6. Bane
Chapter 6
Bane
T here was warg-sign in the Rift, freshly carved into a tree. A beast marking territory that was not his to claim.
The bubbling hum of excitement in my veins died as my nostrils flared open, the powerful fiend senses consuming most of the rational thought in my brain as I studied his scent.
Young male. No more than twenty. Northerner—the thick taste of pine sap and minerals. Recent blood spoor, not his.
I crouched by the tree, closing my senses off once more. Coming back to myself, little by little.
The carriage was only three miles behind me. With my throat aching with unquenched thirst, the last thing I wanted was to be in the mindset of a hunting fiend when it rolled by, spilling the fragrance of the two human women into the air like a beckoning feast before a starving man.
Particularly Cirrien’s scent, which now seemed engraved in my forebrain, a smell I would recognize for the rest of my life.
I should have fed more heavily before bringing my bride back to the Rift. Wyn had encouraged me to do so, but with my vows looming like a tidal wave preparing to crash over me, I had foregone deep drinking. Soon Cirrien would be the only one I would want to taste.
At the time, my thought had been to cut myself off early. To become used to the ascetic lifestyle of a fiend married to a woman who wanted nothing to do with him. Options or not, I would do my best to uphold the vows before succumbing to need.
Thirst would be the defining quality of my future. Always parched, never satisfied.
Now, I thought… there might be a chance. The floral and musk scent of my bride was nearly overpowering to my senses, to the degree that no others had smelled as tempting since the moment I’d stepped into her presence.
If she allowed me to touch her.
Instead of counting slowly, as Wyn had encouraged me to do when the fiend wanted to rise to the surface, I replayed the hand motions the Brother had taught me last night.
A pressing of palms together: thank you .
The twist of a wrist, with a quick flare of the fingers upwards: cannot .
A soft wave, just over the forehead: dreams .
He had taught me over three hundred movements, drilling them over and over, and it had not been nearly enough. He had made it clear that a single night of practice was like dipping a toe in a shallow puddle, when an entire unseen ocean lurked beneath.
Perhaps if Cirrien stayed near me instead of locking herself in her tower, I would be able to piece together more of her language.
I had accepted that it was impossible to learn any of her signs fluently in one night—there was a limit to what one could learn over the course of eight hours. But now I would have a vantage point from which to begin.
With the sign for anger running through my head—a sharp jab with three fingers, palm inward—one of my ears swiveled to the south, the tip quivering.
Distant hoofbeats. Eryan was less than a mile away now with his precious cargo.
I rose to my full height, touching the warg-sign once more. Whoever he was, he had been sacrificed: Thurn Hakkon, the once-defeated commander of the Forian wargs, knew that this boy would not be returning from the Rift.
It was a suicide run. To kill me or the future Lady—whichever one he destroyed, it would be a blow to Veladar.
If I died, the seat would revert to human hands, unless another vampire was willing to make the metamorphosis into a fiend, with all the strictures that entailed… not to mention the horror of the process itself. The Rift would be left weak and undefended by their own monsters.
And if Cirrien died… well. The humans would provide me with another bride, another woman to ensure the Accords remained unbroken.
But I did not want another bride. I wanted her , the woman who stood up straight and dared to look me in the eye.
So the seat would revert to human hands regardless, because I would cross the border into Foria, and slaughter as many of them as I could before they took me down by sheer dint of numbers.
Neither outcome was acceptable. Hakkon had sent the boy to his doom.
The clatter of hooves grew louder, and I twisted my ears back as it came into sight, bursting through the mist on the road. Stepping back into the roils of fog, I allowed myself a glance at the window.
Cirrien. Just visible through the smoked glass, searching the fog.
For a moment I thought she saw me—but in the three seconds it took for the carriage to pass, her gaze focused on the tree marked by the warg.
Eryan still wore his tricorn hat. A sign to me, hiding in the mist, that he had seen and heard no sign of approach.
When they disappeared into the mist, I took another deep breath of the warg-sign, and lowered myself to all fours.
Agony rippled through my bones, spreading outwards like ripples in a pond. My skin shifted and oozed, accommodating the thickening plates of cartilage that would protect my vital organs and weak points. No wings. My business was on the ground.
Moving like a beast, I followed the trail of fresh wolf spoor.
He had moved back and forth, crisscrossing the road, but I picked up a clear trail heading north, so fresh I could almost taste his sweat.
So fresh I knew that he was still in pain from his first shift, frightened but determined, the scent acrid and filling my mind with a red haze.
His target was Cirrien.
He would never achieve his goal. Not while I lived.
Several hundred yards behind the carriage, the trail moved off the road. My tongue flicked out, the sensitive receptors tasting him in the paw prints left behind: distorted prints, somewhere between feet and paws, grooves gouged into the earth where his claws had dug in.
Moving silently over the carpet of dead needles, I ran faster.
Even with sensitive predator eyes, I could only just make out the carriage as I moved over the rocky slope above the road—and there, crouched on an outcropping, the warg.
Tensing, the muscles taut in his legs as he prepared to leap, his scent so powerful it was nauseating. Lips were drawn back over a snout longer and thinner than any natural wolf’s, revealing the double-row of jagged teeth.
The growl in my throat rolled through the air, and the warg’s head whipped around. Narrow eyes gleamed with ill intent, a poisonous, mottled green.
I approached, unafraid of him—he was so young and desperate, no more a threat to me than the buzzing of a fly. “He has sent you here to die.”
The carriage rattled on into the fog, the occupants unaware of how closely death’s fingers had brushed the backs of their necks.
The warg said nothing, his breathing thick but shallow. He stared at me, frozen in place, muscles still bunched for a leap.
“Do you have any last words?”
The warg’s tongue flicked out, licking nervously at his teeth. “Eat… the girl. Must eat it.”
I rose to my full height, claws flexing. “Wrong words.”
The warg wasted a precious second of his life glancing at the forest—debating the outcome of flight.
He wasted another when he looked back at me, hackles rising in a ridge along his spine, preparing himself for the leap.
He never had the chance. I was not there, and then I was.
My fist buried in the warm, pulsing sack of his abdomen. Soft, slippery flesh split under my claws. The patter of blood on stone and the warg’s weakening breaths the only sounds in the forest.
The light began to fade from those thin eyes, and he raised a paw to claw half-heartedly at my chest.
“I would pity you, but you chose this. You chose the murder of a woman who had done nothing to you. You were too young to throw your life away so easily.”
The warg panted, jaws snapping weakly.
“Hakkon knew you didn’t have a prayer,” I told him, and ripped my claws upwards, tearing out his heart.
I dropped the twitching organ, slid my claws from the warg’s body, and let him sink to the ground.
The boy did not return to his human form, not even with his last breath. What the Forians did in Wargyr’s name was as permanent as the metamorphosis I had undergone.
It was the work of minutes to drag him deeper into the forest, obscured from the road by the swirling veils of fog. I left him curled in the hollow under a pine tree, a shallow grave for a lost soul.
In death, at least, he would serve a higher purpose: feeding the wild creatures of my keep. Within a fortnight, not even bones would remain.
Chasing after the carriage on all fours, I cursed Hakkon. To take young men, hardly more than children, to encourage them to bleed innocents to strike a blow he knew would not scratch my hide—he threw away their lives.
The Veladari did not share a shred of my pity for the young wargs. They had lived too long with the threat of teeth looming over them, always stalking from the forest.
But despite my hatred for the Forians, I understood all too well the allure of the monstrous.
I had felt it myself once, lying on the rocky ground and waiting for the end, my guts torn out of my body and the blood of a dead warg cooling on my face.
The moon had been full and ripe, shining down on me as I lay sucking in my last breaths. It had been a beautiful night to die, its silver light dimming as my blood poured out of me.
And then a woman, a predator wrapped in the skin of perfection, crept from the shadows of the trees. Her skin was as smooth as porcelain, eyes glowing in the dark.
“You poor, brave boy,” she had said, crouching next to me, fangs glinting in the fading light. The rough commoner’s vowels of her speech were full of admiration. “What a shame you found the wolf before I did. Such heroics… any vampire would be pleased with this death.”
I could not answer then. My throat was clotted with gore, every breath a struggle. The vampire was no more than a blur by then, but still her crooked grin shone brighter than the moon.
“It seems so wasteful to let such a fearless soul vanish. Would you like a second chance?”
I had, indeed.
She had shed her blood into my open veins, raising me from the sucking whirlpool of death into the burning thirst for blood, the perfection of a new life.
And later still, when the wolves seemed to hide behind every tree in Veladar and the people—who had barricaded themselves behind stone walls and lived in terror—finally broke and sent ambassadors Below, begging for aid and alliance, she had told me to do what I must… so long as I had the conviction in my heart to see it through.
Because the price to be paid would be my own monstrosity, and my own guilt, for as long as I lived.
I had accepted it with honor. But what Hakkon did was not for the good of his people. It was not for nobility, nor for the protection of what was his.
It was because they were always hungry for more, never satisfied with their own lot, and he would throw boys in the skins of wolves at me until he died or I did.
And so long as I could stand between the Rift-kin and Wargyr’s ravenous worshippers, between Cirrien and a terrible death, I would never be sorry for the monstrosity I had chosen.
I caught up to the carriage, my nostrils open for warg-sign, but Hakkon had sent only the one. I counted myself fortunate; Andrus’s first selection had been hunted by a pack.
But Hakkon knew we no longer left the fate of the brides up to chance. This one had been a long shot, a message made of fangs: he knew I had upheld my end of the contract, and he was keeping an eye on me.
On her .
Unseen, prowling in their wake, I did not leave Cirrien again until the road climbed upwards, leading us out of the ocean of fog and through a thick, dark forest.
The walls of Ravenscry loomed ahead, the castle a stronghold undefeated by the wargs. The vampire legions pacing the walls came to a halt, all eyes on Eryan, and when they saw he still wore his hat, the gates were lifted to allow him through.
Cirrien… she would be able to see me soon. There was no fog here to hide my form, the more bestial aspects I had dragged to the surface for the sake of the hunt.
I held back, my gallop slowing to a walk, then to a crawl. The gate clattered down, cutting me off from the carriage.
Instead, I climbed the walls, mortar crumbling around my claws. I perched on the wall, peering down into the castle bailey as Eryan opened the carriage doors with a flourish.
Wyn emerged first, and then Cirrien. Her fiery hair was a beacon, a flame in the pearly mist of the Rift.
I watched Cirrien’s hands engage in a gentle, hesitant dance as she looked up at the castle, awe written all over her face. The commander of my legions dropped from the wall to meet her, a welcoming smile displaying her fangs.
This poor girl… I had brought her here, cut her off from any semblance of a normal life.
Had I consigned her to a lifetime of silence and misery? Would she hide in her tower, a flame slowly dwindling in the dark?
I crouched in the shadows, looking down at myself. Between the thickening cartilage of my transformation and the warg’s last weakened blows, my shirt was shredded. My fangs had grown, lengthening so that clear speech would be even more difficult.
We would marry tonight, as the moon rose in the sky. Only then would the Accords be considered upheld by my people, when the vows between us were completed.
It would take days to undo what I had done to myself tonight.
Cirrien had met me at my best, the most attractive face I could hope to present. She would not be marrying me at my worst, but… it could hardly reassure her when I arrived at the altar far more hideous than when she had met me.
I growled, picking a strip of frayed linen from my shirt and flinging it aside.
“What is this?” an amused voice asked. “Don’t tell me you’re sulking, my lad.”
I looked up at Visca, whose hands were planted on her hips, her lips curled in a smile.
“Commander,” I grated out through a mouthful of teeth. “I…”
Words failed me. Instead I gestured at my face, my thickened, horn-ridged body.
How could I subject Cirrien to this?
Visca dropped into a squat beside me, her elbows braced on her knees. She had looked at me this same way when she first found me dying all those years ago, head cocked as she examined my face.
“So it is a sulk. I thought I beat that out of you years ago.”
I just stared at her. “You’ve met her.”
“As of five minutes ago, and in my professional opinion, she has a good head on her shoulders. I was expecting someone a little more… eh.” She held a hand out flat, tipping it back and forth as she thought. “Hysterical? I was at Voryan’s wedding, and that girl shrieked the whole way through. Ancestors, the headache she gave me. Two hundred years, I thought, I’ve lived two hundred years and this is how I die: from a spineless little sow melting my brain out of my damn ears.”
“Cirrien is good.” Too good for something like me. “It would be easier to doom her if I hated her, but she is… serene.”
“Precisely.” Visca’s blue eyes glowed as they flicked towards the Tower of Spring, the quarters devoted to the Lady of the Rift. “And pretty, too. Call me moonstruck, but getting married to a pretty, serene girl… well, it could be a lot worse.”
“She is the one who will feel hardship.”
My creator glanced sidelong at me. “So she may, but this is necessary. And in time she might see past what the humans believe. Bane, you’re an honorable, selfless man; no matter what you see in the mirror, no matter what you believe about your choices, you are one of the best among us. Given the chance, I think she may come to see things in the same light.”
Like Wyn, who worked tirelessly to ensure her fellow bloodwitches would never be burned at the stake again, Visca would never back down on ensuring the Accords were upheld and our people maintained their freedom.
She wouldn’t allow us to return to the dark ages, when her wife would need to be hidden in the shadows of the Below for her own safety. The sight of a bloodwitch in peril was the one sure thing that would turn Visca into a howling whirlwind of death.
Even if Cirrien had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the altar, this wedding would happen. Wyn and Visca would make sure of it.
The tower windows flickered as shadows moved past the lights: Cirrien and Wyn, the latter bringing the former to be made up in the proper way of a vampire bride.
She was not fighting; she walked into this arrangement with her head held high.
And she was expecting me. I had made my choice years ago; I wouldn’t fail now because I was afraid of what she might think. The Rift-kin’s protection, and my people’s sovereignty from Foria, depended on this contract.
I could only do what I could to ensure I gave her no reason to fear me.
A ragged sigh escaped me. I touched one claw to my deformed face. “As always, you’re right.”
“I knew I did well when I found you,” Visca said smugly, but her eyes were level and hard, brooking no argument. “It’s been many years since you’ve been a lad, but you were always our most steadfast warrior. I’m proud of what you’ve become, and we know you’ll do right by our people… no matter what it takes.”
She rose from her crouch with fluid grace and offered a hand.
“Come with me now. Let’s get you ready for your vows and give her no reasons for regret, hmm?”