Chapter 127 Before she Left
The palace felt different after the meeting.
Not louder exactly, but charged in a way that hadn’t been there before, the particular atmosphere of a place where something had been decided and everyone was still working out what it meant for them personally. Lilith walked back to her room through corridors that felt smaller than usual and closed the door and stood in the middle of the room and thought about what she had agreed to.
She was not a fighter.
That was the plain truth of it and she was not going to dress it up. She had defended herself a handful of times since arriving in the demon real through divine wards that stopped everyone else, but none of that was the same as standing in front of a demon prince who had been fighting for centuries and winning.
She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her hands.
The knock came about twenty minutes later. She knew it was Asmodeus before she opened the door because he was the only person in the palace whose knock managed to sound simultaneously casual and like he had somewhere to be.
“You’re spiralling,” he said, when she opened it.
“I’m thinking.”
“Those are the same thing right now.” He came inside without being invited, sat in the chair by the window, and looked at her with his gold eyes, bright and steady. “I have something for you.”
She sat back down on the bed. “What?”
“A trainer,” he said. “In my kingdom. The best fighter I have ever encountered in several centuries of encountering fighters, and I want to be clear that that is not a short list.” He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Her name is Zara and she has three days and I already sent word this morning.”
Lilith looked at him. “You sent word this morning.”
“I sent word the moment Cain said prove it, because I knew where that conversation was going before it got there.” He shrugged with the modesty of someone who was not modest at all. “You’re welcome.”
She looked at him for a long moment and felt something loosen in her chest, the specific relief of a problem that had been sitting with no solution suddenly having one.
“Three days,” she said.
“Three days is enough for Zara. She doesn’t need more time than that. She needs you to show up and listen and work harder than you have ever worked at anything.” He paused. “Can you do that?”
“Yes,” Lilith said, without hesitating.
“Good.” He stood up. “We leave tomorrow morning. Just us, Sera is still healing and I am not putting her on a horse two days after she got back from an underground cell.”
“She won’t like that.”
“No,” he agreed. “She won’t.”
Sera, as predicted, did not like it.
Lilith told her that evening, sitting in the chair by her bed, and Sera’s expression moved through several things in quick succession before settling on the resigned look of someone who knew the sensible answer and hated it.
“I’m fine,” Sera said.
“You tried to stand up this morning and had to hold the headboard.”
“That was this morning.”
“Sera.”
Sera pressed her lips together and looked at the window. “How long?”
“Three days.”
“And you’ll be careful.”
“I’m going to train with a warrior in Asmodeus’s kingdom. Careful is not exactly the premise.”
“Lilith.”
“I’ll be fine,” Lilith said. “Asmodeus will be there and I need this. I need to know I can do this before I walk into that tournament.”
Sera looked at her for a long moment with the particular expression she reserved for things she disagreed with but understood, and then she nodded once.
“Come back in one piece,” she said.
“Always,” Lilith said.
She told Azrael before dinner. She found him in the corridor outside his study and told him plainly, Asmodeus has a trainer in his kingdom, three days, she was leaving in the morning. He listened without interrupting and when she finished he looked at her with that open undefended version of himself that she was still getting used to.
“You don’t need my permission,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “I’m telling you because I want to.”
He looked at her for a moment and then nodded, and she saw something in his face that was not quite worry and not quite pride but lived somewhere between the two.
“Three days,” he said.
“Three days,” she confirmed.
He reached out and touched the pendant at her throat briefly, the same gesture it had become between them, small and certain, and then he stepped back and let her go.
She packed that night, not much, three days didn’t require much, and she set her things by the door and lay in bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about Zara, whoever she was, and what three days with the finest warrior in Asmodeus’s kingdom was going to feel like.
She thought about Cain saying, " Prove it.
She thought about the tournament and the binding chamber and the seven pillars and everything that was waiting on the other side of all of it.
She closed her eyes and let the night be quiet and got as much sleep as she could, because tomorrow was going to be the beginning of something difficult and she intended to meet it properly.