The Storm King

After Leon and Elise’s chat about polygamy, they stayed in her bedroom for a few more minutes until it was time to have dinner. It was fairly late, but the chefs on Emilie’s payroll still prepared a small feast just for Leon, Elise, and Alix, and laid it all out in Elise’s private living room. The chefs hadn’t expected Anzu to be there, however, so Leon tossed the griffin a few turkey legs, which he happily devoured whole.

“He’s so cute!” Elise gushed at seeing the griffin stretch out and lay down on a couch after eating.

Realizing that he was being talked about, Anzu raised his head and stared at Elise as if he was unsure how to deal with her.

Leon walked over and gently stroked Anzu’s head, much to the griffin’s obvious delight, and asked Elise, “Want a formal introduction?”

Elise almost bounced over with the biggest grin on her face, but as she drew closer, Alix said, “Careful, that guy doesn’t like anyone except Leon.”

Leon chuckled, then said, “It’s all right, he won’t bite or peck or anything else while I’m here.”

With some small amount of hesitation, Elise reached out to gently pat Anzu’s head, and the griffin warily watched her the entire time, but just as Leon said, the griffin didn’t do anything with his human there with him. He didn’t look too pleased with Elise’s head pats, though.

“I guess he’s a little unfriendly,” Leon admitted as Anzu’s glare slowly grew darker and more intense the longer Elise ran her hands through the gleaming white feathers on his head.

“He’s still more personable than you, love,” Elise said with a wry smile.

“You say that like it’s an accomplishment,” Alix added. “Just about every living thing is friendlier than Leon is with a stranger.”

“I… uh… hmmm…” Leon sputtered. He wasn’t able to seriously dispute those statements, but he also felt like he had to respond in order to maintain his dignity. Unfortunately for him, no good answer for this teasing came to mind, and he eventually fell silent.

Almost as if to rescue Leon from his awkwardness, someone knocked on the door of the living room. Without waiting for a response, Emilie pushed her way inside, and her face lit up at the sight of Leon and Alix in her home.

“Oh, I just knew you two were going to stay here, it’s so good to see you!” she said in an almost exaggerated display of hospitality. “Leon, Alix, you two may consider yourselves most welcome here! My home is your home!”

“Thank you, My Lady,” Alix said with a great deal of formality.

Leon was significantly less formal, simply nodding respectfully.

“Hello, Mother,” Elise said quietly with a look of subtle suspicion. She wondered what Emilie was doing in her private wing of the estate, but she refrained from asking directly.

Emilie, however, wasn’t quite so restrained.

“Elise, dear, I’d like to speak with Leon for a few minutes, do you mind if I borrow him?”

Elise frowned, but said, “It’s not like I own him…” She shot Leon a look of warning, but Leon hardly felt like he could refuse, especially after Emilie had just offered such a warm welcome.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, and Emilie smiled and led him out into the hall.

As soon as the door was closed, though, the smile on her beautiful face vanished and her sparkling green eyes narrowed in anger—all trace of the playfulness that Leon had come to expect from Emilie vanished instantly. She spun around faster than Leon thought possible and wrapped her fingers around his throat, lifting him into the air. Leon was so surprised that it wasn’t until she was already holding him at arm’s length that he began to channel his magic and try to resist.

However, when he tried to pry open Emilie’s fingers, his efforts failed.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you,” Emilie reassured Leon, though the effect was ruined somewhat by the look of fury on her face and her steel-like fingers against his windpipe. “I just wanted to impress upon you the importance of my daughter to me. I have raised her to the best of my ability, I have done all I can to give her everything a mother can give, and I will not see her brought to tears because she gave too much to the first boy she took an interest in, no matter who he is! Do you understand?!”

Finally understanding what was going on, Leon stopped trying to resist. He looked Emilie in the eye as best he could in his position and croaked, “Yes…”

Emilie stood there, holding Leon in the air and staring into his eyes, almost as if she could see directly into his mind and soul. Her aura was towering, what little Leon could sense completely overwhelming him and filling him with a deep sense of dread. Emilie’s killing intent wasn’t as intense as Trajan’s was, but what it lacked in immediate inducement of terror it more than made up for with a slow, creeping, inevitable sense of doom, as if nothing Leon could ever do would allow him to escape her wrath.

Once she felt like she had made her point, Emilie dropped Leon back to his feet and said, “She’s giving up a lot to be with you. If you don’t prove worthy…” After her previous threat, she left this one unsaid, but Leon still understood exactly what she was trying to say.

“I’ll always do my best to make her happy,” he said. His bright golden eyes found Emilie’s and held that contact, despite Emilie’s all-encompassing aura. He didn’t flinch, he didn’t back down, he stared right back into Emilie’s emerald eyes and showed no signs of his fear of her killing intent.

A few moments later, Emilie muttered, “See that you do,” and left. She said nothing else, didn’t say goodbye to her daughter, she just turned around and walked away, leaving Leon alone in the hall.

Leon quickly wiped away the sweat that had started to bead on his forehead, composed himself, then re-joined Elise and Alix.

“What did my mother want?” Elise asked, noticing the change in Leon’s appearance despite his attempts to regain his composure.

“Nothing much,” Leon replied as he gave his lady what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “She just wanted to impress upon me just how much she cares for you.”

Elise smiled bitterly and decided not to press for details, then went back to playing with Anzu, who was starting to come around to letting her touch him, much to Alix’s consternation. However, Elise kept an eye on Leon, who collapsed into a nearby armchair and tried to take a few deep breaths without being overt about it.

It took him several minutes to truly recover, but even then, his knees were still a little weak and his hands subtly shook. But he remembered something important that he needed to get taken care of as soon as possible, something that he didn’t want to postpone for later.

“Elise, there’s something I could use your help with,” Leon said.

“What is it?” Elise asked.

“Do you remember the ring I took from those assassins on the boat after I left the Knight Academy?”

“How could I forget?” Elise said with a deep frown of anger. Even after more than a year and nearly ruining House Decimius’ finances, it still infuriated her beyond words that Tiberias had attempted to have Leon killed.

“Well… I broke it. Or rather, it broke when I was fighting with a Talfar warrior.”

“Is that why it took you so long to get back to the Horns?” Alix inquired. She knew that it had been working just fine when he left her and Anzu in the gatehouse during the Talfar army’s first assault, but she didn’t know that the ring had been subsequently broken.

“That’s probably the biggest reason,” Leon admitted. “It was disrupted in the middle of rendering me invisible, and I guess the ring’s more fragile than I thought because it almost split in half.”

“The enchantment placed in it only made you invisible, it’s still made of gold,” Elise said with a smile.

Leon shrugged in mild embarrassment. Gold’s relative softness hadn’t occurred to him before, which was something he vowed to fix in the future. He had to be aware of all the limitations of the equipment his life depended on, but he hadn’t once thought about the fragility of the material his ring as far as he could remember. As an enchanter, this was something he couldn’t let stand, and he vowed to keep the materials of his gear in mind for the future.

“Let me see it,” Elise said, holding out her hand. Leon immediately summoned the broken invisibility ring from his soul realm and handed it to her.

Elise closely examined the ring, making sure she saw every little detail that there was to see. The gold band had a long crack beneath the emerald, but the emerald itself seemed fine to her, which was a good thing. The enchantment also didn’t seem too badly damaged, but she was hardly an expert on these things so she couldn’t say for certain. Regardless, she knew that the Heaven’s Eye smiths and enchanters were up to the task.

“It’s not too bad, I’m sure we can get this taken care of in a couple of days,” Elise confidently estimated as she handed the ring back to Leon.

“Out of curiosity, how much does one of those rings cost?” Alix asked. She didn’t think they would be cheap, but she had built up a little nest egg in her time at the Bull’s Horns and wondered if her meager savings would be enough. Of course, she didn’t actually think that they would be, but it didn’t hurt to ask.

“Depends on who you are and how many you’re buying at once,” Elise explained. “The man who had this commissioned paid about forty-three million silvers for twenty rings, but if you were to go in and try to buy one, it’d probably cost around three million.”

“Holy shit!” Alix exclaimed. She only had about ten thousand silvers in her account, more than enough for a decent enchantment to be placed on her armor, but not even close to buying something that would bestow invisibility. However, she was now a knight in Prince Trajan’s service, so her monthly pay was about to skyrocket, so she was trying to keep her gear in mind when looking to spend some of that silver.

“They’re complicated enchantments and I doubt many enchanters like making them,” Leon said.

“They don’t,” Elise agreed. “They’re exceedingly easy to get wrong, and you can see, they also tend to make the object they’re a part of rather fragile. If the process of turning invisible is forcibly halted partway through, the magic being channeled into the ring will almost explode out, damaging the object, as happened with your ring.”

“Makes sense,” Leon said with a nod of his head. He’d read about plenty of enchantments that would do the same thing, but he hadn’t yet experimented with any of them—his experience was mostly limited to enchantments that raised the defensive properties of his armor and those that augmented his own magical powers, neither of which placed too much stress on the enchanted object.

“We can head over to the Tower tomorrow and get this sorted out. You two aren’t going to have too many duties, are you?” Elise asked, hoping that they could spend more time together. With Valeria and Asiya busy defending the Royal Harem, she didn’t get a chance to spend a lot of time with people she considered friends anymore.

“We should be pretty free; I can’t imagine there’s anything substantial for us to do here…” Leon said with a questioning look sent toward Alix.

“I haven’t been told anything, either,” Alix said.

“That settles it, then!” Elise said with a joyous smile, startling Anzu a little bit. The griffin darted up from the couch, ran over to Leon, and jumped on his lap.

Leon shouted in surprise, but Anzu lay down over Leon’s legs and refused to move while pressing one of his wings up against Leon’s chin.

“Be careful, Elise, I think you might have some unexpected competition,” Alix joked.

Elise stared at Anzu with a frown, but the griffin stared right back. There was a wariness in Anzu’s blood-red eyes, but Elise also couldn’t detect any hostility there. However, before she could do anything to try and make Anzu more comfortable with her, Leon wrapped his arms around the griffin’s midsection and picked Anzu up off of his lap.

“Get off me, you’re heavy!” Leon said with an amused frustration. “I think I might be feeding you too much. Either that or you’re growing too damn fast.”

“If he gets any bigger, he might have to sleep in the stables,” Alix said.

Anzu was practically growing by the day, and his wingspan was already great enough that he had some trouble getting through the doors of the estate. Before too long, he’d be unable to enter the estate at all.

Anzu continued to stare at Elise after Leon put him down, but Leon gently pushed his head down and said, “Don’t be rude!” When the griffin looked suitably repentant, Leon let him up.

Fortunately, Elise wasn’t put off too much by Anzu’s behavior, and she continued trying to make friends with Anzu. And it seemed to be working, by the end of the day, Anzu at least wasn’t so on edge around her that he watched her every movement. When it came time to get some rest, though, he was a little more difficult. Leon had let him sleep on his bed at the Bull’s Horns, but Elise wanted him to sleep on a large and luxurious dog bed at the foot of her bed. Anzu wasn’t too enthusiastic, though, and it took a lot of coaxing from Leon before the griffin finally moved after sprawling out over Elise’s bed.

Making things even more awkward, when Leon and Elise started getting a little more intimate, Anzu stared at the two and didn’t look away no matter what. Leon and Elise, despite finding some amusement in the situation, were so uncomfortable that they ended up going to sleep without doing much more than making out.