23 Years Ago, The Seward's Childhood Home
"Fiona darling, don't slump."
"I'm not slumping daddy," she replied, putting on her best pout face. She did however sit up straighter before sipping her tea. Her hands moved elegantly about her plate, cutting her meat with fine precision before taking the smallest bite to her lips. She even dabbed her mouth with her napkin, looking to please her father with the manners she had learned.
"And for heaven's sake Leopold, take your elbows off the table."
Leopold didn't reply to his father, only turned enough to give him that forlorn look before slowly sliding his elbows into his lap. He barely ate, odd for a boy. He seemed to grow in spite of his miserable appetite, but he was slim just the same, never very muscular.
His mother looked sympathetically at the young boy. Azrael couldn't look at her when she made that simpering face. "Catherine if you constantly baby him he will never learn table manners. How are we to get him an appointment in the Emperor's service when he's such a slovenly little creature?"
The way he said Emperor with such reverence… It sent chills down young Fiona's spine. How she longed to be appointed to her father's job, the High Inquisitor of the Emperor. This was an unspoken dream, though it was well known by Azrael. He could read his children like the Cups read their tea leaves.
Leopold would be a sensitive artist, hardly marriageable to anyone important, maybe a third daughter, maybe a fourth. No aspiration for power, or ability to take it, Leopold had a quiet destiny.
Fiona on the other hand was almost a perfect successor to her father's position. Damned that she be born a girl, held from her destiny by her sex. Azrael knew it was a bit too soon to train her, but before long he would begin in secret to teach her the art of inquisition and execution, that dulcet work often called torture. It was his life's work, his first love. He had to pass it on to someone; he was secretly pleased that his daughter had an interest and that she might prove a worthy candidate to learn his trade.
A shame about his son though, and his wife. She had certainly outlived her usefulness. Azrael knew, with some grim pleasure, that his wife wasn't much longer for this world. She had the wasting disease; they could all see it. Catherine didn't eat much, had grown thinner than her son. She was pale and weak, hardly able to make her face quirk into that pretty smile that Azrael fell for. He was almost sad, more relieved. Once Catherine was gone he'd make one last effort to raise his son into a proper man, but he was positive it was a losing battle. Then he'd begin Fiona's training in earnest.
Strange that his children's futures hung so delicately on his wife's impending death; stranger still, he thought, that his own future would be entirely unchanged by this loss.