began.
"Blindfolded," I confirmed, adjusting the knot until the world disappeared entirely. "Eris, you may continue whenever you like."
She stood there, motionless, with the face of someone who's finally found a situation capable of topping the entire catalogue of humiliations accumulated so far.
"YOU'RE TELLING ME YOU CAN FIGHT WITHOUT SEEING?" she shouted, at a volume suggesting she'd reached the ceiling of her own indignation and discovered, in horror, there was more space above it.
"I'm telling you I can manage the current level without needing full sight," I said, in the flattest, most devastating tone I could produce. "If that changes, I'll take the cloth off. But pedagogical honesty demands I be precise about what this particular spar actually costs me."
"THAT'S AN INSULT!"
"It's honest calibration," I said. "An insult would be faking difficulty that doesn't exist, purely to spare your pride. I'd rather tell you exactly where you stand and where you still have room to go."
Rudeus wore the face of someone watching something his brain refused to categorise. Ghislaine leaned forward with the attention of someone recognising real technique and wanting to understand the mechanism behind it. Sauros went completely quiet, for him, the equivalent of absolute total attention.
Eris attacked.
With pure rage. With new speed. All the accumulated frustration finally finding an outlet.
And I felt the floor give the warning an instant before the air confirmed it.
No magic. Just the vibration rising through the sole of my foot, her weight shifting into the ground a blink before the strike, the kind of reading that only exists once you've learned to listen to the world from beneath, not only from outside. The displaced air arrived shortly after, like a delayed echo confirming what the wood had already reported.
I dodged.
CRACK!
Her sword met the floor exactly where I no longer stood.
She realigned with the speed of a reflex trained over years.
Attacked again.
I dodged again, my foot already reading the next step before she'd finished taking it herself, the weight shifting from one leg to the other, a subtle difference in pressure on the floor, invisible to anyone who hadn't spent entire lifetimes learning to pay attention to such things.
Fighting without sight has a dimension most combatants never need to discover: the world becomes a map made of different layers of information. The displacement of air before the strike. The vibration of the floor reporting weight and direction before the step finishes happening. The breathing changing rhythm at the exact instant the body commits to a movement. The faint warmth of another body occupying space near your own. Nothing supernatural about it, just attention sharp enough to hear what had always been there, available to anyone willing to bother paying attention.
Eris had compensated to the right after the second dodge, the pattern of someone who always pulls towards their dominant side when they lose balance. The third strike would come from there.
I compensated before it even arrived.
WHOOSH!
She cut through pure air, and the strike's own momentum sent her stumbling a step forward, nearly face-first onto the floor.
The silence in the hall now had weight to it, the weight of people realising they were watching considerably more than an ordinary spar.
"The breathing changes before the attack," I said, as Eris recovered for the fourth time. "If you learn to control that, you control part of what your opponent knows about when and how you're going to strike. Not everything, the body speaks in other ways too, but it's a start, Eris."
"HOW ARE YOU DOING THAT?!" she shouted, and there was something new in it. Not just anger. Genuine curiosity, the kind that appears when someone runs into something they didn't know existed and, for the first time, wants to understand instead of only destroy.
"Listening," I said. "Feeling the displacement of air. Calculating from the pattern you established yourself over the last few minutes. Everyone has patterns. The best fighters learn what theirs are and either eliminate them or turn them deliberately into traps. Those who stagnate at an intermediate level keep repeating the same ones, because they still work against most opponents anyway."
"And they don't work against you."
"Not yet," I said. "'Yet' is the word that matters here. It isn't impossible. It's simply the step you haven't climbed yet."
Eris stopped attacking.
In that pause you could clearly see the moment when attacking again had stopped being pure reflex and had, for the first time, started competing with something else.
I removed the cloth.
I looked at her.
Eris's face carried the expression of someone who'd come to the spar hunting a victory, a revenge, and had walked away with something entirely different in her hands, not the defeat she'd feared, but a quantity of new information she didn't yet know where to store.
It was, in the end, considerably more valuable than the victory she'd planned for.
She didn't know that yet.
But time, fortunately, was in no hurry whatsoever.
At the side of the hall, Sauros stayed quiet long enough for the silence itself to become the loudest thing in the room, considerable irony, where he was concerned.
When he finally spoke, the volume had dropped. Not by much, I doubt Sauros could drop it much further without breaking some law of physics, but enough to make clear the next sentence was different from everything he'd said until then.
"PAUL," he said, more to himself than to anyone in the room, "YOU'RE A FOOL FOR NEVER TELLING ME ABOUT THIS."
Philip's smile opened fully for the first time since we'd arrived.
Ghislaine looked at the space between the wall and nothing in particular, with that neutral face I'd already learned was her version of deep satisfaction she'd rather not announce in bold letters.
Rudeus looked at me with the face of a brother who'd just watched some secret theory he'd been holding about his sister finally confirmed in public.
[Sparring outcome: Eris, productive frustration and new content to digest. Sauros, complete recalibration of his mental model. Rudeus, unspoken theory now officially confirmed. Ghislaine, silent satisfaction. Philip, satisfied since the start, now with extra reason to remain so.]
I looked at Eris.
She held the training sword with the expression of someone who'd reached the end of something she wasn't entirely sure how to name.
"Thursday," I said. "Classroom. The maths book's still on chapter five, Ginger Gremlin."
Eris stared at me for a second, eyes narrowed, as though deciding whether it was worth spending ammunition on one more nickname argument.
She decided it wasn't.
She said nothing.
She'd spent the past few weeks leaving every session with the last word guaranteed, a curse, a threat, an "this isn't happening again" that never once came true. It was her vocabulary of farewell, as predictable as the escape that always followed right after.
This time, the vocabulary failed her.
She left in silence, her shoulders a little less straight than when she'd entered, with the face of someone who'd arrived bringing all the right weapons to the wrong war.
The silence said more than any threat from the previous weeks.
Perhaps, for the first time since we'd met, Eris was carrying the thought away with her, instead of leaving it discarded on the training hall floor.