CHAPTER 52
Azra’il - POV
Every garden develops a very particular kind of silence after a domestic tragedy of moderate proportions.
It is not the peaceful silence of wind in the leaves and birdsong; it is that thick, almost digestive silence of an environment that has just witnessed an extraordinary event and is still deciding whether it was theatre, divine justice, or both served simultaneously on the same plate. The birds themselves seemed to have perched on the highest branches merely to observe, with the prudence of one who does not wish to be mistaken for a secondary target.
I was sitting on an ornate stone bench, holding a porcelain teacup. The tea inside it had been completely cold for at least twenty minutes, but I continued to hold it out of principle. To let go of the cup would imply admitting that the scene was over, and I was not yet ready for this pedagogical chapter to conclude for lack of an audience.
In the centre of the garden, tied to the trunk of an ancient ornamental tree, was Rudeus.
He displayed a level of swelling that would be the envy of any medical student. His bruises amounted to eight distinct points of impact, distributed with a symmetry I choose to consider a technical merit of my own. All the injuries were perfectly functional, but none were remotely comfortable. There is an abyssal difference, which few doctors in this world comprehend, between healing someone and healing someone well. For Rudeus, I had opted, deliberately and scientifically, for the former.
"You could have… simply let me pass out," he murmured from the tree, his voice slightly nasal due to his swollen lower lip. He had clearly been saving that phrase for the last ten minutes, waiting for the flow of his own saliva to normalise enough to pronounce it.
"Passing out is a form of escape," I replied, without taking my eyes off the opaque surface of my cold tea. "Reflection requires a state of active consciousness. And I made sure you were extremely conscious to reflect on your life choices."
"That is… a genuinely sophisticated cruelty. Even for you."
"Thank you. It took me at least three civilisations and a few centuries of monastery management to perfect the method."
He fell quiet again, mentally testing if there were any logical arguments or emotional appeals left in his repertoire. There were not. I knew Rudeus's entire catalogue of excuses since the time he was still in nappies and babbling terms in Japanese when he thought no one was listening. I knew exactly where his line of defence ended, and it had ended about three bruises ago.
However, to understand how we had arrived at this specific point in the afternoon, with the magic prodigy tied to a trunk and myself enjoying an infusion of herbs with the serenity of one who has just solved a structural problem, it is necessary to go back a few weeks. The chronology is a courtesy I grant, even when I am in a foul mood.
The shampoo business had ceased to be a simple personal hygiene experiment and had transformed, with an almost indecent speed, into a small capillary empire within the Boreas mansion. The demand from the local bourgeoisie and nobility escalated to such a point that the two storage rooms in the east wing began to look ridiculous. Even with Rudeus producing ceramic flasks as if his life depended on it, which under my supervision, technically it did, the production bottleneck was evident.
I decided we needed additional labour. And the extra hands, in that specific castle, came attached to furry ears and a productive enthusiasm that I had never calculated with mathematical precision.
"Let me see if I've got this straight…," said one of the beast-race maids, moving the silver coins from one hand to the other for the fourth time, as if trying to find an arithmetic error that physics was attempting to hide from her. "Working part-time here, for just one week, is equivalent to what the house pays me for an entire month of domestic services?"
"Approximately," I replied, without taking my eyes off the cost spreadsheet I was drawing up on the parchment. "That is, if you maintain consistency in the mixing of the rosemary extract."
Her ears shot up to a position so perfectly vertical that I suspect they could have been used as compasses.
"That's extremely unfair to the rest of the household staff," she commented, although her fingers closed over the coins with the force of a hydraulic press.
"This is not injustice," I retorted. "This is the introduction of the free market and scale capitalism. The wage disparity is merely the first widely documented collateral effect of progress."
She let out a nervous laugh and returned to work with a renewed vigour that, I suspect, came less from a passion for perfumery and more from the realisation that financial mathematics is the only truly universal language I have ever encountered. In all the worlds I have visited, regardless of whether there were gold coins or transactions based on the bartering of cattle, the desire to obtain more with less effort is a universal constant.
While our capillary empire expanded, Eris's lessons followed their natural course: slow, noisy, and marked by a stubbornness that would make a mule seem like an exemplar of cognitive flexibility. Nonetheless, progress was real. The girl could now add and subtract without needing to resort to her fingers or physical threats against the abacus. Ghislaine also kept pace, displaying that lethal concentration of one who treats every mathematical equation as an opponent that must be neutralised before it can counter-attack.
Even so, multiplication and division with multiple digits remained hostile territory.
"One hundred and twenty-three times forty-seven," Eris hissed one warm afternoon, staring at the sheet of paper with the same resentment she would show towards a direct insult to her family tree.
"Five thousand, seven hundred and eighty-one," Rudeus replied instantly, without even looking up from his own translation of ancient texts.
"How did you do that?" She slammed her fist on the table. "Have you memorised every number in the world?"
"Decomposition," he explained, sighing. "You multiply one hundred and twenty by forty, then add the remaining fractions in steps. Your brain does the summing of the blocks automatically if you train enough."
"That's advanced-level witchcraft! You're using chantless magic on the numbers!"
The ensuing argument was one of the longest and loudest of that week. Eris insisted that the method was a cheat designed to make her look foolish, while Rudeus tried, with a patience that was clearly being sustained by imaginary self-control pills, to prove that mathematics had no feelings. In the corner of the room, Ghislaine remained in absolute silence, her ears tilted towards Rudeus, absorbing the explanation about numerical decomposition with an almost reverent seriousness. In the end, the beast-woman was assimilating more than the two disputants combined.
It was a productive period. Genuinely productive.
But none of that, unfortunately, justifies the fact that Rudeus is currently tied to a tree in the garden.
To understand the punishment, we need to go back just a few hours in time, specifically to the moment I returned from the municipal market with a basket containing new ingredients and crossed the inner courtyard.
Eris had probably escaped from her etiquette lesson, a behaviour perfectly in line with her history of school evasion, and had decided to take a nap under the cool shade of the shrubs in the side garden. Rudeus, who apparently possessed a biological radar aimed exclusively at detecting the vulnerabilities of others, found her asleep.
And he made a decision.
A decision that involved a stealthy approach, touches that violated at least three codes of civilisational conduct I have known, and the attempt to confiscate a piece of undergarment that was not listed in his personal inventory.
What my eyes registered was enough for me to drop the shopping basket on the ground without any regard for the physical integrity of the ingredients, draw my Jian, and decide, with a mental clarity I usually only experience in real combat situations, exactly how the next few hours of his existence would be structured.
The sound of the first impact woke Eris.
She assessed the scene with the speed of one born understanding physical violence as her second mother tongue. Without needing any textual explanations, she joined in the execution of the discipline with a laudable enthusiasm, delivering blows until her nine-year-old child's muscular limits took their toll and she needed to stop to catch her breath.
I, however, had no such limitations.
I used healing magic on Rudeus whenever his pain threshold threatened to make him lose consciousness. He appreciated this medical care at exactly zero per cent, as there is a very particular torture in being healed just enough for one's nervous system to remain fully operational during the remainder of the punishment. I must admit, with the honesty I usually reserve for moments of deep introspection, that I knew exactly what I was doing by prolonging the process.
After concluding the mobile part of the lesson, I tied him firmly to the tree with a high-resistance hemp rope and went to fetch a cup of tea to stabilise my own internal temperature.
It was in this arrangement that Ghislaine found us.
She appeared along the side path of the garden, with her usual alert bodyguard posture. She had clearly heard the symphony of screams and impacts from afar and had decided to investigate with the calm of one who had already formulated the correct hypothesis long before seeing the scene.
She stopped before the tree.
She looked at Rudeus, whose face displayed a palette of colours that varied from purple to a yellowish-blue.
She looked at the rope.
Then, she looked at me and my perfectly balanced cup of tea.
"What did he do?" Ghislaine asked, with her ears in the position I would scientifically classify as 'I already know the answer, but I'd like to see if he has the audacity to deny it.'
"Inappropriate conduct," I replied, taking a sip of the cold liquid. "Involving non-consensual touching and an attempt at misappropriation of another's intimate apparel."
Ghislaine directed a look at Rudeus that carried the weight of a profound professional disappointment.
"I was… it was a conjunction of factors… the aesthetic context of the situation was highly complex…," Rudeus tried to argue, his voice muffled due to the swelling in his left cheek. He knew, and I knew, that that phrase would not be able to save him from anything in this plane of existence.
"The context rarely presents metaphysical complexity when undergarments are involved in the offence," I observed, maintaining the neutrality of an academic describing the migration of amphibians. "It is a case of an elementary conduct deviation, widely documented in individuals with an excess of hormones and a scarcity of common sense."
Ghislaine let out a long sigh. It was that specific sigh she had developed after spending too much time living with the Greyrat family, a lineage that seemed to have a hereditary talent for making decisions that deserved exactly that kind of noisy exhalation.
"Remember the time you thrashed Paul?" she asked out of the blue, connecting the events through a purely practical association.
Rudeus stopped trying to loosen the knots with his shoulders. His eyes widened. "You… thrashed Paul?"
"Yes," I replied, simply. "In the backyard of our house, on the day we left Buena Village."
"You told me you had only given him a verbal scolding for being too severe with me in our fight!"
"I recall using that terminology to spare your childish sensibilities."
"Azra’il, thrashing an advanced-level swordsman is not the same thing as giving a verbal scolding!"
"It is merely an alternative description for the same process of behavioural correction," I explained, maintaining a didactic patience. "The difference is purely semantic and methodological, but the final learning outcome was achieved. Paul will not repeat the same conduct."
Eris, who until then had been sitting on the grass trying to catch her breath and inspecting her own knuckles, raised her head. The mention of a real battle involving our father against one of us had lit that predatory glint she tended to exhibit whenever the subject involved high-level sword fighting or violence.
"What happened in that fight?" she asked, approaching the tree with her eyes fixed on Ghislaine.
The furry-eared beast-woman crossed her arms, adopting that veteran's posture of one assessing a technique that has genuinely impressed them. "It was in that fight that I first saw Azra'il use that combat style," Ghislaine said, with her ears tilted back in a sign of military respect. "The same one she briefly demonstrated to us during our practical lesson. Paul is a formidable warrior, with an advanced level in three different sword styles on this continent. Nevertheless, she managed to take him down systematically."
"She took him down… An advanced swordsman?" Eris repeated, her voice dropping to a whisper that mixed disbelief with an admiration she was struggling to process.
"Yes. Azra'il challenged Paul formally, in the backyard, after Rudeus had been defeated and had fainted on the ground during their earlier fight."
"You really fought against Paul?" Rudeus repeated, his voice rising an octave as he processed the magnitude of the historical event he had missed by being, literally, unconscious at the time.
"He had done something that needed to be addressed," I replied, pragmatically, swirling the cup gently between my fingers. "And I preferred to depart with the outstanding matter resolved."
"What did he do?" Rudeus asked.
I looked him straight in the eye, letting the tone of scorn that I usually wore as a daily veneer evaporate from my voice. I left only the cold weight of the established fact. "You know very well," I said, firmly. "He betrayed our mother."
No one said anything for a moment. Not because there was a lack of reaction, but because the sentence, spoken without any ornament or unnecessary drama, already carried enough weight on its own. The fact that Paul had broken the structure of trust in our house while Zenith tried to maintain the family's stability was a wound that I had not the slightest intention of romanticising or forgetting.
Eris turned her eyes back to me. There was an entirely new alignment in her posture, as if she were reorganising years of casual observations around this new piece of information. "You challenged your own father for your mother's honour," she said slowly, processing the words as she spoke them. "And then you thrashed him."
"It was a necessary corrective intervention. Paul's betrayal of our mother had created an imbalance in the family structure that needed a physical endpoint for coexistence to remain possible."
Eris fell quiet for a moment. The ensuing silence was broken only by the distant sound of horses in the stables. Slowly, her cheeks gained a shade of red that had no relation to the physical exertion of minutes before.
"And today you did the same for me," she murmured, looking at the ground before lifting her eyes again to meet mine.
"I did what the logic of the situation demanded. I do not permit conduct deviations of this calibre to occur under my jurisdiction," I replied, my voice firm and devoid of any artificial sentimentality.
She stared at me for a few more seconds, her fists still slightly dirty with earth.
"Thank you," she said. It was a thanks stripped of her usual defensive aggressiveness or her aristocratic performances. It was just the real girl who existed under the Boreas armour of pride, acknowledging that someone had drawn a physical line to protect her.
Before the silence could become uncomfortable by the standards of a noble family, Sauros walked past along the stone corridor that skirted the garden. He stopped.
His ancient patriarch's gaze, accustomed to managing a territory where violence and political calculation went hand in hand, swept the scene in less than two seconds. He analysed Rudeus's pitiful state, assessed the rope that bound him to the tree, and finally, his eyes landed on me, holding the cold teacup with the poise of an official executioner.
He looked back at Rudeus. "Paul was exactly identical to you at this same age," Sauros declared, with the resonant voice of someone who is merely reading a redundant weather report. "The tree they used to tie him up at the main mansion was a bit sturdier, but the end result was exactly the same."
Rudeus looked as if he wanted the earth beneath his boots to open up and swallow him whole. His face reached a shade of scarlet that defied cellular physics.
Sauros continued on his way without waiting for any response or justification. Men who had already buried generations of Greyrats and watched the same biological mistakes being repeated rarely saw the utility in extending the dialogue.
A short while later, the head gardener approached. He ignored Rudeus completely, limiting himself to inspecting the bark of the ornamental tree to check if the rope had caused any structural damage to Philip's botanical specimen. Satisfied upon seeing that the tree remained intact, he gathered his tools and departed without saying a single word.
Soon after, two maids passed by, whispering, with their ears tilted forward at an angle I would classify as 'high-quality entertainment for working hours'. They quickened their pace as they exchanged stifled giggles.
Rudeus followed each of these visits with an expression that transitioned, progressively, from excruciating shame to a kind of profound philosophical resignation. He was discovering, through direct experience, that prolonged humiliation is an infinitely more painful pedagogical agent than simple physical pain.
[The probability of a recurrence of the same behaviour from the specimen Rudeus in the presence of witnesses drops by 92.7% after the punitive methodology used.]
〈 I like to call this 'pedagogy based on natural consequences' 〉
[Documented. With the technical observation that the term 'natural consequences' is an extremely convenient euphemism for your own structured sadism.]
〈 Sadism is an inadequate term, Eos. I prefer 'commitment to the integrity of another's character'. 〉
When the head cook passed by carrying a tray of vegetables, glanced at Rudeus with the same disinterest one might have when assessing a sack of slightly sun-damaged potatoes, and continued on his way, I decided that the period of cognitive fixation had been sufficient for that afternoon.
I stood up from the bench. I placed the cold teacup aside, approached the tree, and with a single clean movement of my Jian, I cut the hemp ropes.
Rudeus slid down the trunk, needing to support his hands on his knees for a few seconds to recalibrate his sense of balance after spending so long in a non-voluntary position.
I approached him and placed my right hand on his left shoulder. Without uttering any magical activation words, I allowed the flow of healing mana to run through his energy channels, directing the energy specifically to the eight points of impact I had created. As I knew exactly where each bruise was located, the process of blood reabsorption was swift and precise.
I handed him a leather canteen containing fresh water. He accepted and drank with the haste of one who had just received a grant of mercy he had not considered guaranteed at that point in the afternoon.
When he finished drinking and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, I looked directly into his eyes. "What did we learn today, Rudeus?"
He remained silent for a long moment, his eyes fixed on the trampled grass beneath his boots, visibly formulating a response that would not result in a new period of botanical confinement. "That… I should not attempt anything inappropriate if you are in the same geographical quadrant," he risked, with a timid attempt at maintaining his usual humour.
The blow from the pommel of my Jian landed on the top of his head before he could close his mouth. It was not a violent blow, but an extremely precise one, designed to emit a hollow sound that echoed through the garden.
"Ow!" he protested, massaging the top of his skull.
"Try again. This time, without the veneer of defensive sarcasm."
Rudeus took a deep breath. His posture changed; the clever boy glint disappeared, giving way to that seriousness he only adopted when he realised he had crossed a line that truly mattered to me.
"I was just messing about…," he murmured, his voice softer. He looked at the ground before continuing. "What I really learnt… is that I do not have the right to use another person's vulnerability to touch them without consent, especially if they are minors. And much less to steal their undergarments. It was a pathetic and wrong thing to do. I understand."
The silence that followed in the garden was different from before. It was a clean silence, without the weight of pending punishment.
I observed his breathing pattern for a few seconds, searching for any indication that this declaration was merely a performance of projected repentance to avoid new sessions of character healing. there was none. The thrashing and the tree's punishment had done their job of breaking his barrier of denial.
I nodded once. "Excellent. Otherwise, the next tree we use will be significantly taller and less comfortable."
Eris relaxed the shoulders she had been keeping tense for the last two hours, though she turned her face away so no one would see her sigh of relief. On the branch above, Ghislaine put her ears in the position I knew well as a sign of silent approval. The authority and order of the group had been re-established without the need for external intervention from the masters of the mansion.
[Disciplinary report concluded with success.]
〈 What is the recidivism rate for this specific pattern of undergarment theft, Eos? 〉
[Simulations indicate a drastic reduction of 98% for any attempt directed at individuals within the Boreas complex. However, the general character deviation of the specimen Rudeus remains a long-term biological constant. Continuous vigilance is recommended.]
〈 A realistic, though regrettable, conclusion. Document it in the behavioural logs. 〉
[Logged.]
I turned away and headed towards the kitchens, intending to get myself a fresh pot of tea that was actually hot. The day was drawing to a close, and the sky was beginning to take on the first shades of orange that signalled the end of the working day.
"I sincerely hope," I remarked, without looking back as I crossed the stone courtyard, "that I never have to waste an entire afternoon teaching basic concepts of consent to a Saint-ranked mage again."
None of the three replied.
The garden remained silent. But this time, it was the kind of silence that came with rebuilding, where those who remained within it were no longer quite the same people they had been when all of this began.
Perhaps I had wasted a few hours. But at least something seemed to have finally sunk into their heads.