7 #2
He stopped just beside the door and measured the distances. Still no sound from the hallway.
In a single savage motion, Astarion stabbed the wire through the keyhole. Someone on the other side shrieked.
Astarion yanked the wire out and flung the door open.
“Why, Violet, my pet,” he drawled. “Whatever is the matter?”
Bent nearly double, with her hand clapped over her ear, his sister spawn glared at him. “Bastard,” she hissed.
“Dear me. Did you hurt yourself?” He was honestly a bit disappointed.
He’d been hoping to get her in the eye. And while stabbing a wire directly into her brain would have been entertaining while it lasted, the old bastard would probably have something to say about it.
Cazador enjoyed a little recreational maiming among the spawn but objected to severe injuries unless he could watch.
It appeared that all he had managed was to give Violet an impromptu piercing. Ah, well. Astarion folded his arms and leaned against the doorframe. “Is there something I can help you with, dear sister?”
She tucked a pale strand of hair behind one delicately pointed and somewhat bloody ear. Her hair had gone gray when she was turned, not the brilliant white of Astarion’s, a fact that filled him with secret glee.
Being Violet, she didn’t bother to pretend that she hadn’t been spying. That would have required a sense of shame, which Astarion was fairly certain she’d been born without. She bared her teeth at him and flounced away. Astarion resisted the urge to make a crude gesture at her backside.
When he was certain that she had gone, he closed the door and stuffed his handkerchief into the keyhole, shaking his head. “Spying on one another all the time, trying to glean a shred more favor with the old man…It’s a wonder we don’t all go mad.”
“I’m not entirely sure we can,” Dalyria said, frowning down at the beetle shells.
“Beg pardon?”
“Well, think about it. Madness—this type of madness—is an injury done to your mind, is it not?”
“I…suppose…?”
Dalyria set down the mortar so that she could gesture with her hands. “Do you remember a few years ago when Yousen crushed your feet?”
Astarion fought back a shudder. He remembered it extremely vividly.
Yousen had been newly made, and Cazador was still enjoying forcing him to torment his siblings.
Yousen kept whispering, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” as, with a board and a sledgehammer, he systematically turned all the bones in Astarion’s feet to powder while Cazador read a light novel and offered occasional suggestions.
Astarion knew perfectly well that Yousen had no choice in the matter, but the apologies had annoyed him, at least up until he lost consciousness.
His injuries had proved to be a challenge even for the healing powers of vampire spawn.
As fragments of bone rejoined and tried to assume their proper place, they became tiny sharp-edged knives, slicing through nerves and barely healed flesh.
Astarion spent two days in a ragged delirium, and when he came to, he was in the favorite’s quarters.
Cazador bathed his skin with cool water, stroked his hair, and said, “My boy, my poor beautiful boy,” while holding cups of warm cow’s blood to his lips.
It only took a few days for the novelty of playing healer to wear off, but the cow’s blood did its work, and when the vampire lord tired of him, Astarion was able to walk out of the room on his own newly healed feet.
“Of course I remember,” he told Dalyria. “It fixed my fallen arches.”
“And are there scars?”
“No, of course not.” The only scars on Astarion’s body were Cazador’s bite marks and the faint mark on his left cheek from when he’d fallen off a horse when he was fifteen. “Nothing leaves scars now.”
“Precisely. I have wondered sometimes if that includes our minds.” She made a sweeping gesture that took in the wall of the laboratory and, by extension, all of Szarr Palace. “We suffer torments year after year, and we grow…strange, perhaps…but our minds do not break.”
“Pity,” said Astarion. “I was hoping to keep madness as an option.”
Dalyria’s eyes met his, cool and crimson. “If you did not go mad in that mausoleum, I do not believe that you will.”
Astarion did not flinch. He so obviously did not flinch that he suspected Dalyria could read it as clearly as if he had.
The mausoleum was the worst thing that had happened to him—worse than pain, worse than Cazador’s mind games.
His mind had broken there in the darkness, day after day, clawing at the door with nails that cracked and broke, leaving trails of blood across the stone.
Wondering if he would be there forever, wondering how long it would take him to starve to death, until hunger eventually overcame even terror and he became nothing but starving skin and bone.
He wouldn’t say that the experience had left him unscarred.
But Dalyria wasn’t entirely wrong. Once the door had finally opened and he had fallen out onto his knees in the cool night air, once that terrible hunger was sated, his mind had begun knitting itself back together.
He had been making sardonic remarks before his fingers had even healed.
It had been more than a hundred years ago. He wondered how she’d heard about it.
“Ah, the mausoleum,” he drawled. “Quite restful. I finally caught up on my sleep.”
Dalyria, who had seen him not-flinch, said nothing. After a moment, Astarion bent his head back over his work, and his sister spawn went back to crushing beetles for their master.
* * *