had been one of the first people of any import she’d been introduced to upon her arrival in the manse, and she had been forced to work with him for weeks, crawling and digging through the dirt while he smoked his pipe and looked alternately bored, annoyed, or lazy. She had had long conversations across the breakfast nook in the West Wing about his approach to their joint investigation; she had seen him all but scream at The Terafin in frustration and fury.
And she had never seen him, she knew, the way others did. Meralonne did not age. He hadn’t aged a minute in the sixteen years since their first introduction. But sometimes she could see what lay behind the patina of mercurial, slightly vindictive mage: something ancient, something wild, something ultimately unconcerned with the petty day-to-day world in which the majority of her heart lay bound.
She had seen it the first time Meralonne APhaniel had faced a demon lord; she had seen it each and every time thereafter. Something in him came alive only then, as if such life-and-death struggles were the only thing into which he could throw the whole of his heart.
She saw that in him, now. She had always considered it compelling. Finch thought it beautiful, but cold. She shook herself, turned away, thinking of her office, of the room that had been an office. It was small, tastefully furnished, and almost never used.
It was not the place for Meralonne APhaniel.
She learned at least one thing from Rymark’s presence in her inner sanctum: he was not the force, either consciously or subconsciously, that Meralonne APhaniel had become. She had known of Rymark for almost as long, had seen him, resentful and dismissive, from her first tentative entry into the House Council meetings at the unfortunate age of sixteen, but she had never been forced to work by his side in any significant way.
She had never seen him wield the magic in which his sense of his own power was based. Oh, she’d seen him call fire—but there was something about it that had seemed, to her eyes, almost mundane in comparison with APhaniel’s magic—or Sigurne’s. Had he pulled sword or dagger, it would have had the same effect as his fire did: it was a threat, a danger, but it was entirely and quintessentially a human one.
He was just a man she liked to hate, not more, not less.
An arch, very similar to the one that led from the library to the manse, appeared some thirty yards ahead. The one marked difference, to Jewel’s eye, was the adornment. Where the arch that led to the manse was covered in creeping vines that were nonetheless leafy and delicate to the eye, these were marked by thorns and flowers that looked almost like roses.
Meralonne approached them first, his gray eyes wide. “Have a care with the thorns,” he said softly.
“Do you recognize the flower?”
“I do. I have not seen them in a long, long time.” He pulled back, but not far; they had captured his attention more thoroughly than Rymark. Or at least they held it. “I find it interesting that they grace this arch.”
“Given the amount of interesting we’ve had in the past few months, that isn’t a comfort.”
“In all probability, no.” He bowed to her. While technically a bow upon greeting and departure was not outside of the bounds of polite society given his relative rank in the Order of Knowledge, and her absolute rank in House Terafin, it was also seldom offered by Meralonne, a man to whom etiquette mattered only in the presence of the Kings.
Rymark noticed, of course; Jewel wondered if that had been the point. She was accustomed to watching the House Council for obvious—and subtle—social interaction. She was not accustomed to watching Meralonne in the same fashion.
Avandar was silent in every possible way as she approached the arch, taking a deep, grounding breath. Shadow shouldered Angel aside, and given Angel’s expression, she thought he would fill in for Snow or Night and push back; to avoid this, she stopped stalling and walked through the arch.
* * *
The office was not the office she had last seen, and given how little she expected it to be used, the last sighting had occurred during Amarais’ reign. It was also unlike the sparsely furnished room in which Teller held most of the official meetings the House required. The sweep of warm wood, covered mostly by expensive rugs, had been eschewed in favor of stone;