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The four walls of Azriel’s room were cool, porous stone that held in moisture and had a wet, musty smell. When he was very small he could stretch his wings out and run from side to side, managing to hop just high enough to glide for half a second before his feet touched the stone floor again. His wings had itched to stretch and move then. Now that he was taller, almost nine years old, they ached with a ferocity that sometimes kept him awake at night. He could stretch them sideways along the length of the room still, but there was no longer space to run, and the low ceiling would clip him if he tried to hop now.
His heavy door was opened once in the evening, when he was permitted to slip out of the cold room and pad silently through the halls, hugging the walls as he explored. Most nights he bypassed the kitchen where sometimes there were bread rolls and (on special occasions) sweets left within reach by the cook who had, despite rarely speaking to him, had grown a soft spot for the hazel-eyed little boy that clung to the shadows of the house. Instead, he would push open the door to the gated courtyard to the lush, cultivated gardens on his father’s estate. Here he could run across the stone walkways, hidden by flowering bushes that dusted the air with sweet-smelling pollen in the springtime. The ground was usually still warm under his feet, and he imagined it was still basking in the memory of the bright sun. Azriel’s small rectangular window faced the garden, but the sun rose and set on either side of him, out of view. That heat would dissipate eventually, but was almost always replaced with a clear view of the stars, blinking into existence by the hundreds.
Only a year ago he had looked up at those stars and felt such joy it made his chest swell and his throat feel tight. He had remembered what his mother had told him in their last short visit, that she was close enough to the walls of his father’s estate to see the same stars. That his grandparents, kind and generous but taken too soon were up there, happy to see him. He had closed his eyes and tried his hardest to imagine their faces above him, but his mother had never gone into enough detail and so their faces looked like a mixture of his father’s and stepmother’s, and he had never seen them smile kindly in his direction. Instead he had pretended that the stars that fell that night, whizzing by his face and lighting up the garden around him were messages meant just for him. He whispered his thanks to them. He would have told them he missed them, but he wasn’t sure if you could miss someone you had never met. So instead he had told them he missed his mother.
This year he wasn’t wearing that stupid grin. The stars were falling, as they did every year on this date, and he knew they weren’t meant for him. He sat in the shadows and held his knobby knees close to his chest. He knew now that the majority of the stars were high in the air, dancing and performing for the pleasure of his father’s wife, their sons, and their esteemed guests at their party on the roof.
Stars fall here. Why not for you?
He smiled a joyless smile and shook his head. These stars that flew too close to the ground would eventually hit the stone walkways and disappear. These stars came to the garden to die, not to send messages from dead relatives who had never met him. Starfall wasn’t a holiday, it was a funeral. The guests far above him cheered and laughed and Azriel tucked his bandaged hands under his chin.
Hurt.
No, they didn’t hurt anymore.
Scarred.
He hadn’t looked. He had been told the bandages could come off when the skin started to itch, but that had been weeks ago. The cloth had been soft then, but now it was hard and had a strong, metallic odor. The smell didn’t bother him, and the worst of the itching had eventually subsided. But still Azriel kept the bandages on, ashamed to admit that he was afraid of what he would find underneath. What if his hands were gone, or replaced with something that matched the pain he had felt when his brothers had lit the fire? What if all of his skin peeled off with the crusty bandages and they had to call the healer again? The first time the healer had insisted Azriel not exert himself for seven days while his wounds healed. His door hadn’t opened for seven long days. If it wasn’t for the food that appeared and disappeared, for the toilet that emptied itself twice a day, for the noises in the house outside of his door, he would have thought he had been forgotten about.
What if they forget?
He didn’t like to think about it. A star hit his shins and burst into a thousand tiny glowing particles. He didn’t flinch, but watched them blink themselves out.
Sorry.
Yes, he thought. I’m sorry.
He was working up the courage to try flying. He didn’t know how much time he had left before he would be called back in. Starfall was the one night where his one-hour rule was ever extended, mostly by accident. Sometimes it stretched all night, when no one remembered he was still outside and he would creep back in, head down and damp with morning dew. It was the one night he was sure his older brothers were away, completely distracted with whatever it was they did up on the roof on high holidays.
He stood and looked around, ears pricking up to catch the distant sounds of fae voices. His wings felt stiff and heavy as he stretched them out, one at a time, to their full length and height. His back muscles ache as he moved, and when a star collided silently into his left one he gasped and snapped them shut.
Scared.
He furrowed his brow and stretched his wings out again. Not scared, he thought. Just… surprised. He ran a few steps forward and hopped, but his feet hit the ground without any resistance. He tried again and again, sweat beginning to prick at his brow as he concentrated.
“You’ll never fly that way.”
I just need practice, he thought to himself before snapping his wings back to his sides and looking wildly around. He had heard a voice. Not the normal voice, but a clear, high pitched one. As he craned his neck to see into the fruit trees above him he heard it again.
“Didn’t your mother teach you that you need to hold the wind under your wings to fly?”
He pushed himself back against the garden wall and waited. A small, dark shape dropped from one of the trees, swooping up before hitting the ground and flying back up. It disappeared into the leaves once again.
“I knew how to fly when I was three,” the voice bragged. Azriel frowned but said nothing.
“Well?”
Another long pause. The shadow dropped from the tree again and this time hovered slightly above the ground, dark wings outstretched. Azriel realized it was a child. A girl child. Her toes pointed at the ground, almost grazing the stone. When she finally landed, she tucked her wings in primly and stepped closer to him. Her wild black hair was glowing from where a star had seemingly gotten tangled up in it. She was smiling so wide Azriel could see all of her teeth, or whatever teeth she still had in her mouth. The two top front ones were gone.
“Well?” She repeated when he didn’t move from his position against the wall. She screwed her mouth into a pout and crossed her arms. “Don’t you know how to talk?”
Scared.
Azriel opened his mouth to talk but she was already stepping closer and his teeth clamped together again.
“Your wings aren’t bad,” she remarked with confidence. Before he could stop her she had taken one in firm fingers and pulled it out to look at the membranes. “They look like mine, which means you should definitely be able to fly if you wanted to.” He clamped them shut again, face flushing and pushed away from the wall, puffing his chest out.
“I can fly,” he croaked. He had wanted it to sound confident, like she had, but he hadn’t spoken in a while and it had come out like rust. “I just… don’t want to.” He was glad it was dark, because his face was burning hot.
She raised an eyebrow at him skeptically, crossing her arms and cocking out a bony hip in a way that suggested rather rudely that she did not believe his obvious lie. He crossed his arms right back at her and stared. They were at a standstill for less than a minute before she cracked that wide, toothy grin again.
“I can teach you! I’m really good, I’ve taught my brother all sorts of things and he’s older than me!” Her wings began to flap excitedly, stirring up the air around Azriel. She fluttered closer to him, and in the moonlight her wings reminded him more of a riled up moth than anything.
She stuck out a small hand and showed him all of her teeth and gums again. “I’m Velaris.”
Friend.
He hesitated, but as soon as his hand moved she was holding it in her own tight little grip. “Azriel.”
Velaris made Azriel run back and forth along the garden wall. She flew above his head and directed him on how his wings should look, how they should feel. When it came down to it, he realized she had no idea how to coach anyone on flying, but he felt safer somehow with someone else around. When he stopped to put his hands on his knees and pant, sweat pooling on his forehead, she landed crosslegged on a large stone next to him.
“Why haven’t I seen you before?” she asked him, and he glanced sideways at her, straightening his stance to roll his sore shoulders. “I’m here almost every Starfall and I’ve never seen you. Are you trespassing?” Her face had lit up again, so much so that he felt the corner of his mouth tug up.
When he didn’t answer her she grinned crookedly. “I bet you’re a robber, and you were trying to figure out how to get inside and steal all the jewels in this house before I caught you.”
He chuckled and pushed his hair back. “I’d be a stupid robber who can’t fly but robs a house of Illyrian warriors.”
She shrugged. “Maybe you’re stupid.” She studied him for a moment and then shook her head, smiling. “No, I don’t believe you’re stupid. You’re too quiet. Stupid people are always loud.”
Azriel sat with his back against a lemon tree, rolling his shoulder blades lightly against the trunk. He inclined his head back towards the estate, where only a few windows were illuminated. “I live there.”
She fluttered up again to get a better look at the house. “Which is your room?”
He pointed to a first floor window, small and high off the ground. She shook her head. “Well that’s too bad. My room has a big balcony, and sometimes at night my brother and I open the doors and jump right off of it and fly around in the night. We’ve seen real bats!” He closed his eyes as she prattled on and on about her adventures, about the windows she would peek through when everyone was supposed to be asleep, about the frozen air around the mountains and the way the stars stay small, even as you fly higher up.
A voice far away broke into her stories and he turned his head back to the house. The stars had stopped falling, and his stepmother was standing at the back door barking out his name. His shoulders slumped unconsciously and he stood, head down.
“I have to go.”
Velaris stood up too and stuck out her little hand again. No one had ever shook his hand before, and now twice in one night Velaris had reached out, not even caring about the bandages. This time he reached back and she showed him that huge, gap-toothed grin one last time. “Maybe we can play tomorrow!” She chirped and he felt his stomach plunge.
“I don’t… I don’t come outside a lot,” he told her. He wasn’t sure why his face felt hot as he said this, as though it were a shameful secret. He supposed it was because of all of her adventures out in the world. It made him feel…
Small.
Yes, small.
Forgotten.
He supposed.
Velaris released his hand and they said goodbye as his stepmother called again. He tucked his hands under his arms and walked back towards the house. That night, as the door closed behind him and he lay in his bed under the small window, his wings didn’t itch and ache as they had the night before. They wrapped around him in a tight cocoon and he fell into a dreamless, easy sleep.
* * *
The sun had begun to set, and Azriel waited quietly. He had thin memories of being a very small child and crying, wailing and banging on the heavy door. He doubted it was all the time, but when the hours stretched on and he would think of his mother, or hear his brothers playing outside his door, he would be filled with such anxious longing that it would come out of his throat in screeches. Finally one day his stepmother had come in to tell him that if she heard him again she would never open the door again. I’ll brick up the door and leave you in here, ungrateful brat. He hadn’t yelled after that. He had learned to be very quiet, even when his legs kicked restlessly and his throat tightened to the point of pain.
But what if you’re too quiet? What if they forget?
He had thought of this, and it had made him feel like he was falling into a dark void. He would shiver and shake, hot tears rolling down his face. He would lay his cheek on the cold stone floor and peer under the door at the dim light that shone on the other side until that feeling passed. Shoes would sometimes pass by, and even though he was nine years old he had not learned how to stop that feeling of hope that sprang up when they paused near his door.
He was laying on the floor now, belly down, bandaged hand tapping the stone next to his face lazily, when a large stone soared through his window and smacked hard against the opposite wall. He sat up abruptly and stared at the stone. Green and swirled. A river stone.
Before he could move to it another soared through the window and smacked the wall next to the door. He looked around nervously, hoping the noise hadn’t been too loud. A third stone flew in and crashed near the first and he scrambled onto his bed, standing on his tiptoes to peer through the window.
Velaris grinned at him from the ground below, waving a slingshot in her hand.
“Look what I found!” She yelled to him and he put his finger to his mouth to quiet her. She clamped her hand to her mouth and giggled. “Look what I found!” she whispered loudly, gesturing to the slingshot. “Someone left it near the river!”
She fluttered her wings in their moth-like fervency and was face to face with him in the small window. She passed it through and he took it in his hands, gazing at it in wonder.
“Someone just left it there?” he looked at her suspiciously and she put her hands on her hips.
“Are you calling me a thief? Give it back then!”
Azriel handed it over reluctantly and she laughed, pushing it back into his hands. “I’m just kidding. I did steal it, but the boy who was using it before me was hitting birds with it, so really you should call me a hero.”
Azriel smiled a little and she lit up at the sight of it, her wings faltering slightly so she had to readjust to stay level with the window. “Why don’t you come outside?” she asked, trying to peer around him to look into the dark room.
He frowned. “Um… I usually come out when it’s dark.”
She pulled a green rock from her pocket and passed it through the window at him. “Well then, why don’t I close my eyes, you sling these out as far as you can, and I’ll try to find them?”
This is how they came to spend the days together. She would come in the afternoon, carrying stories of her day, her brother, how her mother forced her to read for hours about subjects that bored her, and how sometimes she would switch the covers of the books so she could read more interesting things. Sometimes she didn’t come, but at night when he was out in the garden she would fall from a tree with a thud and apologize profusely, as though they had a longstanding appointment that she had missed.
After a few weeks she was quiet for the first time since he had met her, and he found that he both enjoyed the easy silence and missed the sound of her streams of consciousness. It was nighttime, and he only had a few more minutes of air before he had to return.
“What happened to your hands?” she asked suddenly, and he looked down at the crusty bandages. The urge to tuck them under his arms was strong, but he simply put them on the ground beside his legs.
“Burns,” he said simply.
“From what?” she asked.
“Fire,” he answered.
“Why haven’t you healed yet?” Their kind healed quickly, with even the most grievous of injuries only taking a few days at most to close up. He was quiet for a moment, and for once she was too, allowing him time to come up with an answer.
“I think they have,” he whispered. “I just… I just haven’t looked yet.”
She came to sit next to him against the tree, shoulder to shoulder, a position they would come to repeat as the summer dragged on.
“I can look, if you want,” she whispered back. “Make sure you haven’t grown claws.” When she spoke, she made it sound like they were co-conspirators. It sounded like the start of an adventure. Azriel’s heart began to kick inside his chest. His stomach felt strangely empty. It took him a few moments too long to answer when the sound of his stepmother yelling his name shook them apart. As he stood to go he turned back to her and nodded before leaving.
That night she came when everyone else was asleep. He reached his hands up through the window and closed his eyes as she peeled off the bandages. The smell was awful, but she worked quietly and efficiently. He heard the tiniest intake of breath when the first one was off and he tried to pull back, but she gripped his fingers firmly. When he was still again she unbound the other hand and then stared silently for a long, long time. His heart was beating so heavily he felt like he would throw up, or pass out. His legs had begun to rattle from standing on his tiptoes, and he rested his forehead against the stone, hands still held in hers.
“They’re… they’re different,” she said quietly, and laid a small kiss to each palm. “But they’re still just hands, Azriel.”
Then she was gone. He pulled his hands back inside and lay on his bed in the dark.
Look.
He kept his eyes closed a moment longer.
Look what they did.
At last he opened his eyes and gazed at his hands in the moonlight. They were pale and shriveled, as though he had soaked them in water. And everywhere, on every surface of skin, from the tips of his fingers to the bottom of his wrist, were scars. Each one carried the memory of the pain, of how he had screamed and wailed until his voice was just a heaving of air, of how his brother’s laughter had turned to gasps and then to footsteps as they had abandoned their crime, scared of the punishment that had never come.
His tears were quiet rasps, but he let them fall heavy and thick onto his pillow, promising himself that this would be the only time he cried over this. When he woke, his pillow was still damp, and his palms tingled where Velaris’s gentle kisses had landed.
* * *
Eleven. He was eleven and had already outgrown his room. His wings now touched both walls before they were fully extended, and he could touch the low ceiling if he stretched his arms up. His brothers had ignored him for over a year after their attack, but eventually life had returned to normal and Azriel had begun to shrink further and further inward, longing to be released from the tiny room that had become a cell, and dreading what awaited him on the days his brothers were giddy with boredom.
Velaris waited patiently each night in the far end of the garden, and on nights when Azriel didn’t show she would flutter up to his window and tease him. Over two years had passed, and she knew now the minefields he navigated in this house. How sometimes his brothers would hide behind the door to grab at his scarred hands, threatening to add more, showing them off to wicked friends. How if Azriel was heard inside the room (or if his brothers blamed him for their rows) his stepmother would order the servants to leave the door closed and he would be stuck, sometimes for days at a time.
She says you look like your mother. The older you get, the more you resemble her.
Azriel had heard the whispers and knew this was the reason he was punished. He understood that no matter how silent he was, how ghostlike he made himself, how he tried to melt into the shadows, he would never be loved in this house. On the days when the weight of that impossibility made him feel as though the low ceiling who collapse on top of him, and he thought he would go mad and pull out his hair and tear at his own wings, Velaris would toss a stolen orange through the window and regale him with stories of her escapades. Sometimes they were true, but he suspected most of them were lies. She told him she was a princess, and that one day she would be High Lady of the Night Court. She told him they would get married, and together they would tie his brothers up and throw them into the lake, where sea monsters would devour them, wings first.
“I feel sorry for the sea monster,” he remarked, and she wrinkled her nose at him.
“You’re going to need a much tougher stomach if you’re going to be High Lord, Azriel.”
The sun was starting to set, and Azriel was barely listening to her. His ears were focused on the door, and his chest felt as thin as paper. He had been in the room, stifling hot in the summer air, for three days. Food had appeared and disappeared, footsteps had passed, but the door had stayed closed. His brothers had pressed their mouths to the sides to taunt him.
“We’re moving, Azriel. We’re packing up and moving far away.”
“Maybe our father will forget you’re here.”
“Father already forgot he was here. He can’t even fly, what’s the point of thinking about him?”
They had cackled and kicked the door and run off, and Azriel had stretched his wings out against the walls until they hurt, gritting his teeth and staring at the doorknob.
The last time they had come was that morning.
“Want to hear a secret, Azriel?”
“We got a good one from the gardeners”
“We heard that you have a girlfriend.”
"Who would date an ugly freak without hands?”
“A flightless one at that.”
They had laughed and run off again, but Azriel hadn’t stopped thinking about it all day. There were no gardeners that he had ever seen. As far as he knew, the gardens magically kept themselves up. He chewed on the inside of his cheek as Velaris went on and on about the history of their land, a boring lesson that she couldn't seem to help but pass on.
“Have you ever seen a gardener?” he interrupted her and she smirked.
“Everyone’s seen a gardener, stupid.”
He frowned and she shook her head. “Do you mean here? No, I assumed they were glamoured like ours are.”
“Glamoured?”
She rolled her eyes and dipped down a bit before flying herself back up to his eye level. “Oh really Azriel, even you can’t be that in the dark about the world. Glamoured. Magicked. Wealthy ladies of estates don’t think it’s proper to see the groundskeepers, so they’re magicked to be invisible while working. Did you think the bushes all just magically trimmed themselves?”
There was a knot in his throat and he swallowed hard before saying, “Velaris, you have to leave.” The quiet urgency in his voice made her violet eyes widen, but before she could answer she was suddenly yanked down. The move was so quick she only had time for a quick squeak before she disappeared from view. Azriel craned his neck as far as he could to see out the small window.
His brothers waved at him from the ground, holding Velaris by the arm. “So it’s true! And she’s pretty! Who’d have guessed!”
Velaris slammed her elbow into his brother’s stomach as hard as she could and with an oof! she was free. Her wings fluttered at lightning speed, but as she took to the skies so did Azriel’s brothers, pulling at the membranes of her wings, gripping her by her hair.
Azriel wanted to scream. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to slam his fists against the walls, break through and strangle both his brothers to death. But his voice caught in his throat as he glanced back at the door. It had to be almost time. The sun was going down. The door had to open.
Velaris’s strangled cry tore his gaze from the door. They were on the ground again and one of his brothers held a large hunting knife pressed up against the joint of her wing. Tears were falling from her eyes, streaking down her face and into her mouth. They pooled under her chin where his other brother’s hand gripped her by the throat, holding her down into the dirt.
“Please. Please.” Azriel said as quietly as he could, knowing his brothers could hear him. “Please let her go.”
You have to get out.
Laughter floated up to the window, scraping like glass against his ears. “She’s trespassing! Trespassers pay in blood, brother.”
She managed a strangled yelp as the knife dug into the sensitive wing skin and kicked her legs wildly before they were pinned down by his other brother’s knees.
“Not her wings!” Azriel whispered, reaching an arm through the window. “Not her wings, please. Come back up here, you can cut me. You can… you can do what you want to me.”
“The wings could bring trouble,” he heard his brother mutter.
“We’ll let her decide! Where else shall we take our blood payment from?” The knife unclipped painfully from her wing, and the flat edge was pressed against her cheek, just under her eye.
You have to get out, Azriel.
“Perhaps the face? Or the legs?” A wicked grin passed between them and Azriel clenched his fists and looked back at the heavy door. The sun had almost completely set. He willed the door to open.
The door isn’t opening. You have to get out.
How?
Velaris shuddered out a breath and slowly straightened her arm with a sob. His brothers feigned disappointment but shrugged. “Not as fun, but it’s the lady’s choice.”
Hot, horrified tears sprang from Azriel’s eyes as the knife stabbed just below her shoulder and ripped its way down the length of her arm. She opened her mouth to scream but no sound came out.
Out! Out! Out! OUT.
Suddenly Azriel was falling. One moment he was in the shadows in the room and the next he was falling through them, tumbling through a cold darkness that momentarily blocked out all shapes and sounds. And then he was on the stones below, knocking the knife out of his brother’s hand and punching over, and over, and over.
His other brother screamed, a high pitched, terrified keening and scrambled away. Azriel continued to batter his brother’s face, his fist’s crunching against bone, his eyes blind. A small, wet hand reached out and grabbed frantically at him and he stopped, panting and sobbing to look down at her. He suddenly remembered that she was more than a year younger than he was. She had never seemed younger, but she was covered in blood and dirt and tears and she looked so young that his breath caught.
“I’m sorry!” He gasped and stumbled back. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
She stood shakily, gripping her arms, and lifted herself off the ground painfully. Her wing had already begun to heal from the small scrape. “I have to go,” she cried, and fluttered into the darkness.
He sat next to his brother’s unconscious body, bloody hands gripping at his hair. He looked up at the window high above him and back at this hands. All around him black shadows swirled and whispered. He pressed the heels of his hands to his ears but the sounds intensified, as though they were now trapped in his head. With him.
“What’s happening?” he whispered, eyes shut tight, and tucked his knees up to his chest. He folded his wings tightly around himself as footsteps began to pound closer and closer. The shadows continued to swirl.
“What’s happening?”
Sorry.
* * *
Three days. Then three weeks. Then three months.
His father had been summoned, and even though no one had come to his door to explain what was happening, he knew.
Shadowsinger.
War camps.
Away.
He was being sent away. Something was wrong with him and now everyone knew it. He hadn’t seen his mother in years, but he had begun to long for her in a way that made his stomach twist up into knots that threatened to strangle him.
Shadowsinger.
War Camps.
Away.
A small sound of fluttering wings made him look up from where he was curled up tightly in his cocoon. Velaris’s tiny hand on the windowsill made him stand, but when his face reached hers he kept his eyes down. He couldn’t look at her, not after what had happened. Not after she hadn’t come back. Not now that she knew.
Shadowsinger.
“They’re taking you away,” she whispered. He nodded, still looking down.
“Azriel.”She waited. “Azriel. Look at me.”
He dragged his gaze up, pushing the shameful tears back into this throat like a ball of fire. She smiled at him when he did, and a tear slipped through his defenses and slid down his cheek.
Velaris reached in with an unscarred arm and wiped it away.
“I’m okay. I’m okay,” she soothed. More tears slipped out and he pressed his forehead onto the windowsill, shoulders shuddering quietly. “I’m going to kill them,” he whispered. “I’m going to kill them.” It was a promise, a vow, and as he spoke it aloud he felt a sharp tingling on his hands as two tattoos weaved their way through his scars.
“I need you to listen to me,” she said quietly. “They’re sending you to an Illyrian War Camp. Look at me, Azriel.”
He wiped his eyes and quieted his breaths, and looked up into her violet eyes again.
“When you get there, find my brother.”
Find Rhysand.