The infirmary smelled of clean linen and something medicinal that Azrael could not name and did not particularly want to.
He recognized the room before he fully recognized himself in it. The particular quality of the ceiling, low and white, the kind of ceiling that exists in rooms designed for people who are supposed to be lying down and looking at nothing. The narrow bed. The single window admitting grey morning light at an angle that suggested it was early but not as early as he would have preferred.
He looked at his hand.
It was wrapped entirely. Clean bandaging from the base of his fingers to his wrist, tight and professional, the work of someone who knew what they were doing. He flexed it experimentally. The pain was present and had opinions. He noted both and moved on.
One more scar. He had several already. One more changed nothing.
He lay there for a moment and looked at the ceiling and thought about nothing specific, which was the thing he did when he was thinking about something specific and had not yet decided whether to acknowledge it.
She would have died.
The thought arrived with the particular clarity of something that had been waiting patiently for him to stop ignoring it.
If Maria hadn't noticed. If I hadn't gone back for my clothes. If I had been thirty seconds later.
He had known, in the abstract, that Selena was a target. She was a princess. Princesses had enemies the way stones had weight. Inherently, inevitably, as a consequence of what they were. He had filed this information and moved on because filing information and moving on was what he did.
He had not, until this moment, allowed himself to feel the specific weight of what the information contained.
She would have died.
He did not know what to do with that. So he looked at the ceiling and waited for the feeling to become something he could file away, and it did not become that, and he kept waiting.
The door opened.
Maria.
She looked different from how she had looked the night before. Not in the way of someone who had changed but in the way of someone who had not slept and was carrying the evidence of that in the particular set of her jaw and the slight flatness behind her eyes. Her hair was still dark and precise and her expression was still controlled but underneath the control was something that had been working through the night and had not yet finished.
She crossed the room and sat in the chair beside his bed with the ease of someone who had already decided where she was going to sit before she entered.
Maria: "How are you feeling?"
Azrael: "I've had worse mornings."
Maria: "I don't doubt it."
She looked at his bandaged hand for a moment. Then at him. Something moved in her expression. There and gone, controlled before it could fully surface.
Maria: "I owe you an apology."
He said nothing. He waited.
Maria: "I should have called a guard. Told a professor. Done something that didn't involve keeping all of it between us." She held his gaze. "I thought I had the situation under control. I was wrong." A pause. "And I'm sorry."
She said it simply. Without softening it or surrounding it with qualifications. Just the fact of it, set down and left there.
Then:
Maria: "Thank you. For protecting her."
Azrael looked at the ceiling briefly.
He had assumed, somewhere in the back of his mind where assumptions lived without being examined, that Maria and Selena existed in a state of mutual cold tolerance at best. The way two precise and self-contained people occupy the same space. Aware of each other, wary of each other, never quite at ease. He had filed this under things that were probably true and had not questioned it further.
The way she had just said her suggested he had been wrong about that too.
He was wrong about things occasionally. He did not enjoy it.
Azrael: "The assassin. Which guild?"
Maria: "Foreign. Small operation, not one of the major houses. Someone hired them specifically for this job." Her voice was even. Professional. The voice she used when she was reporting rather than conversing. "They came in through the eastern face of the building. Scaled the exterior. The window lock on your apartment was compromised, probably during the day, which means someone with access to the dormitory."
Azrael: "Someone inside the academy?"
Maria: "Someone who knew which room was hers."
He processed this.
Azrael: "You stayed up all night?"
Maria: "Someone had to."
She said it without particular emphasis. As though it were simply a logistical fact. A task that needed doing and she had been the one available to do it.
He looked at her.
She looked back.
Before either of them could say anything further, a voice arrived from the doorway.
"So you're the one who saved my cousin?"
A young woman stepped into the room with the particular ease of someone who moved through spaces as though they had been arranged for her convenience. She was perhaps in her early twenties. Older than Selena, similar in the way that family resemblances work, the same general architecture of features organized differently. Her hair was silver, but not Selena's silver. Darker, closer to grey, the silver of something overcast rather than something luminous. Her eyes were black.
She was looking at Azrael with an expression that contained interest and something else underneath the interest that he couldn't immediately categorize.
Azrael looked at Maria.
Maria: "Gaelle Varis Ardenthal."
He looked back at the woman.
The shared name registered. Then her earlier words registered. My cousin. He had not known Selena had a cousin at the academy. He filed this under things he should have known and added it to the growing list.
Gaelle had already crossed the room. She reached out and took his bandaged hand before he processed that she was going to do it. Fingers wrapping around his wrist with the casual ownership of someone who had never developed the habit of asking first.
Gaelle: "Does it hurt?"
She squeezed.
Not by accident. Not without knowing what she was doing. She squeezed with the deliberate precision of someone testing something, watching his face as she did it, looking for the specific result she wanted.
The pain arrived comprehensively and immediately.
Azrael: "Let go."
He said it through his teeth.
She released his hand and stepped back. Something in her expression had settled into satisfaction. Brief, controlled, but there.
Gaelle: "My apologies."
She did not sound apologetic.
She held his gaze for another moment with the particular quality of someone who has formed an opinion and found it confirmed.
Then a figure appeared in the doorway.
Lyssael: "Madam Gaelle. They're asking for you in the main hall."
Gaelle turned. Her expression shifted immediately, the coldness replaced by something warmer and more composed, the specific ease of someone who keeps different faces for different rooms. She nodded at Maria. She nodded at Lyssael.
Then she looked at Azrael one last time.
Her jaw moved once. The click of a tongue against teeth that contained an entire opinion expressed in a single gesture.
Then she left.
The door closed behind her.
Azrael: "She has the manners of a cat in heat for someone from the royal family."
Lyssael: "Say that anywhere outside this room and they'll remove your head before you finish the sentence."
Azrael: "Noted."
A silence.
Lyssael: "There is no one waiting for her in the main hall."
Azrael looked at him.
Lyssael looked back with the expression of someone who had done something and was not going to make a ceremony of it.
Azrael held his gaze for a moment. Something in his jaw moved. The specific expression of someone swallowing something that does not go down easily.
Azrael: "I suppose I should thank you for that."
Lyssael: "You should."
Azrael: "Don't push it."
Lyssael said nothing. But something at the corner of his mouth moved. Barely, just enough to notice if you were paying attention.
Azrael: "Where is Selena?"
Lyssael: "The Silver Palace. The king sent for her this morning."
Azrael looked at the ceiling again.
The Silver Palace. The royal residence in Arden, its pale stone visible above certain rooftlines from certain points in the city, catching the light differently from the buildings around it. He had noted it when he arrived and filed it and not thought about it further.
He thought about it now.
She's with her father.
She's safe.
He lay back against the pillow and looked at the ceiling.
The feeling he had been waiting to file away was still there. It had not become something smaller or more manageable in the time since he had last checked.
He left it where it was and said nothing about it to anyone.