11 #2
Astarion chose a middle seat, where there would be someone on either side to buffer him from Cazador’s attention. Dalyria took the place next to him, on the far side from Cazador, and Petras sat down across the table. Aurelia paused a moment, then sat down beside Astarion, at Cazador’s right hand.
“A toast,” Cazador said, lifting his goblet. “To our family.”
“To our family,” the spawn echoed, then drank.
Even now, long after being turned, the warm blood still slid down Astarion’s throat like silk, like velvet, like a mouth on his cock, like a hundred pleasures magnified and twisted back on themselves.
Oh gods, it’s bull’s blood. They must have dragged the animal into the stables and butchered it not twenty minutes ago.
Astarion swallowed it down, his fangs biting helplessly at the rim of the cup, and suppressed a moan.
It took all his willpower not to drain the goblet at once. Wait for it, he told himself, wait. A second drink will be just as good. You’re not a teenage boy frantically wanking himself in the privy. You know how to wait.
He set the goblet down, half full, and licked blood off his teeth. Across the table, Petras had blood running down his chin, and his eyes rolled back in ecstasy. Typical.
Cazador waited until everyone had set their goblets down and recovered themselves. “And now, my children…enjoy your dinner.”
The servants stepped forward and pulled the covers from their plates.
Maggots squirmed in the eye socket of a dead rat carefully arranged on Astarion’s plate. He groaned internally. Petras stared down at his own rat, his lip curling in disgust. Yousen retched.
Aurelia gazed at a piece of salmon identical to what Cazador was eating.
She looked at it for a moment, then shrugged and picked up her fork.
Typical. One of us is lucky, and the rest suffer.
Violet was gazing at Aurelia with dislike, but Astarion didn’t bother to expend any emotion on it.
There were so many grudges to hold without involving random chance as well.
He could have chosen to sit closer to Cazador and had not.
“Well?” Cazador said. “Eat up, my children.”
“You must admit,” Astarion said, stabbing the carved radish that decorated the rat’s tail, “the plating is superb. My compliments to the chef.”
Dalyria snorted. Violet rolled her eyes the way she did when she wished she’d thought of something first.
“I hate radishes,” Petras muttered unwisely. By the gleam in the old man’s eye, he was going to eat a lot more of them in the near future.
This was not the first dead rat that Astarion had eaten at Cazador’s command.
It probably wasn’t even the hundredth. He kept his face as neutral as possible, picked up knife and fork—which fork is for the dead rat course, again?
—and began carefully scraping the wet spikes of fur off the animal’s ribs.
Beside him, Dalyria was dissecting her rat with the dispassionate intensity of an autopsy.
The trick was to hold your breath and think very hard about something else, then wash it down immediately with wine.
The entrails were the easiest because you didn’t have to keep chewing.
Astarion cut a small section of too-soft guts and took a breath, then popped it into his mouth while staring across the room at a carving that was meant to look like dancing serpents.
It wasn’t a very good carving. His mouth was full of squishing gunk that stuck to his teeth, but he swallowed, then gulped down half a glass of wine.
Thank the gods I saved the blood. It would purge the taste from his tongue as nothing else could.
Not even Violet could pretend to enjoy this meal. She attacked her rat with suppressed fury, snapping the ribs with her hands. Cazador made a tsking sound and shook his head.
“Remember your table manners, my children,” Cazador said.
“We will have a guest tomorrow night, you see. The hunt is suspended, and I expect you all to be on your…best behavior.”
He lifted his own glass and drank, watching them over the rim with heavy-lidded eyes.
The smell of fresh blood was a cloying counterpoint to the thick stench of decay.
“Will our guest be getting dead rat, too?”
Astarion asked dryly, extracting the rat’s heart with the end of his fork.
It had turned black and slightly gelatinous.
When he bit into it, something sprayed unpleasantly inside his mouth, and he pressed his lips tightly together to keep from gagging, then drained the rest of his wine in a single gulp.
“Oh, no,” Cazador said, smiling, as Yousen lost his battle with his stomach and was violently ill on the floor. “I have something much more delectable in mind.”
* * *
The manor house of Lady Erikinia was built in the old high elven style, the pillars worked into the shape of fantastical trees and the windows framed with artfully carved branches.
But these trees had leaves of beaten silver, and the door they framed was set with stained glass, and the man who opened the door wore black and violet silk.
“So you found them,” he said to Bajia.
“Was there any doubt?”
The man smiled, then turned to Astarion’s mother and bowed deeply, very deeply, as if she were someone important and not just a minor druid who spent most of her time as a bird. “Lady Miriana.”
“Hello, Wendin,” she said almost absently, fussing with Astarion’s collar. He squirmed away, far more interested in the house than in whether his collar was straight. For that matter, why does she care? She’s never worried about my collar before.
“Lady Erikinia wishes you to be conveyed to her presence immediately,” the man said.
Miriana’s hands stilled on Astarion’s collar. “We’ve been traveling for some days now. A chance to rest…”
“I understand, milady, but she was most insistent upon the matter.”
Her fingers twitched against Astarion’s skin, rippling slightly as if they longed to become wings, but she stepped back and said only, “I suppose we must get this over with, then.”
Inside, the ceiling soared upward, at least three stories, and the roof was made of glass. A live tree grew in the center of the foyer, ringed by blue tiles, and an immense staircase rose up behind it, the railings so deeply carved that they looked in danger of falling apart at a touch.
“If you will follow me,” the man named Wendin said with another bow.
“I know the way,” Astarion’s mother muttered, but she turned to follow him, reaching for Astarion’s hand. He avoided it. I’m not a baby, he thought resentfully, even if the size of the house made him feel very small.
Wendin led them through a series of halls and doorways.
The first hallway was light and airy, the windows open to the breeze.
The second hallway, though, was wallpapered in deep red, and the tile floor gave way to carpet so thick that their footsteps were swallowed up without a sound.
The air smelled of incense, though not one he recognized from the little chapel in the village.
Astarion glanced over his shoulder and saw Bajia bringing up the rear. She winked at him, and the flicker of alarm he’d been feeling died away.
The third doorway opened into a long room, lit by lamps on chains hung from the ceiling.
The windows were tightly shuttered, and the smell of incense was thicker here.
Despite the lamps, he had the impression of an underground lair, the sort of place where a dragon might curl up and dream of treasure.
At the far end, on a chair that wasn’t quite a throne but also wasn’t not a throne, a figure waited.
Wendin closed the door behind them. Astarion’s mother took a deep breath and struck out across the expanse of carpet toward the figure. Bajia tapped him lightly on the shoulder, and Astarion started, then followed her.
As he grew closer, he saw the figure more clearly.
Lady Erikinia—it had to be her—was the oldest elf he had ever seen in his life, her skin sagging from her skull into jowls and a deeply furrowed neck.
She wore some kind of headdress with fluttering black scarves hanging from it, and gems gleamed in her pointed ears.
She was wrapped in a dressing gown made of rich scarlet brocade that gleamed in the lamplight, and her long, spidery fingers were wrapped around a steaming mug.
“Granddaughter,” she said.
Her voice was a revelation. Someone that old should have a thin, frail voice, either high and whispery or cracking when she spoke. But Lady Erikinia’s voice was rich and buttery, and it wrapped around the listener like a comforting hug.
Astarion’s mother squared her shoulders, looking not at all comforted. “Grandmother,” she said grimly.
“You certainly did not make yourself easy to find. Bajia spent months figuring out where you ended up.”
His mother said nothing.
“And this must be young Astarion. Come here, young man, and let an old woman look at you.”
He took a few steps forward and made his clumsy bow. “It’s nice to meet you, Great-Grandmother.”
Lady Erikinia smiled like a skull. “And you, Great-Grandson. Though something must be done about that accent…and those clothes! Dear me, Miriana, if you were in such straits, you should have written. I know that we have not always seen eye to eye, but I would not have begrudged a copper of it,
if I had known.”
“I did not want your money then, and I do not want it now,” Astarion’s mother said through her teeth.
“For yourself, perhaps not, but for your son…Here, young man, no need to stand. Come sit here.” She gestured to a small table beside her that was adorned with a silver jug. “Do you like chocolate?”
Astarion had never heard of it before, but Wendin pulled out one of the chairs, and Astarion sat. The man poured a mug of something brown and steaming that smelled like heaven and passed it to him.
He missed the next few minutes of conversation as he discovered that he liked chocolate very much indeed.
He could not believe that it had existed all this time and no one had ever thought to mention it.
It was as if someone had taken the smell of freshly turned earth and mixed it with butter and dipped it in honey, only this was better and richer and utterly divine.