14. Bane
Chapter 14
Bane
H e’d almost killed her.
A few seconds too late and my Cirri would’ve been dead, cleaved right through the heart.
Icy claws stroked my guts, my heart racing at how close she’d come to the ancestors, so close I could almost see them around us now, watching, waiting, their hungry souls eager to welcome her among them.
And the worst part was that I knew Derog. He had fought alongside me against the wolves, a brave man of honor.
A man of honor, and yet he’d tried to send my Cirri to the afterlife before her time.
Now he trembled in my grasp, his shattered arm held close against his chest, blood soaking into his patched shirt. In my haste to get to Cirri before the worst could happen, I’d been sloppy—tearing through flesh and bone instead of simply latching onto him, nearly ripping his arm off in my effort to turn it aside.
“Cirri,” I said, my voice rough. “My lady. Were you harmed?”
She still stood behind the table, face as white as the chalk she used to write with, Derog’s blood coating her in a bright crimson spray. Hands trembling, she let the pieces of her broken slate drop to the table—then raised her fingers to touch the still-warm blood on her cheeks and lips.
Her eyes widened as she examined the scarlet smears on her fingertips.
She signed to me slowly, and Wyn touched a hand to her shoulder, nudging her to sit down. Cirri moved like a dreamwalker, sinking into her chair of holly and primrose, the petals now dripping.
I should never have let her leave the keep. This wedding… I was willing to make allowances for the beliefs of the Rift-kin, their deeply-held lore that governed their lives, until those beliefs threatened my reign or the defense of the Rift.
Or my wife. Her, most of all.
“This will only take a moment,” Wyn said to her, the bloodwitch’s clipped tones more gentle than usual. She pressed one of her healing cloth patches to Cirri’s forehead, the blood sigil inscribed on it flaring with crimson light, and I couldn’t stop myself from shaking Derog, my grip on the back of his neck unyielding.
“Do you see this?” I growled, as Wyn pulled the cloth away, now bloodstained, leaving smooth, unmarked skin behind. “She is no Fae creature. It was an accident, you fool—merely a scratch.”
Derog let out a strangled groan as I shook him again.
The celebration had ended abruptly, and now the people of Fog Hollow watched, waiting with bated breath. Gilam waited at my side, the lines in his hangdog face deepening.
I looked at them, only for a second, unwilling to keep my eyes from Cirri for too long.
“This ends now.” In the silence, the rumble of my voice carried. The pop and crackle of the bonfires were the only other sound. Even Derog’s tears were silent, pouring down his cheeks as he stared at my wife in horror. “I’ve been patient with you all, despite the troubles you’ve given me. You ask us for protection from the wargs, then refuse to step foot outside your houses at night when we need your sword-arms. You ask us to run supply lines so you do not starve—then refuse to eat the food we’ve brought, because there was a mushroom with three spots instead of five. You ask us for walls, and we put forth the effort to rebuild them—fighting with you every step of the way to reopen the mines, because of this foolish belief in ghosts .”
Some of them shuffled in place, and others looked at the ground. Gilam examined his boots, his shoulders drawn up.
“And now one of your number has tried to assassinate my wife.” I made no effort to hide the deep rumble, nor the venom seeping into my tone. “A ridiculous, absurd superstition has nearly cost you all a heavier price than you could afford to pay. There are no Fae. There are no ghosts. We know this because we lived among them, and I will tell you: there is nothing beneath the ground now but shadows and dust. The only threat in the forest is the wargs.”
I paused, allowing them a moment to breathe. To appreciate how close they had walked to the razor’s edge, because if that had been Cirri’s blood spilled… there would be no Fog Hollow come morning.
“From this moment on, it ends. If we require a night patrol, you will leave the safety of your homes and do what must be done.” I stared at a young man, who no doubt hid behind a hearth covered with cold iron charms and trinkets while my vampiric legions stood guard by moonlight.
I turned my eyes to one of the women. “The food shipments will not be wasted. I don’t give a damn if there’s a daisy mixed with the wheat or a four-leafed clover stuck to the driver’s coat, you will eat the food that is brought, or you will starve. I will not send more.” She swallowed, her fingers curled around a beaded charm of holly and iron, but she nodded slowly.
Finally, I turned my eyes to Gilam. He, at least, had the stones to meet my eyes. “The old mines will be reopened, and I will not hear a word about ghosts from any of you. As you’ve endlessly hammered into my head, Tristone’s walls must be fortified. So, now we will fortify it—and if any of you fear the dead enough to shirk your duties, believe me… I will give you a reason for fear.”
Gilam nodded, face as pale as Cirri’s. I gazed at my wife as she folded a napkin, wiping the blood from her face. She was still moving slowly, her eyes on the broken pieces of slate before her. Wyn gave her a cup of wine, diluted with fruit juice, to calm her nerves.
Had Cirri ever been attacked in her life, living among the Silver Sisters?
I thought not. She had never truly been one of them, with violence expected around every corner. She had been a maid, an indentured servant—her experiences were with domestic duties and her studies, not with weapons.
I’d seen this reaction before, in the men who were young in the beginning of our rebellion against the invading Forians. In their first days of fighting—no longer running nor hiding—some of them had looked like this.
So, she was in shock. I imagined that she’d felt the cold touch of the ancestors’ fingers on the back of her neck as Derog plunged his knife towards her chest…
I inhaled, savoring the deep breath and the tinge of iron-sweet blood it brought to my tongue, and drove my mind away from that terrible thought.
Never again would I be able to look at Derog and not want to destroy him, his entire house, his family.
He had come too close.
“And from this moment forth, let it be known: if a hand is raised against the Lady of the Rift, that hand, and everything attached to it, is mine. You would not have tried to murder me—and the offense of attempting to murder Lady Cirrien is far worse in my eyes. She is neither Fae nor vampire. She is as human as you are.”
Derog’s tremors grew worse, bordering on violent shaking. My fingers tightened, so gently, only enough to hold him in place and not snap his spine.
“Derog… if you had only stopped to think,” I said bitterly. “I wish you had not done it.”
Cirri stopped wiping at her cheek, looking up. Some of the glassiness had finally left her eyes. She shook her head once.
I’m sorry, Cirri , was what I didn’t say, because it must be done.
“I… I thought she was Fae,” the man in my grip whispered. “I thought it had burned her.”
“After years of us telling you—from the experience of our own lives, our own eyes and ears and the things we’ve killed—that the Fae are dead and gone? And yet you still raised a knife to her and almost slayed an innocent. There is no excuse.”
Cirri shook her head again, harder, but Wyn laid a hand over her shoulder and squeezed, then bent down to murmur in her ear.
My wife signed something, her fingers still unsteady, but I couldn’t understand—and even if she’d still had the slate that had slowed Derog enough to save her life, there was nothing she could have written to change my mind.
“This man attempted to murder his liege, the Lady of the Rift.” I spoke loudly, letting my voice carry to them all. “The punishment is death. Let it be heard and carried out.”
No one spoke in his defense. Not for this.
Cirri tried to rise, but Wyn kept her in place. Visca strode towards them, thunderclouds on her face, but I twisted Derog’s arm behind his back and marched him away, past the crowds that remained.
He had been a man of honor before, so he would be given a modicum of dignity now, to die in privacy without his last throes witnessed by his people.
I brought him out to the forest, to a still, silent clearing where the fog wreathed the ground in playful tendrils and the pines stood as silent sentinels.
“Because I respected you, Derog, I will let you choose the manner of your death.”
The old soldier exhaled, looking up at the sky and the sliver of moon above. “I didn’t mean to, my Lord. I truly thought she was one of them. One of the faeries, with all that fire-hair and the mark on her forehead.”
“I know,” was all I said. I believed him.
I was also unwilling to let him walk free—to become an example for the Rift-kin, that they might try to strike at Cirri and walk away unpunished.
Derog swallowed. I heard the dry click in his throat, the thickness of unshed tears in it. “Will you make it quick?”
“I won’t draw out your suffering.”
He sighed, staring at the moon again. “Then take my blood. Why waste it? At least it goes to a good use now.”
For a moment, I hated myself. That my thirst roared to life at his offer, parching my throat. That I felt relieved it would soon be slaked.
Slaked by the blood of a man I’d called a friend.
“Look at the moon,” I told him. “You’ll go to sleep, and the ancestors will be there to greet you.”
He looked up, exposing his throat. I tilted my head, my gums aching with the anticipation of fresh, hot blood, and bit into the pulsing vein, the one that would bleed him dry within moments.
Derog sucked in a sharp breath, but I held him steady as I drank. The rush of blood over my tongue, down my throat—ancestors, the relief . For the first time in days, the monster in the back of my head went still.
All thoughts of friendship faded, replaced by the gluttonous desire for more, the ravenous craving for every last drop in his veins.
But I remained steady, and as Derog wavered and slumped, I lowered him to the ground, still drinking. Still feasting.
He watched the moon as he slid towards unconsciousness, and I continued to drink. Taking deep pulls, until he was dry… the thirst faded, becoming satisfaction, a feeling of fullness I experienced only rarely.
I raised my head, looking into Derog’s sightless eyes, already clouding over with death. I tried to arrange him so it did look like he was just sleeping. For all my rage, he had been a good man. I would not leave him in ignominious disarray.
“I’m only sorry it was you, old friend.” I pressed my fingertips to his eyelids, closing them. The ancestors held him in their arms now—he would see as they saw, with no more use for earthly sight.
Perhaps in death he would see me as I was, not as a friend or a brother forged in the fields of combat, but as the selfish, unrepentant monster I’d always been.
I lapped the blood from my fangs, straightened myself, and returned to the field of bonfires. Gilam lurked on the outskirts, waiting and twisting his hands with nerves, and I nodded to him. “You may bury him now.”
“Is he…?” Gilam paused, his gaze weary.
“Whole? Yes. I wouldn’t have savaged him unless he’d succeeded.” I spoke bitterly, still angry that it was Derog who had done something so idiotic.
“Good. Good.” Gilam ran a hand over his scruffy face. “My Lord… Bane… it won’t be so easy.”
No, it wouldn’t be. The Rift-kin clung to their traditions like a child to its sweets, comforted by them even as they were harmed.
“It’s long past time to change ways,” I told him. “You’re a wise man. You know as well as I do that the danger is not in ghost stories. And now look where that’s gotten us—I’ve executed a man who served the Rift well, because he was so poisoned with unfounded terror that he tried to murder a defenseless human woman.”
Gilam inhaled, opening his mouth to speak—and shut it. He rubbed his eyes, glancing towards where Derog’s body lay.
“Well, we can try. We have to now, don’t we?” He shook his head, the lines around his eyes deepening.
I couldn’t muster much sympathy. Their own delusions had brought them to this.
“Yes. You do. Or the true threat will come through your ruined walls and devour you all.”
I left him with that, finding the table empty of Cirri and only the pieces of her broken slate left behind. I picked up one of the fragments, turning the thin, dark stone in my hands, and finally tucked it into the pocket of my shirt.
I would keep this small piece, a reminder to myself that she had survived—and that I couldn’t blindly trust the people I ruled over. Danger could come from friendly hands, so long as I allowed them to continue to wallow in their foolishness like children.
I found them in the town square, where Eryan already had the carriage waiting and several grooms waited with the horses. Visca looked unusually grim, and had wrapped Cirri in a shawl. My wife stood outside the carriage, clutching the wool around herself, but when she saw me, her shoulders didn’t relax as they usually did.
A frisson of disquiet ran through me.
“I apologize for leaving you,” I said, opening the carriage. “I apologize… for this whole night. Things would’ve been better if we’d just broken the wheels and stayed home.”
The smile that exposed my fangs felt fake, a mockery of what we’d shared on the way here. Cirri didn’t smile back, her eyes red-rimmed and focused on a point below my chin.
When I pulled the carriage door open, she tucked herself inside—squeezing so that she didn’t quite come into contact with me. The frisson had become a serpent, twisting around in my stomach.
I looked down at myself, and saw what she saw.
Derog’s execution had been quiet, but not tidy. Draining a human of all their blood never was.
I had been so caught up in my own regret that I hadn’t noticed the droplets of blood on my sleeves, the warmth of red soaking into my shirt-front.
What had I been thinking, to return to my wife with the evidence of death all over me? A death she had spoken against.
But Cirri had only been the Lady for a day. She didn’t yet realize that to allow them to bite the hand without punishment would only court further violence and disrespect.
I hesitated, looking at those stains, and then up at my wife. Her hands were silent, curled into her lap; one clutched a primrose with bruised petals.
“I will leave you alone,” I said quietly. “Bar the door.”
I shut it and waited for the sound of the iron latch. The soft snick had a weight it didn’t have before, like the slamming of a prison door with no key.
Visca sucked her teeth, still sour. “Should’ve known this would be a mess. I forgot—all that nonsense here about red hair.”
Few Rift-kin—if any— had Cirri’s fiery locks, Veladari or not. It had likely been bred out long before the vampires had arrived, a color once held dear by the Fae. Either bred out, or the Fae had taken all those Rift-kin unlucky enough to be ‘born of the flame’, as they said.
But we had forgotten, all of us. None of my people had put much stock in their lore or myths when we knew perfectly well for ourselves that they were baseless.
“Don’t beat yourself up.” Visca was only sour because she had come within a hair’s breadth of failing in her duty to protect Cirri. “Something might come of it, at least. And she’s unharmed. That’s the most important part.”
“Right.” Visca cast one last infuriated look back at the stone houses of Fog Hollow, and mounted her horse. “I’m rather torn on this. Suddenly it seems like a good idea to keep her locked in her tower. Didn’t think these people had it in them.”
She nudged the horse into a walk as Eryan got the carriage moving. I stared at Fog Hollow as well before prowling after them.
So I would finally get my way on things that had been gnawing at me. They would have strong stone walls. They would eat their food instead of wasting it. They would join us in the night-hunts.
And as necessary as all these things were, somehow they paled in comparison to the way Cirri had looked at me. As though none of our moments had mattered. As though I were a monster, a creature from her nightmares, something that only lived to drink blood—bathed in her light, I’d forgotten I wasn’t just a man.
I was grateful to leave the firelight and step into the shadows. The way she had stared at me… it felt like the sun had gone down for the last time.
Like it would never rise again.