WW Chapter 80: Better Introductions (Patreon)

Thanks to James for letting me realize I somehow missed posting this. Took down 81, it's coming in a few seconds.

“That’s your dinner?” Ezra demanded. “Every night?”

“Tonight was easy, because you were there for the first time,” Adonis replied, his tone flat but amused. “I’m nearly positive that tomorrow she’ll ask you to join in.”

“I already have enough training for how to act at dinners,” Ezra grumbled. “Chloe runs me through them every night.” Then, he realized that he wouldn’t have that opportunity any more, and surely they’d planned for that. “Shit.”

“I see you see the inevitability as well. Mother has always been insistent that all of her children be schooled in every type of propriety. As such, every dinner is an example of today, in which various different etiquette are observed, and we are all tested.”

“I’ll be honest with you,” Ezra said, “I’m really not sure what you were saying just now. I get that your dinners always are that formal, and that’s about it.”

Adonis laughed, his shoulders relaxing as he did so. Ezra had continued to see the young man in times of high stress, so seeing Adonis cut loose, even a little bit, was nice.

“Honestly, you got the gist of it. Basically, dinner is the meal of the day where we can’t relax. The other meals are good, but Mother can be so overbearing it makes me want to scream.”

“Better overbearing than abandon you on the streets so she can better feed herself,” Ezra shrugged with a chuckle.

As Adonis froze and stared at him, he realized that the joke he was making didn’t even nearly land for his new charge.

“That was a very specific example,” Adonis said, keeping his tone even.

“Yes, it is.”

Ezra knew what Adonis was trying to get Ezra to answer without having to ask, but he figured he might as well tease the little noble.

A handful of seconds passed before Adonis took a deep breath and asked, “Did your mother abandon you?”

“Most prostitutes do, when they’re as desperate as she was,” Ezra shrugged. “The way I see it, I’m lucky she was as beautiful as she was. Kept her able to feed me for as long as she could. She had lots of work, like most pretty, cheap whores do. Unfortunately, being a busy prostitute means that it’s easy to get sick. And from there? Well, what she did wasn’t kind, but it wasn’t cruel either. It was just life.”

They walked in silence for a while after that, Adonis seemingly unwittingly slowing his pace in response to Ezra’s words.

“I’m sorry,” Adonis said, his voice so soft it could almost be called a whisper.

“Don’t apologize. You had nothing to do with it,” Ezra dismissed his words. “That’s the place where I was born, where, when it was possible, people were kind. And when they couldn’t afford kindness, most weren’t cruel. It’s better than what happens to some.”

“That’s horrible,” Adonis said, shaking his head. “But I wasn’t apologizing for that. I wanted to apologize for complaining about my mother caring about me and trying to prepare me for life, and then complaining about it.”

“Huh. I wasn’t really thinking that that was something you needed to apologize about,” Ezra shrugged. “It’s just a part of life for me, you know? But thanks, I appreciate it.”

The silence became less one of discomfort, and instead one of companionship as they walked down the hall and arrived at a door. The hallways were all starting to blend together, and Ezra couldn't say that he knew what door or hall led where. Here, though, at the end of a hall, Adonis gestured at the door.

“This is the entrance to my rooms,” Adonis said, looking nervous, or maybe even embarrassed.

Ezra had no clue why he would hesitate, so he stepped forward and opened the door. Being the bodyguard, and, if he was honest, enjoying his assignment as the bodyguard who poked around the corners and was kinda nosy, Ezra stepped forward.

Entering Adonis’s quarters, he could see that a fire was banked in a fireplace along one wall, the room an almost uncomfortably warm temperature. A few candles had been lit throughout the room, and into the next providing a rather uniform light throughout, and with it, Ezra saw, for the first time, the room of a noble.

The first thing he noticed was that he wasn’t actually in the bedroom itself. Instead, there was some sort of waiting area outside of the rooms themselves. A set of sofas was set out with a small table between them, evidently to entertain guests, and a few paintings of landscapes were on the walls, with a variety of decorations laid out in what Ezra was sure was a tastefully expensive fashion. It was the Duke’s home, after all.

From the... he swore he knew this word. What was it... a foyer? That sounded right. From the foyer, there were two doors, one on the left that hung open and was well lit and one on the right with the door closed.

“The door on the right is where you will be sleeping,” Adonis said, his voice betraying that, yes, he was embarrassed.

Ezra nodded, walked over to his quarters, and peeked in. From what he could see with little light, it was a plain room, with a door at the back left that obviously led into Adonis’s room, a bed, and a chest-high dresser. Seeing that nobody was in there, he didn’t care to continue to look. Pulling back, he walked over into Adonis’s bedroom.

The first thing that took his notice was the door on the right that led into his room. It was just behind two shelves packed full of books that dominated the rest of the wall. Various different books and scrolls were stuffed in, bursting, stacked on top of each other, and almost seeming to spill out. The wood seemed to groan under the weight that was stacked so completely over it, and Ezra couldn’t help but mentally calculate just how many hundreds of gold would be required to buy every one of those books. In truth, he had no idea how to begin to calculate the value of all of those books, only that they were expensive.

He let his vision move along, seeing the wall of windows spread out in front of him. Actually, it wasn’t a wall of windows, but there was a pair of doors with panes of glass through them that let out onto a balcony that he could vaguely see. In front of the doors sat a desk, and on the left side of the room, opposite the bookshelves, sat a huge four-poster bed.

A few chairs were scattered throughout the room, but it obviously wasn’t set up for entertaining guests like the foyer was. Instead, this was a room where Adonis could sit in various different places, reading, and painting, apparently. An easel sat in the corner of the room, a painting half finished on it.

“It’s a good place,” Ezra nodded once, turning to look at the owner of the room. “My understanding is that we’ll just be here for the rest of the night?”

“Yes,” Adonis replied. “This is my personal time, and I prefer to stay here, if I can. Sometimes, I send for…”

He trailed off again, staring at Ezra, as he seemed to come to the conclusion that he shouldn’t say anything. Ezra stared at the apparently tongue-tied noble for a few seconds before he threw his hands up.

“Spit it out. I don’t know what’s got you thinking you’re not allowed to talk or whatever, but do it.”

“Sometimes I send for snacks or for more books from the library,” Adonis finally spoke, blushing a deep scarlet.

“All right…?” Ezra answered, not sure what this reaction was for. “Because of what my job is, I won’t go do get them for you, if that’s what you’re so embarrassed about.”

“No.” Adonis spoke emphatically. “Everything that I say just makes me sound more and more like a spoiled child, and the only things I know about your life are that you’re immensely talented and it’s only through the apparent attention of Inkosuza the Watcher himself that you managed to get here, even with all of that talent. Then I stand here, whining about how I don’t want people to come in and bother me except to give me a new snack.”

As Adonis let loose that concern, Ezra couldn’t help but feel like he understood a little bit of what had the young noble so worried. Though a small part of him wanted to laugh, Ezra pushed down that knee-jerk reaction. Instead, he stood tall and looked right into Adonis’s eyes.

“Honestly, when I was made to accept this post, I expected you to be like the nobles I have to deal with in the prospective Knight’s squad.”

As he said it, Ezra paid attention to Adonis’s body language. In truth, he had remarkable bearing and didn’t seem to reveal anything as Ezra continued, “I was going to take this assignment to continue to get stronger and get out as fast as I could. After all, if I became a Knight and wanted to go somewhere else, there probably wouldn’t be anything you could do to stop me.”

“I couldn’t blame you,” Adonis said, his voice soft. “You could help so many more people if you went out there instead of guarding some soft kid hiding in his parents’ mansion.”

“You saying that is just another sign that I think I should stick around, so long as you don’t stray too far from this path,” Ezra smiled. “I just said I might leave, and you didn’t try to offer me more money or make threats or twist my arm. Instead, you think about how I could potentially do good in the world. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to stick close to you and see what kind of positive impact you can have on the world.”

“I’m not the heir.”

“I know.”

“I’m never going to have the power of my father, to be able to command armies or to adjust the focus of the entire Duchy.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. Who knows where you’ll end up.”

“… I’m nothing special. I don’t think I deserve the attention of somebody who everybody says is as talented as you are.”

Again, that insecurity that Ezra had read in the boy returned. Despite no real relationship beyond having spent the last handful of hours together, he leaned forward and said, “We’ll see about that.”

Then, Ezra stood straight up and looked around. “I don’t think there’s any reason for me to stay in my armor now, is there?”

“No,” Adonis shook his head. “I won’t be leaving the rooms tonight, unless something comes up. In that case, I’ll let you know.”

“Alright. I’m going to take off my armor and hang around wherever you’d like me to.”

Adonis nodded and Ezra walked out of his new charge’s bedroom, testing the door that led into his private room. It was unlocked, and he stepped in, taking in a better view than before. There were no lights prepared in the room, so he grabbed a candlestick, stepped back into Adonis’s room just long enough to light it on the nearest flame, and then return to his room. As he’d seen before, it was a nondescript room, but something that he’d missed in the corner of the room was another door hidden behind an armature mannequin.

With a squint, he came to a decision and moved the mannequin to open the door. 

“I can’t say I knew what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this,” Ezra mumbled as he looked at a small, unornamented room with no decorations or furniture beyond a couple of buckets, a large pot, and a massive brass tub. A water sluice led along one edge of the room, leading through a grate somewhere. 

There’s a fire pit below the pot and the tub, Jormun observed as he floated down towards the ground. You could ask for some firewood and get a good soak in.

“I’d like to,” Ezra sighed, just thinking of it. “For now, though, I probably just need to get myself clean and then back to Adonis. I’m not sure what kind of expectations they have for me to be guarding him at night. Maybe it’ll become something I can do in the morning?”

Or you could use it as an opportunity to work on spreading your awareness, Jormun replied. You can feel the wind almost fifty meters away, now, when you’re outside. Now, you should work on keeping that awareness permanent as well as spreading it through whatever cracks in walls or windows there are.

The thought of more training might have upset Ezra a few hours before, but now that he’d had a pretty substantial break, he actually felt excited at the prospect of diving into his inner world. With the thought of just being able to practice for a good while pushing him, Ezra started removing his armor. 

Even though it was “only” half plate and not as complicated as a full set of armor like Michel’s, it was the work of ten minutes to get the armor to the point that he could pull it off. Then, setting it on the mannequin, he decided against stripping fully just yet. Instead, he took off his shirt and, wearing  just his pants, went into the washroom and started wiping the worst of the grime of the day off with a wet rag. Then, with his hands moving just barely enough to keep the water moving over his body, he started to spread his awareness beyond the room. 

The windy aura struggled to leave his room, and Ezra realized that his hands had stopped scrubbing at his chest and neck. He halfway tried to continue doing so but quickly lost focus on moving  his body as he lost himself in the aura. The wind pushed uselessly against the door before, with a flash of inspiration that had him cursing his idiocy, he pushed the wind under the door. Like that, it whooshed into the room and Ezra got a good view of what was happening there. 

Adonis sat on a chair, sitting with a painful propriety as he read. At least, that was the vague picture that the wind seemed to paint for Ezra. He could see silhouettes and movement, but nothing more than that. And, feeling uncomfortable about intruding on Adonis’s personal time, Ezra instead moved the wind he was observing back where he was. Before he did so, he decided to continue pushing the wind towards the doors that led outside. These were more secure against the wind than the internal doors were, so it took a bit of doing before he could finally escape.

There, he could see even less, the wind’s connection much weaker being separated by two closed doors. The faint shadows he could see were the bending of trees, nothing more, and he started to retreat, only to feel a flash of an approaching silhouette.

It climbed onto the banister, vaulting onto the landing with an ease that had Ezra spinning, picking  up his axe and shield, and sprinting into Adonis’s room as the doors were thrown open.

Ezra jumped forward, keeping his eyes open. It was better that he did, because instead of startled by the sudden noise, Adonis looked more annoyed as he turned to look at the intruder. As such, Ezra didn’t swing his axe towards the stranger. Instead, he threw his shoulder into their center mass, causing them to let out a surprisingly feminine grunt of pain.

“Ezra,” Adonis said, not showing the same worry he had when Ezra’d attacked Jhas, “meet Hera, the secondborn of the Brayton house.”

Looking down, Ezra saw a pretty face trying to catch her breath. Her hair was straight and braided, and she wore a boy’s tunic and trousers as she looked up at Ezra’s face and then body.

“Hey there, new guard,” she said, gathering herself and sitting up. “I usually meet people when they’re dressed, but this isn’t a bad option, if they look like you.”