9
The halls of Szarr Palace were cool and dim in midafternoon. No shaft of sunlight penetrated the thick stone walls, but air currents shifted, ever so slightly, when one of the mortal servants opened or closed a door.
Astarion woke and stretched. As an elf, he needed only four hours of trance a day.
Sometimes he stayed tranced longer, seeking relief from his waking life.
Other times, it twisted and grew out of his control, his memories becoming a dreamlike horror of dark, wet earth under his fingernails, choking his throat, as he clawed his way through the dirt with only the broken board of his own coffin lid as a tool.
Sometimes, in the trance, he reached the surface and Cazador was waiting. Sometimes he never reached the surface and could only dig and dig and dig for miles, until his arms gave out and he was reduced to teeth, gnawing at the soil like a fanged worm, forever…
And then again, other times, he was in the magistrate’s court without his pants on. Whatever god oversaw dreams had a bizarre sense of humor.
He sat up. His rooms were small and hung with burgundy velvet.
Someone who knew Astarion well—and there weren’t any anymore, if there ever had been—might have observed that the room was both opulent and oddly spartan.
A wardrobe for clothes, a basin for washing, a bed with linen sheets worn to softness, and a half dozen pillows.
No truly personal belongings, no knickknacks, no paintings on the wall, not even any books.
In his living days, Astarion’s home had been crowded with artwork, the doors flanked by ornate statues or vases glazed in all the colors of sunset.
But he had learned, as all the spawn had learned, that anything you treasured could be taken from you.
He had once watched Aurelia gaze into the fire, stone-faced, as Cazador tore pages from her sketchbooks and tossed them onto the flames.
In fact, it was from Aurelia, oldest of the spawn, that he had learned the secret to keeping something safe.
She had not been kind to him, exactly—kindness was not in her nature—but having a second spawn in the palace meant that Cazador’s sadism was divided between two targets.
In the first few tendays, when Astarion was still stumbling and weeping and half mad with a hunger that never faded, she would sometimes pause beside him and utter a few words. Never many, but always useful.
Start screaming early. It’s what he wants, and he’ll stop sooner.
Never try to run.
He gets bored easily. Make yourself boring.
It was that last one that had caught his attention. He looked up, aware that his face was streaked with tears, and met the tiefling’s red, red eyes. “Darling,” he said, “I’m never boring.”
One corner of her mouth crooked up. “You’d better learn.”
It was easier between them after that. She taught him the things that Cazador didn’t bother with—how to keep his fangs hidden and where to bite a rat to extract the most blood with the least mess. How to move around lights so that his lack of shadow didn’t show.
Eventually, how to pick out a victim and hunt them through the streets.
Cazador had been in one of his family moods then and described Aurelia as “a perfect older sister.” They had played the part because it was so much easier than the alternative.
One day, he’d woken to find Aurelia outside his door. “Come on,” she said. “I have something secret to show you.”
“But Cazador—”
“Asleep.”
That was how he learned that the old vampire tranced for eight or ten hours a day.
For an elf or a tiefling, that meant there were hours during the day when your mind was almost completely your own.
If you’d been given leave to hunt, you could even leave the palace, provided you kept to the Undercity, where sunlight rarely penetrated.
In those early days, though, you were expected to hunt only once or twice a month.
But Szarr Palace was very large, and not even Cazador knew every single stone within it.
Aurelia had taken him to the wine cellars and showed him a dusty stone half hidden behind an ancient barrel.
It opened a passage in the floor, so low that she had to twist her head sideways to keep her horns from scraping on the ceiling.
A dozen feet along the passage was a bricked-up wall, and against it lay a stack of pages.
He’d picked one up, the edges rough where they had been torn from a sketchbook, and saw an unfamiliar tiefling woman looking back.
When he handed it over, Aurelia carefully gathered the rest and took them with her.
Astarion knew without being told that she did not trust him not to reveal the hiding place to Cazador.
That was probably wise.
“There are plenty of secret places here,” she told him. “They raised and lowered the ceilings every time it became fashionable. But never go to one when Cazador’s awake. Inside the palace, he can find you with a thought.”
And there she left him, in the dusty passage under the cellar, and maybe he cried again a little, out of gratitude, but he would never, ever admit it.
* * *
—
Astarion’s hiding place was in an unused bedroom that had become a storage area for unwanted furniture.
There was a chest shoved into one corner, halfway underneath a tilted bed frame.
It had a lock that even a paladin could have picked, though only if they really wanted some sheets that had been folded for so long that they crunched when you tried to unfold them.
Under the sheets, however, was a false bottom, and inside that was a rather clever combination lock keyed to a date that had no significance to anyone but Astarion and a young man more than a century dead.
He unlocked it, wiped his dusty hands on the sheets, and reached down into a recess carved into the floor itself.
His fingers touched silk.
He drew the fabric out. It was a silk scarf of the most exquisite material, cool and slick, like woven ice.
There was a velvet coat in the hiding place as well, heavy with brocade, and a spidersilk cloak lined with satin.
He let the textures flow over his fingers like liquid, eyes closed.
Darkvision could not show him the colors anyway, but that didn’t matter.
The important thing was that Cazador had never seen them at all.
More than a century in the vampire’s service had turned sex into a tiresome chore.
Food was an empty shadow of its former self, on the days when he wasn’t choking down decaying rat.
Trance was nightmare-tainted, and he certainly did not have the luxury of losing himself in drugs.
Blood was the only thing he truly enjoyed, and Cazador knew it all too well and withheld it at his whim.
But Cazador did not know about this. A single sensual pleasure still belonged to Astarion: that silk was still a cool whisper and velvet a warm glide against his fingertips. This solitary thing remained untainted…as long as the old man never found out.
That was why Astarion’s rooms were so spartan. Even the velvet curtains were the same type that were hung all over the palace. He was careful never to even run a hand over them when Cazador was present.
Sometimes, when he had leave to hunt and the old man was busy tormenting someone else, he smuggled clothes out in a bundle and changed into them outside the palace. They made him feel, however briefly, like himself again. He had chosen these for himself, and Cazador had never touched them.
He knew, with hard certainty, that if the vampire ever learned of it, his last pleasure would be taken from him. The old man would strangle him with silk, or entomb him, wrapped in velvet, for a tenday or a month or a year, until the touch was a horror that haunted his nightmares.
So he was careful never to let the secret slip, and because Cazador sought luxury for the trappings of wealth and not inherent longing, the vampire never cared or even noticed.
* * *
One of the many innovations brought by the Lady of Silverymoon was the institution of village schools throughout the region.
Astarion’s schooling had previously been conducted in a haphazard fashion by a crotchety old druid who showed up for a tenday or so at a time, usually arriving in the form of an ox carrying baskets full of books, slates, and chalk.
Astarion had learned to read, write, and do basic sums, but not with any great enthusiasm.
It was possible he had learned to count only so that he could tally up the number of warts and moles that sprouted from the old druid’s skin like mushrooms.
Then the school opened. The schoolmistress was a lovely young human woman who always smelled of lavender and had a smile like dawn breaking.
Astarion, who had just turned eight, was instantly and profoundly smitten, and he drove himself to new heights of scholarship to please the object of his affections.
He didn’t even try to find loopholes in the rules she laid down, which for Astarion was a declaration of devotion on par with slaying dragons.
“Now, write me an essay, class,” she said one day. “Tell me what you want to do when you grow up, and why. It should be at least six lines long.”
His classmates groaned. Six lines? That was an impossible length—longer than most books of magic, surely!
But Astarion was not the only one smitten by the schoolmistress, so the single room filled with the squeak of chalk on slates and the mumbling of students engaged in the ancient practice of padding out sentences with extra verbiage.
Astarion, meanwhile, stared at the blank surface, his mind a whirl of silk and velvet and southern cities and the smell of lavender, and thought that six lines wasn’t nearly enough to cover it.
* * *
—
Astarion was twelve years old when the messenger arrived.
She was tall and lithe and human, dressed in leather that had been cut to show diamonds and half-moons of brilliant violet suede underneath.
Her hair was dark and curly, and her skin was the color of oak bark.
Astarion, who was lurking behind the stone wall that led to the house, watched her beating the dust from her boots, her lips pursed in distaste.
Then she straightened her clothes, retrieved an envelope from her pack, and knocked on the door.
His mother answered. Astarion could hear her gasp of dismay, then a swallow came shooting out of the doorway, leaving the messenger standing on the front step and the door hanging open.
He watched his mother’s wild-shaped form arrow across the sky, then slipped out from behind the wall and approached the messenger.
“Are you from Silverymoon?” he asked, that being the grandest place he could think of.
The human woman turned, her eyebrows rising. Her eyes were tawny, a shade lighter than her skin, and full of secret amusement. “You must be young Astarion.”
That someone so grand knew his name was so astonishing that he forgot she hadn’t answered his question.
“Yes, ma’am.” He bowed as well as he could, aware that he wasn’t good at it.
When he straightened up, the woman was looking past him to his father, who was coming up the long pathway from the vineyard.
“Lady Erikinia sent me,” she said.
“Who?”
She looked back to Astarion, clearly surprised. “The Lady Erikinia? Your great-great…you really don’t know? Hells, the old lady won’t like that one bit.”
“My great-great what?”
But he didn’t get an answer, because by then his father was in earshot. “So it’s time, is it?” his father said, as if continuing a conversation he and the messenger had already begun.
“It is,” she said, inclining her head.
“Miriana doesn’t like it.” Miriana was Astarion’s mother’s name.
“I am afraid that my lady is not concerned with that.”
“No,” his father said, “she wouldn’t be.” His eyes found Astarion and dismissed him. “Well, not as if any less work will get done around here.”
“Don’t say that!” his mother cried, suddenly dropping out of wild shape to land on the path. Astarion, who was used to his mother’s erratic comings and goings, didn’t flinch. The messenger did, then caught herself and rolled her eyes.
Astarion looked from his parents, in their shabby homespun, to the messenger, in her black-and-violet suede. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing!” Miriana put herself between the messenger and her son. “You, whoever you are, just go back and tell her we’re all very happy and we’re not coming.”
Astarion craned his neck to see over her shoulder. The messenger tapped her foot. “I am afraid, Lady Miriana, that is not an option. The terms of your arrangement are very clear.”
“But it’s too soon!”
The messenger met Astarion’s eyes where he peeked out from behind his mother. “How old are you, lad?”
“Twelve,” Astarion said, at the same time his mother said, “Nine!”
There was an exquisitely awkward moment while the lie hung in the air, and then his father said, “Astarion, go inside and pack for a trip.”
His mother let out a cry and turned into a swallow again, zipping frantically back and forth along the eaves. Astarion said, “But what—”
“Go,” his father said, in a voice that would have made a hardened veteran cower.
Astarion went.
* * *