25 #3
“I think it’s a safety measure. The artificers don’t want small children getting hold of a wondrous rhinoceros or something and getting squished when they summon it in the nursery. So if you don’t have a clear space, the figurine just sits there.
A necromancer once accused me of throwing knickknacks at him. It was all rather embarrassing.”
“I’d be more than happy to take it off your hands.”
“It wasn’t that embarrassing. Anyway, it’s a family heirloom.”
Den Suriel plucked it from Astarion’s grasp.
“Supposedly given to my grandmother by a celestial being.”
He smiled ruefully. “Of course, I’m proof that he gave Grandma something else as well. My parents were extremely surprised, but she was smug about it until the day she died.”
“I can imagine.” Astarion pulled out the next object. “A bottle of lover’s oil? Oh my. And is this a second bottle? Dear me. One wonders how you have any time to fight evil.”
“That second one is a healing potion, I’ll have you know.”
“And the first one?”
Den Suriel rocked on the balls of his feet and didn’t meet Astarion’s eyes.
“Is this what they teach nice young paladins in oath school?”
“Teach, no…learned, yes. You can’t coop that many healthy young people up in dorms and not expect things to happen.” He coughed. “And a few had to take oaths of celibacy once they were knighted, so they were, um, sowing their wild oats first. As it were.”
“I see.”
“If you’re quite done rummaging…?”
“Oh, very well.” Den Suriel shoved everything back into his bag of holding while Astarion turned to more important matters.
“And now you’re remaking your bed. Under the bed.” The paladin pursed his lips. “Any particular reason?”
“The window,” Astarion said, plumping his pillow.
Den Suriel turned his attention to the window. It was a decent size, though the curtains were rather faded. “This window here? Why—oh, sunlight. Yes, of course. I’d forgotten.”
“Unless I wish to turn into an extremely attractive charcoal brick, I don’t forget. There will be sunlight around the edges, but under the bed will be quite safe.”
“Was your left hand burned by sunlight, then?”
Astarion went very still. A cold chill seemed to be crawling up his spine, each individual vertebra filling with ice.
“How,” he said in a light, conversational tone that would send anyone with sense running for the hills, “the hell do you know that?”
No one knew that. No one except Cazador.
Astarion’s mind flooded with paranoid fantasies—Cazador arranging the entire encounter with den Suriel, Cazador listening in on the truths Astarion had been forced to speak—and the possibility that the last few days had been nothing but another mad illusion,
only instead of a hallucination in the crypt, he was still in Szarr Palace, probably talking to a pig carcass.
“Uh…” Den Suriel sounded concerned but not particularly alarmed. “Whenever you talk about sunlight burning you, you start rubbing your left hand. Did you not know?”
Astarion looked down at his hands as if they belonged to some other person. He was cradling his left hand protectively against his chest, massaging the knuckles with his right.
“No,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know.” He dropped his hands, suddenly much too aware of them.
White eyes watched him solemnly. Astarion sank down onto the bare mattress and heard himself saying, from a great distance away, “It wasn’t long after he turned me. He told me I had to know what it felt like, so I wouldn’t get careless. He put on these heavy leather gloves,
like a falconer’s gauntlets, and pulled back the drapes so there was a single beam of light coming into the room. Then he took my wrist and held my hand in the light. The skin burned off it and turned to ash. I watched all the little black flakes drifting down to the floor…”
Den Suriel reached out and gripped Astarion’s shoulder. The vampire spawn started, then forced lightness into his voice. “I screamed bloody murder, of course. But in fairness, I’ve never been even a little careless about sunlight since.”
“That sounds monstrous. I’m sorry.”
Astarion shrugged. The hand on his shoulder was warm, even through his shirt.
He did not usually like to be touched, but there was something almost impersonal about the heat, as if the paladin were a hearth fire and he was merely warming himself beside it.
The fire would be there for anyone who needed it.
Astarion could smell the scent of his soap on the man’s skin, rosemary and bergamot, and underneath, the spicy scent of the aasimar’s blood.
“When you said you wanted to live to make it all worthwhile, I didn’t really understand. Now, between that and what you said about the crypt, I think I do, a little.” Den Suriel squeezed Astarion’s shoulder briefly, then withdrew his hand and went to his bed on the other side of the room.
Astarion slid underneath his own bed, into the nest of blankets he’d built.
It wasn’t uncomfortable. Compared to, say, the stone floor of Godey’s kennels, it was downright luxurious.
And it was warm from the kitchens below, and there was no reason that Astarion should feel cold, as if he’d stepped away from a fire. Absolutely no reason at all.
* * *