11 #3
He surfaced from the chocolate only because his mother shouted, and she never shouted. He looked up, startled, in time to hear his great-grandmother say, “You’ve had over a decade to ruin the boy. That was the bargain.”
“He belongs with his family!”
“I am also his family,” Lady Erikinia said, tapping one long finger on the arm of her chair. Rings winked in the lamplight.
His mother drew breath for another impassioned defense, but the old woman cut her off. “Enough of this. Let the boy answer for himself.” She turned toward Astarion. “Has your mother explained the bargain to you, then?”
“Errr…no?” He set the empty chocolate mug down, not without some reluctance. “What bargain?”
“Miriana, really?” She clucked her tongue. “Well, I suppose you always did prefer to ignore anything unpleasant if you had the chance to fly away from it.”
This was such a staggering insight that Astarion felt as if the world had shifted around him.
He would have liked a moment to consider it, but his great-grandmother had turned to speak to him.
“Your mother did not enjoy the life of an elvish noblewoman and chose to remove herself from it. She had every right to do so, but as head of the family, I did not feel that she had the right to remove her children without consulting them first.”
Lady Erikinia gestured in his direction, as if there were any doubt about whom she was referring to.
“So, she agreed that her children would be given a choice as to whether they wished to explore their noble heritage or continue as…ah…common folk.”
Astarion had the feeling that she had meant to use another word there and changed it out of politeness. His mother was standing on the toes of one foot, the way she did when she was about to launch herself into bird shape.
“I always meant to tell you,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “I just…well, you were so happy at the vineyard, and I didn’t want to take that away.”
Happy? She’d thought he was happy? Astarion stared at her and had the sudden realization that occurs to all children sooner or later: that their parents are merely people, not gods, not all-knowing, not able to read minds.
He’d been bored to death and sick of everything, dreaming of the city, and butting heads with his father nearly daily… and his mother had no idea.
It was freeing. It was terrifying. He had no idea how to feel about it.
“Since you haven’t held to your end of the bargain, there’s no reason to hold to mine,” Lady Erikinia said.
“But let’s ask the boy, shall we?” She turned back to him.
“Well, Astarion, you have a choice. You can turn around and go back where you came from, or you can stay here and learn what it is to be an Ancunín.”
She smiled her death’s-head smile. “Which you may love or hate. I make no promises.”
Astarion looked to his mother. She was mouthing words at him, the same words from the inn last night. Say you want to work at the vineyard like your father.
His great-grandmother said nothing, simply watching him. She was very old and a little frightening, but she lived in a manor house like nothing he’d ever seen, and even her servants wore silk.
Astarion licked his lips, tasting chocolate, and looked for the loophole. “If I hate it, can I go home again?”
His mother covered her face. Lady Erikinia’s smile grew to a sharp-toothed grin. “Certainly, you may. Though I ask you to give it a little time to adjust first. Say, one year?”
“Then I’d like to stay.”
He would have apologized to his mother, but she cried out, her voice turning into a falcon’s scream, and then she was a bird, beating her wings against the shuttered window.
Wendin unlocked the shutters, letting a spill of light into the room, and the falcon shot out the window and was gone, leaving only echoes behind.
* * *
The spawn gathered in Cazador’s chambers, a place of pleasure and horror—but mostly horror.
Astarion eyed the decorations: more cheap sandstone columns and winged sun disks, painted by artisans who had clearly never seen wings and were possibly a little unclear on the sun as well.
Those flight feathers are wrong, he thought absently.
He knew that only because he’d watched his mother fly often enough and had registered the shape of her wings without even realizing it.
Huh. He hadn’t thought of that in years. Decades, perhaps. It had been far longer since he’d thought of her husband. There was now only one man who came to mind when he heard the word father.
“Such a lovely idea, a masked ball,” that man murmured. “I attended the most fascinating one last tenday at the Eomane House, for…well, never mind.” He gestured to six boxes tied with ribbon, sitting on a side table. “Gifts for you, my children.”
There was a half-second pause while the spawn weighed the word gifts.
A gift was a dangerous thing in Cazador’s hands.
It might be an object of surpassing beauty, a necklace wrought in platinum or a coat embroidered in gold.
It might just as easily be a dead rat or gloves of silver wire that burned lines into the wearer’s skin.
When Cazador opened the first box and revealed a tooled leather mask, the spawn were silent, but the air in the room moved from six exhaled breaths like an unheard sigh of relief.
Cazador lifted the mask and turned it in his hands. It was the face of a white fox with a long narrow muzzle and metallic gold markings around the eyes, tied with black ribbon. “Astarion, my dear child, come here.”
Astarion went to one knee in front of the elder vampire.
Cazador slid the mask onto his face and smiled.
Sharp nails slid through Astarion’s hair, leaving an erotic tingle along his scalp.
In other days, Astarion had enjoyed it when lovers played with his hair.
Now he looked at his body’s response dispassionately, from somewhere outside, and was glad when Cazador finished tying the ribbon and let him rise.
“How it suits you, my child,” the vampire murmured, eyes heavy-lidded.
“Your taste is impeccable, Father,” Astarion lied.
With my white hair and skin? No, you want contrast, you old bastard, and it should match my clothes.
A black fox, or even a red one, that would work.
As it is, my head is going to be a white blob completely unrelated to the rest of me.
Ugh, I’ll simply have to hope the gold echoes the gold embroidery on this jacket.
He had been no stranger to masquerade balls in his living days, and he had even worn a fox mask once, but it had been a fantastical orange made of dozens of autumn leaves. The craftsmanship had been better, too.
“Oh, oh, me next!” Violet squealed, clapping her hands together. Cazador smiled indulgently and presented her with a wolf mask in her namesake violet. Astarion leaned over to Dalyria and murmured, “I suppose the shop was out of weasels.” Her lips twitched, but she didn’t comment.
Petras was presented with a hound mask, which undoubtedly galled him.
Yousen’s almiraj was too large for his head, and his wire whiskers stuck out absurdly to either side.
Dalyria received an owl with delicate golden feathers around a white face mask.
Astarion had to admit that it suited her rather well.
“For my wise girl,” Cazador said, smiling.
And of course the old bastard doesn’t know that owls have brains smaller than their eyeballs. Mother used to complain about how her thoughts felt squished after she took owl form.
Gods, he was getting maudlin or nostalgic or something. He adjusted the ribbons against his pointed ears so that the fox fit better.
“And to match your horns, my dear,” Cazador purred, sliding a black goat mask onto Aurelia’s head.
Her face was expressionless, and Astarion suspected, by the way she held her eyes, that it remained expressionless underneath the mask.
That was always the way. You could not tell if she was pleased or humiliated or anything else.
It was as if some vital connection between her face and her feelings had been severed long ago.
She had been that way as long as he had known her.
He wondered if it was how she had always been or if she had learned it under Cazador, retreating from her flesh like a soldier retreating from a burning keep.
Occasionally, when Cazador took it into his head to torture her, she would react, but Astarion always suspected that it was an act, that she chose to scream and bare her teeth so that the old vampire would be satisfied at wringing a response from her and turn his attention elsewhere.
When Astarion had been very newly made and very much a fool, he’d wondered if Aurelia was jealous of him, angry at her new rival, and simply hiding it well.
Cazador’s delight in making them fight each other like dogs at his feet did not help.
It was only later, after the next spawn was made, that Astarion understood the emotions Aurelia never showed—the pity, the grudging solidarity, the endless question: Will I be able to trust you?
And above all else, the sheer relief that someone else had come to divert their sire’s attention.
It was terrible to be a sadist’s plaything. It was infinitely worse to be their only plaything.
The sadist clapped his hands and admired his toys. “Come, my children. Let us go and meet our guest for dinner.”
* * *