Chapter 33
Nyxiana
Icome through inside Vampiria, at the family gate on the east side of the courtyard, the one with no guard and no record kept of who uses it.
My travel clothes go over into court dress while I’m still finishing the step through.
Dark, fitted, high at the collar. I go over the visit one more time, the same as I went over it on the crossing.
Greet them in the receiving hall. Ask where the fourth point is kept in this realm.
Hold the audience under an hour. Be out of here before anybody has room to ask me a second question.
I check my hands; they’re steady.
The courtyard is exactly as I left it. Black stone underfoot, laid in the long pattern nobody has changed in four hundred years.
The dark glass in the upper windows throws the moon back at itself so that the whole east face of the palace glows dull red from the third floor up.
Somewhere behind the wall a horse moves in the stable yard.
I start across it toward the main doors but I don’t get to them - my mother and my father come out to meet me themselves, through the small door under the arch.
No herald walks ahead of them, nobody trails behind at the proper distance.
For as long as it takes them to cross the stones, the space at my left side is very obviously empty. He would have crossed those stones on my left, walking between me and every door in that courtyard. He does that everywhere. He always has.
My mother gets to me first, takes my face in both hands. For a while she doesn’t say anything, just looks at me the same way she’s looked at me over skinned knees, unhurried, going over all of it before she’ll comment on any part.
“You’re pale,” she says. “Even for you. And you’re worn straight through. It isn’t the kind sleep fixes.”
My father stands a step behind her with his hands folded, waiting his turn. He’s watching her face more than he’s watching mine.
“I’m here for the fourth point,” I say. “Niko will have told you what we took out of Drakoria. There was one in the North Range after that and one in Doria. The fourth is in this realm and I need to know where you keep it.”
My father starts to answer, slowly, turning it over, the way he handles anything that lives in the old records rather than in his own memory.
“There’s nothing in the household register under that description,” he says. “There may be something in the deep archive. I’d want to look before I told you yes or no.”
“Where’s Valen?” That’s my mother, straight across the top of him.
She has his name. Niko will have given it to her, because Briarstone was the first realm we walked into together and my uncle has never let a thing like that go unmentioned to his sister. The question isn’t a guess. She has been holding on to it since we came through that gate.
“He didn’t come” is all the answer I give her.
My hand closes at my side, nails digging into my palm hard enough to leave marks that will be gone in a minute.
Neither of them can see it from where they’re standing.
My mother’s eyes stay on my face. She’s already decided there’s more to it than I’ve handed her.
My father’s eyes go to my hand. He puts his hand at my back and turns me away from the corridor that runs to the audience hall.
“The map can wait until you’ve fed,” he says.
We go through the private way, the narrow halls between the family wing and receiving rooms. The stone in here is older and darker than the polished floors out front.
It’s worn into dips at the middle of every threshold from a few hundred years of the same handful of feet.
Lamps set into the wall down here rather than hung - small and low.
They come up as we reach them, settle again behind us.
The place smells of old stone and candle wax, with the faint metal underneath both that any house full of my kind carries in it.
We pass the stair - the narrow one that comes out on the gallery above the small court.
Kaspian and I ran up it half our childhood, straight past a session in progress underneath.
A steward always came after us with his hands out, hissing at us to be quiet.
I look at it, then I look away and keep walking.
“Has anything come across the borders?” I ask.
I keep it light.
“Anything unusual. Anything the watch flagged and couldn’t place.”
“Nothing,” my father says. “The borders have been quiet since spring. There’s nothing in the logs that hasn’t already been walked down and accounted for.” He looks over at me. “How long are you staying?”
The receiving room he takes me to is one of the small ones.
Two low couches facing each other, a table between them, one narrow window.
Nothing in here was built to impress anybody.
My mother chose every piece of furniture in it herself, which is not something that could be said about a single room on the public side of this house.
“Blood,” my mother says to the steward at the door. “Not tea.”
“I’m fine.”
She doesn’t argue with me, doesn’t look at me either. The steward goes.
“I fed before I left Ash Hollow,” I say but the order stands.
My father sits across from me and asks me about the crossing while we wait, whether it ran clean, whether the family gate still sets a person down half a stride short.
It’s an easy question with nothing under it and I take it gratefully.
The steward comes back with two chalices already filled to the rim.
He sets them down on the low table between us.
Both of them make the same small sound against the wood.
He’s out of the room before the second one has finished settling.
My mother picks one up, putting it into my hands and closing my fingers around the stem, both her hands over mine while she does it, so setting it back down would take a decision on my part.
“This is family blood,” she says. She uses the old cadence for it, the formal one she keeps for inside these walls. “Given freely. It was not bought from a man in the lower quarter for a fistful of cruor.”
I look down into the cup. It’s warm through the metal against my palms. What I buy in the lower quarter is warm too but comes in glass, off a board, from a man who bites a coin to make sure of me first and forgets my face by morning.
My mother sits down across from me, close enough that her knees nearly touch mine.
“What happened between you?”
She asks it the same as she’d ask about a wound that needed looking at.
I put the chalice down on the table and look at her, then at my father, sitting there with his hands loose on his knees, both of them waiting without one word of pressure.
I pick the chalice back up. I turn it once in my hands. Then I tell them.
“I knew what he was the first day I laid eyes on him. He was standing in the trees at the edge of the compound and I read him from the porch, a hundred yards off. Ancient. Divine. Asleep. A thing that looks like a wolf who can’t shift and is nothing of the kind.
He hadn’t come in yet, hadn’t given anybody his name.
I said nothing about it to a single person.
Not to Dane or Kaspian. He walked in off the perimeter weeks later told me his name, and I stood there and let him do it. ”
My voice catches on his name and nowhere else in it.
“Then I said nothing for months. He worked our line every night and I let him go on believing his thoughts. He believed it through four realms. In Doria he was still believing it while I read the account of what he actually is off a page, standing close enough to touch me.”
Neither of them says anything.
“He found out because he came to my door and heard me telling Kaspian. Not because I told him. He was never going to hear it from me, not that night, and I don’t have a good answer for when he would have.”
My mother is quiet for a while.
“You have been deciding what people are allowed to know about themselves since you were a child,” she says. “You did it to your brother. You’ve done it to me.”
“I didn’t want either of you worrying about it.”
“I know why you did it. It still wasn’t your decision to make.”
My father sets his cup down on the table.
“Stop doing it,” he says. “Not for his sake. For yours. You’ve been keeping other people’s secrets on your own and it has done you no good at all.”
“And if the truth ruins them?”
“Then it ruins them. That’s theirs to live with. It was never yours.”
I drink from the chalice when there’s nothing left to tell them.
My father reaches across and puts his hand over mine around the cup.
He doesn’t take it away, just steadies it and leaves it where it is.
My mother reaches over and tucks a piece of hair back off my face, two fingers, the same as she’s done since I was small enough for her to lift.
Her hand stays at my temple, then she lets it drop.
My father picks up the second chalice for himself. He drinks without ceremony.
“Is the room too cold for you?” my mother asks.
“No.”
The blood goes to work almost before I’ve finished swallowing it.
Nothing down there is this old or this clean.
It goes through my chest, then out along both arms. It doesn’t stop halfway.
What Evren gave me was enough to travel on.
This is something else. I finish the chalice, set it down.
There’s nothing left in me that’s short.
For the first time since before Drakoria I’m standing in a body that has everything it needs.
My father puts his own cup down beside mine and stands. “There’s somewhere I need to take you before you go,” he says. “It’s below the archive. The map has something to do with it, and so do your mother and I.”
My mother doesn’t move to stop him. She’s looking at the window.
“I kept something once,” he says. “A long time, and from people who had a right to know it. It wasn’t only mine to tell, which is the reason I always gave myself. You may find some use in hearing how that went.”
He puts out his arm the way he has since I was young enough to need it on these floors. I take it. He walks me out of the receiving room and deeper into the palace. My mother comes a step behind.