Chapter 2 · The Junior Special
The Crownguard mess hall was the loudest, most chaotic place in the Empire that did not currently contain an active battle.
It was also the only place in the Empire where Azazel was reliably happy.
She loved it. She loved it without irony and without dignity. She loved the way the noise hit her the second the doors swung open — the clatter of trays, the bark of orders, the hoarse laughter of cadets who had survived another morning. She loved the smell, which was a war crime — scorched grease, industrial cleaning solution, and the heavy metallic ozone-tang of a hundred mages refueling after drills, which combined to produce something like a cheap inn that had been shelled by a magna-cannon. She loved the long communal tables, the wax-paper trays, the half-melted plastic spoons that nobody had bothered to replace because every spoon in the building was at least three years old and had earned the right to keep working until it died.
She loved that here, briefly, she was just hungry.
Out in the city she was a Wickerman. In the manor she was Azamoth's daughter. On the training floor she was the one who falls. In Genzō's eyes she was — well. She didn't think about Genzō's eyes.
In the mess hall, she was the cadet currently obstructing the line at table four, and that was the entire shape of her identity, and it was a relief.
She walked in beside Cro and Miyu, the morning's bruises already settling into a low ache along her left shin, the hem of her coat still slightly crooked from the fall, and felt the small loosening in her chest that the mess hall always gave her. The Wickerman crest at her shoulder didn't matter here. The white strand at her temple didn't matter here. The fact that she had introduced her face to the polished tile floor of the training hall nine times in the last month did not — in the immediate vicinity of the mess hall's serving counter — matter.
What mattered was the steam rising from the spice-rib trays.
Her stomach gave a slow, ravenous growl that felt more like an order than a request.
"I am going to eat," she announced to the back of Cro's coat, "until I lose consciousness."
Cro, ahead of her in line, didn't turn. "Pacing."
"No pacing. Only consumption."
"Pacing."
"You are not in charge of my mouth."
"Mm."
Miyu, behind her, made the small hmm of a person who had decided that the best response to the morning's chaos was to be politely amused by all of it.
Azazel grabbed a metal tray from the stack. The metal was warm from the dishwasher and slightly bowed in the middle, the way mess-hall trays bowed when they had been used by ten thousand cadets and had not yet been replaced because the Empire's procurement office moved at the speed of a particularly thoughtful glacier.
Her hands shook a little.
She hated that they shook. She hated that Cro had probably noticed.
The shake wasn't fear. The shake was hunger — the specific, structural hunger of a Wickerman whose Blood Seal had quietly burned through her body's reserves while she'd been failing footwork. The Seal didn't run on nothing. It ran on her. Calories, fluids, the small irrelevant warmth of having a body. When her magna ran low the Seal started gnawing at the rest of her, and the gnawing manifested as a hollow ache behind her sternum, a tremor in her fingers, and a deep biological certainty that if she did not put food in her mouth in the next forty-five seconds she was going to bite someone.
This was a known phenomenon. Wickerman daughters were fed aggressively from the day they were weaned, because the Seal would otherwise feed on them. Ela had spent nineteen years performing the daily miracles required to keep something — anything — warm in a pot for when Azazel came in looking like a small angry ghost. Day-old bread from the bakery on Iron Way. The cheap end of the butcher's cut. Lentils stretched across three meals. An egg, on a good week. Ela had her own thinness to show for it. Azazel had pretended not to notice for as long as she could.
The Crownguard mess hall served, broadly, the same biological function. With less love.
She shuffled forward.
Above the serving counter, a faded banner stretched across the back wall — NAAMAH HALL, EST. 1631 — the lettering done in the heavy serif of an older century, the gold paint flaked in places where a thousand grease-fires had eaten at it. Azazel had read that banner so many times in her life that it had stopped being words. Naamah. The hall was named for someone, presumably; some legendary figure from the Empire's deep past, the kind of person who got halls named after them. She didn't know which one. Somebody important enough to be remembered. Somebody unimportant enough to be forgotten by everyone except whoever maintained the banner.
She didn't think about it.
She thought about food.
The lunch lady's name was Helga, and Helga had — Azazel was certain of this — wrestled at least one bear in a previous life.
She was broad through the shoulders, gray at the temples, scarred along one forearm in the looping pattern of an old magna burn, and she wielded the soup ladle like a weapon she had personally tested in combat. She had been at the serving counter for twelve years. Cadets had come and gone. Officers had come and gone. Wars had been quietly fought in the lower wards and quietly buried in the back pages of the imperial gazette. Helga had remained, ladling.
She squinted over the sneeze guard.
"Next."
Azazel stood on her tiptoes to be seen above the glass.
"Three servings of the spiced steam-ribs, please. And extra rice. And the gravy. And the —"
Helga glanced down.
She took in Azazel's height, which was five-foot-one on a generous day. She took in the long black coat — Azamoth's coat, the one he had taken to wearing after he had walked out of the Shiranui estate and walked into the Wickerman manor, the one no Wickerman daughter could have inherited because Wickerman daughters were the only Wickermans there were — and which currently engulfed Azazel like a particularly fashionable blanket. She took in the wide red eyes, the slightly mussed black hair, the white strand at her temple, the tremor in her hands, and the deeply sincere, deeply ravenous expression of a small predator about to commit a crime against the lunch counter.
Helga's face did something soft.
Azazel, who had been at the wrong end of Helga's ladle for two years, recognized the soft thing and felt her stomach drop.
"Oh no," she whispered.
Helga reached, with terrible deliberation, for a different ladle.
Plop.
A mound of soft, finely chopped meat landed on Azazel's tray. It was glossy. It steamed. It was, objectively, the best-looking food on the line.
Helga added a small fluffy bun. The bun had been steamed into the shape of a cartoon bear. The bear had little ears. The bear had a little nose. The bear was looking at Azazel with the bland white-bread serenity of something that had been baked specifically to be cute.
Then, with a devastating amount of care, Helga produced a small paper flag from somewhere beneath the counter and stuck it into the bear's head.
The flag read: FUTURE HERO!
Azazel stared at the flag.
She stared at it for what felt like a very long time.
The line behind her, sensing blood, went quiet.
"Um," Azazel whispered. "Excuse me. Helga. Ma'am."
"It's the Junior Plate," Helga said warmly. "Easy to chew. Good for growing bones."
"I am NINETEEN."
"Mm."
"I have been legally an adult for years."
"Eat your bear."
"This is discrimination."
"It's braised veal. It's the cut they serve to the officers' children. You're getting a better lunch than your friends."
Azazel opened her mouth.
She closed it.
She opened it again.
"That," she said, "is a horrifyingly effective argument."
"Move along, sweetheart."
"I am not your sweetheart. I am a Wickerman of the direct line."
"Move along, direct line."
Azazel moved along.
Behind her, Miyu made a sound that was somewhere between a cough and the early stages of laughter.
Cro, picking up his tray, said nothing.
Cro never said anything when it would have been kind to say something. Cro saved his dialogue, the way other people saved currency. Azazel, dragging her tray and her wounded pride toward the seating area, decided she was going to find a pit, and she was going to push him into it, and she was going to laugh.
They found a table near the back, away from the cell of senior agents who always sat by the windows because seniority in the Crownguard came with the right to natural light.
Azazel set her tray down and slid into the bench with the controlled aggression of a person who had decided to commit to something.
"It's discrimination," she said, stabbing the bear-bun with her fork. "The whole Empire is built by tall people, for tall people, and that is a choice they made. It's a violation of my dignity as a citizen."
"It's efficient," Cro said. He sat across from her. His tray was — as Cro's tray always was — a study in utility. Hard-tack biscuits. Lean cuts of grilled meat, no sauce. A small dense block of nutrient paste in a paper wrap. He ate, Azazel had once concluded, the way he did most things: like a man fueling a vehicle he respected.
"It is not efficient. It is condescending."
"It is both."
Miyu slid into the seat next to Azazel, her tray landing with the soft, civilized clatter of expensive porcelain. The contents were, of course, perfect — a delicate salad with cold-grilled fish, a small ceramic cup of green tea that the kitchen kept specifically for her because three generations of Shiranui-line officers had drunk it and the kitchen had given up arguing.
She broke her chopsticks with a crisp, surgical snap.
"Eat, Azazel. Your aura is thin."
"My aura is furious."
"Mm."
"Don't you mm me."
"I'm eating."
Azazel, despite herself, ate.
The braised veal was — and she would not admit this out loud, ever, under any circumstance, to anyone — astonishingly good. It was tender in the way that things were tender when they had been cooked by a person who actually understood meat. It had been seasoned by someone who respected the spice rack. The bear-bun, dunked in the gravy, became something like a small edible cloud.
She closed her eyes.
She made, involuntarily, a wounded sound.
"It's good, isn't it," Miyu said gently, not looking at her.
"It is fine."
"Mm."
"I am still furious."
"Of course."
The food hit Azazel's stomach like a warm stone, radiating heat outward through her chest, into her limbs, settling into the hollow places the Seal had been gnawing on. The tremor in her hands eased. The ravenous edge dulled. The world, which had been narrowing to a tunnel of eat-eat-eat for the last twenty minutes, slowly widened back out.
She slumped against the bench.
"I am alive again."
Cro, across from her, chewed methodically. Cut. Chew. Swallow. Repeat. He didn't look up.
"You went pale," he said.
"I did not."
"You did. In the line."
"I was focused."
"You were low."
"I was focused on being low."
His eyes flicked up. Just for a second. The Cro version of a smile.
She glared at him to cover the small, embarrassing warmth in her chest.
It was while she was finishing the rice Helga had relented on that her gaze caught on the pin.
She had seen it a thousand times. She had probably looked directly at it a hundred times. Every cadet who'd worked with Cro for more than a week knew about the wolf pin on his collar, the way they knew about Miyu's habit of carrying a sewing kit in her field pack, or the way the captain on the third floor always smelled faintly of cigar smoke. It was just a thing about Cro. A small, fixed fact of the world.
Today, for some reason she could not name, she looked at it differently.
The pin was small. Silver. Wolf's head, in profile, the lines clean and angular in a way that suggested expensive craftsmanship. The eyes were two tiny chips of blue crystal. They were the same blue as Cro's eyes. They were the same blue as a particular shade of cold mountain river.
Azazel's chest did a small, unfamiliar thing.
It was not quite déjà vu. It was the second cousin of déjà vu — a vague, cold feeling, sourceless, that she had noticed this pin before in some way that she could not now retrieve. As if at some point she had thought something important about it and the thought had gone somewhere she could not follow.
"Hey," she said, pointing with her fork. "I've been meaning to ask."
Cro paused, hard-tack halfway to his mouth.
"Hm?"
"The pin. Is that a dog?"
Miyu choked on her tea.
It was a clean choke, the elegant choke of a woman who had been raised never to spit and was therefore committing an act of personal heroism by getting the tea back into the cup before it became a public incident. Azazel watched her cousin recover with the polite frozen smile of someone who could not laugh because laughing would mean spraying, and felt a brief and undignified pride.
Cro lowered his hard-tack slowly. He set it down. He looked at the pin. His thumb brushed the silver snout — a small, automatic gesture, the kind of motion a person makes when they have been touching something for years without noticing.
"It's a wolf."
"Same thing."
"It's not the same thing."
"Wolves are basically just large dogs."
"They are genetically distinct predators with a fundamentally different social structure."
"Wow."
"What."
"That was the longest sentence you've said all year."
Cro's eyes flicked up. Cold mountain river.
"It's a wolf."
"Okay! Okay. It's a wolf. Got it. Mr. Specific. Big bad wolf. So is it like a — a squad logo? Because if we're getting team logos, I vote strongly for something cooler. Like a dragon. Or a skull. Or a dragon eating a skull. Or a dragon eating a skull while on fire."
"It's not a squad logo."
"Then what is it. A souvenir? Did somebody give it to you? Because if somebody gave you a wolf pin, I want to know who, because I want to know what kind of person looks at you and thinks yes, wolf."
Cro didn't answer immediately.
He looked down at the pin.
For one strange, suspended second, the noise of the mess hall seemed to thin out around him — the clatter receding, the laughter going faint — like the volume on his particular slice of the world had been turned down by an invisible hand. His face did not change. Cro's face never changed. But something behind it did. Something old. Something that had been there long enough that he had stopped noticing it, the same way he had stopped noticing the pin under his thumb.
Azazel, who was usually too busy talking to look at things properly, looked at him.
Her chest did the unfamiliar thing again.
"An oath," he said quietly.
The word landed wrong. Azazel didn't know why. It was a perfectly normal word.
She blinked.
"...An oath to a dog?"
"A wolf."
"You're really invested in this distinction."
"Details matter."
Miyu had set her cup down. Her gaze on Cro had gone soft in a way that Azazel rarely saw — the polite-mask dropped, the elegance momentarily set aside, replaced by a younger, plainer expression that Azazel recognized from rare childhood moments. Knowing. Miyu had always been the one who knew.
"Wolves are loyal," Miyu said, gently, into the small quiet around the pin. "They protect the pack until the end."
Cro returned to his food.
The volume of the world came back up.
"Something like that," he said.
Azazel watched him for another second.
Something tugged at the inside of her ribs. Not pain. Not quite anything. Just a sense — and she would not have been able to name it if she'd tried — that she was sitting across from someone whose end was already written somewhere, and that he knew it, and that knowing it was the reason he ate his food the way he did. Like a man whose plate was a contract he had agreed to.
She shoved the thought down. She was nineteen, and she was eating bear-bun, and Miyu had just done the polite-not-laughing thing again, and the mess hall was warm. There were no contracts at her plate. There were ribs.
She leaned her chin on her hand.
"Well," she said. "It suits you. You have loyal guard dog energy."
"Wolf."
"Sure, sure. Wolf. Big bad wolf." She grinned, despite herself, and poked his arm with the handle of her fork. "Just don't bite me."
Cro glanced up. Cold mountain river. The faintest flicker of something that, in a face as still as his, qualified as warmth.
"Don't wander," he said, "and I won't have to chase you."
She opened her mouth to retort.
The intercom chimed.
It was a single soft tone, and then a clipped voice, and the voice cut through the mess hall — clean, bored, indifferent to whatever conversation it was interrupting.
"Cell Four. Report to the Shiranui estate immediately. Commander Genzō is waiting."
The warmth in Azazel's stomach turned to ice before the announcement had finished.
She set her fork down. It hit the metal tray with a clatter that, in the private hush of her ears, sounded like a gavel.
"Lunch," she said quietly, "is over."
Miyu's smile faded. The polite mask slid back into place — composed, gracious, every line of her cousin retreating behind the careful arrangement of Shiranui in public. She straightened her back. She set her chopsticks neatly across her bowl. The whole sequence took the space of a single breath; she had been trained for it since before she could read.
"We shouldn't keep him waiting," Miyu said.
"No," Azazel said. "We shouldn't."
Cro stood. He swung his rifle off the bench beside him and across his back in one practiced motion, the strap settling against his coat the way it had settled there a thousand times before.
He waited for Azazel to slide out of the booth.
"Ready?" he asked.
Azazel looked down at her tray.
The bear-bun was half-eaten. The little paper flag, FUTURE HERO!, had drooped sideways into the gravy and was bleeding a small ink-stain into the brown.
She plucked the flag out by its toothpick. She wiped the gravy off on a napkin. She held it for a second, considering.
Then she folded the flag, very carefully, into a small square, and put it in the inner pocket of her coat.
She told herself she did not know why.
"No," she said. "But let's go anyway."
She followed Cro and Miyu out of the mess hall, the warmth of the food still sitting in her chest, the cold of the intercom sitting beneath it, and somewhere — not at her sleeve, not in her chest, but under her, low and tidal — the Seal kept its slow patient time.