A Court of Wind and Song

2: The Palace of Light

Azriel

Evening sunlight, and the sound of Leur's fingers drifting across piano keys. A beautiful melody, a song of hope and love as she sang a quiet tune. Drifting through the hallways of the palace, filling each sunlit hallway with song and melody, like a siren song calling to me as I showered.

Even after all these months, it still felt strange to stand without my wings. Leur and Rhys had spent so long teaching me how to control them, how to summon them and hide them again. It was like relearning everything, how to walk and fly. The missing weight of them adjusted everything, every single thing. They moved differently now too, like all the muscle memory I had was wrong. If anything, it was is if they were more powerful than they were before. But I hadn't realized just how different things would feel without them sometimes, just a bit more free to move.

It made training without them fun. I was more agile, quicker.

That was where I had just come from, the training center we had built underneath our new house. The palace that used to sit on these grounds was pure gold, and Leur had been right when she called it the most obnoxious thing she'd ever seen. I was a fan of grandeur, but that was entirely over the top. We'd enjoyed blasting it to pieces in front of our subjects, putting an end to the previous reign of cruelty, oppression, and endless war once and for all.

So, when the smoke had cleared, we had called a man named Ammon. He was the same builder that had helped her design and build the House of Song. We designed this house as our palace in Solarea, affectionately called the Palace of Light by the people in the city of Aelius.

It was a beautiful building, similar to the House of Song in its white marble stone and the motifs of the moon and the sun everywhere. Except, it was much larger and detailed with silver and gold in the architecture. Stained glass everywhere, with balconies up high enough for us to take off of, celestial art on every wall, and a sprawling garden full of lavender and forget-me-nots. Leur had even consulted Elain when we designed it, asked her to come help with it. She had enjoyed planting, had loved the bright sunlight of our city even more. Out of everyone in the family, she was the one who visited the most.

But the thing I liked most about this palace was that it had a clear separation between the areas that were reserved for our work and our private residence. The throne room, ballroom, meeting rooms and such were all in the west wing, and the east wing was guarded by wards and only entered by us and our family. Leur had even created a spell for it that was similar to the House of Wind, where this section of the palace had a mind of its own and would offer up whatever you needed at request.

And almost daily, I'd come back from training to Leur playing some kind of musical instrument and singing. The custom piano that Cassian had gifted her for her birthday, her old guitar that Rhysand had kept all those years. Right now, Tamlin was also teaching her how to play the violin. She had a whole room for it, riddled with notes of lyrics, sheets of music, instruments, and books upon books of ancient songs.

The first time that Tamlin visited us here, he had simply just stopped and stared at it. He was completely still, eyes just wandering over the space. When I had asked him what was wrong, he had told me that for a long time, he didn't think he'd ever hear her sing or play again.

And now, she did it every day.

Leur and I bounced between Solarea and the Night Court all the time. It was difficult, working with the fact that it was day here when it was night there. However, it also meant that we could work a day here and then go home and work a day there too.

Unfortunately, it meant we didn't sleep much.

Then again, Solarea didn't need too much looking after. We had changed the laws to allow the Generals to do a lot more than they did before, allowing them and the Councils to pretty much run their territories. So, Leur and I were not as busy with Solarea as I thought we would be. However, Rhys required a lot more of us recently. After the war, things in Prythian were... tense. I spent most of my free time fulfilling my duties as spymaster.