28. Bane
Chapter 28
Bane
Y ou’ve come along well , Brother Glyn signed. The basics should be understandable by now.
Much better, I returned, though I didn’t have the effortless flow of Cirri and Glyn.
The Silent Brother had drilled me on verbs today; now that the sun was sinking in the sky, our lessons over, all I wanted to do was go find Cirri.
Of course he knew from our time together that by now I was itching to leave.
See you after Bloodrain , he signed, deliberately enunciating the name of the holiday so that I would know the sign for it.
Enjoy drinking your gold away , I told him, and he grinned. The Brother had used conversational instruction to tell me of his plans to sample the local brews of every tavern within easy riding distance for the celebration.
I stretched as I rose, and left the tower—and the godawful stink of sex, thanks to Kajarin—only to find a face I hadn’t expected in the hall.
“My lord.” Miro gave me one of his courtly bows, the one that hinted at scorn and sarcasm, but his eyes were sparkling. “I’ve got something you should see.”
“What’s that?” I examined the lad, who dressed like the court dandies of Argent in a velvet coat, with lace trim at the cuffs and gilded buttons. Well, he was an artist, not a renowned warrior.
“Please, Lord Bane, don’t make me spoil the surprise.” Miro grinned, teeth white against his tanned skin, and led the way.
The servants’ quarters were in the back of the keep, near the heat of the kitchen fires. Miro opened his door to a small room that was not plain in the slightest; an old Forian rug was spread across the floor, the bedding fine linen. The lamp was blown Serissan glass, rather than the usual beeswax tapers the rest of the keep used.
I had just enough time to wonder if he’d been working on other commissions and lining his pockets with gold when I saw it.
At first, I thought there was a window, and Cirri beyond it, but it was merely paint on canvas. The scent of pigments, paint medium, and expensive incense filled the air rather than her own rose-and-musk perfume.
I froze as she seemed to look back at me, that wry little twist to her smile, secrets held in eyes the color of primeval forests. Instead of painting her with her hair styled formally, he’d painted it as it usually was, spilling in long waves over her shoulders, albeit with a rose tucked behind her ear. There was even the slightest freckling across the bridge of her nose, true to life.
It was so perfect, a flawless representation. “You have your mother’s talent,” I finally said, astonished by his skill. If one had told me that Edda had returned from the afterlife to paint this last portrait, I would have believed it wholeheartedly.
Miro tilted his chin, acknowledging the compliment. “Now you will always have a way to look at her, even when…”
A chill ran down my spine. I had commissioned this portrait of Cirri so that I could see her when she had joined the ancestors, and all at once, the beauty of the paint unsettled me.
I was looking at future pain, at a gravestone. What good was paint when I didn’t have her ? How could I have ever believed this would suffice compared to the living, breathing woman?
A low rumble reverberated through my chest.
He sucked in a breath. “I apologize, my Lord. No one wants to think of that now, in the present. Please forgive me.”
“You’re forgiven.” But my voice was dangerously deep, the anger of a fiend quivering deep inside me. What good was it? I’d rather have her, alive and warm and laughing, in the flesh.
It was a waste of talent. A waste of paint. I had been wrong to ask for this.
“It’s completely finished?” I asked, and Miro nodded.
“Signed and sealed.” He gestured to the signature on the bottom; he even had Edda’s writing style, and from a distance the signatures would appear identical. “I’ll have someone deliver it, my Lord. Where—?”
“The upper levels of my tower.” I needed to leave here, to stop looking at that face, because the next time I studied it with a hunger for every detail, Cirri would be in her grave. It sickened me now, the realization that I had not commissioned a beautiful memory, but a future quagmire of agony to wallow in. “Truly, Miro—Edda would be proud of you. You’ve got her eye.”
A quick, dark smile crossed his face. “I’m sure she would. I painted most of it from memory. Your wife doesn’t enjoy sitting still.”
“No, not unless there’s a book in front of her,” I agreed, finding it easier to speak with my back to that thing.
“Perhaps…” Miro examined the portrait, his gaze flicking to me. “We should do yours as well. A matched pair, as you are now.”
“Why?” Who on earth would want to look at such a thing?
Miro reached out, touching the edges of the canvas. “I know my mother painted you before you turned fiend. But when you hang Cirrien’s portrait next to yours, there will be no truth in that set, will there?”
I frowned, forcing myself to look at my wife’s image again. It was easier to think of it sitting next to mine the way I had been, rather than now.
My knuckle rubbed against my jutting cheekbone, felt the peaks beneath the skin of my face.
“No,” I said abruptly. “This is not a face that should be committed to an image. Let hers sit next to the old one. The only person to care will be me. Have it delivered, Miro. You’ll get your pay.”
I turned my back on him, no longer willing to look at the thing, nor to imagine the absurdity of that beauty next to my ugliness. What a joke it would be.
A stormcloud hovered over me all the way to the library, sickness and dread washing through my veins. Why did I have it made? What were all of Edda’s paintings, if not epitaphs in themselves? So few of them depicted anything pleasant or beautiful—she had spent the last years of her life painting the truth as it was, the truth we saw every day, and the cold fact was, the truth was horrendous.
Much better, I thought, for Cirri’s painting to sit next to a beautiful, long-dead lie.
But in the library, I found nothing. No lover to warm me and dispel the cold cloud of regret in my bones. Her table was empty but for neat piles of books, though her fragrance still hung in the air.
Along with something else; my nostrils flexed, tasting a thick, cloying cloud of jasmine perfume and the reek of a man’s sweat.
Kajarin had been here… but where was my Cirri?
I looked in my tower next, finding no sign of her, but Visca waited for me outside the door when I emerged. She leaned against the walls, paring her nails with a sharp dagger.
“Why is everyone lurking in the halls today?” I grumbled, and Visca raised a brow.
“I don’t lurk ,” she said loftily. “I simply wait with great patience for the perfect moment to ambush my prey.”
I squinted at her. “That’s—”
“Come on, my lad. Let’s have a chat.” Visca slapped my shoulder, steering me down the hall. “Up on the wall, now, if you don’t mind.”
We crossed through the stableyard, where Cirri’s old maid was toiling to muck out stalls, coated to the knees in horseshit and mud. She watched us pass with furious, red-rimmed eyes, and I gave her barely half a glance in acknowledgement.
Bruise my wife, muck out shit. Seemed a fair enough trade to me.
Visca was ahead of me, climbing up the wall hand over hand, climbing with practiced grace. I followed, and when I reached the top, she was already leaning against the far wall, almost directly where Wroth had stood only a night ago.
“Tell me what you see, what you smell,” she said quietly.
As always, most of what I saw was a hundred thousand pines, their pointed tops poking through the sea of mist below. The mountains in the distance of either direction, encompassing the Rift like a long, narrow bowl. A few birds; an overcast sky.
This was not what Visca was looking for. My nostrils widened, taking in the scents I’d come to expect from the Rift’s forests: sharp pine, the delicate rot of the mast under the trees, the coolness of the air. A trace of urine from a passing fox; the carrion musk of a badger’s den.
“Not so much a hint of warg,” I said, as quiet as she had spoken. “I would’ve expected at least a trace, a scout.”
“Exactly.” For once, Visca wasn’t smiling or cocky; she stared over the mist with her mouth downturned in a grimace, eyes squinted at the corners. “Not a single one, when we’ve been harassed constantly for months? I don’t like it.”
“No.”
“It’s deliberate, that’s for certain.”
“Yes.” I breathed in again, and the air tasted natural, normal. No taint whatsoever. “But why?”
“Could be they’re trying to lull us into a false sense of security.”
I frowned at the mist myself. Thanks to Wyn’s bloodwitchery, Cirri would be protected at all times—even if, ancestors forbid, a warg made it over the walls.
“Or… they want me to come hunt. Hakkon knows I would investigate this sudden silence.”
Visca drummed her fingers on her dagger’s hilt as she thought. “That would make sense. Lure you out, and while the fiend is away…”
“The wolves will play.”
Even as I considered Hakkon’s motives for suddenly withdrawing his scouts, I felt the itch to go hunt, to stalk up and down the Rift until I found the warg-sign I knew was out there.
“When did the nightly visits stop?” Perhaps the presence of Wroth, two fiends so close to the Forian border, had made Hakkon rethink his tactics…
“A week ago. That scout you chased to the eastern border.” Visca sighed. “It’s not because of Wroth, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“How well you know me.” So this was a tactic to lure me out, and not because of our combined presence. I snorted. “Surely he doesn’t believe I’m so stupid as to leave her unguarded.”
My commander lifted one shoulder in an easy shrug. “It’s a fair enough gambit, isn’t it? But it makes you wonder what they’re up to where we can’t see them.”
A prickle ran down my spine at the thought of a bloody messenger appearing on our doorstep, with news of the worst kind—a not-uncommon occurrence before the Forian king signed a writ of peace and put an ‘end’ to the war. “The usual, no doubt.”
“Either way, I still don’t like it. It’s easy enough to keep you here in the keep, but I want to send out extra patrols, put more guards in the eastern villages.” Visca glanced up at me, long enough for me to read the worry hidden in her eyes.
“Done. Yours is the final word on that front.”
“That means fewer knights in the keep,” she reminded me, and it was my turn to chuckle.
“If I, and those things Wyn made, can’t stop a warg from getting in, a few extra legions won’t make the difference. Send them out. Better the Rift-kin have their protection than us.”
Visca nodded shortly, but she was still scowling at the misty valley before us. “I still don’t like it. Something is up, and we’re blind to it.”
“Most likely. Has Hakkon ever given us a surprise we enjoyed? All we can do is send out the extra legions. Arm the villagers, the women and any child old enough to fight. With the mines open, the walls will be rebuilt before winter. We’ve two fiends in residence—we have no need of the extra guards.”
She made a tchk sound with her teeth. “And what if the plan is to empty the keep of the guards? That’s what I hate, this uncertainty. This could be a plan, or it could simply be more of Hakkon’s random uncertainty that he likes to spread around. That man was always good at making us second-guess ourselves.”
“Then don’t second-guess yourself.” I put a hand on her shoulder and she patted it absently. “Send our people out to keep watch. There is nothing Hakkon can send to us that Wroth and I can’t handle alone.”
“I’m going with them,” Visca said. “I’ll miss Bloodrain again, and Wyn will probably unspool my guts for missing another one of her functions, but I can’t send the untried boys out alone.”
“You know she’ll understand.”
We watched the mist roil in silence for several minutes, and I debated offering myself up, to make the journey alone. I could cover the ground of the Rift far faster on all fours than the legions could with their weapons and supply wagons, but… I couldn’t stand the idea of leaving Cirri, even if every room in the keep was packed with knights.
Not when I’d heard, from a warg’s own mouth, that she was to be eaten by them.
She sighed again, blowing her lips out. “Well, to hell with it, then. I’ll get them moving. Keep an eye on Wyn, would you? You know she starts some questionable shit when no one’s around to tell her it's a bad idea.”
I winced, remembering a time Visca had brought the legions south, and in the span of that week Wyn had created a self-replicating blood sigil that propagated via flesh. Everyone had gone hungry for a while after that, as the entire convict population had been affected, and most of them had bled out through their pores after being infested.
“Both eyes,” I promised her fervently.
“There’s my lad.” Visca turned away from the forest, stepping up onto the wall and dropping down into the inner courtyard with feline elegance.
I turned back to the forest once more, giving it a last, long look before I followed.
Whatever Hakkon was planning, he would have no luck trying to get to Cirri through me.
I finally found my wife, who was in precisely the last place I’d checked that she hadn’t been: my tower, curled up in the bed with the ritual book of the vampires open before her, scowling at her journal.
“I’ve been looking for you.” I closed the door behind me, mostly to keep her trapped in here. I didn’t fancy searching the keep from top to bottom again.
Cirri looked up, the scowl fading, but for a brief second a different expression crossed her face before it melted away—and it was not the usual, bright-eyed happiness I’d come to expect. It was something almost wary.
But then she was smiling at me, her hands moving: I was with Wyn. I decided to give her and Visca a little privacy.
She moved her hands a little more slowly so I could follow, and I nodded. “Visca is taking the legions out into the Rift. She won’t be here for Bloodrain.”
Why?
She looked so wide-eyed and curious, and I told myself I imagined that wary look. She was just tired, and Kajarin had clearly been in the library with her. That would make anyone tired and irritable.
“The wargs,” I started to say, and cut myself off. I didn’t want to give her any cause to worry.
Cirri stared at me patiently. To hell with it; she was the Lady of my hold. The only things that grew in the dark were mushrooms.
“The wargs haven’t been coming,” I said, shedding the constriction of my shirt and climbing onto the bed. “For months—years, really—we haven’t gone longer than a day without a sign of them. For them to just up and quit entirely… we think Hakkon is planning something. The only question is what.”
Cirri considered that, carefully closing the ritual book and putting it on the nightstand. Instead of signing, she turned to paper.
Don’t you hunt them? she asked.
“I do. I could.” I looked at her face, hungrily drinking in every detail. After the travesty of a painting I’d commissioned, nothing could be so lovely as my Cirri in person, rumpled in bed with wild hair. I pushed her skirts aside, stroking her bare leg. “But that would involve leaving you… and, like Wyn, some things I feel are better done by my own hands.”
I don’t want you to go, but I won’t complain if you must , she wrote. Rose and Thorn are here, after all, and Wyn. And that one guard you’d assigned me. Either way, the Rift-kin come first, right?
“Koryek? He’s leaving with the legions. As for the golems… they’re a marvel of modern bloodwitchery, but…” I examined my hands, hideous and bulging and long-fingered against her smooth thigh. “I would not be able to think clearly, knowing your life was in others’ hands. It’s something I must do myself.”
She smiled at me over the journal. I suppose I understand.
“No. I don’t think you do.” I looked up at her. “There was a warg the day you were brought to the Rift.”
She raised a brow, waiting, but some of the color had left her face.
“He was like any other warg—a young man, probably brought into the fold by Hakkon for the sole purpose of being used. But this one… he was sent for you.”
For me? She frowned. How could he even know who I was?
“Oh, he knew nothing about you personally. Not your name, nor your face. He knew only that there would be a girl in the carriage, and that the girl was his target. To eat my bride would have been a powerful blow—demoralizing my people, upheaving the Accords, to say nothing of the agony you would experience.”
Cirri licked her lips. To … eat me? I thought that sort of thing was just tales.
She signed it, seemingly forgetting the pen resting on the pages.
I looked down. “I don’t want to tell you this. I want you to understand why I feel the way I do, why I can’t run the Rift myself and leave you here, but I want you to live a life blissfully ignorant of these things.”
She wrote, and touched my hand. No one in Veladar has gotten to live a blissfully ignorant life. I’m only surprised that there was a warg waiting for our arrival—and that eating me was a priority over just killing me.
“That’s what they do,” I said bitterly. “Everyone knows what happened to Andrus’s first bride, and yet they don’t. We tell everyone they simply slaughtered her, but… she was mostly devoured. To outright kill you is their mercy stroke, and they don’t grant it often.”
Cirri stroked the tendons standing out on the back of my hand.
“So you see why I can’t bear to leave you alone,” I muttered. “To find what Andrus had to find, to know it was my fault if I had only stayed put… to know you’d spent hours in agony, devoured bite by bite. I could not bear that. It’s best that I stay here, because I trust in myself alone to prevent it. Ancestors, this is grim. I didn’t mean to come here and horrify you with could-have-beens.”
She touched my face, fingertips playing over the crests of my forehead and cheek, and wrote: Well, you should stay with me then. Under no circumstances should you go anywhere.
I couldn’t help but smile at that. “As you wish.”
She hesitated before writing again. I do feel a little guilty asking you to stay. Especially with Visca out there.
“My commander can handle a few wargs, believe me. They’re nothing compared to the things she’s seen Below.”
Cirri shook her head. I feel selfish. There’s another girl just like me in one of these villages. Why do I deserve more protection than she does? What makes me better?
“Don’t feel guilty. That’s why Visca is bringing the legions out. The new boys are unblooded, and the veterans need practice. The girl in the village will have Koryek and his brothers out there watching over her.”
She gave me a little half-smile. T hat’s good. Better she have him, than me. I really do understand now, Bane. It’s always better to tell me of grim things, than to make me guess at them. If all I knew was that the wargs were avoiding us… then maybe one day I wouldn’t have taken the warnings quite so seriously. She looked down at her page for a moment. But knowing what I know now… I don’t think that will ever be a problem.
“Always take them seriously,” I growled, and Cirri put a finger to my lips.
No growling at me , she signed lightly, then wrote: Not unless you’re going to put those teeth to good use. I’d say we’ve both had enough grim talk for the day and it’s time for lighter things.
I would have protested, would have severely pounded the absolute necessity of the rules into her head, but she tossed her journal to the nightstand, dropped the pen on it, and leaned forward to cup my face, bringing me closer.
Her lips were so soft, like the petals of the bloodroses. She caressed my misshapen mouth with her own, tucking kisses into the corners of my lips, moving with slow, deliberate consideration over my fangs.
Her kisses were a blessing, a light in the darkness I feared.
When she looked up at me, her eyes were bright, pupils dilated. My cock ached at the sight, remembering those lips wrapped around me, their warmth and softness wringing me out.
Drink from me , she said, signing carefully, but with a sense of command. Her fingers trailed over my chest, tip-tapping down my stomach, until she reached her own leg. She pulled the hem of her dress up further, running her fingers over the smooth expanse of her inner thigh. Here .
“By your command, my lady,” I said hoarsely, unable to look away from her silky skin, the unmarked canvas begging for silver scars written with love.
Cirri smiled.
I lowered myself between her legs, wrapping my hands around her thighs as she leaned back. She pulled her skirt out of the way, and my cock twitched at the sight of her sex, already gleaming wet for me.
But my lover had given me an order.
I couldn’t kiss like a human, but I nuzzled against her thigh. Goosebumps rose on her skin where my fangs grazed. A muscle trembled in her calf, and I felt her relax, her body going limp.
She reached down, stroking one of my horns, exhaling a faint sigh of need.
My tongue flickered out, skimming her flesh. I tasted the faintest hints of her spicy rose soap, but it was the musky scent of her skin that made my mouth water and fangs ache. Even before piercing her, my sensitive tongue sensed the sweet coppery savor of her blood, flowing just beneath that fragile silk.
Cirri sucked in a breath as my tongue meandered upwards, the forked tips flicking at her playfully, and she gripped my horn as they lapped over her nether lips, parting them.
She could give me orders, but I could tease her.
I groaned at the taste of her, the way her hips bucked to meet me. Cirri’s next gasp was sharp and sudden as the prongs of my tongue wrapped around her clit, sliding around it, lashing at her lightly. Her entire body spasmed, rocking towards me.
A low laugh escaped me. “Not yet, lover.”
She signed with one hand, panting. You’re an awful tease.
I laved my tongue over her, laughing as another full-body spasm took her, and glided towards her thigh again.
Cirri’s breath rasped as I nuzzled her again, my lower lip brushing against a spot several inches below her pussy, and I let the venom in my fangs flow—one drop, two, three. Enough to numb the pain, to give her ecstasy, without driving her into a giggling stupor.
When I slid my incisors into her satin flesh she tensed again, her body going tight as a bowstring. A trembling moment passed, and she relaxed, gripping my horn tightly to keep my head between her legs.
I sucked the sweet heat of her blood, relishing the taste with every mouthful. She was perfection. No wine could compare; no other blood would ever quench my thirst.
My tongue lapped at her, licking away the thin rivulets of blood that spilled downwards, catching each drop before it could touch the sheets. To waste a single drop of her would be criminal.
Cirri huffed lazily as I wrapped my lips around the fang-pierced skin, taking another long draught. The hand that held my horn with a death-grip had vanished.
She was panting again, so relaxed I knew the venom had coursed through her body. For her, this would be all pleasure, a floating, warm cloud of bliss. She shivered as my tongue stroked her, healing the wounds. They would be silver by morning.
Moving slowly, nuzzling up to her pussy, I peeked at her. Her arms were flung above her head, one hand flexing slothfully.
My tongue delved into her again, and she moved under me, with the slow, syrupy motion of a wave.
The sound of her breathing, shallow and panting, was better than any words she could’ve spoken aloud. In those tiny sounds I heard her need, the tiny hitches and stutters as the pronged tips moved independently, curling around her clit and stroking her in time to the rhythm of her hips.
I heard her inhale, holding her breath, and she quivered. Her hips rolled, thrusting up to meet my tongue, and I plunged it into her, tasting the sweetness of her come as I stroked the sensitive spot inside her sex.
Gods, my cock was aching, but I wanted nothing more than to feel her shiver apart and then hold her. With her blood blazing like a fire inside me, I felt every trembling muscle in her body, the tightness of her lungs as she exhaled, collapsing in a limp heap.
I ran my tongue over her clit in a long, slow lap before climbing up over her, pulling her into my arms.
Cirri smiled up at me, her eyes slightly unfocused. The skin that showed every blush was pink, her hair wild.
Now you? she asked with desultory motions, flinging a leg over me.
I nuzzled her neck, pleased when she tipped her head back. “I want to hold you, Cirri. Let me hold you while you’re in the ecstasy.”
Ask and I will give , she said, a momentary seriousness coming into her gaze. You are mine, Bane.
I couldn’t stop the grin that spread across my face, exposing all my bloodstained fangs in a terrible display of happiness. “As you are mine.”
She raised her head for a kiss, nipping at my lower lip with her adorably blunt human teeth.
“Are you trying to bite me?” I asked, amused at the thought.
Cirri laughed breathily, flopping back to the bed. Yes .
She snuggled against me, and between one breath and the next she was asleep.
I curled around her, pushing aside all thoughts of awful death-portraits and wargs. My fingers smoothed over her hair, and I stared at her sleeping face, memorizing every inch of it.
There were only so many years left for us.
I had to love the gift of every moment as much as I loved her.