CHAPTER 61
Azra'il - POV
The main Boreas Greyrat hall had, over the course of that final week of frantic preparations, become a temporary monument to the very concept of celebratory excess.
I watched the scene through the gap in the velvet curtain separating the improvised backstage area from the guests. My mind catalogued every detail with the coldness of someone needing to calculate the exact moment to launch a military operation.
Entire tables covered in white linen cloths stretched along the stone walls, holding silver trays stacked with outrageous quantities of food. There were whole roasts of noble game, towers of fruit imported from regions most of the guests couldn't even place on a map, and sweets decorated with edible gold leaf, delicacies made, evidently, to display wealth rather than please the palate. The Boreas family hadn't spared a single copper coin on that tenth birthday, and every corner of the hall seemed to shout that fact into the ear of anyone who walked in.
The guests themselves formed a spectacle of social inadequacy all their own. Dozens of minor regional nobles, dressed in silks and brocades openly competing with one another for visual attention, laughed with that affected tone of people who need to be seen laughing, not people who'd actually found something genuinely funny. I identified the type who measured their own worth by the amount of jewellery hung around their necks, and the type who feigned polite interest in political gossip they clearly considered a waste of their time.
I spotted Rudeus near one of the central columns. He wore a heroic discomfort inside a formal outfit Hilda had, without a doubt, personally chosen and arranged. The impeccably cut coat had a collar too high and stiff for his taste, and his hair had been styled in a way he hated but didn't have the nerve to undo in front of so many important nobles.
Shortly before the banquet began, he'd invaded the backstage area under the pretence of offering me moral support. Rudeus had walked into the improvised dressing room and, after inspecting my bard's outfit, let slip one of those comments that begged for a painful physical retribution.
"You know, you actually look pretty handsome in that outfit, Azra'il." He tilted his head with a sly smile. "Dressed like that, you look like one of those cheap-romance-novel playboys who make half the girls sigh and the other half question their own orientation."
"And you look like a starched penguin with serious oxygenation problems in that tight collar, you perverted Chubby-Cheeks," I replied, without looking up while I tested the instrument's tuning.
Rudeus took a step back, raising his hands defensively in front of his chest. "Hey! I was just complimenting you! I didn't even say anything that bad!"
"The compliment has been logged. Now get out of here before I decide to say thank you by pulling those cheeks of yours until they reach your ears."
He'd retreated with a short laugh, looking rather pleased at having managed to get some reaction out of me before the show.
Now, in the hall, he stood beside Eris. The birthday girl shone inside a pompous silk dress she surely hated with every fibre of her being, but that, at least that night, she seemed willing to tolerate given her anticipation of the surprise I'd promised.
In a discreet corner, almost camouflaged against the heavy tapestries, stood Ghislaine.
She wasn't wearing lady's attire, but she wore considerably more clothing than her usual standard. She had on a closed coat and long trousers that fully covered her muscular legs. I suspected the choice had been purely defensive in nature: dressing in a way that wouldn't draw the nobles' insistent stares, who already showed an irritating tendency to look at her longer than etiquette considered acceptable.
I adjusted the mask over my face, felt the familiar weight of the old lute against my back, and waited for my entrance cue.
Philip walked to the centre of the hall, raising a crystal glass to quiet the guests' murmur with that natural authority years of governance had given him.
"Friends," he announced, projecting his voice with the ease of someone who'd performed that manoeuvre hundreds of times. "Before we proceed with the toasts, I have the pleasure of presenting a special attraction prepared for my daughter."
The hall gradually fell silent, sincere curiosity replacing the side conversations.
"A few weeks ago," Philip went on, keeping his tone serious, "my wife had the good fortune of watching a performance in the streets of Roa that left her utterly delighted. A travelling artist, of unusual talent, who'd been drawing attention wherever she went." He paused briefly, calculated. "We invited that very artist to gift us, tonight, with an exclusive performance."
Not a single word of that was true. Philip lied with a fluency and elegance so professional it drew, even hidden behind my mask, a deep technical respect for his political talent.
I crossed the threshold of the hall.
The silence that settled over the room carried the weight of a crowd trying to process an entirely unexpected element. The first whispers arose before I'd even completed my first steps towards the centre of the floor.
"Is the artist a child?"
"Is it a boy or a girl? Can't tell with that costume."
"What an intriguing mask..."
I ignored every whisper with the calloused indifference I'd cultivated across much older lives, and made my way to the central space reserved for the performance.
I stopped at the centre of the floor, the wolf mask covering my face completely, and bowed slowly, deliberately, the kind any experienced street performer knows how to impose even before the most hostile audience.
"They call me Lyka," I announced, letting my voice echo through the whole hall before any music began. "And tonight I bring with me a story the sea tried to silence for far too long."
A fresh murmur ran through the tables, more curious now than suspicious. The name meant nothing to most of those nobles, just another travelling artist among the many who crossed Asura seeking patronage. But there was something in the way I pronounced it, an almost too-intimate reverence for a mere stage name, something perhaps even I didn't wish to examine too closely.
Our eyes met across the crowd.
Eris recognised me almost immediately beneath the mask. I saw the exact instant her expression changed, her pupils dilating and her cheeks taking on a flush that had nothing to do with the hall's temperature. A glint of pure intensity and anticipation appeared in her gaze, and she gripped Rudeus's sleeve violently, murmuring something I couldn't hear, but that was certainly the confirmation that I'd kept my promise.
I adjusted the lute against my chest and plucked the first chord, letting the old wood's full-bodied sound fill the room's silence.
Unlike the narration, which I kept in my usual dry, descriptive tone, the sung passages carried the metre and lyrical air of old tavern ballads.
🎵 "Hear me, you lords of noble lineage,
The world's greatest farce, its fairest mirage.
I sing not of heroes who came by their power,
Nor kings crowned in idleness, hour after hour.
I sing of the one who faced her own fall,
And rose from the ruins to answer the call.
For even when ice should cover the way,
There's always a path back to hearth, come what may.
This is the legend the sea tried to drown:
Asteria, the queen who dared to turn round." 🎵
With a light movement of my free hand, I applied chantless earth magic. The first clay figure rose from the polished floor before me: a small silhouette with a clay crown, a short cape, and a hunting bow on its back, slowly rising before the guests' attentive eyes.
"Long ago," I narrated, letting the music's lyrical tone pause for a moment to make way for the sobriety of my descriptive voice, "in a region surrounded by deep waters, there existed a small kingdom of sailors called Thalassia."
🎵 "Thalassia, born from the salt of the sea,
Where life takes its shape in the wind's raging spree.
There she loved, and she reigned free of pain,
Beside the one who was her heart's own domain.
Calliope, keeper of autumn-bright braids,
Whose laughter chased off the coldest of shades.
She stood at the threshold, and there she would stay,
While her beloved sailed out and away." 🎵
Around the figures of Asteria and Calliope, small clay structures began sprouting from the floorboards: miniature houses, a detailed harbour, and ships anchored along an invisible coastline the audience was already beginning to picture projected in the air.
The introduction of a romance between two queens drew an immediate murmur from the more conservative guests.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two nobles trading indignant whispers, clearly torn between the social awkwardness of interrupting the Boreas family's party or accepting the bard's boldness. Hilda, however, tilted her head with puzzled interest, keeping her eyes fixed on the performance. I had not the slightest interest in providing moral explanations to the local lords; the story went on, and the best answer to prejudice is to keep the narrative moving forward with conviction.
"But Thalassia's peace was destroyed," I continued, and the musicians I'd instructed the day before began the accompaniment with quick chords, lending the scene a tone of urgency.
🎵 "But far, in the ashen grey country of Ilion,
The wrath of the gods set aflame the pavilion.
Ten years of siege, and ten years of fire,
Men's blood made the plaything of gods' cruel desire.
Walls that once stood turned to ashes and coal,
And the glory of kings sank to dust in the soil." 🎵
I gestured with precision. Grey earthen walls rose in the centre of the hall, and I applied low-intensity fire magic to make small flames wrap around the top of the structure, projecting real heat that made the nobles in the front row draw back slightly.
At the far end of the hall, Sauros leant forward so far he looked about to fall out of his chair. His arms began spreading in a gesture of childlike excitement, entirely captured by the miniature battle unfolding before him.
With a mental command, I undid the earthen structure, turning the walls into fine dust that dissipated before touching any guest's clothing.
"Asteria prevailed in the War of Ilion," I narrated, letting the silence do its work on the audience before returning to the lute's melody.
🎵 "Ten years of war to seize glory's crown,
And a lifetime besides just to journey back down." 🎵
The set underwent a complete structural change under my mana commands.
Using water magic, I projected a liquid current suspended in the air, crossing the centre of the hall like a translucent river made manifest before everyone. The small clay ship I'd shaped glided smoothly over that suspended water, its fine linen sails billowing under the continuous breeze I channelled with wind magic. Small waves broke against the hull with a soft sound, matched by the musicians' sustained violin chords.
A collective gasp of pure astonishment escaped the audience.
"All the other warriors returned home that same summer," I narrated, lowering the lute's intensity until the melody became little more than a murmur.
🎵 "Twelve ships set sail from the harbour that day,
Straight into the tempest, straight into dismay.
But the gods of the sea hold their grudges like steel,
And the dark waters swallowed their trace and their keel.
Asteria gazed at the endless divide,
And laughed at the fate that the heavens had tied:
'Let the tempest come, the wind and the scourge,
For today, it is I who begins the journey's surge.'" 🎵
The clay ship came to a stop in the centre of the suspended current, its sails still fluttering under the continuous wind.
I held the last note suspended in the hall's air for a few seconds of deliberate silence. I used the dramatic pause to study the audience: Sauros was barely breathing, leaning over the table; Hilda kept her hand discreetly over her chest; Philip watched his political guests' astonished reactions with a satisfied smile; and Eris was leaning so far forward her body nearly touched Rudeus's back, cheeks flushed and crimson eyes fixed on my performance.
I plucked the next chord, and the ship began moving again across the suspended water, sailing towards Nereus's storms that my repertoire still had to recount.
Asteria's journey was truly beginning that night. And the nobles of Asura, I noticed with quiet satisfaction, no longer seemed concerned with Thalassia's moral conventions.
They only wanted to find out whether the queen would manage to make her way home.