House of Hunger

by Alexis Henderson

To bleed is to be. —VANESSA, FIRST BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF HUNGER

The way she saw it, friends were a luxury reserved for people who had the spare time to spend with them—like the girls who wandered Main Street with their parasols and bone-white gloves, retiring to their parlors in the afternoon to take a bit of tea and talk.

Girls like Marion and Agnes had no use or time for companions. They were simply fixtures in each other’s lives, a part of Prane’s habitat, like the reeking miasma and the crows and the rats that roamed the streets in packs at night.

That was something Marion’s mother used to say. That folks in Prane had two souls—one made of the stuff of the heavens, the other from miasma.

Thus, the slums of Prane felt much like a realm caught between, in perpetual indecision, as if the skies couldn’t decide what they wanted to be. Never fully day. Never fully night. Never anything at all.

But begrudging contentment was not the same as happiness. At best it was familiarity, and at worst defeat. It certainly wasn’t the same as true fondness.

WANTED: Bloodmaid of exceptional taste. No more than 19. Must have a keen proclivity for life’s finer pleasures. No references required. Candidates will be received by mail at The Night Embassy, 727 Crooks Street, Prane, or personally from 10 to 12 in the evening hours. Girls of weak will need not apply.

“Whoring for a night lord is nothing like a marriage.” Marion saw little difference between the two. Both the act of becoming a bloodmaid and the act of becoming a wife were a kind of amalgamation of fealty and flesh, blood and fidelity. And why sell yourself to a penniless man when you could sell yourself to a lord of the North?

“I don’t see how the two are so different. I’d rather bleed to sate the appetite of a night lord than bleed on the birthing bed, bearing the children of a man I hardly love.”

We are all alike in the fact that our great life’s work is deciding who and what we are willing to bleed for. —OLIVIA, BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF FOG

The first bloodletting is a kind of unbecoming, wherein a girl dies and a bloodmaid is born. —JOYCE, MOTHER OF THE HOUSE OF NOON

The night I was chosen, I believed myself most highly favored. A goddess among girls. I was not wrong … but I know now that there are greater goddesses than me. —MARCIA, BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF EMERALDS

You want more than an honest life. Is that it? You want splendor and luxury and all the vices that come with it. I can see it in your eyes. The greed. The want for things you were never meant to have. The way you watch the women of high town hold their parasols and tilt their chins just so. Even as a child you’d try to mimic them, walk heel to toe the way they did. Turn up your nose.”

“I make no apologies for my ambitions,” Marion snapped. “But to say I mean to rise beyond my station is a lie. I have no intention of turning my back on my past or pretending to be something more than I am.” Even as she said it, she wasn’t sure it was the truth.

Your blood is mine along with the rest of you.

That strange and vile feeling stirred in her stomach again. Behind the cage of her ribs, her heart began to race.

But she didn’t move to help him. Instead, she turned her back on him, on the slum house and the only home she’d ever known—which was, in earnest, no home at all—took to the streets, and ran.

The calling of a bloodmaid is that of pain and luxury in equal part. —ROSA, BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF BRAMBLES

It was better to take the pain. That was what her mother always taught her. If you cheated your way out of life’s hurts, you wouldn’t be ready for the next blow. And the next blow was always coming.

“This isn’t true night, child. True night is black too thick to see through. It’s a crescent moon and starless skies and the kind of cold that kills. You’ll know it when you feel it.”

“There’s no place for nostalgia in the North. What you’re to become will require you to forsake everything you were before. In time you will purge yourself of all that you were in order to become all that you must be. That is the way of the bloodmaid. It’s your great sacrifice.”

Consumption is the highest honor. —SELINA, BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF HUNGER

She is always the novice but never the fool.

We bleed for those we love most. —ELMA, BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF DUSK

She wasn’t sure what girl had come before her, but she was certain of this: Whoever she was had not been as strong or resilient as she.

Thiago had told her she was born to bleed, and she was determined to prove it. So Marion scrawled her name at the bottom of the contract and surrendered herself—body and soul—in service to the House of Hunger.

My mother once told me beautiful was the worst thing a girl could be. I’m now inclined to believe her. —MINA, BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF HUNGER

It’s a strange thing to go from the hungry … to the hungered for. —VANESSA, FIRST BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF HUNGER

Favor is hard won and harder kept. —JESSAMINE, BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF FOG

Of this I am utterly certain: I will never again know peace. —VANESSA, FIRST BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF HUNGER

“My father used to tell me I had eyes for the things I shouldn’t see.”

“I’m afraid there’s very little left, my lady. Sometimes I fear that whatever natural virtue I once possessed has been drained down to the dregs.”

There was some part of her—small, but hungry with ambition—that wanted to be the favorite. Perhaps that was only natural, but the more she considered the possibility the greater her desire became.

I am a fox caught in the maw of the hound, but I know no fear. —CONSTANCE, BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF MIRRORS

What is my purpose if not to bleed? —LILA, BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF DOVES

I’ll never know an evil so debased as my love for her. —CECELIA, FIRST BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF HUNGER

As I sit with the needle buried deep in my arm I wonder, do I empty myself in vain? —AURIEL, BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF MIRRORS

rivalry makes enemies of the kindest souls.

In fact, she didn’t feel much of anything at all except, perhaps, a peculiar hollowness. As though she’d lost something and couldn’t remember what.

But now, when I’m laid low, it feels like starving. It’s as if I’m housing a storm of locusts in my belly, and they’re hungry for all of the things I’ll never get to do or see. The people I’ll never meet. The mountains I’ll never climb. The oceans I’ll never sail across. The lives I’ll never lead.”

“Hunger makes monsters of the kindest souls. And to be quite honest … I’ve never been particularly kind.”

Love is an act of sacrifice. —NOEL, BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF STORMS

My sins are too many to count … but I feel I’ve bled enough to absolve them all. —ARACELI, BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF DOVES

Even if Lisavet made her bleed until Marion teetered on the very brink of death. She would’ve done it gladly, and it would have been enough.

“Sometimes I feel like I’ve been building you a House out of my own bones. And still, you look at me with so much contempt and mistrust. You complain because there are gaps in the roof of my ribs, and you ask me to give more of myself to fill them. You want my hips to be the bowl you drink from. My shoulders, your bed. My arms, your walls. My legs, the very ground you stand on. You want your fill of my blood whenever you crave it. What more do you want from me?”

To love is to devour. —HELENA, BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF ROSES

The dead answer to no one. —DOREN, BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF FERNS

A bruised plum is always the last chosen. —LUCILLE, BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF HUNGER

I belong more to her than I do myself. Is that not love? —THE WRETCH, FORMERLY CECELIA, FIRST BLOODMAID OF THE HOUSE OF HUNGER

“You know, when I was a little girl, my father once told me that if you eat the weak, you’ll never go hungry. I learned at a young age that love requires a kind of … dismantling. One learns to make the object of your hunger love you. Because when they love you, they’ll do the emotional butchery themselves. It was you, Marion, not me, who cut open your own chest, reached into the wet cavern behind your ribs, cut your heart loose of its rigging, and offered it to me. I had only to take it.”