"Let me guess," Nymiria huffed. "Magic?"
Aziel smirked. "Now, you're catching on." He placed his fork and knife onto his plate before tossing his napkin over them and pushed the plate away, making room for his forearms to rest against the table. "Anything and everything peculiar that happens in this realm and the human realm can be explained by magic. It's something of an umbrella term, but it covers all things that we are not able to explain. There are things in our world that justare.Like this food," He stabbed a perfectly scalloped potato and held it up to the light. "All I had to do was think it into existence and itwas. Whatever is able to be pulled from the earth can be brought to fruition with just a single powerful thought. And that is exactly why Dorid Yaarborough wants us dead or caged."
Nymiria knew that much. It'd been ingrained in her from a very young age to know that the power her people had was coveted so intensely that people around the world killed for it. But the food was not common. It was something only done out of desperation and by someone who was far more powerful than the low fae. Your average wielder could not produce a meal from a single thought. Which left Nymiria feeling a flurry of different things all at once, knowing that Aziel was capable of this much.
She looked over at the large doorway that she could only assume connected to the same balcony that was outside of the washroom, hoping that a single ray of sunlight could filter through and bring the tiniest bit of hope to this dark, dim world that was unfurling in front of her.
“This darkness is Magic, too?”
He laughed at this, a sound that reminded her of the sweetness of dragon berries, but was warm like wine. It shocked her, really, that such a joyous sound could come from such a morose being—that he had another emotion other than anger and aggravation. “Yes,” he coughed, clearing his throat of any semblance oflaughter before looking at her again. “But, really, that’s just Trio. He’s the only damn shadow wielder on the continent and he likes to show it off, too. I asked him to raise wards around the house and he believed that casting this veil would be good enough. It is, but it was definitely a show of skills more than it was him following orders.”
Nymiria grabbed the goblet of wine from the table and breathed in the sweet aroma before taking a small sip. “And you are in charge of him?”
“We worktogether. There is no rank when it comes to him and I.”
“But if I had to find the person who makes the rules around here, who would I go to?”
He stared at her for a moment before he blinked, one finger raising to his hair and scratching. As if the question was extremely hard to answer or made him incredibly uncomfortable. “Me.”
“Is it against the rules for me to go outside?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?” She arched her brow at him, an incredulous smile toying at the corner of her lips. “And why is that?”
Aziel was growing irritated by her interrogation. She could see his jaw quivering again, his eyes narrowing at her so sharply they were almost closed. The gall of this man. At this point, she’d rather turn to the bookshelves that lined the walls of his room. They’d be of more help and would probably not make her want to pluck eyes from skulls.
Her violence was quelled by the image of sharp teeth smiling down at her and a bloody dagger being pulled from scaly skin. She shuddered. A blow to her ego, definitely. She was good at killing humans, but the fae were unfamiliar territory. The first fifteen years of her life weren’t spent being taught to kill her people, but tokeepthem from dying.
“Don’t tell me that you are daft enough to not understand the circumstances we are facing.” He said it so blandly that it made her tongue dry. Of course, she had an idea of what was going on, but—
Aziel pushed himself away from the table with an aggravated huff, fisting his hair with his fingers and tugging at the ends out of sheer frustration. An ounce of fear settled into her stomach, her palms starting to sweat the longer he paced.
Perhaps the circumstances were more severe than she originally believed.
The sudden desire to approach him, calm his warring thoughts, was overwhelming. She gripped the arms of her chair to keep seated, her brow drawing together at the emotions that filled the room. "Aziel—" She started.
His eyes met hers, looking like a turbulent tide of greens and blues, his pupils dark and enlarged. "Do you not realize what he's doing to you?" He snarled. All she could do was stare at him. Because while she knew most of what Dorid intended, it seemed that Aziel knew more. Which would explain why his father deemed him to be such a threat to the kingdom. "You are his project, Nymiria. Not a courtesan, not a pet—you are a message, an example he is going to use when he presents himself and his kingdom to other world-leaders. He's accustomed you to their ways and their lifestyle, manipulating you to turn against your own people and see them just as much of an abomination as he does."
She couldn't take it. Being berated like this, treated as if she hadn't had to endure the last ten years of Dorid's torture and his angeralone. Treated as if she wasn't a victim, but an accomplice.
"I know this because of what he's done before. When his other attempts at deconstructing the Seelie and stripping them of their culturefailed, he did away with them. You were not the first, Nymiria, and you will not be the last. But I cannot stand for this—" His voice cracked and along with it, the facade of the stoic and angry man she once knew, giving way to someone who experienced the same calculated torment at the hands of his father. Her anger melted away the moment his features softened, a hopeless look pulling at the corners of his eyes as he slumped back down into the chair across from her. No matter how much she would have liked to hold onto it with all that she had, she couldn't allow herself to feel it. "I can't let him have you." He shook his head. "Iwon't."
"What makes you so sure he has me, Aziel?" Nymiria asked softly. "I must have done a fine job with my performance if you could believe, for one second, that I am happy at his side."
He worried at his lips with his thumb, his eyes following the trail his other hand made along the smooth black surface of the table. "And what about Oran—was he just apart of your performance, too?" Thoughts plagued his mind of the soft touches, the dances, the doe-like eyes she stared at Oran with every moment they were near one another.
"He wasn't a part of my plan at all, but—" Words failed her. At that moment, she had no idea how to explain her feelings for Oran. She'd distanced herself from him in the last few days, but she still had a strong attachment to him. And the more she assessed the words Oran had spoken to her that day on the lawn, the more she started to understand what he'd meant. What she felt for him wasn'tlove. There wasn't even an ounce of lust between them. But there wassomethingthere—like Oran was the missing piece to a puzzle she'd been trying to assemble for the last decade. "I care for him, Aziel. Not in a romantic way, but I do care for him. He was never supposed to be something more than a man who fucked me whenever he wanted to. But he kept coming to me and… well, we became friends."
There was a flicker of something in Aziel's eyes, something that his face couldn't quite express. She was learning that about him, that while he was seemingly impassive about most things, his eyes had a tendency to tell a completely different story. She just hadn't quite learned what those stories were yet. "What was your plan?" Aziel asked. "You said you had a plan—what was it?"
She pressed her hand to her head to hide her smile. There was a part of her that was afraid to confess her dark secret in fear that Aziel could be doing all of this to trick her, that Dorid had senthimafter her in a wild turn of events. It wouldn't have been the first time something like that'd happened. "I was the assassin planning to kill your father.Andyour brother." She confessed on a sigh. "Obviously, that plan isn't going very well."
Aziel didn't look like an assassin sent to dispatch someone, but more so like someone who was incredibly proud. Whether his pride was with her or himself, she couldn't quite tell. He looked triumphant, releasing an incredulous scoff into the air as he shook his head at the ceiling. "Iknewit." He chuckled. His angry obsessiveness over trailing her at the engagement party was starting to make sense. He'd watched her like a hawk that night. "It was the jimsonweed, wasn't it?"
One good thing about being Dorid’s trusted little pet was that she was able to peek at all of his incoming letters. She had scoured over hundreds of pages Oran had written, detailing battles and news from other realms. Most importantly, there were more personal bits of information in them. Like Oran’s struggles with sleeping—the night terrors that haunted him and the spells of flashbacks that rendered him motionless during the day. She had also read of his experimentation with jimsonweed and cannabis to help ease the side effects of these unfortunate ailments. And upon his return, she’d managed to glamour herself at the apothecary outside of Yaar and sell her concoction to a very desperate young man who'd bragged about being an errand boy for the Prince of Yaar.
At the time, she didn’t regret it. But now, she couldn’t imagine killing him.
