35. Cirri
Chapter 35
Cirri
W ith my stomach empty, my throat sore and raw, and the chill creeping through my cloak, I slunk out of Wyn’s tent, the basket with the laika under one arm, my journal in the other.
The vampire legions had already brought down the terrible pillar of limbs. They’d dragged the bodies from the snow, leaving nothing but dirty crimson and brown smears behind. In the distance, the barn was collapsing in on itself, its blackened, skeletal frame illuminated against the hungry flames.
Most of the town square was quiet. They had dug pits in the wide field around the barn, my husband among them, doing their best to arrange the dead with respect.
I exhaled, my stomach clenching again, and settled on a large rock fallen from the wall, with a view of the square before me. I put the basket by my feet, giving the pup a scratch behind its pointed ears.
Poor little thing, all of its siblings now consumed.
You’re very fortunate , I told him. Then I pulled out my journal, flipping to the index in the back.
There it was—the symbol I’d translated as Wargyr, that had made my hand shake and sent pins and needles through my fingers as I wrote it. It matched the massive symbol painted in blood across the church’s front.
I turned back a few pages, and began to sketch the church, down to the wolf’s head, the stick-figure-like emblems of people marching into its maw, the symbol clasped in its jaws.
Then I drew the tree of limbs from memory, and wrote what Bane had told me of the conversion from man to warg. The ritual of blood and tears… blood shed with hatred, tears shed in pain.
It was so similar to the ritual I was translating, but why would the vampires have detailed a ceremony on the creation of wargs, their ultimate nemesis?
I added a few details to my sketch, frowning at the page. Despite the similarities, it might not be the creation of wargs at all. They had nothing to do with thorns or roses, and I was positive those translations were accurate.
If there were answers at all, they would be at home in Ravenscry, contained in those ancient documents. But it seemed unlikely at this point. What were the odds that another perfect Silversun Fragment had escaped the burning Arks that ended Liliach Daromir’s reign?
They had to be low. The good luck of even having a priests’ book was unprecedented, not to mention the clear parallel texts I already had. Instead of mourning the lost knowledge, I should be grateful I had that much.
But it was difficult to summon any gratitude while sitting on a frozen rock, looking out at the remains of what had been one of the largest villages in the Rift yesterday. While I was lost in the throes of passion, these people had been in the throes of agony.
It didn’t seem fair, but then if there was one thing I knew, it was that life wasn’t fair at all. Bane would want to blame himself for taking a soft hand with his people, for accommodating their beliefs, and yet it was a fine line between being a strong-hearted leader and a tyrant.
I scuffed my foot in the snow, absurdly glad I’d worn fleece-lined boots. It felt wrong to be happy for such a simple thing in the midst of all this, but there was no going back, was there? What had happened, had happened, and now I would keep living and be grateful for warm boots.
Next time , I told myself. We can stop this next time.
I turned back to my lexicon, shaking my head.
Wargyr.
A circle of thorns.
Tears and blood.
All so familiar, and yet completely incomprehensible in how they related. No matter how I turned it over, I couldn’t make a ritual with the Mother’s sacred imagery align with Wargyr in any way.
Finally, I sighed and shoved my journal in my bag and scooped up the basket of pup. There were no answers to be found in staring at a page, nor any likely to be found here, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least try.
The barn was gone, which would have been my preferable destination. I would’ve been willing to risk puking up my own stomach lining again to check for any signs of thorns amongst the wreckage.
Instead I went to the church. The dead woman had been taken away, imprints left in the snow where her legs had been.
There was still a horseshoe of cold iron nailed into the door, frosted strands of dried primrose draped over the window sills. I pushed the door open, the laika panting in the cold air as I stepped over the threshold.
If there had been bodies in here, they were gone now. But the pews had been smashed to pieces, the walls battered from the fight that had taken place, the floor stinking of iron and salt and soaked through.
I knelt in the mess, using a splintered piece of wood from one of the pews to poke through the crusted slurry of snow, blood, and dirt left on the floor. I unearthed a silver coin, shreds of cloth, even the horrible discovery of a clump of hair ripped out by the root with a bit of scalp still attached, but not so much as a single thorn.
Dropping the wood, I scowled across the floor and petted the shifty pup.
Perhaps it was a mistranslation, and I was searching for the wrong things. There was a chance I had plowed ahead blindly, so convinced I’d had the proper translations that I’d allowed a single mistake to compound into multiple errors.
I blew out my cheeks as I left the church, knowing this would mean hours of double- and triple-checking past work. I needed to send a letter to the Head Librarian of the Cathedral and ask for a second opinion, as well as a clear copy of the Silversun Fragment.
Dear Sister Loranin, I might have irrevocably fucked up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to translate the High Tongue due to my own inflated ego. Please put a pin in my bloated head and bring me back down to earth. Yours, Cirri.
No. I might have made a mistake, but I did have faith in my memory of the runes. This was merely a setback, and these documents were ancient, regardless.
Who could have said what the vampires of the Red Epoch were thinking when they wrote the book? The vampires of today were so divorced from the cultural mores of the Daromir reign that the translations might not remotely reflect their modern rites. There was every possibility they were bastardized from a completely different ritual.
Blaming myself for a mistake wouldn’t make any progress. I would write a proper letter to Sister Loranin, ask for her eyes and the runes, and start over from the beginning.
As the Eldest Sister had been fond of telling us, humility was the greatest of teachers.
Or perhaps she meant humiliation. Either one worked, in this case.
Besides… as I looked down and saw an uprooted tooth ground into the dirty snow, I figured being alive to experience humiliation at all was a lovely gift.
“Carting it around like a pet, now?” Miro was leaning against the broken wall, arms crossed, cheeks reddened with the cold.
I looked down at the bright-eyed laika and shrugged. What else would I do with a pup?
“You should release it into the forest. Give it a chance to make its own way.”
I hauled my journal out, resting it one arm to write as I drifted closer to Miro.
Why would I give it a death sentence? He’s still got milk teeth.
“He’s Forian.” Miro snorted. “He’ll survive.”
I’d rather give him a chance in the keep.
“Why?” Miro rubbed his cheek, smearing the soot there. “So the vampires can keep another Forian minion around and walk all over it when it pleases them?”
I gazed up at him, tipping my head. Do you really believe that’s why you’re treated like a nuisance?
“Of course.”
Maybe you should spend some time in self-reflection.
“Or…” He leaned in. “You could release the pup. Give it a chance to go back to its own people. Being a Forian in Veladar… I don’t wish that on anyone. Always treated like an outsider. Always considered lower. He won’t even be considered a proper hunting dog, not by the Master of Hounds there.”
It could be worse . I shrugged again, unable to summon even irritation. My emotions seemed trapped behind a wall, separated from the rest of me. He could’ve been a meal.
Miro’s mouth twisted. “Just so long as you know what you’re doing. Consigning him to a lifetime of being dragged along on a leash. That’s all that’s done to Forians here.”
Aren’t we all? Everyone has a leash. Everyone owes something . I paused to scratch the laika’s soft back. What do you know about wargs?
Miro was obsessed with his Forian heritage, hellbent on complaining how it brought him down. If he was so in love with it, perhaps he knew something more about the ritual.
It was Miro’s turn to shrug, frowning. “Creatures of great strength. Fast, powerful, furious.”
What about their creation? Have you ever heard tales of that?
Those pale jade eyes focused on my face, flicking from my eyes down to my mouth, and back again. “That’s a rather gory interest for a lady to take.”
Indulge me.
“Very well…” He leaned back against the wall, brows furrowed. “I’ve heard you need to be committed. Utterly, absolutely. Saying you want it isn’t enough. You need to believe , down to the marrow.”
I watched his eyes move to the church wall as he spoke, his fingers tapping.
“You need to eat a feast of flesh,” he said quietly. “And it must be terrible. It must surpass the bounds of pain and horror. I’ve heard… some of them ate their own children. The ultimate betrayal, the gut-wrenching knowledge that the thing that trusts you most in the world is ruined by your own hand.”
My stomach turned over, a slow flip-flop, and bitter saliva flooded my mouth. I swallowed hard.
I had asked, after all, and now I was indulged.
“And the whole time that’s happening, you must keep the faith. The belief that you are Wargyr’s claws, his fangs, his hands on this earth.”
Have you heard anything about thorns being involved? I wrote. A circle of thorns?
Miro’s brows crinkled further. “No, of course not. They’re sacred to the vampires’ Mother, not Wargyr. Where would you even get that idea?”
I worried my lower lip, thinking. Just a misconception.
“Hell of a misconception. No, blood and flesh are sacred to Wargyr. Pain. He is the god of torment, of being forged in a crucible of agony and emerging in your most powerful, primal form.” Miro glanced towards the field of pits. “A little like the fiends, in fact.”
How so? I didn’t believe that for a moment. I couldn’t picture Bane lifting a finger against any of his loved ones.
“He never told you how they took that form?” Miro snorted.
I’m sure he didn’t tell you, either.
The man grinned, showing his white teeth. “No, but he didn’t need to. My mother told me. There are some interesting parallels, though. To be born, a warg needs to emerge washed in blood. Just so with them.” He nodded towards Bane. “You think the vampires feed all pretty now in their blood shops? They had to cause epic suffering to go fiend. She told me…” He leaned in closer. “It took thirty deaths before Bane could make the shift.”
I didn’t know what to say. Without meaning to, I looked out at my husband, deep in the trenches, covered in blood and soot, his broad shoulders flexing as he shifted bodies.
Thirty agonizing deaths, to become what he was… but this was Miro speaking, and if I thought I understood anything about him, it was that he would twist any truth to his advantage.
“It’s kind of funny.” Miro followed my gaze. “They hunt the wargs for being what they are, and yet between the four of them, they killed over a hundred people at once to become fiends. You could argue that they are the exact same coin, on different sides. Neither is born from love and rainbows, I can tell you that. What makes a warg any different from a fiend?”
The fiends don’t hunt and eat innocents and children, to start with.
“No?” He raised his brows. “So… you’ve never seen Bane or Wroth raise a hand in anger?”
My pen was motionless in my hand, my mind flashing back to that night in Fog Hollow, how quickly he’d moved—that man’s arm nearly torn off, the warm, wet spray of his blood across my face.
The white-hot hate in Wroth’s eyes.
Bane, claws slashing through my side as he prepared to kill him.
He had reasons , I wrote.
“Ah, well then. Reasons. Were you there on the battlefield against Foria?”
I shook my head, a tendril of warm anger finally seeping through the numbness of my emotions.
“Some of the wargs were children,” Miro said quietly. “Do you think that stopped him from gutting them on sight?”
A long, taut silence passed.
“But I suppose you know everything, don’t you?” Miro smiled, with more than a touch of snide superiority in his tone. “Never been on a battlefield, grew up safe behind nice thick walls, but you know all there is to know about fiends. I’m glad you’re an expert and can correct the rest of us, who’ve been living under them for the last ten years.”
I sucked in a sharp breath, but Miro had already shoved off the wall. He gave me a mocking bow.
“Thank you for amending my errors, my Lady Silence,” he said. “I bow to your superior knowledge. Or…”
He came close enough that I felt his breath on my ear as he spoke. “Or you’ll see one day just how terribly wrong you are, and when that day comes, you’ll wish you’d listened. Two sides. Same coin. There is no difference between your husband and what he hunts.”
He left me alone in the cold silence, the wind kicking a flurry of snowflakes through my cloak, my toes frozen numb, my heart a stone. Finally, I forced myself to return to Wyn’s tent, making my notations from Miro’s knowledge and putting the laika by the brazier to keep him warm.
I still hadn’t thawed as the legions filled in the last of the pits. As the tents were packed, the wagons loaded, the horses saddled.
Bane’s shoulders were slumped as he emerged from the twilight, his hands filthy to the elbow. He bowed over as he walked, like the weight of the world rested on his shoulders.
I watched as he scrubbed them in a bucket of well water, scouring blood and dirt away with harsh soap.
“We’re going home alone,” he rumbled, his voice low. “The legions are spreading out, reinforcing where they can. We need to get Miro back to the keep. He’s going to run supplies south—it’s the most likely place for Hakkon to attack next.”
I nodded, unsure of what to say. How could I never have questioned before exactly how he became a fiend?
What else would force such a transformation but a sea of blood?
I examined him as he scrubbed, taking in the giant form I’d found so hideous on first appearance. The horns curling back over his skull, the long, dextrous ears, the crests of bone deforming his face. The bat-like snout, with those flared nostrils, turned into a despairing frown.
And yet I couldn’t find any fault in him now. He grieved as any man would, blamed himself.
Miro was only right in the broadest sense of the word. Bane had bathed in blood to become this monster. But he had a good soul. He had done it for good reasons.
Not even in my wildest imaginings could I fathom Bane doing what the wargs had done to Tristone. He only turned to that brute violence when there were no other options. When it was the only card left to play.
“What is it, lover?” he asked, a crooked half-smile on those distorted lips, and I blinked, realizing I’d been lost in thought while staring at him.
I’m ready to go home , I said, and meant it.
The ride back to Ravenscry was a blur. I only vaguely remembered entering the keep, stumbling to the stables and handing the basket of pup over to the Master of Hounds. My golems, joyful to see me again, Rose’s soft hands scrubbing away the ice and grime. Curling into bed with Bane, his warmth at my back, clutching me close to his chest.
I woke the next morning alone, as I had expected. With Bloodrain over, and the tragedy of the previous day, Bane would have a full plate.
As did I.
My books were precisely where I had left them, my desk in the library gleaming with welcome. I spread out my lexicon, opening the ritual book and the parallel text.
For the next twelve hours, I double-checked the runes so many times I lost count. I wrote three letters, asking Rose to give them to the steward for dispatch—one to Sister Loranin, two to scholars I had heard of in the Collegium of Argent.
I examined and cross-examined the parallel text, looking for the tiniest discrepancies, the most minuscule of mistakes.
And as the moon rose high outside the windows, I finally sat back, my neck aching and head pounding, and came to the same conclusion I’d reached before.
Unless there was something wrong with one of the initial twelve runes translated from the High Tongue, the parallel text was pristine. I had made no mistakes.
The symbol of Wargyr was incontrovertibly linked with the vampiric ritual, denoting ‘a circle of thorns’, ‘blood’, and ‘tears’.
I tapped my pen harder than usual, staring furiously at the page, my eyes red and sore. All that work for the same nothing. None of this helped.
I rubbed my eyes again, letting out a deep sigh. All I wanted was to be useful, and all I’d dug up was a load of nonsense.
Rose touched my back, her hand soft and hesitant.
I took my hands from my face. I’m fine. I just hate when things don’t make sense.
She tipped her head, and finally her shoulders rippled in a shrug. No fun , she said.
All too true.
Bane hadn’t come for dinner. He was probably speaking to Wyn and Visca, maneuvering legions, managing the word of the news. I missed him deeply.
He wasn’t in the tower, either. I put my books aside, my appetite diminished by my failure, and signed to my golems.
Would you two go to the library, please? I asked Rose. We’ll look in the Migration Era books next if you could pull them. And stay there, if you don’t mind. I’d like to be alone with him tonight.
Thorn bristled, his footfalls stomping a little harder than necessary as he obeyed my orders, giving me an accusing ‘glare’ over his shoulder, but Rose loved to pull books and organize them. She went rather perkily, hips swaying.
I looked forward to a night of privacy with Bane. But despite my exhaustion, my mind wouldn’t stop spinning, disquiet gnawing at me—I couldn’t tune Miro’s voice out of my head, telling me that my husband was no better than a warg himself.
I tossed and turned, snatching a few hours of restless sleep until the sky lightened with another misty day.
Bane hadn’t come to bed.
Except my journal was open to a fresh page. A bloodrose with thick, luscious petals, still beaded with dew, laid atop it.
Sweet dreams, lover
I cannot have you by daylight
But I await the night
Sleep well, my burning flame
When the moon is high
I am yours again
I smiled widely despite the dragging melancholy of yesterday’s defeat and the mostly sleepless night, knowing he would’ve gritted his teeth to rhyme it as much as possible, and it warmed my heart.
The bloodrose I tucked behind my ear after I brushed my hair. I would press it in my journal tonight and keep it forever. In one year I would drink Bane’s blood, and a hundred years from now I would open this book and see this bloodrose and remember it all, as fresh as if it were yesterday.
Instead of going to the library, I decided to check our thorns and roses. The last time I’d laid eyes on them, they had been dug up a little to create the golems—and perhaps staring at the thorns would give me some small insight into what exactly that maddening rune meant, and how it tied in.
The keep was almost eerily silent as I stepped into the Bloodgarden, making my way to the alcove where our thorns grew. For a moment, I stood there in surprise, wondering if I’d wandered to the wrong plot.
But no… that was ours. I distinctly remember this spot. It was just that the thorny brambles looked as though they’d been growing for years, rather than a single month.
They had crept upwards over the column, covering it with a riot of black thorns, green leaves, and tiny red buds. At the very top, the most new and spindly tendrils were reaching for the Tower of Winter.
I bit my lip, suppressing a grin as I knelt before it and touched a glossy leaf. The Mother had blessed us. Or the ancestors, or hell, even the Lady of Light.
I sat there and looked at it, my grin slowly fading to a frown.
Mother Blood or the Lady of Light. A heretic scholar had claimed they were the same goddess, shaped by different cultures through the eons.
The High Tongue runes were so similar to formal Veladari. Comparable enough that a theory had been postulated that they came from the same root language, so many thousands of years ago that any record of it was long forgotten.
But there were other commonalities to consider, parallels that had kept me up all night.
The fiends’ process of creation was also similar to that of the wargs, the need for violence, for pain, for conviction. Their strength, their speed. The hunting prowess of a creature of the night. The need to consume blood.
I forced myself to breathe evenly, thinking it through. It was undeniable, the links between warg and fiend, a rite confirmed from two different sources.
With trembling hands, I slid the ritual book from my bag and opened it.
Who said that they did not share the same root? If languages and goddesses shared roots… why not the monsters that walked among us?
I read the runes I had translated.
In a circle of thorns,
With blood freely given…
I knew ‘tears’ in the next line, the rest still undeciphered.
But it was close enough. It was a root, a common cause. The only problem was that I still couldn’t think of how the hell it applied to Wargyr. His ritual was clearly defined by a frenzy of savagery, offerings of flesh and blood spilled by force, not thorns nor willingly-offered blood.
I closed my eyes, clamping down on frustration. The vampires had always hated the wargs… so why write their god’s name in the very first chapter of a sacred vampiric ritual book?
Because Miro was right. It was the ritual of Wargyr… for vampires.
They are the same , I wrote, defacing my own lexicon. They encoded this in their traditions because they knew they were the same. They knew fiends and wargs come from the same dark place, with the spilling of blood and tears. They retained the knowledge that to become a fiend was a dark and twisted thing, the same as the wargs. Both wargs and fiends must kill to become what they are.
I stared at the words, tapping my pen on the page.
Very well. I could, on some surface level, accept the similarities. But the fact remained that I had asked Miro for that information, and I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.
I knew Bane had killed before. I’d been there when he sentenced Derog to death and carried out that sentence himself.
But I struggled to imagine him performing the ritual he’d described… forcing torment upon an innocent person.
Why? I asked myself. Because he leaves you poems and roses? You truly can’t imagine him acting the monster?
No… it was that I didn’t want to imagine him acting the monster. I was so used to seeing him in a certain way that the idea of extreme, rabid violence, not a tidy execution, seemed anathema to me.
I couldn’t envision Bane doing the things the wargs had done in Tristone. But if Miro was right… he had. He’d done absolutely forsaken things.
For a good reason, I reminded myself. The wargs were powerful, fast, far more so than the average vampire. If Bane had chosen to perform such a rite… it had to be for the sake of being able to stand against them.
I looked back at the deciphered ritual, struggling to place it with this unwelcome knowledge, considering similarities.
Languages, goddesses, monsters… maybe they all shared a root, sprung from the same fertile soil, watered with blood and pain. Maybe the page I’d been deciphering was the ritual to convert a vampire to a fiend.
Or I was just being ridiculous and leaping to conclusions. My translations had hardly even begun, and I was already trying to link Wargyr and the vampires, making them out to be the same thing.
The answer was simple: more research. I tore the page with my accusing revelation out of the journal, fully intending to throw it in a fire the first chance I got.
But my feet didn’t turn towards the library. I was tired, worn out from endless hours of research and translation, and from a sleepless night contemplating the unthinkable.
I took a deep breath. I trusted Bane with my life, did I not? I trusted him.
So I needed to ask him if he’d done it. If he’d once been like a warg himself, or if Miro had lied. If the ritual to become a fiend was gentle, with freely given blood… or a nightmarish bloodbath full of horror and despair.
I looked at the page I still held, torn from the precious journal—I didn’t want to deface my journal by comparing the fiend I adored to the wargs. I folded it and shoved it deep in my pocket.
It would hurt him terribly… but the similarities were undeniable. He would tell me the truth of how he’d been created.
All I had to do was work up the courage to ask the fiend himself.