10. Bane
Chapter 10
Bane
M y fingers curled into fists, gripping the bedspread on either side of me. Visca had filed them down to dull points, hoping to reduce my monstrous appearance to something more palatable to my new wife. For once I could touch the fine cloth without shredding it.
Why had I bothered?
It was my fault. I had misinterpreted something… a vital connection missed, a misreading of her smiles.
It had been far too early for joy, I thought sourly, wishing my claws remained in place, so I could at least have the satisfaction of tearing the bedding apart. In my delusional happiness to find that my bride was a level-headed woman, one who touched and walked near me without open revulsion, I had allowed my ardor to overcome my better sense.
Had I genuinely believed paper and a book would win her over? I snorted in disgust, staring down at the floor where one discarded, pearl-encrusted slipper lay turned over.
Fool. Hideous, overeager fool.
For the first time in years, the heat of lust had overpowered the flames of thirst. It was not a luxury I allowed myself, but Cirrien… if I could turn back time, to the days before I was a beast, she was exactly the kind of woman I would have desired for myself.
In those days, she would not have run from me.
Lifting a hand from the bed, I dragged it idly over my chest, wishing I still possessed my claws so I could rip the beast from my body—tear it all away, discard the warped flesh and the twisted bone, until nothing remained.
But it remained. It surrounded me, the few sweet drops of blood I’d tasted scouring my throat with fire, my cock pulsing with the need to bury myself inside her as I drank. I didn’t want to finish it myself. Lust, I had learned to live without. Now, in a moment of weakness, my walls had crumbled.
I wanted all of her. Her mind, her body, her soul… and most of all, her heart.
I wanted her to smile at me. To touch me lovingly. To submit without fear, with bravery and the unshakeable conviction that I would never harm her.
To stand at my side proudly, without reservation.
“You ask too much,” I told myself hoarsely, still feeling her in my lap, her hands moving between us, the softness of her skin and the warmth of her body against mine.
Her throat, so smooth against my tongue, giving beneath my fangs…
With a wordless snarl, I tore my trousers open, releasing the full length of my cock. It jutted, hard as iron against my palm as I stroked myself roughly, imagining peeling the silk from her and throwing her into the bed.
Or had she felt it? My strokes slowed; the same ridges that covered my body extended over my chest and stomach, dipping down to my cock as well. I squeezed tightly, a pearl of fluid beading at the barbed crown. Heat boiled low in my stomach as I pumped myself, still thinking of Cirrien.
She had to have felt it, pressing against her insistently. Perhaps she’d harbored hopes that despite the rest of me, my manhood would match what most men possessed.
No such hope existed. I stroked that hated shaft, a groan escaping me—ancestors, that single tantalizing taste of her. The pounding of her heart beneath her soft breasts, the peaked nipples that made my mouth water.
If I could not have her in body, I would have her in mind.
For several glorious, freeing minutes, I thought of nothing but her. I imagined her spread before me, her scarlet hair like a corona, writhing under my claws, the wet warmth of her wrapped around my cock, and my hand sped up.
The ache in my sack became a molten flood, and I slowed my violent stroking to a tight caress.
It was the simple thought of her on my lap, so close and yet a thousand miles away, that brought me to the edge. Close enough to taste, close enough for my lips to touch her throat—
My cock jerked, seed bursting forth in thick white ropes. I sucked in a breath, holding back the groans of pleasure that wanted to escape, milking the last of the flood as the white hot, tingling release filled me.
Afterwards I sat panting, wondering why I tormented myself.
Moving slowly, still musing over these thoughts of Cirrien that felt strangely guilty and blasphemous—ancestors knew what she would think if she could see inside my mind, the ways in which I’d pictured her—I cleaned up. I resettled myself in my trousers, smoothed my shirt, and pretended to be a normal man for a moment.
I realized moments later that the strange sound I heard, the soft, resentful laughter, was me.
This bitter mood was unlike me. Most days, it was easy to push away the anger. I had believed I was strong enough—when I had decided to become a fiend, I had truly believed it was for the best. That I had the inner iron, the strength of will, to see this through without any true regrets.
I supposed it merely took having my deepest, innermost hopes run out of my bedchamber on swift feet to drive home how much there was to regret.
Behind one of the warg pelts, there was a door. I pushed the pelt aside and stepped through, moving upwards through the tower with silent steps. Few came here; the maids were forbidden from traversing this stair. There was nothing at the top of this tower but old memories, ones better left dusty and forgotten.
The moon shone full through the open windows, illuminating the stacked paintings with silver light. It occurred to me that I was spending my wedding night sulking in a tower, an overgrown bat roosting in his lair, but as the humans would say: to hell with it. She was not here to watch me pout like a boy denied his favorite toy.
No, she was safely in her chambers, with handsome Koryek guarding her door.
My lips curled back over my fangs at the thought. I could not be angry with her. She had not wanted this, nor asked for it.
I was only angry with the circumstances. I would have preferred a hateful woman who would take poppy dreams over reality, because it would be less painful.
“That’s a selfish thought, Bane.” There was no one else here to hear me; I spoke freely. “Why would it matter, to doom one woman over another?”
The paintings did not answer, of course.
I looked over the first one, a bloody scene. Every picture in this tower had been painted by one of the humans who had lived in Ravenscry before the end of the war, when the Rift was held by humanity.
The painter had been named Edda, a Veladari woman with an eidetic memory I’d envied. Everything she saw, she remembered in perfect detail; combined with her artistic talent, she had captured images of the Forian War as though plucking them from the minds of those who had fought on the front lines.
All of Ravenscry, human and vampire alike, had mourned when she was slain by a warg. Much of her work still decorated the halls of the keep, but the bloodier memories, the things no innocent should have witnessed, were kept up here in the dark.
All but one; a painting she had thought to give me as a reminder.
“You are still him,” she had told me, when the pain beneath my skin was still fresh and new, an agony of thorns. “This is to remember who you are.”
I clasped my hands behind my back, gazing into my own eyes, though not into a mirror. Edda’s memory had captured me perfectly, though I was twisting into a new shape as she’d painted it.
The man in the painting… he was handsome, cheekbones as sharp as knives, lips full and tilted in a smirk, amber eyes glowing, black hair a waterfall down his back.
How smug he was, how vainglorious, believing he was equal to this burden.
“You stupid bastard,” I whispered, reaching out to touch the painting, wishing for my claws once more. I wanted to destroy it so thoroughly it would be like it had never existed at all.
Instead I turned my back on him. He was a reminder, after all—not of better times, not of the noble vampire I had been, but of the cost of arrogance.
I turned away from the past’s mirror, looking out the window; Cirrien’s tower was opposite mine. Guardians traveled the shadows around it, leaving no weak points for a warg to slip through.
Her windows were almost perfectly dark, but for the single candle flickering in one. While I brooded in this tower, she spent her wedding night alone and…
And what? Cirrien had not said so much as an unkind word to me, despite her clear terror. Was she really in there cursing my name, begging the ancestors to release her from this burden?
No. She was not. Maybe I was being the fool, but I didn’t believe that of her.
She had said the vows with strength. She had planted the binding thorns with care.
From the moment we had come for her, she had met this fate with her head held high, and I was the fortunate one. I had no right to lurk about, moaning and whining to myself, when she was doing no such thing.
I stared at that faint candlelight flicker, wondering what she was doing. Perhaps… writing in the journal? Putting those obscured thoughts into words?
My greatest wish in the world, greater even than the desire to return to my old body, was to understand her with clarity.
Please be writing. Please let me hear you , I thought, not daring to voice the words aloud. It was too precious a wish to be spoken.
I thought of her hands when she’d come to me, the words moving through the air as gracefully as birds, as softly as whispers. What had she said then, before her hands had moved in terrified shapes, the meaning obvious even if the words were not?
No . She had said no in the end, and because I desired her, there was no choice but to let her go.
Let me hear you, because I want you, and I want to love you.
I allowed myself to watch the candle for one more minute, and then I forced myself away. Away from the memories, down the tower steps, back into the room of the warg pelts where I had slept alone for many long years.
I couldn’t be the man she deserved, but I could try to be something she needed.
The keep was dark and still; the nobility who had chosen to travel by daylight were kept in the Tower of Summer, furthest from Cirrien’s room. Nobody was around to disturb me, the guards not giving me much more than a glance. They were well-trained to keep their attention on other shadows, deeper shadows that might hide a wolf rather than a fiend.
When I found myself straying too close to the Tower of Spring, which was now Cirrien’s from foundation to peak, I forced myself to turn away.
She had said no, and no it must be.
So I prowled restlessly, finally stalking outside the main doors of the keep to the cool wind atop the fortified wall outside. The scent of fresh pine on the breeze cleared my head, the mist drifting over the valley of the Rift like a white sea.
A small sliver of me wished for a warg to come; merely for something to do, something to kill. My release had satisfied only the lust, not the hum of frustrated tension in my veins.
But no wargs came to save me from my own discontent. Here and there the mist parted raggedly, revealing the needle-strewn ground far below, empty of enemies to slay.
If I could do something for her… but I had no idea if she had liked the book. If she even liked reading at all. I knew the paper would have been a small happiness for her, but perhaps the book had been outside her taste. Maybe she was interested in flowers, or sewing, or… or perhaps she thought that a book about vampires meant that I was trying to force her to want—
“Why is it that every time I come up here, I find you brooding? Don’t you have better things to do?” Visca scowled at me briefly, but she kept her gaze outside the walls, ever vigilant. “There’s several supply wagons to be mended, if you want to keep your hands busy.”
“I was just thinking.” I stood a little straighter, shaking off the broodiness. “About what Cirrien might like. Everything here is new to her.”
“Mm-hm. I did notice you’re not in your new bride’s bed, as is right and proper.”
My tongue flicked out, tasting the air. Still no wargs to save from myself or Visca. “She ran from me. And before you ask, no, I’m not angry. I’m… unused to feeding from those I wish to keep alive. I took her serenity for granted, and moved too fast.”
“Well.” Visca settled against the stone wall, her leather armor creaking. “It’ll take some practice, I s’pose.”
“A bit.”
We fell into companionable silence as I considered the excuse I’d given Visca.
What would Cirrien like? Did the Rift seem like a place she could call home? What brought her joy?
“You know… you’ve spoken to her more than I have.” I touched my fingertips to the wall, unused to not having my claws scrape. “You said more in one evening to each other than Cirrien and I have spoken in several days.”
Visca’s ever-present smile touched her mouth. “She’s learned in her letters. Better than I am, at any rate. I think you’ll find her quite useful in that old pet project of yours.”
I glanced her way, brow creasing. “My pet project… the historical archives?” Visca nodded.
It had been several years since I’d thought of the archives. I was no great shakes at language myself, and with every vampire of the Red Epoch long since turned to dust, I’d put aside the crumbling fragments preserved from that era.
I mused over it as Visca left, taking another turn around the walls and checking on the guards. Cirrien had already proved she was intelligent; I couldn’t let her waste away in a tower with nothing to occupy her.
With a new course of action, a new hope springing to life inside me, I dropped from the wall, landing softly in the courtyard with no more than a grunt to mark my passage.
The library was not unused, but it was not a favorite haunt for most of us. Wyn kept her own texts in her personal chambers, and after I’d abandoned my project of reassembling the High Tongue, I hadn’t stepped foot inside.
Until now, only the steward had bothered to make use of the place, and that was on rare occasion; I shoved one door open, wincing at the creak that echoed down the corridor.
Dust covered many of the spines and shelves; the melted-down candles had not been replaced. The rest of the keep had been of far more importance than ensuring this forgotten space was kept clean.
My eyes adjusted to the darkness easily; my clawed feet left dusty indents in the carpet. I touched a scrap of paper left on a desk, and then a dry inkwell.
Like the room at the top of my tower, this place was a capsule frozen in time.
A list was already forming in my mind. I went back to my own chambers, found a fresh pen and sheet of paper, and wrote out orders for the steward. It took an act of the ancestors to prevent myself from dragging him out of bed right now, in the middle of the night, to begin disseminating tasks to the keep maids.
The tension under my skin no longer itched with aimless energy; instead I considered what Cirrien might need the most. We had no Librarian—the last Scrollkeeper, the official title of a Librarian responsible for the preservation and translation of a keep’s historical records, had died in the war. But she would want to speak… so a slate it was, by her own request in Thornvale. I didn’t want to force her to use her paper to ask simple questions when it clearly bothered her to do so.
Perhaps she would have no true interest in the High Tongue, but if she was good with language, she would find a wealth of knowledge at her fingertips. The library hadn’t suffered the damage of the outer keep in the days of fighting; centuries of history were preserved here.
Then I thought of something else that would suit my needs. Someone else, directionless and searching for his place in life, and this might be a project he’d like.
Without allowing myself the luxury of misgivings, I penned a brief second letter.
When I lowered the pen, that sense of purpose remained. A book was nothing compared to ten thousand, all of them at her disposal. I refused to let her fire wither and extinguish for lack of anything to do.
I summoned one of the night-shift maids to deliver the letters, with orders that the instructions be carried out from the moment dawn broke. This would be my gift to her, to show her that I had not meant harm, that I wanted this union to thrive. That she was no ornament to be kept locked away, but the Lady of the Rift.
There would be no sleep that night, even though we would travel the Rift tomorrow.
I laid in bed, staring at the ceiling, all of my thoughts turned in prayer towards the ancestors.
Let her find something she loves here. Just one thing.
Even if it’s not me.