House of Hunger

by Alexis Henderson

In Prane, bloodmaids were regarded as symbols of opulence and depravity in almost equal measure.

The worst of their job was the bleeding, which bloodmaids did frequently to satisfy the carnivorous appetites of the nobles, who relied on the healing properties of their blood as a lavish remedy for their varying ailments.

In the South, the prejudice against bloodmaids ran deep,

Some girls, even beautiful ones, refused to consider the position of bloodmaid as a matter of principle. Such was the stigma against the profession.

mothers would rather see their daughters become harlots on the streets of Prane than bloodmaids in the North. And many a southern priest had preached from the pulpit about the immortal dangers of bleeding, the toll that dark work took on the body and soul.

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.

Now, of the twenty-seven Houses, only four held any real power: the House of Hunger, the House of Fog, the House of Locusts, and the House of Mirrors.

The first bloodletting is a kind of unbecoming, wherein a girl dies and a bloodmaid is born.

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.”

“I’ll let you in on a little secret that will serve you well in the North: The whole world runs on blood. Who has good blood. Who has bad blood. Whose blood is shed and whose isn’t. That’s what it all comes down to in the end.

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.”

To be a bloodmaid is to commit yourself, body and soul, to one’s master or mistress, as the case may be.”

Marion, Bloodmaid of the House of Hunger, Ward of Lisavet Bathory.”

They say there is honor in the calling of a bloodmaid. If so, I have never known it.

As a rule, the more diverse the selection of bloodmaids, the more esteemed the House they served.

It’s illegal for children to be bloodmaids. By northern law, a girl must be six months past her first monthly bleed to even be considered for the role.” “We have to learn how to bleed for ourselves before we can learn to bleed for them,”

northern law prohibited bloodmaids from entering sacred matrimony with their keepers.

My mother once told me beautiful was the worst thing a girl could be. I’m now inclined to believe her.

“What we are made to feel we are made to remember. And there is no feeling as memorable as pain.

It’s a strange thing to go from the hungry . . . to the hungered for.

Favor is hard won and harder kept.

One shouldn’t need to inflict pain to be listened to and regarded with some measure of respect.”

“Don’t ask questions that lead to nasty answers.”

I’ll never know an evil so debased as my love for her.

I thought the distance would help, but it only made me want you more. I can’t continue to fight my hunger for you, Marion. I want you near me. I would give you everything. All of me, if you’ll only let me have you.”

It is only natural that bloodmaids form certain affinities for their peers. However, favor is a fickle thing and rivalry makes enemies of the kindest souls.

“Does your sickness have a name?” “Not a proper one. My father, and all of my ancestors who came before him, simply called it the hunger. The sickness is this House’s namesake. It’s been with us for generations. Since the very beginning of our bloodline.”

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

“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?” “Your teeth,” said Lisavet.

To love is to devour.

The sickness, the depravity, that had dragged the House founder from his dwelling place in the depths of the sea. The urge, no, the compulsion, to drain and devour and feed. To take a barely living thing and bleed it of what little life it had left to spare. Lisavet wasn’t just draining Cecelia of her blood, she was draining her body of its very soul.

Even now, they were aging beyond their years. Lisavet was draining them, of their health, their youth and time.

I belong more to her than I do myself. Is that not love? —the Wretch, formerly Cecelia, First Bloodmaid of the House of Hunger

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.

A darkness yawned open before them, the esophagus of the House, spiraling down to its belly, where Marion—like the other girls who’d come before her—would be digested. Consumed.