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“You f-fool. W-we have different gods.”
“I am ruler of this court, and I will be heard!” She stood at the edge of the dais, beautiful and terrible as a storm, the air rippling and distorting around her. I wasn’t a member of the Sanasrothian Court, but even my ears rang with her authority.
“From this point forth, whenever you are in my presence, this is how you will greet me: on your knees! All subjects of the Blood Court of Sanasroth are forbidden from harming, hindering, or killing me, my mate, or any of my friends. Additionally, from this moment onward, no feeder enthralled to a high blood of this court may be used for the purposes of war, malice, or mayhem. I have spoken. It is done!”
Saeris had delivered her own edicts. The first laws of a new monarch, passed with force. The first steps of our plan were in place. The vampires of Sanasroth had no choice but to obey.
“She dosed you? In front of the whole Sanasrothian Court?”
Did you tear her clothes off in front of everyone?”
But I was remembering the heat of her venom in my veins and my head was starting to spin out again.
“Sounds to me like Saeris is one of the most powerful beings this side of the afterlife. They’ve crowned her. She’s spoken her will and made it law.”
“It gets sulky if I don’t clean it every night.” Lorreth’s tone bore a hint of exasperation. He grinned at us both in greeting. “The damned thing has mood swings worse than a Faeling whose balls are about to drop.”
Do the swords talk to those they bond with?
But selfishness was not my lot in this life. As if reminding me of my path, the tattoo on my inner left forearm tingled, the ink shivering beneath my skin. Sacrifice. It pulsed often, even stung from time to time, as if the ink were still fresh. But it never changed. Never spelled out some other, less painful future.
If she couldn’t find the information we so desperately needed in the Sanasrothian libraries…
the sudden urge I had to wrap my hands around Lorreth’s neck and squeeze until he stopped breathing. But a mated Fae didn’t like another male talking about his mate at the best of times. And I was newly mated. Hearing that he’d spoken to Saeris about the blood trade at all made me want to turn feral and burn down the fucking war tent.
Years later, I discovered the truth: that Taladaius had been there that night, overseeing the assault on the mountain. When asked, he’d said that he had done it as a kindness to me. That he had fed Foley his blood and then drained him, if only so that he might have a choice in whether he lived or died.
Faith.
“We have to hope. We need him. His grandfather was one of the last Alchemists. Foley knows more than anyone else about Alchemical magics and practices. Belikon burned all the Alchemists’ texts when he seized the crown. The few books that my father collected back at the library in Cahlish don’t explain much of anything at all. So that leaves the knowledge that exists in Foley’s head. If he won’t share that with her…”
The runes for vengeance and justice had been marked into my skin for a very long time… but now there were other runes layered over the top of them. So many runes, in fact, that they were impossible to differentiate from one another. The runes and script that wound their way up my arms—the God Bindings that matched Saeris’s own—were beautiful and terrifying, even to me.
Ren’s magic didn’t crackle and ebb, leaving bodies in its wake as it normally did. It flared, illuminating the dark, and then it absorbed into the two feeders that it had struck.
But when they hit home, spearing the feeders through the glowing marks where Ren’s magic now appeared to be trapped in their chests, my magic was pulled into them, too. And gods, did I feel it. It was like breathing in ice water. The cold struck hard, ripping my breath away. And the loneliness. The sorrow. It coiled up in my chest and wrapped around my heart so tight that it felt as though it were breaking. In over a hundred years trapped inside Malcolm’s maze, I had never felt as bereft as I did in that instant.
“They fed on our magic,” he whispered. It was so much worse than being bitten. Worse than them feeding on our blood. Blood was sacred, yes, but our magic? I wanted to be sick. In the grand scheme of things, neither of us had expended much of our power, but I could still feel it—that small piece of me that I had sent out into the world and would not be getting back.
Even Malcolm hadn’t been able to work that kind of magic on his feeders, though.
Algat?
“Tal hasn’t sired any feeders.”
“At every turn, you deny what’s staring you right in the face. He abandoned you. He left you over a thousand years ago. He willingly chose to leave us all and go with Malcolm. How do you think he is still walking the realm, hmm? The only way he is still here, proving to be a thorn in all our sides, is because he feeds from the living. He is everything we despise, and yet every time something like this happens, you make excuses for him.”
“I know that there can never be anything but bad blood between you and him. But you’ve never been bound by a curse, brother. You’ve never been forced to act against your will. And you have never been so in love with someone that you’d sell your soul to the devil to protect them. I pray that when you find your mate and you fall in love, you’ll know nothing but an everlasting peace with them. But for others…” I added sadly, “it isn’t that simple.”
The oak tree had been there for as long as I could remember, tall and proud despite the cold. Now, its trunk was shriveled, its bark sloughing off in thick slabs. From its roots to the tips of its branches, it festered with slimy mushrooms. The charred, headless bodies of the feeders struggled against their ropes, trying to wrestle free, but thankfully their restraints held true.
Similar to the tree in the Corcoran
Some deep, unsettled feeling inside me had told me something was wrong in Irrín.
“Do you like having fingernails, Carrion?” he asked politely. “I—” Carrion gaped. “I do, actually.”
“She isn’t my girlfriend. She’s my mate,” Fisher said quite amicably. “And if any part of your body, literally any part of it, comes into contact with hers, then I will remove it.”
“This is intentional. This is Madra’s doing. This… is how the rot got here in the first place.”
She hears us. Oh yes, she hears. She will come. Soon. Soon. Soon.
“Ammontraíeth has always had a pool.”
“The last time most of us saw you, we were shoving you up into a shadow gate in the library. Having you back here at Cahlish in one piece is something to be celebrated!”
Now that I came to think about it, her accent was fairly similar to Renfis’s. I would have to ask him if they hailed from the same part of Yvelia.
Carrion and Danya together would be the kind of living hell that I had no desire to experience firsthand—but he was my friend, and friends watched each other’s backs.
It’s hard to concentrate on camp logistics when I can smell you across the room, though, Osha.
Be under no illusion, Little Osha. You are all I can smell.
“Smells like you worked hard for that appetite,” Danya drawled, spearing a piece of fish onto her fork. Now that I looked at her, she wasn’t breathing through her mouth. Strangely enough, she seemed to be the only one who was inhaling deeply through her nose. Gross. She leaned across the table, angling her torso in Carrion’s direction. “From the smell of you, you must be ravenous.”
“If they procreate, I’m banishing them from Cahlish. A combination of the two of them would probably tear open some sort of hell gate and suck the entire estate through it.”
“You know I would marry you,” he rushed out. “You must know that I want to.”
“A Fae wedding ceremony is extremely sacred. It is the greatest commitment two lovers can undertake in Yvelia. Not because they swear to love and honor each other for all their days. Not because they give each other their hearts, either. It’s sacred because they give each other their names. Their true names. And I can give you everything else, Osha. But I can’t give you that.”
“I don’t know it,” he whispered. “I’ve never known it. We usually receive our true names on our fourteenth birthdays, and my mother—” He blinked. “Well, she died before I turned fourteen. And my father was already gone. So…”
“I love you, Fisher.” It was the first time I’d said it. “I love you, and nothing else matters beyond that. Wherever you are, I’ll beg the gods and all the fates to let me be there, too,” I whispered.
“I love you, Fisher. Of course I do. Always. Forever.”
I could suddenly feel the air inside the room. The way it eddied around the furniture and rose up to bloom against the roof rafters. I didn’t understand how I knew to do it, but I felt the air thickening. The molecules swaying with the tide of the room stopped, stilling, and my ears suddenly felt as if they were full of cotton wool.
“I don’t know. I just… I didn’t want anyone to hear us. I reached out, and I did it.”
“That’s a neat trick, Little Osha. An affinity to a small magic, perhaps. I wonder how many others you have up your sleeve.”
“No. Before, you smelled like fresh crushed leaves and the mountain air before a cold snap. A subtle hint of spices and citrus, and fire smoke.”
“Now, those scents are amplified a thousandfold. You smell like excitement. You smell like laughter. And peace. And love.”
Memories and scents have always been heavily interlinked for me. I smell something, and I immediately experience the association.”
“You forget that I’m a winter creature, Saeris,” Fisher murmured. “I don’t crave the attention of the sun. The snowcapped mountains, the forest, the frozen river… those places are my home. You are home.”
“I despise the gods, Saeris. I’m Oath Bound by this land and the blood of kings. I swore I would never offer up a word of gratitude to them again, but you have made a liar of me. You’re a gift that cannot be ignored. My heart…” He swallowed, giving a tiny shake of his head. “I’ve killed more people than I can count. I lost the parts of myself that knew how to feel anything other than pain and sorrow centuries ago. But for better or worse, you have brought me back to life.”
