A Vow of Blood and Tears

1. Cirri

Chapter 1

Cirri

T he hours until the wedding were ticking away, and the bride-to-be had smeared herself all over the room.

Eldest Sister Sifka stood in the doorway, taking in the ruined carpet and the blood soaking through the cracks in the floor. She trembled, not from grief or disgust, but from pure rage.

I waited in silence with another maid, not relishing the work to come. It was our misfortune that we were the first to answer the frantic summons, unaware that a body awaited us.

The Eldest Sister stared at the scene, her fingers drifting to her temples to massage away a headache.

“Very well, there’s nothing to be done for this.” She curled her lip at Antonetta’s stiffening body. “Clean it up.”

I hurried in, falling to my knees and spreading my cleaning rags to soak up the deepest puddles, ignoring the thick scent of copper and the unpleasant, congealing coolness of the blood on my hands. Antonetta’s head had tilted onto her shoulder in death, blonde curls now as crimson as my own, so that she seemed to be watching me with puzzlement as I worked around her feet.

The other maid, a new girl named Ellena recently brought in from begging on Argent’s streets, had turned a pale greenish color and audibly swallowed. She clenched and unclenched her hands, breathing rapidly as she stared anywhere but at the body. “Eldest, I can’t—”

“What use are you, then?” Sifka bared her dull silver teeth, showing a strip of gray gums. “Go fetch Sister Aletha!”

I kept my head down, working in silence as I stripped the linens from the bed and began spreading those across the floor around the dead girl.

Poor Antonetta had possessed three qualities which doomed her: she was a junior Librarian in the Silver Sisters’ Library, not quite yet ascended to the full rank of anointed Sisterhood. She’d also been pure-blooded Veladari, and, as of the previous evening, rather pretty.

These things combined had made her the perfect expendable warm body, marked for a fate she considered worse than death: marriage to the Lord of the Rift.

Which was supposed to take place in three hours.

They would have to find a new bride on short notice, one the Silver Sisterhood could afford to lose. Their ranks had been falling in number since the Blood Accords had been signed, when vampires and humanity put aside their long-lived hatred to drive the wargs of Foria out of Veladar.

The Blood Accords had saved us all. I’d been fifteen when the last of the Forians were sent back over the border, and to this day the tolling of bells still sent a deep chill through me, a primal fear that no Veladari in this generation or the next would ever forget.

Bells meant wolves. They meant teeth and claws at your door.

It was a fear ingrained in us by mythical monstrosities. Wargs, the men who shed their skins to become wolves, had been children’s fairy tales for centuries. It was only forty years ago, when King Radomil of Foria decided to take Veladar’s fertile lands for himself, we discovered that they were all too real.

Real, and just as horrific as the stories claimed. After three decades of losing ground, ravaged by the Forians’ animal appetites, the high nobility of Veladar had elected to turn to our old enemies: summoning the vampires from the depths beneath our feet, offering everything we had for their protection.

They had accepted the agreement, eager to escape an eternity of darkness in the underground.

With their aid, we had won against the Forians… but at what some considered too great a cost.

Antonetta had clearly been one of them.

The vampires had allied with us with conditions that seemed like lesser evils at the time, when the common sight of a Forian warg meant tolling bells and families lost: from the day the Blood Accords were signed, the Four Lords of Veladar would be vampires, then and forever.

The human nobility who had held these seats—the Lord of the Rift, the Lord of the Moor, the Lord of the Vale, and the Lord of the Rivers—had given them up, though not without extreme dissent and anger.

But they’d taken their petty vengeance on the vampires. The vampires might rule this country now, but the Blood Accords were clear: within ten years of the declaration of peacetime, each Lord was required to take a fully human, pure-blooded Veladari bride, to ensure humanity’s voice at their tables. If they failed to do so, the seat would revert to human hands… and we all knew the vampires wouldn’t allow that.

They couldn’t allow it. Not with our fraught history.

Today was the tenth anniversary of that peace, the Lord of the Rift was coming, and his bride-to-be was dead. I dropped a blood-soaked cleaning rag in my bucket and grabbed another.

Soft footsteps sounded in the doorway, along with a frustrated sigh. “She couldn’t face Lord Bane, then?”

I knew Sister Aletha from her rough, broad voice alone, but kept my eyes down. My hair was covered, but I was taking no risks.

“Obviously,” Sifka snapped. She took a calming breath, and her voice gentled. “They do say he’s monstrous. I’ve glimpsed him myself, and I can’t imagine he’s gotten any easier on the eyes since then. Antonetta was a flighty girl. Clearly an unwise choice.”

I wasn’t sure ‘flighty’ was the proper adjective for a girl sold to a vampire who was reputed to be more beast than man. My stomach flipped as I grabbed another rag, my composure over this mess fading rapidly.

I tried to distract myself with selfish thoughts. Like the fact that there was now an opening in the Librarians’ roster, if they would have me. I had applied last year and been rejected, but this year, with our numbers so low… maybe I stood a chance.

“Hmm.” Sister Aletha sounded doubtful. “Well, she’s left us in a bind, Eldest. We can’t spare any of the younger Sisters, not with these recruitment numbers. And most of them are Forian by-blows, regardless.”

The good thing about being an indentured servant in the Sisterhood—rather than a Silver Sister myself, which was doubtless my parents’ original intent when they’d left me to their care—was that people talked openly in front of me. I heard all manner of secrets and discussions, rendered invisible by my thousand-times-patched dress and bucket of rags.

It was an open secret that recruitment had dropped drastically after the Blood Accords, when vampires had gone from bogeymen to heroes almost overnight. The Silver Sisterhood, once the protector of humanity against their bloodlust, was on its last gasp, and Eldest Sister Sifka was clinging to relevance by the skin of her teeth.

When it was announced that the Lord of the Rift would be coming to Argent, the capital city of Veladar, for a bride to meet his requirements, every Guild in the city had met to essentially draw straws for who would take on the hardship of providing one.

The thing was, although these vampires were the heroes who had driven out the wargs, few humans actually wanted to marry them.

The vampires who had taken the seats of the Lords were no normal vampires. There would be no handsome, deathless husbands for these brides. Women had not lined up for the honor, even if it would give them a rank of nobility above all others.

Eldest Sister Sifka had drawn the short stick. She’d been furious that the vampire slayers would be the ones to provide, though the other Guild leaders had been relieved they would not have to give up one of their own to a monster.

The head of the Spicer’s Guild had reputedly laughed, claiming that the Sisterhood had enough young women to give the Lord an entire harem if he pleased.

But, according to the requirements of the Blood Accords, they did not. In fact, the other Guilds might have had an easier time producing a candidate.

While the Silver Sisterhood took only women into their ranks, they did not discriminate based on rank, titles, or nationality. Every Sister, whether she was born in silk or scooped from a gutter, was equal in the eyes of the Lady of Light.

This meant most recruitment had, in fact, come from the gutters and alleys of Argent. Most of the Sisters had a bit of Forian in them; after three decades of occupation, with the mad wolf-men raping and pillaging their way across Veladar, a lot of the younger recruits were of mixed blood.

The Blood Accords were quite clear that the bride had to be of pure Veladari descent. There were barely a handful of women in the Sisterhood who met that requirement, and of those they were further whittled down by the enhancements all Sisters underwent during induction to their higher ranks.

One had recently been fitted with silver teeth, a not-quite-cosmetic change they called ‘anointing’; unless the Sisterhood wanted the Lord’s lips bubbling and blistering with the first kiss of his bride, that brought the potential pool of candidates down to three.

The Eldest Sister seemed to be following my train of thought. “Sister Gisele was just anointed last month.” Her tone was sour. “And we can’t spare Nadia, she’s too valuable in her current position. If I weren’t afraid of insulting that bloated leech, I’d give him Risna, but she’s…”

“Ugly,” Aletha volunteered.

“Yes. Well…” Sifka paced the narrow section of floor where no blood had spread, sucking her teeth as she thought. “He’s no beauty himself. Perhaps with a little face-paint…”

“No, Eldest.” Aletha was serious, her arms crossed over her chest. “If he is insulted, that will rebound entirely on us, and we’re in a precarious enough position as it is.”

Ellena returned with clean rags and a bucket of soapy water. She left them next to me, departing in a hurry before she could be told to get to work.

I mentally sighed, pulling up the sodden linens, and began composing my letter to the Mother Librarian in my head. I was a perfect candidate, with a list of qualifications as long as my arm, and only one small hurdle to overcome.

“What about Brigit?”

“A Forian grandfather.” Aletha shook her head. “I know it pains you, but it must be Nadia, Eldest. Risna might be ugly, but she has the intelligence to take Nadia’s place with the right training—and unlike half of the new girls, she knows which end of a sword to hold. We can recruit again in the spring and make up for Nadia’s loss.”

With the linens moved aside, the pool of blood was quite diminished. I took the straight razor Antonetta had used to perform her last deed and carefully folded it before dropping it in my bucket. If I was lucky, no one would notice its disappearance, and I could clean it off and keep it for myself.

Morbid, perhaps, but I couldn’t afford such fine steel on my own. When my parents had left me on the Cathedral’s doorstep, they had pinned a letter to my dress bearing my name, their reason for giving me up to such a grim place, and a request that they remain blissfully unbothered with any news of what was to become of me.

Not so much as a clipped copper was left to my upkeep. While I had never gone hungry in the Cathedral of Silver, Sifka had determined that I was not fit material to become a Silver Sister proper, and my way in life would be made with a mop and broom in hand.

With the straight razor secured, I composed another line to the Librarian in my mind. Last year I had been circumspect about my studies, afraid to make myself sound better than I was.

This year I would boast my achievements with pride: I was one of three people in all of Veladar who had successfully learned the early Nord wyrd-runes. I was fluent in Veladari, Forian, spoken and written Low-Country Nord, Serissan, as well as several runes of the vampires’ High Tongue of the Red Epoch.

The last one had become part of the previous year’s studies, and I owed the Sisterhood yet another six years of servitude for the privilege of that knowledge, but—it would be worth it.

None of the words would ever cross my lips, but one day there would be no document I could not read.

Why should I not be a Librarian?

With my crowning achievements mentally composed and ready to be committed to parchment, it came time to address the body in the room. I could clean no further with Antonetta lying there, slumped against the wall with her veins open to the world.

The Eldest Sister was pinching the bridge of her nose as I straightened up from my crouch, ignoring the low groan in my back.

“Lady save me. Nadia is one of the most talented girls we’ve had pass through these walls in nearly a decade. The thought of giving her to that… that animal makes me sick. It must be Risna.”

“No,” Aletha said more firmly, and I waved a hand. She scowled. “What is it, Cirri?”

I signed to her with filthy hands. Will the Sisters remove her body soon?

And that was why I was apparently unfit to become a Silver Sister. I had been born mute; I could read in multiple languages and speak with one—the language of fingers, known as the priests’ tongue—but none of those languages would ever leave my mouth.

My parents had left me here because I was worthless to them; the youngest of four children, unable to speak a word, a useless mouth to feed. No man of high noble blood would want to marry a mute, not when they had three other daughters who sang like nightingales and would snare rich husbands.

Even when I had written twelve pages detailing why I should become a Sister, Sifka had turned me aside.

She did not need a mute, she told me, reflecting poorly on the Sisterhood when they were already struggling against the tide of the vampires’ popularity. None of the women with obvious impediments were brought into the fold—the Eldest preferred the prettiest, most physically capable women to serve as the face of the Silver Sisterhood, the better to bring up recruitment numbers.

I had been relegated to scullery maid instead, but in the Silver Cathedral, every woman—even the maids—received a basic education until they reached adulthood. With one avenue of communication lost to me, I had put my blood, sweat, and tears into learning as many languages as possible, so that I might be heard with pen and paper and hands.

And when I hit eighteen, the age of majority, I had elected to continue selling years of my life in servitude in exchange for a higher education. For every year of study in their Library, I owed them three years of work. For an unwanted daughter with no other prospects, it wasn’t the worst contract, but…

By now, I would be indentured until I was almost fifty. I’d hoped that it would one day lead to the Library, and this would be my year.

But my other hope had died a slow, painful death. I was the only invisible person in the Cathedral.

It was amazing, in a way, how easily you could vanish when you couldn’t speak. And as no one else had ever bothered to learn the priests’ tongue, I found that even with my signing, a language in itself… still no one could hear me.

In many cases I had to write on a small slate I kept tied to my apron to make myself understood, and often in a quick, crude way; the longer it took me to write, the less patience one had for reading it.

At this very moment, Aletha stared at me like my hands were butterflies performing some whimsical ballet, utterly uncomprehending of my question.

I silently sighed and performed crude gestures, miming the removal of Antonetta’s body from the room. I refused to touch my writing utensils with bloody hands; a single stick of chalk cost me three days’ labor.

If you knew how eloquent I can be with my hands, you would not look at me that way.

“Ah. The night-diggers will be up in a moment,” she said, finally understanding thanks to the pantomime. “Just clean around her until then, and for the love of the Lady, wash yourself twice before you step foot near the kitchens again.”

She sneered at Antonetta’s corpse, no less forgiving than the Eldest Sister. The Sisters would never love, or forgive, a suicide—particularly not one that had left them in such dire straits.

“Eldest, we’re running out of time. We must prepare Nadia for the wedding, or the broken Accords will be on us. How long do you think Argent will tolerate our presence if we’re responsible for that?”

I knelt, trying to find a patch of floor I could start scrubbing without touching Antonetta’s clammy, grayish-white skin, but a hand like a vise fastened around my shoulder, drawing me back up.

I started, meeting Sifka’s pale blue gaze. Her deeply lined face had split into a smile, showing her silver teeth and the gray gums of someone who’d had them for years, as she searched my eyes.

Then she reached up and tore the wimple from my head, revealing my wine-red hair twisted into a tight braid beneath it.

A laugh of relief sent a gust of sour wind into my face. She dropped the wimple and gripped my chin, turning my head this way and that.

“Red hair, and eyes as green as the grass in spring. Oh, thank the Lady, you have saved me. Stand up straight, Cirrien.”

She alone called me by my full name, and every time, I heard the mockery beneath it: I was Cirrien lai Darran, once of a noble house, but mute and worthless. A noble name for a nobody.

What is it, Mother Superior? I signed, my stomach roiling with dread, and she batted my bloodied hands away with a grimace.

“Keep those filthy hands down. Just look at you. Not a single Forian dog in your entire family tree, is there? You can nod or shake your head, girl.”

A chill ran down my spine, one that had nothing to do with the ringing of bells. I was invisible, unheard. What were the odds she would catch a single glimpse of my eyes and remember my existence?

And I could not lie to her. The Eldest always knew when we were lying.

I shook my head, wishing desperately I could force my frozen fingers to move, to beg for a place in the Library, but it was another dead dream. I was nothing to her, when she could give me away and keep her favorite Sister, and years of the switch on my fingers had taught me to keep myself unheard when the Eldest was speaking.

Not even Antonetta’s body had produced a horror in me that the speculation in Sifka’s eyes did.

“No, of course there isn’t,” she murmured, curling an errant lock of scarlet hair around her fingers. “I’d almost forgotten you entirely. You’re a lai Darran, an old family, pure-blooded Veladari. Young. Reasonably pretty. No one can claim we insulted Lord Leech with you.” She grinned triumphantly at Aletha, letting out a husky laugh. “And at the cost of one scullery maid. No loss to us.”

Astonishment and disbelief were at war on Aletha’s face. “You’re going to give the Lord of the Rift… a scullery maid? A dumb scullery maid?”

“The time has come to be pragmatic, Sister,” Sifka said, as though she had been the reasonable one this entire time. She kept an iron-hard grip on my hair, so I couldn’t move more than an inch without tearing it out—though I did manage a wince, mostly because I loathed being described as dumb. “And perhaps the bride being dumb is an asset. She can give no cause for offense. And if Bane were to take it into his head to question her about the Sisterhood, well… she could not speak of it. She has never been inducted.”

I knew from overheard conversations that the Sisterhood feared the vampire Lord questioning his future bride, that he would wish to learn the secrets of the great vampire slayers of old.

I thought it was a futile terror. The Blood Accords were in place; he had already won. What more could he possibly gain?

But futility did not mean I wanted to go to the bed of the Lord, who was no normal vampire.

“I suppose that is true…” Aletha was now looking me over with the same speculation as the Eldest. “She might be even prettier than Antonetta once she’s clean and out of those rags.”

“You can read and write quite well. I remember your letter to the Librarian last year.” Sifka frowned at me, considering.

I nodded quickly, my hands fluttering before I could stop them. Yes, in six languages, but please—could I not do more good in the Library?

“Hands down.” She smacked my fingers with her cane. “Aletha, get a bath ready and everyone we can spare to help. Find someone good with a needle and thread. We have a little more than two hours to make her a presentable bride… and I’m going to let Cirrien know how things are going to be.”

I met those cold blue eyes, reading my doom in them.

“You will not run,” the Eldest Sister said softly. “You will not shame the Sisterhood. The weight of the Accords, and the fate of Veladari humans, rests on your shoulders now, Cirrien, and you will meet this with all the bravery of a full and proper Sister. Do you understand?”

I understood, all too well.

Whatever came next, whatever my new husband appeared to be… I had to do my best to ensure the Accords were upheld. To be a good wife to the creature called Lord of the Rift.

Because if I didn’t, it wasn’t the vampires I would need to fear. It would be every vampire ally, every human soldier who had fought at their side, every man or woman who had sacrificed themselves to defeat the Forians.

If I failed in this, if I broke the agreement…

All of Veladar would fall on me like a wolf at the feast.