Chapter 115 Finally
Lilith had been in the garden long enough for the cold to settle into her shoulders when she heard Cain coming.
She didn’t turn around immediately.
She finished looking at the white flowers Belphegor had planted around the base of the moonvine tree, the small ordinary blooms that had no business surviving in the demon realm but were surviving anyway, and then she straightened up and turned.
Cain stopped a few feet away.
She wasn’t in her sparring clothes, which was the first thing Lilith noticed. She was dressed plainly, her hair loose, and she had the look of someone who had made a decision early that morning and come out here before she could change her mind about it.
They stood there for a moment without saying anything.
It wasn’t hostile. It was just awkward in the way things got between two people who had left too many things unsaid for too many days and were now standing in front of each other with all of it still sitting between them.
“I’ve been trying to find you,” Cain said.
“I know.”
“You’re hard to catch alone.”
“I noticed you tried,” Lilith said. “The corridor. My room the other night.”
Cain nodded.
She looked at the moonvine briefly and then back at Lilith.
“I owe you an apology. Two, actually.”
She said it without preamble, without building up to it, which was very Cain. She was not someone who decorated difficult things.
“The throne room. I knew you didn’t know about that room and I spoke to you like you had walked in there on purpose to cause offense. That was wrong and I knew it was wrong even while I was doing it.”
Lilith waited.
“And your birthday,” Cain said. “I didn’t know but that’s not an excuse. I wasn’t paying attention. I was so deep inside everything happening with Azrael and the succession and all of it that I stopped paying attention to the people around me, and you were one of them, and I’m sorry for that.”
Lilith looked at her for a moment.
“Thank you,” she said. “I mean that.”
Cain exhaled, something releasing in her shoulders.
“I thought you were going to make me work harder for it.”
“You came out here before sunrise and said it without being pushed, that’s already work.”
Something close to a smile crossed Cain’s face and then left just as quickly.
They started walking without discussing it, falling into step beside each other along the garden path.
It was easier than standing still and looking at each other with all that unsaid history between them.
“The candles,” Cain said after a while.
“Yes.”
“I’ve been thinking about it since it happened. He went into that room for decades and he never lit them, not once. We all knew it, all of us knew not to go near that room or ask about it because it was the one thing that was just his.”
She was quiet for a step or two.
“And you walked in and they lit before you even crossed the room, before you touched anything.”
“I didn’t ask them to,” Lilith said.
“I know you didn’t. That’s what I keep thinking about.”
Cain glanced at her sideways.
“You never ask for any of it. It just keeps finding you.”
Lilith didn’t answer that because there wasn’t much to say to it that wouldn’t sound like either false modesty or something worse.
They walked past the far wall and back along the inner path.
The palace above them was beginning to stir, the first lights coming on in the upper windows.
“Tell me about the binding,” Cain said.
“The real version. Not the declaration. What you actually know.”
Lilith told her.
She laid it out plainly, the vision, her mother, the seven pillars, what alongside meant versus beneath, what she knew and what she was still working to understand.
She didn’t try to sell it.
She just told it the way it was, including the parts that still had gaps, because Cain would have noticed if she smoothed those over and it would have cost her more than the gaps did.
Cain listened properly.
She didn’t interrupt, didn’t argue, didn’t start building a counter position while Lilith was still talking.
She just listened, and when Lilith finished she was quiet for long enough that they had completed a full circle of the garden.
“I’m in,” Cain said.
Lilith looked at her.
“Don’t make it strange,” Cain said. “I’m in. That’s all I came to say.”
“That’s four,” Lilith said.
“Who’s left.”
“Lucian is close. I haven’t reached Beelzebub yet. And Azrael.”
Cain’s expression didn’t change much at Azrael’s name but something behind it did.
“He’ll be last. He always needs to be certain before he moves and he won’t let himself be certain until he can’t avoid it anymore.”
She paused.
“But he’ll get there.”
“He’s already closer than he’s showing,” Lilith said.
Cain looked at her with a question she decided not to ask out loud, which felt like its own kind of progress between them.
They stopped at the garden entrance.
The morning had properly arrived now, grey and cool, the kind of morning that didn’t make promises about the rest of the day.
“I’ll knock next time,” Cain said. “Properly.”
“I’ll answer,” Lilith said.
Cain went back inside and Lilith stayed in the garden a little longer, looking at nothing in particular, just standing in the cool air with the quiet before the day started and the small solid fact of four sitting in her chest like something she could lean against.