The restaurant had emptied slowly, the way places empty when no one particularly wants to be the first to leave.
The food had come in waves small plates at first, then larger ones, the kind of meal that expands to fill the time available to it. Around the table conversations had overlapped and separated and rejoined, the particular rhythm of a group of people discovering, with varying degrees of surprise, that they could occupy the same space without catastrophe.
Azrael had eaten. Had listened. Had said approximately eight things across two hours, which was more than he had expected and fewer than anyone had tried to draw out of him.
The topic had arrived somewhere between the second and third round of plates, carried in by Solene with the particular energy she brought to most things which was to say, loudly and without preamble.
Solene: "Does anyone else find it strange that we're here right now? This specific year?"
She said it to the table generally, her eyes bright, one hand gesturing at nothing in particular and everything at once.
Solene: "The Celestial Throne published a statement last month. The high clergy. They've been reading old texts actual original texts, not the copies and they're saying the signs are converging. That the five Seraphins are going to awaken again."
A pause at the table. Not silence the particular quality of people deciding how much attention to give something.
Aldric: "The clergy says something like that every generation."
Solene: "Not like this! They're citing specific passages. Cycles of a thousand years. And this year" She looked around the table with the expression of someone who finds it remarkable that not everyone finds this remarkable. "This is the thousandth year. Exactly. Does no one think about that?"
Michaelas: "I think about it."
Solene: "Finally! Someone!"
Michaelas: "I think it's extraordinary. The idea that power like that could return to the world that somewhere, right now, there are people who carry something ancient without knowing it." He said it with genuine wonder, the kind that doesn't perform itself. "That would change everything."
Jeanne: "It would terrify everything, you mean."
Michaelas: "That too."
Aldric leaned back in his chair with the expression of someone who has an opinion and intends to share it at the correct volume.
Aldric: "If the Seraphins return they'll need bodies. Vessels. People exceptional enough to carry that kind of power." He looked around the table with the particular satisfaction of someone positioning themselves within a flattering narrative. "That's why we're here, isn't it? The academy selects for exactly that. The best of the best."
Solene: "That's not how reincarnation works."
Aldric: "How would you know how reincarnation works?"
Solene: "How would you?"
Charles Valdris, who had been eating with the focused efficiency of someone completing a task, set down his fork.
Charles: "Whether it's true or not doesn't change anything practical. We train. We get stronger. If something ancient decides to use that strength for its own purposes that's a problem for later."
Dorian: "Agreed."
Solene: "You're both so boring!" She said it without malice, the way you say something you find genuinely puzzling. "We might be living through a mythological event and your response is that's a problem for later?"
Charles: "Yes."
Dorian: "Yes."
Solene looked at them both for a moment. Seemed to decide this was a lost cause and redirected her energy toward the rest of the table.
Solene: "What about the rest of you? Would you want it? To be chosen? To carry something like that?"
A silence that was more interesting than the ones before it.
Nora smiled pleasantly and said she thought the question was fascinating without answering it. Lena Harken said she'd rather not, thank you, she preferred her body as it currently was. Jeanne looked at Michaelas briefly and said nothing. Celia continued eating with the focused composure of someone who had decided this conversation did not require her participation.
Azrael looked at the World Tree through the gap between the buildings across the plaza. Its silver bark catching the lamplight. Its leaves moving.
He said nothing.
Lyssael said nothing.
Victoria said nothing.
Selena, at the far end of the table, was looking at something in the middle distance with an expression that gave away nothing and, to someone paying attention, gave away everything.
Solene: "The quiet ones are always the interesting ones." She said it to no one specific, delighted by her own observation. "Fine! Keep your secrets! The clergy will figure it out eventually!"
Iris: "Or they'll be wrong and nothing will happen and we'll all have had this conversation for no reason."
Solene: "That is also a valid outcome and I accept it!"
The meal continued. The conversation moved on to other things courses, professors, the rumor that the Trial of Awakening this year was going to be different from previous years in ways that nobody could specify but everyone had heard something about. The World Tree above the rooftops did what it always did. The evening deepened around them without being asked.
Eventually the plates were empty and the cups were cold and the particular momentum that keeps groups of people at tables had finally run out.
They paid. They stood. They moved out into the plaza.
Arden at night was a different city from Arden in the evening.
The lanterns were fully committed now, burning warm and steady along the main street, their light caught by the cobblestones and the shop windows and the silver bark of the World Tree at the center of everything. The air had gone properly cold, the kind of cold that clarifies things outlines of buildings sharper, sounds carrying further, the two moons high and distinct above the rooftops, one deep blue and one pale.
The group moved through the plaza in the loose formation that groups naturally take when they have eaten together and are heading somewhere and no one has officially designated a direction. Small clusters formed and reformed. Michaelas and Jeanne walking close, their conversation low and continuous. Solene moving with the slightly unpredictable trajectory of someone who kept stopping to look at things. Charles and Celia side by side with the practiced proximity of people who had spent years being placed next to each other at formal events and had arrived, through repetition, at something that functioned like comfort.
At the back, two figures walking with their hands in their pockets.
Lyssael and Azrael.
Not by decision. Just by the way things arrange themselves when two people at the back of a group have nothing to say to anyone else and have not yet decided whether they have anything to say to each other.
The silence lasted past the plaza. Past the first turn. Past the point where it would have been natural to break it.
Lyssael broke it.
Lyssael: "Do you know how to use a sword?"
Azrael: "Daggers. That's all I've trained with."
Lyssael: "And you want to learn?"
Azrael: "It would be useful."
A pause.
Lyssael: "If you asked me. Properly. I would teach you."
Azrael: "I'd rather ask Violette."
Something moved in Lyssael's expression. Not quite offense. The particular recalibration of someone who had extended something and received an unexpected response.
Lyssael: "You and Violette are close?"
Azrael: "I've known her for three days."
Lyssael: "Then why—"
Azrael: "Because begging you would cost more than it's worth. Violette would just mock me. That I can deal with."
Lyssael was quiet for a moment.
Lyssael: "You don't call her Dame Violette."
Azrael: "She never corrected me."
Lyssael: "That doesn't mean—"
Azrael: "She had plenty of opportunities. She chose not to use them."
Another silence. Lyssael's jaw moved slightly in the way it moved when he was processing something he found unreasonable and was deciding whether to say so.
Lyssael: "You really are a bastard, aren't you."
Azrael: "Probably."
The street ahead curved. The dormitory building was visible now, its windows lit against the dark, the particular warm light of a place people were returning to. The rest of the group had spread out along the street, their voices drifting back.
Then something caught his arm.
He looked down before he looked up the instinct of someone who has learned to identify threats by their point of contact first. A hand. Fingers around his forearm. And then the person attached to it pulling him slightly, pressing his arm against something warm.
He looked up.
Maria.
She had appeared from somewhere he hadn't seen where, hadn't heard her approach, which said something about how she moved when she chose to move quietly. Her black hair was loose around her shoulders. Her red eyes were looking up at him with an expression that had warmth in it and calculation behind the warmth and something behind the calculation that was harder to name.
His arm was pressed against her. Against her.
Around them the rest of the group had registered this. He could feel it without looking the particular quality of a group of people who have just witnessed something unexpected and are performing not having witnessed it with varying degrees of success.
Across the group Michaelas had gone very still. Aldric's eyebrows had achieved an impressive elevation. Lyssael, beside him, had developed a sudden interest in the architecture of the building on his left.
From somewhere near the front he heard, very distinctly, the sound of a tongue clicking against teeth.
Selena.
Not looking at them. Walking. Clicking.
Maria turned her attention from Azrael to Lyssael with the serene ease of someone changing the subject of a conversation they have been running the whole time.
Maria: "Lyssael. Would you mind if I borrowed him?"
Lyssael looked at her. Then at Azrael. Then back at her.
Lyssael: "Do whatever you want."
He said it with the clipped delivery of someone who has decided that this situation is not his problem and is communicating this as efficiently as possible. His ears were faintly pink.
Azrael: "What do you want?"
Maria looked up at him. The corner of her mouth moved.
Then, loud enough to carry:
Maria: "Nothing urgent. I simply wanted to walk with my fiancé."
The group ahead processed this.
Michaelas stopped walking.
Lyssael stopped walking.
Aldric stopped walking and put his hand over his face.
Victoria looked at the sky briefly with the expression of someone asking it a question it was not going to answer.
Maria smiled at no one in particular and guided Azrael gently but with complete certainty around the corner and away from the group, her arm through his, her pace unhurried, as though what had just happened was the most natural thing in the world and she could not imagine why anyone would find it otherwise.
He let himself be guided. He was choosing not to make a scene and this was the decision he had made and he was committed to it.
She planned that. He looked at the street ahead. Every part of it. The timing. The volume. The specific people who would react.
She is exhausting.
She is also very good at this.
He did not say either of these things.
They walked for half a minute in the particular quiet of two people who have just made a small scene together and are now on the other side of it. The street was narrower here, the lamplight warmer, the sounds of the group behind them fading.
Then she stopped.
He stopped.
She turned toward him slightly. Her hand was still on his arm. Her red eyes found his in the lamplight with an expression that had dropped most of its performance — the calculation was still there, it was always there, but underneath it something more direct.
She raised her other hand. Two fingers, tracing a slow line down the center of his chest through the fabric of his uniform. Then her chin tilted up and she pulled him gently down toward her, close enough that her voice arrived as warmth before it arrived as words.
Maria:"I want you to spend the night with me."
Azrael did not move.
The lamplight held them both. The street was empty. Somewhere behind them the city continued its night without particular interest in this specific corner of it.
He looked at her.
She looked back.