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As the days continued and their casual companionship grew more comfortable, Ember assumed she was not going to be removed from Severath’s home, but she didn’t ask him about his reports just in case he had forgotten to tell the council about…

everything. He sent letters daily on the wings of those colorful drayk creatures, but no one came to cart her off, and she was glad she would not have to meet someone new and risk them being unlike Severath.

Which she supposed meant she liked him. She certainly didn’t not like him. Apathy was impossible when someone had held you, and hating him now was right out, so that left little else to feel.

And that was more convenient than anything, really.

One evening in the parlor as they sat beside each other on the small sofa, she asked if he felled the creature whose antlers were on the wall.

Severath shook his head and admitted he didn’t care much for hunting but that hiriivi naturally dropped their racks every seven years.

As the fire crackled and cast crimson over the walls, he stood and retrieved a book off the shelf.

There was more information inside about many of the Veilwood and Dreadmoor beasts, he told her as he handed it off with excitement sparking in his eye.

Ember curled her fingers around the rough leather cover as he sat beside her again.

Chatting about nameless flowers and sautéing techniques had certainly helped her feel at ease, but contemplating an admission of more truth made her innards prickle.

She could flee up the stairs and shut herself away if it got too hard, of course, so the words forced themselves up her throat and let her flounder in their wake. “I can’t read.”

His eye narrowed and his nose wrinkled. “But we use an almost identical script to the human language here. Demons keep up with your writings so that we can stay abreast of your advances and?—”

“I mean, I can’t read at all .”

His face faltered even more.

Before the embarrassment could come, she clicked her tongue. “Guess your assessment isn’t going all that well if you didn’t figure that out, huh?”

Severath sat up straight. “My assessment is impeccable, but this is unacceptable.” And then he marched away.

Ember listened as he headed up the stairs, unsure exactly what to do, but at least his actions were so perplexing she didn’t have the space inside to feel shame.

There was shuffling overhead, and then the demon returned to the parlor with a stack of parchment and a bright green quill in hand.

His tail wrapped around the leg of a short table as he passed, pulling it right up to Ember’s knees.

“I have no idea how to teach something like this,” he said as he sat beside her, “but we will figure it out together.”

There was very little figuring at first, but there was quite a bit of swearing, mostly from Ember.

The frustration never elevated to fury, however, likely helped by the fact that Severath too was frustrated, and she found that supremely amusing.

The way his black brows pinched together and shifted the swath of fabric over his injured eye, and how his fangs peeked out from under his upper lip were particularly entertaining, but the best of all was when his tail thwacked against the sofa.

He wouldn’t really notice right away but would then look around as if hearing the rhythmic sound for the first time, discover that he was the source, and bashfully tuck its tip behind his leg.

They added studying to their routine, and soon their days were filled with each other, and inevitably, brief touches.

But Ember didn’t tense when her arm brushed Severath’s as they traded the quill or when he hovered close to observe how to properly scramble eggs.

Ember did, however, notice Severath’s annoyance when he ran his hands through his hair and caught himself on the sharpness of his broken horn.

“Are your horns like the hiriivi’s? Will they replace themselves in a few years?” she asked carefully one evening over the beast compendium she’d been copying out of to get the feel of the letters.

He grunted and shook his head. “Horns can grow back, but mine won’t.”

That was the answer she suspected. “What’s left is sharp,” she observed as she spun the quill between her fingers. “I noticed your hair gets caught on it sometimes.”

He grunted a little lower.

“Are you using the tincture Balran gave you for pain?”

He shot her a disdainful look, his uncovered brow arching. “ This is not painful.”

“Except when you nick your hand.”

“Except when I nick my hand,” he admitted, flipping over his palm and revealing a dark line where he had sliced himself earlier—the result of Ember properly identifying two letters in a row and then failing at the next four. “I have trouble seeing the top of it to file the jagged point down.”

“Oh!” She turned to him, abandoning the quill a bit too happily. “I can do that.”

Severath’s mouth fell open, parchment slipping out of his hand to sail slowly to the floor. She knew she was smiling at him, and maybe that was it—Ember didn’t smile that often, especially not at the demon—but he only stared back as if she’d offered to chop off his other horn.

“You would…help me?” he finally asked like the concept was as foreign as Kaetong.

“You’re helping me.” She gestured to her squiggles beneath his own neat script.

She wouldn’t say it was because of the guilt building mountains in her mind like the god Rohash molding the earth itself, but when the demon retrieved a grinding stone and handed it over, the range shifted with the smallest of quakes.

She took the teardrop-shaped stone and flipped it over a few times, one side smooth and glittering with golden veins and the other rough with hundreds of tiny markings.

“Like this,” Severath said, turning her hand in his own so that it was palm up then sliding the smooth surface of the stone into her grip, its point nestled between her second and third fingers.

He gently squeezed her hand around it, and it wasn’t until he let go that she realized how visceral that touch had been.

She knew she should have had some kind of reaction to it, yet she hadn’t thought to pull away.

Severath sat there beside her, hands resting on his knees. The firelight danced over his profile, his eye covered and unable to see her, probably a good thing when she felt her face redden.

“I suppose I’ll just…” She made a rubbing motion with her hand and peered at his broken horn. Well, that was sort of a long way up.

Ember folded her legs and extended upward on her knees.

When she could see the top of his head, she remembered the night that she had buried her fingers in his hair.

Just as carefully as before, she placed her hand on the back of his head and angled the broken nub toward her.

The skin around its base was scarred, the red pinker in some places, browner in others, but she knew it would be worse behind the length of fabric he wore as a cover.

“I’m just going to…start?”

Severath’s next grunt was a clear affirmation, so she brought the stone to one of the many jagged peaks of what was left of his horn and began to rub. She was careful, dragging the stone in just one direction with a light touch. Nothing much seemed to happen.

“You may have to be a bit more aggressive,” Severath cautioned from beneath her.

“You’ll tell me if it hurts?”

“Of course.”

She didn’t entirely believe him, Balran’s words about his propensity for self-punishment echoing in her mind, but she put more pressure behind the stone anyway, and the tallest of the shiny black points began ever so slightly to dull.

Ember ran a finger over the point after a few minutes and was pleased to feel a smoother surface. There were more to do, and a cleft she noticed his hair always got caught in, so she moved in closer. “Is it all right if I do this?” she asked, touching his other horn.

Severath grunted as he was wont to do, so she took it as approval, gripped his other horn for stability, and went to work.

It was almost like scrubbing a stove that had been neglected after a holiday, chipping away at the roughness and mess.

Only this would not be quick to be made dirty again, and when she was done, there was a much greater chance someone would be happy with her work.

Ember bit down on her tongue as she leaned close and searched for the hidden, still-sharp places.

She smoothed each then moved on, delight growing.

She didn’t bother to ask the next time she readjusted his head, using his intact horn as a lever, and he didn’t protest, but it wasn’t as if she forgot he was there, his body warm against hers.

She slid forward, one knee wedging itself behind his back and the other up against his thigh.

His shoulder ended up pressed to her as well, but that was only useful really, keeping both of them steady as she ground down the hardest-to-find points.

It was as close as they’d been since that night, she knew, but she wouldn’t let the fact slip into the front of her mind, she simply let herself enjoy the softness of his hair and smoothness of his other horn and warmness of his body.

Finally, she ran her hand over the nub, and it was smooth too, no places to catch his hair or slice his palm. “I think we’re done!” She sat back on her feet and grinned. “Give it a feel.”

Severath turned his face slightly so that his good eye could see her. Demons had no whites, but if they did, Ember imagined she would have been able to see an entire ring around his pupil. The redness in his face had deepened, and his fangs were visible again.

“Oh, shit, you were supposed to say if I was hurting you!”

Severath shook his head, reaching up to feel her work. His face changed then, surprise and contentment both battling there. “More than adequate,” he said.

“I’ve cleaned lots of stoves and things.” She chuckled and tossed the grinding stone from one hand to the other. “So it’s not my first time rubbing one out.”

She was still grinning, so that might have explained the apprehension Severath wore, but then his head dipped slightly, and she followed his gaze to how their bodies had fallen together. With knees still bent, her legs were spread around his side, and his arm was trapped between them.

“Oh, ah, s-sorry.” She laughed nervously as she struggled to push herself away. Severath remained unmoving like a terrified animal until they were detached. “Well, my arms are really tired now, and I don’t think I can write anymore, so bed?”

Severath began to nod then stopped himself.

“On my own,” she said quickly as she stood, gathering up the parchment she’d been practicing on and stuffing it between the book’s pages.

“But obviously that’s how it always is, and I wouldn’t…

I mean you wouldn’t…you know what I fucking mean!

” She wasn’t laughing by the time she made her way to the stairs, book and parchment squeezed to her chest. The stone was also somehow still in her full hands, so she placed it atop the banister and pointed.

“For you. Because it’s yours, obviously, and I don’t have fucking horns.

” She scurried up the stairs, the vision of an unmoving but deeply red Severath burned into her brain while embarrassed anger at herself flared under every inch of her skin.