38. Bane
Chapter 38
Bane
G ods. I had screamed at her.
I had bared my claws, my fangs, showing the truth of what lived under my skin to the one I loved the most in this world.
My Cirri, my lover. She had run from me.
I curled in on myself, covering my face with my bloody hands.
Now she knew the truth, that there was nothing good inside me. Everything I had been, everything I once was… was now subsumed by the beast in my heart and mind. The creature that drove me to violence, that begged and fought for blood, that had no remorse and no care for life itself.
I was evil, and now she had seen it, in its most raw and open form.
The body was cooling. I smelled its thick, meaty stench in the air, the iron tang of blood, now congealing.
I could have offered a trial. Judgment by those who might have heard her out, rather than a death sentence at my hands. From the moment she had walked in through that door, that damning letter in Visca’s hand, she had been doomed.
But I didn’t regret what I’d done.
That was the worst part. Knowing that Cirri was right to fear me, because I had torn apart a woman she knew without an ounce of remorse. What was one woman after the hundreds that had come before?
Perhaps I had been a fool to think this would work in the end. To promise that I’d give her my blood, keep her by my side forever.
What kind of life would that be? To be trapped in the cage of a vicious fiend, afraid enough to run, yet too terrified to leave?
And still, even with that knowledge, I wouldn’t release her. I would give her my blood and keep her, evil or not. Brutal or not. As terrible as I was, I belonged to her, and she to me.
And of course I believed that, because I was evil.
I drew my hands away and looked at them, really looked at them.
The blood had dried to a glaze on my fingers, sunk into the lines on my palm, pooled around my claws.
These were the hands that touched Cirri every night. They were the hands that could reach into a chest, break through ribs like twigs, and tear a still-beating heart out.
Those two things did not belong together, but I would keep her nonetheless.
She couldn’t really believe that I was no better than a warg, though she knew the truth now. Her love for me, her demand to stay with me, denied that.
I exhaled, wishing the blood didn’t smell so delicious, wishing I hadn’t done it in the tower where I’d recently found such happiness.
Moving slowly, I picked up the slashed portraits. I touched Cirri’s face, torn through and gouged open, wishing I hadn’t ruined hers. This one was the only one that mattered.
I would have Miro paint a new one. The shredded one I would keep as a reminder to myself, that I was evil and I must never, ever turn that wicked gaze upon Cirri.
She could be so easily torn apart. Like the portrait, like the once-living girl cooling on the floor.
I propped it up among the other paintings, and looked at Ellena.
She looked so young in death, her eyes still shocked and open. And as much as I didn’t regret it, I wished I had done it away from Cirri’s eyes.
I picked her up, lip curling at the heavy ragdoll feeling of her body in my hands. Humans weighed so much more in death, like sacks of sand, nothing but dead weight to carry around.
I brought her down. Down beneath the keep, through the secret door that even Cirri hadn’t tried to open. There was no glory down here in the dungeon, no swooping buttresses, no marble floors. It was all stone, cold and unforgiving, the cells lined with iron bars. The air stank of moss and fungus, the eye-watering reek of piss, the curdled taste of old blood.
I brought Ellena to a long, wide room, where drifts of ash fetched up against the walls.
There was one Ark in here. One remaining out of ten, the others long since rusted shut or fallen apart. An old remnant from the days when humans rose up and killed their vampire overlords.
They had staked them with silver, shoved rowan down their throats, and that had killed many of them. But in their frenzy for revenge, the human rebels had created the Arks: oversized ovens, where the vampires stunned with silver and poison had been piled in heaps, and locked inside with the flames.
All of these Arks had once been maintained, their fires kept burning day and night, but eventually only one had been tended. It had been decades since a bloodwitch had been locked inside; now only corpses were burned there.
I laid Ellena aside, and began to shovel coal into the Ark’s grated bottom. When that was full, I laid wood atop it, building a pyre in silence.
No, I didn’t regret this, but for Cirri’s sake I would give Ellena a proper funeral. No rotting in a pit for this traitor, no.
I laid her atop the pyre, and shoved a bit of kindling under the grates piled with coal and wood, striking sparks off a flint and steel until it caught.
And when the flames began to climb hungrily, crackling through the wood and licking at Ellena’s cold flesh, I shut the iron door and barred it.
There. It was done; the traitor had paid in full. For every life taken, she received a hungry flame—but if I didn’t regret it, why did I have to keep telling myself I didn’t?
I crouched on all fours, the air around the Ark shimmering with the growing heat, watching through the bars as Ellena’s body was slowly consumed. It took several long hours before the blackened char consumed her outer shell, and I spent those hours with my thoughts running in circles of shame and guilt.
Cirri had witnessed it. She deserved an apology for my brutal behavior. I would tell her I should have given Ellena a trial… but that I didn’t regret it.
I left the Ark burning, the wood inside popping and crackling, the thick scent of ash and charred flesh coating my nostrils and throat.
Cirri would not be in the Tower of Winter. Not after she’d run. I went to the library, but the air carried no fresh scent I could pick up through the ash; it was silent, feeling strangely lonely. The golems were the only living things in there, standing at a window with their backs to me.
In the Tower of Spring, the air was even staler, no signs of life to be found.
Wyn was working alone; Brother Glyn was in the Tower of Summer, and he told me with pleasure that he had our next lesson worked out.
But by the time I was done searching the four towers, there was an odd sensation in my chest.
I went to the ballroom, retracing the steps of Bloodrain to the balcony, which was empty; I prowled the servants quarters, tearing through the kitchens and upsetting Cook. I breathed deeply, searching for her scent, but all I could smell was ash and burning blood.
By the time I had circled around to the keep’s entrance, that odd sensation had blossomed into a feeling I was almost entirely unfamiliar with, a cold spill down my spine, emanating into my guts and limbs and gnawing at my heart: fear.
She was nowhere.
She had run away from me and vanished.
I paused in the doorway of the keep’s entrance, and Koryek gave me an odd look as he passed.
“My Lord,” he said politely, keeping a wary distance.
I nodded, amazed at how suffocating such a thing as true terror felt; gods, was there anything else like it?
This was because of what I’d done. I was merely… not myself. She was here, she simply didn’t wish to see me.
Well, that was it. I could give her breathing room, let her come to terms with the facts of the matter: that she was trapped here, married to a murderous brute.
And yet.
Walking on hands and feet, forgetting the civilized walk of a man, I found myself once more lurking outside the Tower of Spring.
Surely she was in the upper tower with the door locked, biding her time before she had to face me and my bloodstained hands again.
I crouched outside her door, clearing my throat, and debated what to say.
My mind was blank, still glazed with the odd terror that she would never want to see me again. She would shut her door to me forever.
But she hadn’t locked this one.
I fumbled the latch in my haste to be inside, creeping in on silent feet.
“Cirri?” I asked, my voice hoarse. “Cirri, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you…”
There was no answer. Twilight had fallen, the sky outside the windows studded with stars and a column of black smoke—the Ark, sending Ellena’s final remnants into the open air.
I frowned at them, creeping in further, and saw what I had missed in my first chaotic search.
Her dresser’s mirror reflected an empty expanse of wood. The velvet-lined boxes containing her jewels were gone; her wardrobe door was askew, several dresses torn down and puddled on the floor.
I inhaled sharply, still smelling nothing but ash, and tasting the sharp terror that built in me.
“Where?” I breathed, my eyes grazing her desk and seeing nothing. Would she really leave without a word? With nothing to say?
But the jewels were gone, her cloak was gone…
I turned blindly, striding until I reached the Tower of Winter, and my first footstep was onto paper.
A single page of it, slid under the door.
Fear was a tight restriction in my throat, an ache in my gums; the ungodly taste sickening in my mouth as I bent to pick it up.
It was her writing, her lovely, neat hand.
Fiends and wargs come from the same dark place , she had written, and beneath it was her letter.
I cannot live here another moment. You are just the same as them—a monster. I refuse to live on your leash. I’d rather be dead than the wife of a warg.
Let me go. If you really love me, don’t come after me.
Cirrien lai Darran
The ice in my spine hardened, crystallizing into something new and awful.
The terrible sensation that I had been hollowed out, that an unseen hand had reached inside me and ripped all the color out of the world.
There was only silence, the chill crawling over my skin, the sucking abyss in the center of my being.
I had done this. I was a terrible thing, something that shouldn’t exist, and I had driven the warmth and light out of my world.
I couldn’t tear my eyes from the letter, from the words of her soul, openly condemning me.
To become a fiend is a dark and twisted thing…
I’d rather be dead.
Had she been coming to tell me that she was leaving, that this was a cage she couldn’t abide? My love, a leash she was desperate to slip?
Of course she had been. I should never have told her of the ritual.
I would rather she had told me herself. Said goodbye so I could look into her eyes one last time and fully understand that I was the one who had done this. I had made this happen.
I exhaled, wanting to tear the letter to pieces and throw them in the Ark, unable to so much as pierce it with my claws.
My love’s last words to me. This was all I had left. This, and the portrait I’d torn apart in front of her.
She’d watched me rend her face in effigy. That would be her last memory of me, destroying her, shouting at her.
I had broken… everything.
As night fell, I remained in the darkness, holding her final words to me close. Smelling the reek of blood from above. Listening to the change of guards, the soft call that all was well, and not hearing anything at all. Eyes unseeing, the words on the page becoming a blur.
Sometime later, beyond my reckoning, there was a soft knock on the door. The light of dawn was coming through the window; Cirri was gone.
I had obeyed her last wishes. I would let her go.
Visca stepped in, her face hard and frowning, her nostrils flaring as she smelled the blood.
“Good ancestors, Bane, what are you doing, crouching in here like that?” She wrinkled her nose. “Didn’t you let someone in to clean the body up? We’ve got warg-sign in the southwest, and as I was planning to pay a visit to Coran regardless, I’m going to direct two of the legions to the south. We’re riding out today.”
I blinked, the words swimming back into focus.
I imagined eyes like the deep forest, but hard and cold. Her hands forming irrevocable words: You are just the same as them. Monster.
“Bane?” Visca’s voice, growing sharper. “What is it? Where’s Cirri?”
Wroth had been right. My brother had told me… and I had not listened.
I shook my head, wondering how I could ache inside when I was hollowed out into nothing.
Strange, how calm I sounded. A far cry from the fiend screaming inside my head. “My wife has… Cirri has left me. She’s gone.”