7
Astarion had grown up in the Silver Marches, with parents who were deeply devoted to the land. His mother had a minor druidic talent, and his father had tended a vineyard for nearly three hundred years.
As a child, Astarion was neither particularly good nor particularly bad. “Strange is what he is,” his father muttered. “Strange and lazy. You tell him to do something, and he sits and thinks about whether he wants to do it.”
“He’s thoughtful, that’s all,” said his mother, who spent a great deal of time in wild shape and had perhaps a more malleable outlook as a result. “Thoughtful’s not bad.”
“When my father told me to do something, I jumped up and did it. I didn’t look for loopholes. I told him to go pull weeds in the south field this morning, and when I went out at lunch, he had pulled five dandelions and was taking a nap. And do you know what he said?”
Astarion’s mother wondered silently which wild shape would get her out of this conversation. “What did he say, dear?”
“He said that he’d pulled weeds, like I told him, but I never said to pull all the weeds. Can you believe it? And he looked at me like he’d—Don’t you turn into a snake at me! I know that snakes are deaf!”
“Ssssorry, dear. Thought I sssaw a mousssse.”
In the year 1236, Astarion’s parents took him to the city of Silverymoon for Shieldmeet.
He was seven years old and had never been inside city walls or seen a town larger than a few dozen houses.
His world was defined by greens and browns—the green of leaves and grapes on the vine, the brown of oak wood and rich earth—accented by white snow, white clouds, and pale sky.
The city was a revelation.
There were people—hundreds, thousands, more than he could meet in even an elven lifetime.
And the colors they wore! Reds that weren’t merely rusty shades of brown but brilliant scarlet and crimson, blues even richer than the sky, violet and orange and fuchsia, colors he didn’t even know the names of, like carmine and vermilion.
He’d spent his young life dressed in gray and brown homespun because it didn’t show the dirt, and here in Silverymoon, there were people walking down the street wearing black-and-white doublets with canary-yellow hose, as if they might not have to get on their knees in the dirt to pull weeds.
It wasn’t just the colors. They stayed the night at a cousin’s, and the fabrics in the house came in textures—a gauzy scarf that shimmered when it caught the light, a worn velvet pillow that nevertheless felt softer than anything Astarion had ever imagined,
lace edging along a curtain with its curious repeating bumps and hollows.
He spent the night on the couch, barely sleeping, rubbing his cheek against the velvet pillow and remembering the parade that had wound through the streets, edged by cheering crowds.
He had been too short to see the Lady of Silverymoon as anything but a distant dot of white and gold, but the human burgher next to him had worn acres of some impossibly smooth burgundy fabric, and every time the man moved, it brushed against Astarion’s skin.
“Excuse me, sir,” Astarion said, touching the man’s sleeve, which was slick as ice beneath his small fingers.
“Eh?” The burgher looked down, spotted Astarion, and frowned as if he expected to have his pocket picked. “What?”
“Please, sir, can you tell me what this fabric is called?”
The burgher clearly was not expecting that question, but his frown faded, probably because of the sheer admiration in the child’s voice. “It’s silk, my young friend. Comes from the South.”
“Thank you for telling me,” said Astarion gravely, which made the burgher laugh. Then his mother had noticed and told him not to bother the man, and Astarion didn’t even protest because his mind and his fingertips were full of the memory of silk, silk, silk.
They went back to the vineyard the next day, but from that moment on, Astarion’s entire goal in life was to get the hell out of the Silver Marches, get as far from nature as possible, and go south to a city full of colored silk.
* * *
Szarr Palace was, as always, a dark and gloomy place.
The lack of light was no impediment for a vampire spawn, but it made mending clothing difficult.
With everything washed out into shades of gray, Astarion could never be quite sure he wasn’t accidentally stitching up a tear in a white shirt with bright pink thread.
The one reliably well-lit room was Dalyria’s laboratory, where she compounded reagents and spell components for the vampire lord. Wizards had apprentices to grind up leeches and whatnot; Cazador had Dalyria. She was a recent spawn, barely three decades dead, but she rarely went out hunting.
Just as well, really. Her personality just isn’t cut out for seduction.
Dalyria had been a doctor in her mortal life, but Astarion suspected she was the kind who poured medicine down her patients’ throats and then informed them that they felt better now.
Still, he rather liked her, at least compared to the other spawn.
She was sharp, intelligent, and utterly devoid of sentiment.
Talking to some of the others was like talking to an animate bag of misery.
Yousen had been turned less than a century ago—practically yesterday, for Mystra’s sake—and if you so much as passed him in the hall, you could feel the angst rolling off him like mist.
Dalyria did not seem miserable. Granted, she didn’t seem happy, either, but who was?
Once or twice, usually while Cazador was doing something appalling, Astarion had met her eyes and seen the calm slip, revealing a core of rage like molten iron.
He respected that, even though he knew it wouldn’t last.
Another few decades, another century, and the rage would be buried so deep under horror that it would be almost impossible to find again.
But if nothing else, she didn’t complain if he came into her workroom to mend clothes with the proper colors of thread.
She was crushing green beetle shells with a mortar and pestle when he walked in. Astarion wiggled his fingers at her through the rent in his shirt where the dagger had missed him.
“I take it tonight’s prey didn’t go quietly?” she said.
“Tonight’s prey thought having a big knife made him dangerous.”
“More the fool he.” Dalyria went back to her beetle shells. Astarion settled on a stool in the corner and began fixing the tear with small, even stitches.
“Anything new in the palace tonight?”
Dalyria shrugged. “Violet and Petras are at each other’s throats, as usual. Aurelia’s brought in four already this tenday.”
“Four? The old man needs to feed, not bathe in the stuff.”
He didn’t particularly care about occupying the chambers where Cazador kept his favored spawn, but if Aurelia kept bringing in twice as much prey as anyone else, the vampire lord was likely to decide that the other spawn were shirking.
“Someone should tell her to take a night off.”
“As long as young bravos think beating up a tiefling in a dark alley is good sport, Aurelia will have all the prey she desires.”
Astarion grimaced, thinking of his own beating in a dark alley.
After the better part of two centuries, the memory should have lost the power to affect him, but it still had a bite to it.
Possibly because it had been his last few moments as a mortal, or because it had sent him on the road into endless night.
Possibly because you never stop picking at it. You know what your mother used to say about picking at scabs.
“I never thought I’d say this, but I miss the old days,” he said.
“When I was turned, the old man only expected two or three a month. You had time to plan things properly. Now it’s two a tenday or back to the kennel to reflect on your failures. I’m surprised he’s not swelled up like a tick from that much blood.”
Dalyria made a noise of acknowledgment without treading over the line into actual agreement.
Astarion felt a brief glow of something not entirely unlike pride.
She was finally learning not to say anything that one of the family could run and repeat to Cazador.
Granted, that was a lesson that Astarion had learned within a tenday, but Dalyria was not a political animal.
It was one of the reasons that he had continued to cultivate her.
They were not friends—none of the spawn could afford to be friends—but Astarion felt about her much as he’d felt about promising junior solicitors during his days as a magistrate.
Besides, he already knew her secret. Dalyria believed that vampirism was a disease, and by all the Hells, she was going to find a cure. Astarion was pretty sure that she was wrong on both counts, but it cost him nothing to keep her secret and, occasionally, to assist her with small experiments.
“So, what fascinating horror are you working on now?” he asked.
The doctor stopped, looking down at the mortar full of beetle shells as if she didn’t know where it had come from. “Making a reagent,” she said.
“For you, or for him?”
“Him, of course. Nothing I wish to do requires beetles.” Her nose wrinkled slightly. “What I require…”
Astarion held up a hand to stop her. There hadn’t been anything so indelicate as a sound, but the quality of the silence outside the workroom door had changed almost imperceptibly, a velvet quiet instead of the cold silk of absence.
“You require the same thing we all do, I’m sure,” he said, slitting a thread on the side of his breeches with a fingernail. “Decent food, moderate luxury, the occasional live pig to drain to the dregs…”
There was a thin wire hidden in the seam along his thigh. Just flexible enough that a cursory search wouldn’t find it, just stiff enough that it could be bent into a crude but useful lockpick. Astarion drew it out and held it like a miniature rapier.
“…a good book and a good fuck now and again…also, to be made into a vampire at some point.”
Making less sound than the shadow he no longer cast, Astarion moved across the floor toward the door, carefully staying out of the line of sight of the keyhole. Dalyria was pretending to crush her beetles, but her eyes kept flicking toward him. Some of us were not made for intrigue, and it shows.