A Dowry of Blood (A Dowry of Blood, #1)

by S.T. Gibson

Magdalena for her brilliance, Alexi for his loveliness. But I was your war bride, your faithful Constanta, and you loved me for my will to survive.

ven loneliness, hollow and cold, becomes so familiar it starts to feel like a friend.

I wonder if you would have wanted me if you found me like that: vibrant and loved and alive.

What else could I have said? I didn’t know what I was asking for, besides begging not to be left alone in the dirt to drown in my own blood. If I had refused you, would you have left me there? Or was I already marked for you, my cooperation merely a bit of formality?

They feel no compassion, the moroi. Only hunger.

All I tasted was red and wrong and burning.

Liquid rage pooled in my stomach and lit up my face. It made me strong, that rage, hardened to solid iron in my limbs. All of a sudden, I wanted to destroy every man who had beat my father until he stopped moving, held torches to our home while my brother screamed for them to spare the children inside. I wanted to break them, even more slowly and painfully than they had broken me, leave them bleeding out and begging for mercy.

You did not let me keep my name, so I will strip you of yours. In this world, you are what I say you are, and I say you are a ghost, a long night’s fever dream that I have finally woken up from. I say you are the smoke-wisp memory of a flame, thawing ice suffering under an early spring sun, a chalk ledger of debts being wiped clean. I say you do not have a name.

I was more shocked by your tenderness than by your miraculous arrival at the moment of my death. In hindsight, I should have paid more attention to the convenience with which you arrived. There are no angels in this world to accompany the dying in their final moments, only pickpockets and carrion birds.

We mature over hundreds of years, moving every night a little further away from our humanity.

think, my lord, that this is when you loved me best. When I was freshly made, and still as malleable as wet clay in your hands.

Human beings were a less evolved creature, you said, wretched short-lived beasts suitable for food and diversion and little else. Certainly not true companionship. I should not attempt to forge any friendships outside our home, you warned me. They would only end in heartbreak.

I had always been a faithful person, sometimes bordering on superstitious. Entering my second life hadn’t changed that; it had simply broadened my existential horizons.

It is my intention to unravel it, to comprehend and map our condition.”

“Does that mean I could sire another?” I said, pressing my hand to my abdomen in shock. An old habit, associating birth with a womb. But it wasn’t childbirth I had in mind.

You always hated it when I overreached the carefully drawn limits of my knowledge.

The doctor took a few strides towards you, and I almost thought he might catch your arm as though you were a common merchant. Bold, this one.

You always kept a pair of strong black mares, and would replace them throughout our lives with animals that looked exactly the same. As much as you thrived on innovation, you preferred your own domestic life to stay unchanged.

1452

You preferred pretty women with stars in their eyes, or young men you had dazzled with your intelligence in one of the students’ drinking circles. But I had never outgrown my thirst for vengeance, and I preyed on only the most wicked members of society. Men, all of them, who I caught spitting at beggar children or grabbing a working girl’s arm so hard it bruised. I reserved a special sadism for serial violators and batterers. In my mind, I was God’s lovely angel of judgment, come to unsheathe the sword of divine wrath against those who truly deserved it.

I wouldn’t realize until later that you were irritable precisely because I was in bloom, because there were suddenly so many sources of joy in my life apart from your presence.

Why else would God allow me to fall into your hands if he did not want me to use my monstrousness to serve the common good?

“You must never overthink any good and pleasurable thing,” Magdalena went on, her cheek almost pressed to mine as we twirled. The wine on her breath was as sweet as blackcurrants. I wanted to taste it on her lips as much as I wanted to taste it in her veins. “We should never deny ourselves any pleasure in this life.”

We all developed our tricks for dealing with you: my invisibility, her sweetness.

I was not your first.

And for a long time, Magdalena simply thought that there was no use in keeping up correspondence with great minds that would only shrivel and die in a blink of our immortal eyes. Gradually, she retired her stationery and stopped accepting letters. We kept moving, never staying in one place long enough for our nature to be discovered by the locals, but we stopped following her adventurous whim from nation to nation. We traveled by your compass now, following the northern star of your interests. Just like it had been before she came to join our family. And Magdalena, poor lovely Magdalena, began to fade.

Two days prior she had been on top of the world, giggling at your jokes and preening in the mirror and stalking the streets like a beautiful panther out to find her nightly prey. She had been ablaze, barely needing any sleep and so full of ideas that she could scarcely string them together into a sentence. But now, she could hardly bring herself to brush her own hair.

Had any of them been sick like Magdalena, losing their shine when they could no longer dote on you and smile for you every hour of the day?

All the enthusiasm of youth with none of the wisdom and caution of age.