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The rhythmic scratching paused.
Wicander's quill hovered above the parchment, and he glanced up at Tyranny with such alarm that she turned to follow his gaze, already tugging experimentally on the wellspring of darkness that rested low in her belly. Cold eldritch light waited in her palm.
"Aspirant Tyranny," said Wicander. "Are you bleeding?"
Oh. Well, that was disappointing. Tyranny closed her fist and dissolved the spell. He wasn't looking at the door. He was looking at her, and she certainly wasn't going to blast herself. She pivoted on her heel again, skirts flaring. Then she reached down and smoothed her dress down, savoring the feel of silk beneath her fingers.
"If you say so, your Radiance," she replied with a shrug. She wasn't quite sure why he seemed so dismayed. From what she understood, this was simply one of those things about having a body. Blood, everywhere, rushing beneath all that supple flesh. Some was bound to slip out every once in a while. "Where?"
"Where?" Wicander had gone high-pitched. "What do you mean, 'where'?" He gestured at her.
Tyranny looked down, bewildered. There were indeed smears of red on her skirt, but no discernible source. She began hitching up her dress to check her underthings—she knew from Agony's accounting that mortal bodies sometimes expelled tissue from their private bits, and that it could go right through your clothes—but she aborted the motion when Wicander made a strangled sound and waved frantically for her to stop.
"Your hand, Tyranny!" He was bright red. "Your hand! For brightness' sake."
"Oh," she said, with a dismissive flick of her tail. That was what he was on about? "I forgot about that."
She'd barely noticed it in the first place, if she was being entirely honest. If she hadn't needed to pull the knife out of her palm to continue her work, she'd have probably bled the day away.
"You forgot about it." Wicander repeated. "Tyranny, you cannot truly expect me to believe that. How did you do this?"
"Rude. You're the one told me to help in the kitchens yesterday," she countered. "I was cutting potatoes! It's not my fault that my hand was, like, right there. So if anything, this is on you."
Right on cue, Wicander began to stutter. "Tyranny—I, that is, Aspirant Tyranny. Charity and humility—"
"Brighten the light," said Tyranny, in perfect unison with her ward. That shut him up, and she smiled tightly at him. "Yes, I know. But also, you pay them. So I don't think it's charity." After a moment, she tacked on: "Your Radiance."
"Now, Aspirant," Wicander's voice was light but strained. It was almost sweet, how hard he tried to be patient with her. And he clearly had to try really hard. "You know quite well that our kitchens feed the hungry."
Tyranny bit her tongue hard to stop herself from giggling. It was easier than it used to be. She knew. Of course she did. She knew about the food plied into the mouths of the poor so as to harvest their belief—about the beggars who broke their teeth on hard bread and were thankful for it while House Halovar feasted every night.
She also knew about the unlucky ones, the ones who accepted the House's offer of a warm meal and employment, and instead of being used for hard labor received a purse of gold coins for the tailor.
She knew everything. But Wicander certainly didn't. How could he? The House handed out the good food when he was looking, and he'd never so much as walked past the Mercanaud, much less been in the room where they sheared souls from writhing, begging bodies they stitched shadow into the seams.
Of course he believed what he did. That made it less fun to laugh at him.
"Right as always, Your Radiance," Tyranny said. Her throat nearly hurt.
Wicander's eyes dropped down, not even bothering to linger over her chest the way his siblings' did—he really did take the whole purity thing way too seriously—and instead locked onto the swish of her tail.
"Now, Tyranny, you don't need to be nervous," he said, and it was as gentle as it was condescending. "I'm not upset. Injuries happen here on the mortal plane. I suppose I'm only confused why you didn't go to a healer."
The family doctor was a demon too, and as far as Tyranny could tell, she didn't like Wicander, or Tyranny herself, all too much. They'd both be better off if they stayed very, very far away from that woman.
She said, "Aw, does someone go to the healer for every little boo-boo?"
"Tyranny!" Wicander snapped, but his cheeks were ruddy. She'd struck a nerve, then. He took a deep breath in through his nose, then exhaled much the same way, low and slow. "Why must you be so...?" he trailed off, shook his head, and instead said: "Just let me take a look at it, then. If you won't do the sensible thing."
She stared at him. He met her gaze with doelike blankness, as if he didn't understand what, exactly, was looking back at him.
"Okay," she said, and held out her hand.
He took it in his own.
They were such delicate things, Wicander's hands, even for a mortal. Long, elegant fingers. Not a callous to be had. Cruelty would've called them torturer's hands, artful and precise, but then Cruelty would've sooner broken Tyranny's arm at the wrist than touch her like this, so careful and kind.
Wicander turned her palm upward and hissed. He went a concerning shade of grey.
"Don't pass out," Tyranny told him, pre-emptively. It wasn't so bad a wound, she thought. A single clean line that dragged from the base of her palm to its middle, though it went all the way through. The scabbing that had formed overnight was beginning to crack, thus the fresh bleeding, but it wasn't all that much, considering the sheer quantity of liquid that mortals kept in their fragile little bodies.
"I'm not going to pass out," Wicander said, appalled.
"Don't vomit either."
He looked up at her through his long, pale lashes, baleful. "I'm not. Doesn't it hurt?"
Tyranny bleated, so abruptly that Wicander startled in his seat.
"Sorry," she said.
"Is something funny, Aspirant?" His question fell short of stern. In fact, he sounded so much like a child who knew that they'd been left out of a joke that for a second, she almost wondered if he knew.
But no. No, of course he didn't. And so there was nothing for Tyranny to say—certainly not the truth.
Hurt was a very relative term when you'd been scooped out of a roiling primordial soup not a month ago. When you were a breath yanked violently from a pit of anguish, a dream of pain shoved into a mortal body and dressed in frills.
"No," she said. "No, sorry, your Radiance. It feels fine. See?"
She stuck a clawed finger right into the wound, until her nail stuck out the other end, between the birdlike bones.
Wicander yelped and grabbed her by the wrist.
That she could feel, a delicate aching beneath Wicander's grip as he made her retract her hand.
"Alright, alright," he said, sounding frayed. "You've made your point. Please don't do that again."
"…Okay?" Tyranny couldn't pull her gaze away, even as Wicander gathered himself and frowned down at the bleeding flesh.
"Good," he said, his brow furrowing in soft concentration. "Be still, please."
The tattoos on his face began to glow as he turned back to the injury, giving it entirety of his holy attention. Tyranny's breath caught in her throat.
She wondered if he'd ever noticed that his magic was different from his family's. It was still light. It was always light with Halovars, light and blood, even though Wicander didn't know about that last part. But Wicander's light was—
It wasn't the same as theirs. It was gentler. The glow emanating from his palms didn't sear; it only warmed her skin, though it tingled at her fingers, like she was trying to heat her frozen hands before a hot stove. A pleasant sting.
The cut, that gleaming fissure of flesh and fine muscle, began to stream light too. And then the light began to dim, covered by fibers of skin as they slowly knit themselves together, until suddenly there was no light and no wound left at all. Not even a scar.
And now, bewilderingly, it began to burn. Where the wound should have been, and somewhere deep in her core.
"That was silly, your Radiance," Tyranny said faintly, when she managed to piece her thoughts back together.
One of Wicander's eyebrows rose, at once haughty and dismissive and yet—maybe there was a hint of a smile there. "Come now, Tyranny. Being ungrateful dims the light."
"...Right," Tyranny said. "Thank you, Wicander. I mean, your Radiance."
"Aspirant," Wicander said abruptly. "You could call me Wick occasionally. If you like. In private, that is."
A better demon would've made a jab. Why, and deny you a much-needed boost to your ego? Or they might have taken the opportunity to steer their ward in the right direction. Oh, your Radiance, I could never undermine your authority in such a manner, even at your own request.
Tyranny said, "Thanks, Wick. Really."
He straightened in his seat and smiled at her, so warm and earnest that it immediately filled Tyranny's heart with dread.
"Of course, Tyranny," he said. "I am responsible for your Brightening, and the Candescent Creed makes no provisions upon an Aspirant's suffering. It's my job to help you if you need it."
"Is it?" Tyranny asked, and then clapped a hand over her mouth. It was the healed one, she realized only after she'd done it. The scabs were flaking off her restored skin and fluttering to the ground like ash.
Wick gave her a bewildered look. "Of course it is, Tyranny."
"Right," said Tyranny, and she wasn't sure why she was still talking, except that she'd already raised the question to begin with. In for a penny, in for a pound of flesh. Was that how the phrase went? It ought to be, especially since Enmity might try to throw her off the estate's ramparts if she found out about this. But then, that didn't really matter. Nothing mattered except that they couldn't send her back. They wouldn't have the authority. That belonged to Wick and Wick alone. And they would never ask him to condemn her to the Pit, because then they would have to tell him why. They would have to tell him all the rest of it, and they weren't going to do that. "But is it?"
"What on earth do you mean?" Wick glanced at the window, as if he were looking for an escape, or more probably, as if he thought the setting sun might help illuminate the situation. He was going to end up blind at this rate.
"Can you really," she said, "I mean really imagine one of your siblings healing a demon?"
Or anyone at all, outside of a public showing of power, she didn't add.
"Tyranny!" he turned back to her with a strangled sound, no doubt shocked by the rather sacrilegious allegation.
"I'm being serious, Wick," she cut him off. "Think about it."
Come on, Wick. That was the real sacrilegious thought, a betrayal of her very purpose, and she didn't even know why she was having it.
And to her surprise, Wick paused, his lips parted just the barest amount as he thought.
"I..." he was stuttering. That was a good sign. "Well. Perhaps not. But that's only," please, please, "because they have other duties," Wick decided, with a nod of self satisfaction. "And because their Aspirants are…"
He gave Tyranny a meaningful glance. If he noticed the slump of her shoulders—probably not—he didn't remark upon it.
"Their Aspirants are what?"
"…Different," Wick settled upon. "They're different. It's not a bad thing." He added that last bit on very abruptly, as if he'd only just noticed the now-sullen set of her jaw.
"Yeah," said Tyranny. "They are. Don't you think you might be too?"
"What?" said Wick, just in time for Tyranny to shake her head.
What was she doing? This was treacherous. Which, alright, she was a demon. Treachery was the name of the game. But this was sloppy. She had no idea who might be listening at the door, or who Wicander might tell about her ramblings.
"My apologies, your Radiance!" she chirped, plastering on a smile and clasping her hands demurely in front of her waist. "Speaking of my siblings, I completely forgot that I need to go and. Do something. With them. Can I…?" she gestured toward the door and waited to be dismissed, scuffing her hooves on the fine wooden floors.
"Yes, Tyranny," said Wick, sounding so dizzy that Tyranny was nearly tempted to see him to bed. Nearly. "But wouldn't you like to—"
"Bye," she told him, and hurried out the door.
She clomped down the hall. Cruelty was wiping her own hooves on the prayer mat outside her ward's room, only a few dozen feet away.
"Aww," she said, before adding in demonic: "What has your poor stupid lordling done today?"
"Shut up!" Tyranny spat back, still in Common, and emphasized her point by punching the wall hard enough to make something inside her hand crunch.
The sensation was peculiar. Was this what mortals considered pain? Really? She drove her fist into the stone one more time, ignoring the way that Cruelty tilted her head back and laughed and laughed.
Later, curled up in her plush bed, Tyranny tried to feel it. Really feel it, the way mortals did.
But all she could think about was Wick. Her knuckles were bloody; the skin torn. She'd undone all his work, and somehow the distant throbbing of the fresh injury didn't bother her nearly as much as the idea that tomorrow, he might just do it again.