Chapter 126 Prove it
It started, as most things in the palace did lately, with Cain.
She had walked into the main hall where Azrael was holding his afternoon session and sat down without being invited and looked at Lilith across the table with the particular expression she had been wearing since the council room, not the hot open anger of before but something colder and more settled, the expression of someone who had decided something and was waiting for the right moment to say it.
The right moment came about ten minutes in when Azrael raised the binding again.
He had been doing that more in the past few days, raising it carefully, not endorsing it fully but not dismissing it either, circling it the way he circled things he was still working out. He said that given everything, the eighth throne room, the wards, the candles, it was worth serious consideration. He said that the prophecy could not be ignored indefinitely. He said that Lilith had demonstrated a consistency of vision that deserved to be heard properly.
Cain laughed.
Not the warm laugh. The short flat one that meant she found something insulting rather than funny.
“Consistency of vision,” she said.
Azrael looked at her. “Cain.”
“I’m just repeating what you said.” She looked at Lilith. “Consistency of vision. That’s what we’re calling it now.”
“Whatever your issue is with me,” Lilith said, keeping her voice level, “this table is not the place for it.”
“My issue with you is exactly what this table is for.” Cain sat forward. “You want to bind seven kingdoms through yourself. You want all of us connected to you, answering to you, tied to you. And you sit here and ask us to take that on faith based on a vision only you witnessed and a prophecy that can mean seventeen different things depending on who’s reading it.” She looked around the table. “Nobody in this room has seen her do anything. We have taken her word for everything. The vision, the binding chamber, what her mother told her, what the Keepers said. Her word.”
“The wards,” Belphegor said quietly.
“The wards let her through. That proves she has divine blood. It doesn’t prove she can hold seven kingdoms.” Cain looked back at Lilith. “I’m not saying you’re lying. I’m saying none of us actually know what you’re capable of and you’re asking us to hand you everything on the assumption that you can handle it.”
The table was quiet.
Lucian was looking at the middle distance with his mirror eyes, which meant he was thinking rather than positioning, which meant something Cain had said had landed somewhere real in him.
Mammon had set down his pen.
Azrael was looking at Lilith with an expression she couldn’t fully read.
“Then tell me what you want,” Lilith said. “If my word isn’t enough and the wards aren’t enough, tell me what would be.”
“Prove it,” Cain said simply. “Don’t tell us you can hold seven kingdoms. Show us.”
“And how exactly am I supposed to do that before the binding ceremony.”
“Fight for it,” Cain said. “If you can stand in front of all seven of us and hold your ground then maybe you can stand in a binding chamber and hold seven kingdoms.” She leaned back in her chair. “We fight each other first. Whatever’s left standing challenges you. You prove you belong in that chamber and we go in together. You don’t and we find another way.”
The room absorbed that.
Lilith looked at her. “You want me to fight.”
“I want you to prove it. There’s a difference.”
“There isn’t much of one.”
“Then prove me wrong about that too.”
Lilith looked around the table. Lucian was still in his thinking posture but he was looking at her now, waiting. Mammon had the expression of someone who had run the numbers and found this particular solution distasteful but not unreasonable. Asmodeus was watching her with his gold eyes careful and still. Belphegor was looking at the table. Beelzebub, at the far end, was looking at his hands.
Azrael was the last one she looked at.
He met her eyes and held them and didn’t look away and she understood that he was not going to tell her what to do with this. He had said he believed in the binding. He had said she needed to prove she could handle the role. This was him being consistent with both of those things at the same time.
She looked back at Cain.
“If I do this,” she said, “and I win, everyone at this table commits. No more conditions, no more positioning, no more half measures. Everyone walks into that chamber.”
“If you win,” Cain said.
“When I win,” Lilith said.
Cain looked at her for a long moment and something moved through her expression that was complicated and layered and not entirely hostile.
“When you win,” she said. “Fine.”
Lilith looked around the table one more time. One by one they nodded, Lucian last, a single precise inclination of his head that meant more than it looked like because with Lucian it always did.
She looked back at Cain.
“Set the date,” she said.