Garden of Embers: Beneath Devouring Eyes #2

Chapter 6, Part C

Aix dipped his head at the pair of Electi guarding Domi's door and then smiled as he recognized the shorter one. "Good afternoon, Alumna."

Sidus smiled back, but the young starholder looked uneasy. Aix could not blame him for feeling worried after Domi's most recent blunder. Until a new captain of the Electi could be found to replace the youth's re-assigned father, Sidus carried the nerve-wracking responsibility of keeping Domi safe.

A responsibility that had just become far more difficult.

"Hello, Aedificanti," his student said. Sidus reached out and opened his young friend's blackwood door. "Please talk some sense into him."

Sighing, Aix strode into the bedchamber and eyed his royal pupil.

Domi darted up from his bed and crossed his arms, giving the older worldholder a sullen look. "I'm not in the mood for tutoring right now, Aedilis."

Aix lifted a brow. The boy sounded exactly like a spoiled Lightholder royal, but his displeasure came from a very different place than highborn ego. Aix doubted the former Pullatus enjoyed being locked in a stuffy room after being subjected to the embarrassment he'd no doubt felt trying to read in public. But the uncanny resemblance to a spoiled Princeps amused Aix, given the current difficulty getting the boy to play the role convincingly.

"I am sure, Basilicus," Aix said, dropping the contractions from his speech as Comitas had requested all staff do around the boy. They needed to train him to sound more like his twin, and quickly. "But someone needs to discuss what just happened in the odeon with you, and Comitas selected me." Better him than Valens, certainly, who had not been able to stop laughing every time the irreverent man recited his Alumna's final, dangerous remarks.

And they called Aix a heretic.

"Just happened?" The boy flopped down into the chair at his desk and threw slippered feet atop its mahogany surface. "That was two hours ago!"

"I apologize heartily for the delay, Basilicus." He did not often have to drag himself to Vola Apertus for family business, but the courtly manners came back to him, as they always did. "Comitas has had all your staff working hard to get ahead of the situation as much as possible, and I am only now free to speak with you."

The boy nibbled his lip. "What situation?"

Aix lifted a brow at the youth's slippered feet, then spoke when, sighing, Domi lowered them to the ground. "The situation we fear may develop as a result of your sermon, Basilicus."

The youth wilted. "What did I do wrong now?"

Sympathy pricked deep. Aix had avoided court life for most of his eighty-two years, but as a member of two royal families and a distant heir to the Throne of Sorrow, he knew something of the pressure Domi now faced.

A royal's life was an intricately choreographed dance between the roles of ruler, priest, and sorcerer. Domi, a child of the slums, did not know the dance steps. Could not know them. He did not even know to point his foot. Aix knew not to expect more than stumbles yet. Everyone in Domi's household staff knew their job was to enter the dance with the inexperienced royal and ensure the inevitable stumbles did not become falls.

But the boy seemed to believe he ought to already know all the choreography without help. And today, Domi had tossed that help out the window and then found himself dismayed to have nearly sprawled flat on his face on the dance floor.

Ah, to be young again. Aix missed that sense of boundless confidence in his own capabilities, that righteous rush of assurance in the wisdom of his own actions. He did not, however, miss the crushing disappointment of discovering his own limitations. That disillusionment thankfully lurked far in the past, behind youth's gilded gate.