Chapter One: Waiting
Elodie
The hallway outside the throne room was exactly as I had imagined it, long and cold and impossibly grand, the kind of space designed to make you feel small before you had even opened your mouth.
I sat with my back perfectly straight and my hands folded in my lap, the way I had been taught, my folder resting across my knees. The marble beneath my feet was so polished I could see the faint reflection of the chandeliers above, each one dripping with crystal that caught the light and scattered it across the walls in long bright patches. Everything in this place was deliberate. Everything was designed to remind you of exactly where you stood.
I waited.
Art had gone in first. He usually went first, he was the eldest of us, tallest, broadest, the kind of person a room naturally deferred to even when that wasn’t the intention. I had watched him disappear through those doors twenty minutes ago with his easy unhurried stride and I had been sitting here since, listening to the silence and trying not to think too hard about what was waiting on the other side.
Oli sat beside me, his knee bouncing.
“Stop.” I said quietly.
He stopped. Then started again almost immediately.
“Oli.”
“I can’t help it.” He whispered, his voice tight. “What if she picks me for something terrible?”
“She won’t.”
“How do you know?”
I didn’t. But I had learned a long time ago that the most useful thing you could offer someone who was frightened was certainty, even when you didn’t have any.
“Because you’re good at what you do.” I said. “They wouldn’t waste that.”
He looked at me sideways. His blonde hair had fallen across his forehead the way it always did when he forgot to push it back, and his green eyes were wide and a little glassy. He looked younger than twenty right now. We all probably did.
“You’re not nervous at all are you.” He said. It wasn’t really a question.
I was. My hands were clasped so tightly around my folder that I could feel the edge of it pressing into my palm. But I kept my back straight and my face entirely still, the way Master Orin had drilled into us across a decade of training, and I didn’t let any of it show.
“I am nervous.” I said.
“You don’t look it.”
“That’s the point.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. Not quite a smile but close enough.
Ten years. Ten years of training that had led to this single moment, our assessment, in the presence of the Demon King and Queen themselves. I had seen them before of course, glimpsed them from a respectful distance during my time at the palace, my mother moving quietly at Queen Auryn’s side and my father at King Volmos’s. But I had never spoken to them directly. Had never sat before them as myself rather than as someone’s child.
Today that would change.
There were three of us this year. Three who had turned twenty, marking the end of our training and the beginning of a lifetime of servitude. We would each undergo the Fealty Bond, the purest bond, a bond without bargain, willingly giving a piece of our souls for nothing more than the honor of serving. It was the highest calling our kind could answer. My parents had told me so my entire life and I believed them completely.
The great door creaked open and Art stepped back into the hallway, a soft smile on his face. He looked the way he always looked, composed, unhurried, entirely at ease with himself in a way I had always quietly admired. He straightened his uniform and held the door open.
“You’re up.” He said, turning toward Oli.
As if on cue a voice carried through the open door, loud and formal and entirely flat.
“Oliver Grey.”
Oli stood slowly, pulling in a long unsteady breath. He clutched his folder against his chest like it was the only solid thing in the room.
“You’re going to do great.” I whispered.
He nodded without looking at me, his small frame seeming even smaller as he crossed the threshold. Art eased the door shut behind him with a quiet but definitive click that echoed down the length of the hallway, bouncing off every hard surface until it faded into silence.
Art turned and came to sit in the space Oli had vacated, leaning back against the wall with his characteristic ease. I kept my eyes forward.
“Well?” I said.
“They were different than I expected.” He said after a moment. “Nicer.”
I turned to look at him. His warm brown eyes met mine and he smiled, that particular soft smile he reserved for moments he meant.
“They’ll love you.” He said. “Though I suspect they already do.”
I lowered my eyes to my folder, something in my chest settling just slightly. “Thank you.”
He stood, stretching his broad shoulders, and for a moment he just looked at me the way Art sometimes did, like he was checking that everything was alright without wanting to make a thing of it.
“One more day.” He said quietly. He patted my shoulder once as he passed, his footsteps unhurried as he made his way back down the hall.
I looked at the closed door. Then down at my folder, at my name printed neatly across the top.
Elodie Belle.
“One more day.” I said to no one in particular.
“Elodie Belle.”
The voice carried through the door and down the hall, formal and flat and entirely without warmth. I stood, smoothing the front of my skirt and straightening my bun before pulling in a slow breath.
Oli held the door open for me, looking paler than he had a few minutes ago. He gave me a small half smile as I crossed the threshold.
The throne room stole the breath from my chest before I had taken three steps inside.
It was vast, impossibly so, the ceiling stretching upward so far that I had to actively remind myself to keep my eyes forward and my expression composed rather than tipping my head back to stare. The walls were grey stone, ancient and cold and utterly immovable, broken only by tall windows hung with thick velvet drapes that swallowed most of the light. What remained fell in long narrow columns across the floor, illuminating the deep red carpet that ran the length of the room from the doors to the foot of the throne dais. I kept my eyes on it as I walked, following its path, grateful for something specific to focus on.
The thrones sat atop a shallow staircase at the far end of the room, not dramatically elevated, just enough to ensure that even seated, the King and Queen remained above everyone who approached them. A quiet and deliberate reminder of where things stood.
King Volmos sat in his throne with the particular stillness of someone who had occupied positions of power for so long that authority had simply become part of how he held himself. He didn’t look up as I approached. His attention was directed somewhere to the left of me, at something I couldn’t see, and his expression gave nothing away.
Queen Auryn was entirely different.
She was a vision, there was no other word for it. Her fiery hair was swept up and pinned, a few loose curls framing the warm planes of her face, and her black gown was long and heavily beaded, its train pooling past the base of her throne in a cascade of deep jeweled fabric. Both of them were in their lower forms. I suspected it was deliberate, a consideration extended to the three of us who were about to sit before them for the first time.
She was smiling as I approached. Warmly. Genuinely. Like she had been looking forward to this.
A guard stood at the center of the room, his palm extended. I transferred my folder to both hands before offering it to him, bowing my head as he took it. He examined it briefly then turned and carried it toward the Queen with a careful gentleness that surprised me. She received it with a small nod in my direction.
I completed my approach and stopped several feet from the base of the dais, bowing deeply.
“Thank you for taking the time to meet with me.” I said, straightening slowly. My voice came out steadier than my nerves felt. I was quietly grateful for that.
“Time,” Queen Auryn said, her voice carrying easily through the room without effort, “is something we have an abundance of. No need to thank us for that.”
She opened my folder and began to read.
I kept my hands clasped in front of me and my eyes at a respectful level and waited. The room was very quiet. The only sounds were the faint shift of pages and somewhere distant and high above me the soft creak of the building settling around us.
She started at the beginning, my early assessment scores from the academy, the foundational years. I watched her eyes move across the page with calm efficiency, turning it after a moment and moving on. Then she slowed.
“Languages.” She said, almost to herself. Her eyes tracked down the column of scores. “You have fluency in four.” She looked up briefly. “Including the old Demon tongue.”
“Yes, your majesty.” I said. “I began studying it at twelve.”
She held my gaze for a moment then returned to the page.
She read through my cooking assessments next, theory, practical application, presentation. Each marked at the highest possible level. Then music. Then etiquette and protocol. Then the physical assessments, posture, movement, deportment. Score after score after score, each one the same.
She paused.
“These are remarkable.” She said, her voice careful and considered. “Consistent perfect scores across every subject area. Cooking, music, languages, etiquette, deportment.”
She looked up briefly.
“Every single one.”
“I tried to make them so.” I said.
“Trying and achieving are different things.” She turned the page. “Most students have areas of strength and areas of weakness. That is expected. That is entirely normal.”
She looked up at me again.
“You appear to have only the former.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that so I said nothing.
She reached the internship section. I watched her expression shift almost imperceptibly as she read Master Bileth’s name at the top of the page.
“The Bileth house.” She said, “That is quite a placement for an academy student.”
“I was fortunate.” I said. “Master Bileth’s household was… demanding. But I found that suited me.”
“Demanding.” She repeated, the faint ghost of a smile at the corner of her mouth. She began to read his review. The smile grew slightly. “He writes here that you adapted to every challenge presented without complaint and without error.”
She looked up.
“I want you to understand that those are not words Master Bileth uses lightly. Or at all, in my experience.”
“He was generous.” I said.
“He was accurate.” She said simply, and turned the page.
Master Orin’s review was the longest. I knew that without being able to see it, I had watched her write it over the course of an afternoon three weeks ago, filling page after page in her precise careful hand while I stood at the window pretending not to notice.
Queen Auryn read it slowly. More slowly than she had read anything else in the folder. Her eyes moved down the page and then back up, rereading something. She turned to the second page of it. Then the third.
When she finally looked up her expression was entirely composed but her eyes were very bright.
“‘I cannot recall,’” she read, her voice quiet and deliberate, “‘in three hundred years of teaching, a student who combined technical excellence with genuine instinct in equal measure. Elodie Belle does not simply learn what she is taught. She understands it. The distinction is rare. I do not expect to encounter it again.’”
She closed the page carefully.
“‘It has been the privilege of my career to teach her.’”
The room was very still.
I felt heat rise in my face and looked down at the carpet for a moment before remembering myself and lifting my eyes again.
Queen Auryn sat back slightly. She looked at the closed folder in her hands and then at the space between us, her expression distant for just a moment, the look of someone who has already made a decision and is simply letting it settle.
Then she turned to King Volmos.
“Dear.” She said, turning her head toward the King.
He looked at her. For the first time since I had entered the room his attention shifted fully to the present, and then, slowly, to me. I felt his gaze move across my face and had to work very hard not to look away. He was not unkind. He was simply enormous in the way that all truly powerful things were enormous, not in size exactly, but in presence. In the sense that the room arranged itself around him without his having to ask.
He looked back at Queen Auryn.
He looked at her with the attention of someone who had learned over centuries to read the meaning behind his wife’s expressions. She leaned toward him and spoke quietly, her voice low enough that it didn’t carry across the room. I kept my eyes low and my hands clasped and my breathing even.
He was silent for a long moment.
His gaze moved to me again, slowly, deliberately, the way he seemed to do everything. I felt the full weight of it and did not look away. I had been taught never to look away.
He looked back at Queen Auryn. Said something quietly in return. She responded. He listened with his eyes slightly narrowed, not in displeasure exactly but in the focused way of someone weighing a thought carefully.
Another silence.
He looked at me again. This time his gaze moved across my face and then downward, taking in my posture, my stillness, my clasped hands. Assessing. I had the distinct sensation of being read the way Queen Auryn had read my folder, methodically and without hurry.
He turned back to his wife.
Whatever passed between them in that final moment was brief. A look more than words. And then he nodded once, slow and certain.
Queen Auryn’s smile widened. It lit her face completely.
She closed my folder and passed it back to the guard before turning her full attention to me. Her golden orange eyes were warm and entirely direct.
“I have a very special position.” She said, “One that I believe would suit your particular skills extremely well.”
The words landed somewhere in the center of my chest and bloomed outward all at once.
I knew, every servant on the palace grounds knew, that Queen Auryn had recently lost one of her personal attendants. One of her inner circle, a woman who had served her for decades before succumbing to the weakness of being human. A position of extraordinary trust and proximity, now empty. The thought had crossed my mind before I could catch it, spilling through me in a sudden bright rush. I could stay here. On the palace grounds. The place I had grown up in, the corridors I knew by heart. I could work beside my mother. My father would be steps away.
I felt a smile pulling at the corners of my mouth before I could fully contain it.
“Of course.” I said, bowing deeply once more, pressing the excitement down until my voice came out at an appropriate level. “It would be my greatest honor.”
“Wonderful.” Queen Auryn said, clasping her hands together with a kind of quiet satisfaction. “I will see you at the ceremony tomorrow.”
“Thank you.” I said. “Truly. Thank you so much.”
The guard gestured toward the door. I turned, and the moment my face was no longer visible to the thrones I let the smile come fully, wide and helpless. I walked back down the length of the red carpet with my shoulders straight and my steps measured and my heart beating so hard I could feel it in my fingertips.
I didn’t let myself look back.
I stared down at the small metal tin in front of me. The meal was simple, cold noodles with an unidentified brown sauce, a small cube of meat and a handful of vegetables. It was portioned to perfection, just the right amount of sustenance to ensure we remained healthy. The taste was manageable. It had always been manageable. And it was the last official meal our academy would ever provide for us. After tomorrow we would be shipped to our respective new homes.
The three of us sat in silence at the small round table in the middle of the canteen, pushing our food around our plates.
I was too nervous to eat. Or perhaps too excited. The two feelings had been layering over each other since I walked out of the throne room that afternoon, mixing into something I couldn’t quite separate. Tomorrow was the ceremony. I would step forward, offer a piece of my soul freely and without bargain, and Queen Auryn would step forward for me. She would draw my fragment from me and hold it within herself, and I would feel her in return, her moods, her needs, her preferences, as clearly as if they were my own. We would hold hands in a show of union and I would belong to her household. I would wake up every morning in the place I had always known. I would learn her rhythms and her preferences and I would be good at it, I was always good at it, and my mother would be steps away and my father just down the corridor and everything would be exactly as it was supposed to be.
A warm feeling flooded through me.
I looked around the canteen at the faces of the younger students still working through their own years of training. The room was small with low ceilings, the walls painted a dull yellow that had probably once been cheerful and had long since given up the pretense. The lights above were harsh and white and there were no windows. I had eaten almost every meal in this room for the last five years, ever since I had moved to the academy full time. Art and Oli almost always beside me at this same table, in these same seats.
I studied their faces as they pushed their noodles around their tins.
We had been inseparable from the moment we realized we would be in the same graduating class, three students born in the same year, thrown together by coincidence and kept together by something that had quietly become necessary. This day had seemed so distant then. More like an idea than something that would actually arrive. Now here we were on the very edge of it and I could barely contain myself.
Art turned to look at me, his gaze dropping almost immediately to my tin, still mostly untouched.
“You’re not eating.” He said, shoveling a forkful of noodles into his own mouth with complete composure. He seemed entirely unbothered, unhurried in the way that Art always was, as though the ground shifting beneath his feet was simply something he had already accounted for.
I looked down at my food.
“I keep thinking about tomorrow.” I said, my voice coming out quieter than I intended.
Art sat back in his chair, tilting his head slightly with that particular inquisitive look he got when he was actually paying attention.
“What kind of master are you hoping for?” He asked.
“Hoping for?” I repeated. “I don’t think it really matters what I’m hoping for.”
“Come on.” He said, mildly exasperated. “Young, old, male, female, strict, kind? You must have some preference.”
I thought about it honestly. Gender didn’t matter, I was certain of that. Nor did age, not really. Youth might offer something no textbook ever could, a rawer and more immediate insight into the Demon world, one that existed outside of formal tradition and strict protocol. The kind of knowledge that only came from living rather than studying. Age would bring its own gifts too, centuries of wisdom, a household shaped by experience, a master who knew exactly what they wanted and could show me how to provide it.
Strict would sharpen me. Kind would sustain me.
“I have no preference.” I said after a moment.
I thought each possibility over again carefully and found that I meant it when I said I had no preference. Every option had something to offer. Every option was something I could work with.
I kept Queen Auryn’s name tucked carefully in the back of my mind where it belonged. It wouldn’t be fair to say it out loud. Not yet. Not until it was official.
Art exhaled, the specific sound he made when he found my answers unsatisfying.
“How about you?” He said, turning to Oli, who had eaten even less than me.
Oli looked up suddenly as if he had forgotten we were there. His green eyes were glassy and slightly unfocused, his blonde hair falling across his forehead.
“What kind of master do you want?” Art said.
Oli looked back down at his tin. He was quiet for a long moment, considering the question carefully.
“Someone patient.” He said finally.
Art let out a short half laugh. We all knew why. Demons were a great many things. Patient was rarely among them.
I looked back down at my tin and said nothing. There was nothing to say really. We had all made our peace with uncertainty in our own ways, Art by not dwelling on it, Oli by worrying quietly, and me by tucking the one thing I actually wanted carefully into the back of my mind where it couldn’t jinx anything.
But in the quiet of my own thoughts I let myself imagine it properly for the first time.
I would learn Queen Auryn’s schedule, the specific rhythms of her mornings, the particular way she took her meals, the things she preferred without having to be asked. I would become indispensable to her the way my mother had become indispensable, the way the very best servants always did, not through grand gestures but through the kind of quiet consistent excellence that made everything around it run more smoothly. She would come to rely on me. Trust me. And I would be worthy of that trust every single day.
I thought about my mother’s face when she found out. My father’s.
I looked back down at my plate and picked up my spoon, scooping up the small cube of meat and putting it in my mouth. It tasted of nothing in particular. I chewed and swallowed and reached for my fork.
I needed to eat. Tomorrow I needed to be at my very best.
