Chapter 147 Going Home
The decision to send the brothers back to their kingdoms came from Mammon.
He raised it the morning after the battle, sitting in the council room with his jaw stitched and his arm in a sling and a cup of tea he hadn’t touched, and he laid it out practically and without sentiment. The kingdoms had sent their forces to the palace for the battle and those forces needed to return home. The territories closest to the northern border had taken construct activity in the weeks before Armageddon’s march and needed assessment. The political situation in each kingdom had been frozen since the succession crisis began and needed to be addressed before the freeze became something permanent.
Nobody argued because everything he said was correct.
Azrael called it a temporary dispersal. Two weeks, each brother returning to his own kingdom, dealing with what needed dealing with, and then returning to the palace for the first formal council of the unified seven kingdoms. Lilith would remain at the palace. The binding connected them regardless of distance and none of them had fully worked out what that meant yet but it meant the connection held even when they were not in the same room.
They left on the third day after the battle.
Belphegor left last.
He was still healing and the healers had opinions about travel that he was listening to, and Sera was at the palace and leaving Sera was something he did slowly. She stood with him at the gate the morning he left and Lilith stayed back far enough to give them the space of it but close enough to see his face when he turned to go, the particular way he looked at her before he did, and she looked away because some moments belonged to the people in them.
He came back in ten days. Four days before he said he would.
Nobody mentioned it.
Cain’s kingdom had taken the worst of the construct activity.
Three villages needed rebuilding. A watchtower was gone. A stretch of border road had been torn up. She arrived home and moved through all of it with her jaw set and her sleeves rolled up and her advisors running to keep up, and she rebuilt what needed rebuilding and reinforced what needed reinforcing and held two councils with her border commanders that were productive in the way things were productive when the person running them refused to sit down.
On the eleventh day she sat alone in her throne room after everyone had gone and looked at her kingdom and felt it differently than she had felt it before. Not just hers, she was connected. She sat with that for a while and found that it felt less like a loss than she had expected.
She came back on the twelfth day and knocked on Lilith’s door properly, two knocks, and Lilith opened it and they looked at each other.
“The border is handled,” Cain said.
“Good,” Lilith said.
Cain nodded and that was the whole of it and it was enough.
Lucian found three things in his kingdom that needed addressing and addressed all three before the end of the first week. A neighboring territory that had been testing his borders during the succession crisis was dealt with in two letters and one forty minute meeting. An administrative backlog was cleared in two days.
The third thing he hadn’t expected.
He went to the room where he kept his scrying mirrors, the ones he had used for weeks to find Sera, and he stood in front of them for a long time. The floor patterns were still there from the last working. He had found her through those mirrors. He had felt the gap in the ward and pushed through it and seen her sitting in the dark counting and he had come back to the palace and said she is still here and Belphegor’s hands had tightened on his knees.
He cleaned the floor patterns up himself, carefully and methodically, and when the room was clear he stood in it for a moment and then left and closed the door.
He came back on the fourteenth day, exactly when he said he would, because Lucian did what he said he would do.
Mammon’s kingdom had run itself in his absence with the competence he paid his stewards for, and the damage to the northern supply routes had already been assessed and the repair estimates were on his desk when he arrived. He worked through them, approved three, sent two back with revisions, and then sat back and looked at the map on his east wall.
All seven kingdoms. The borders between them marked in precise lines, the places where things had always gone wrong, where Armageddon had moved through the gaps.
He called his chief cartographer in the next morning and asked for new maps. Maps that showed the seven kingdoms not as seven separate territories with contested borders but as a unified territory with internal divisions. The cartographer looked at him for a moment and said he understood and left.
Mammon took the old map down from the wall and set it face down on his desk.
He came back on the twelfth day with the new maps rolled under his arm.
Asmodeus’s kingdom had not been touched by the construct activity and had continued exactly as his kingdom always continued, loudly and on its own terms, and he spent the first three days doing nothing administrative.
On the fourth day he went to find Zara.
She was in the training building where she always was and she looked at him when he came through the door and said nothing and he said Lilith won and she said I know and went back to what she was doing.
He stood in the doorway watching her work for a while and felt something in his chest that was warm and quiet and not something he was going to name out loud and then he left and went to find something to eat.
He came back on the ninth day, five days early, and when Lilith opened her door and saw him she said you’re early and he said there was nothing left to do and she raised an eyebrow and he said almost nothing and she let him in.
Beelzebub moved through his kingdom slowly because the healers had been right about travel and his ribs were reminding him regularly. He did what needed doing in the first week and in the second week he did what he wanted to do, which included three meals he had been thinking about since before the battle and a long afternoon walking through the gardens and orchards of his eastern territories, feeling his kingdom under his feet and the six other kingdoms through the binding and finding that the feeling of all of them together was something worth sitting with.
On the last day before he left he went to his kitchens and spoke to his head cook for two hours.
He came back on the fourteenth day with a list in his pocket.
Azrael stayed at the palace for the first four days, working through the immediate aftermath of the battle, and on the fifth day Lilith told him to go.
He looked at her and she looked at him and she said your kingdom needs you and he said you need me here and she said I have six threads connecting me to your brothers and the palace staff and Sera and I will not be alone and he said that is not what I meant and she said I know what you meant and you still need to go.
He left on the sixth day.
He dealt with his kingdom the way Mammon had predicted, thoroughly and without leaving anything unresolved, and on the eighth evening he sat in his throne room and reached for the thread that was Lilith’s and felt it warm and present and steady and sat with that for a long time.
On the tenth day he wrote her a letter.
A letter with several pages, the kind that said things that were harder to say in a room with other people present, and he sent it with a rider and two days later a letter came back in her handwriting and he read it in his study alone and sat with it for a long time after.
He came back on the fourteenth day.
She was waiting in the corridor when he arrived and she looked at him and he looked at her and she said you read my letter and he said three times and she said, " Good, " and he pulled her in and she let him and they stood in the corridor together while the palace moved around them and the day resumed.