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He tore down the hallway, no longer bothering with stealth or anything like it. The barking was coming closer and turning into a bay as the mastiff took the stairs. The baying had a dark, discordant note to it that chilled the blood in Astarion’s veins.
Behind him, the harp was belting out the chorus.
“Oh, I’m broke and I’m tired and I can’t help but weep—”
Astarion groped for the knob of the office door and discovered that it had locked itself.
“—and I’ll never get home to old Waterdeep—”
Gods and devils, when I oiled it, I must have unstuck the lock.
Tymora, why do you hate me? He yanked out a lockpick, missed the keyhole twice, and got it in on the third try, which would have woken unpleasant specters of losing his virginity if his mind hadn’t been so intensely focused on a) the tumblers and b) whether vampire spawn could return from inside a
dog.
“—so listen, my young lads, and learn from my tale—”
The bay rang off the walls. If it had been anything but an absolutely cut-rate lock, Astarion would have learned whether he could fight off a shadow mastiff with a dagger and his teeth.
But it was the same model as the one on the storeroom door, and he had it open before the harp had finished the chorus.
“—for you can’t trust a lass with a come-hither tail!”
Astarion hurtled through the door, looked up, saw black teeth coming at him, and slammed the door in the monster’s face. He fumbled with the lock, wasting precious seconds, then wood splintered next to his head, and the mastiff’s jaws came through the flimsy door.
Right. Fuck that lock. Astarion was across the room in an instant, papers flying up like startled birds in his wake. He heard crashing noises from the door as he leapt for the top of the desk, got his shoulders through the window, pushed off—
And stopped.
The mastiff was no longer baying, but unearthly growls leaked from the sides of its muzzle as it hung onto his trouser leg. Astarion slowly flexed his bare foot and felt his toes brush against coarse fur, drawn-back lips, and then wet gums and slick, dripping teeth.
Oh, this is bad.
They were at a dreadful stalemate. If the shadow mastiff let go of the leather, it could probably take most of his foot off in one bite. But if Astarion was faster than it was, he could yank his foot out of the window and be gone. Either way, it was the dog’s decision.
“Good dog? Drop it?”
Foam dripped onto his ankle. He cautiously freed one hand, hoping to reach his dagger, but the dog twisted its muzzle, trying to pull him back. Astarion grabbed for the windowsill and hung on for dear life. “Bad dog! Errr…horrible, evil dog!”
In the distance, the harp twanged out a strained rhyme between lost and lust that Astarion would have had very strong opinions about under normal circumstances.
And then, like a thunderbolt, like a comet, like an extremely cheap gift from the gods, Rooftop Henry dove through the window and slammed his sharply curved beak into the shadow mastiff’s nose.
The monster let go with a yelp. Astarion was out the window so fast that he had to slap both palms against the wall and think very hard about being a spider to avoid plummeting to his death.
He flung himself headfirst down the brickwork, hearing enraged barking and a few inventive avian curse words behind him.
Then he was on the ground, the beautiful, glorious ground.
Why had he left it in the first place? When he became a real vampire, he was never going to turn into a bat, and that was final.
The mastiff began to bay again. The sound echoed off the cobblestones and chilled the air. He looked up and saw a black muzzle jammed through the window as it barked. There was no sign of Rooftop Henry.
The trick to these things was to pretend that you weren’t involved. Astarion reclaimed his shoes and socks and ducked into an alley to put himself to rights. The shadow mastiff let out a howl that curdled the fog around it.
He dressed hastily, wiped the worst of the bird shit off his cloak, got to the end of the alley, and broke into a very serious stroll.
As the mastiff’s barking began to fade, he made sure to look back over his shoulder with the pointedly concerned expression of an elf out late who had no idea what that noise was but didn’t like it.
Two guardsmen passed him a block or two later, and he nodded coolly to them—ha ha, no, Officer, this isn’t my vial of unicorn blood, I’m just holding it for a friend.
He made sure he was several streets over and the baying had faded completely before he leaned against a wall and let the adrenaline wear off.
That had been embarrassingly close.
You got sloppy. You started gloating before the job was done. You know better. He did know better. But a good gloat was one of the few pleasures left to him, so he’d indulged, and, like any overindulgence, he’d paid the price.
He examined his trouser leg. The dark leather had clear tooth marks and had begun to tear along the seam. The wages of overconfidence were more repair work.
With a clap of wings, Rooftop Henry landed on a barrel next to him and said, “You owe me, bloodsucker.”
Of course. The evening needed only that.
“Right,” Astarion said. “What was it that you wanted, again?”
* * *
—
He considered simply ignoring Henry’s request—after all, how long would the bird really remember?
—but decided against it. There was always the chance that Henry wouldn’t forget a grudge, and while most people would ignore anything he said about a vampire eating pigeons on the roof, Astarion wasn’t inclined to take the chance.
Not after the prostitute had put him on his guard.
Anyway, it was on the way to the Guild locker where he stored most of his things.
So, with as much dignity as he could muster, he went into Redfur’s All-Night Fish and Chips on the dock and came out five minutes later with a large bottle of the house sauce.
Rooftop Henry landed next to him, small eyes bright with desire. “You got it? You got it?”
“Yes,” said Astarion, “my skills do extend to going up to a counter and ordering.” He set the bottle down on the sidewalk.
Henry pounced on it, jammed his beak into the cork like a living bottle opener, and popped it out. He pried the cork off his beak with one foot, then stuck most of his head inside the bottle. “Oh yeah,” Astarion heard, muffled by sauce. “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff.”
Astarion rubbed his face and wondered how his unlife had come to this.
“Are we square, then?” he asked.
Henry emerged from the bottle, beak smeared with sauce. “Yeah, we’re square.” He recorked the bottle with practiced ease. “You wouldn’t believe how this stuff goes with raw herring.” The seagull studied Astarion for a moment. “What was your name again?”
“Petras.”
“Right, right. And you’re a…thing. Tip of my tongue. Eats people, something like that?”
“Zombie,” Astarion said. “Petras the zombie. Just remember that.”
* * *
—
Dalyria was so grateful to get the vial of unicorn blood that for one horrible instant, Astarion thought she might hug him. Fortunately, the shutters slammed down behind her eyes, and her expression smoothed out before he was forced to make a hasty exit.
“Well, here is your bottle of unicorn scab,” Astarion said. “You can’t imagine the indignities I went through to acquire it. In fact, I would suggest against trying to imagine it. Harrowing is not too strong a word.”
“Ah.” Her eyes were riveted on the vial.
“Where did you even find out about this, anyway?”
“Eh? Oh. Gurgan was always trying to sell me the damn thing. Of course, I didn’t need it then. By the time I did, he was dead, and his replacement couldn’t get at it.”
Astarion might have asked why a well-known and highly regarded physician was on speaking terms with a two-bit black-market mage, but it was clear that Dalyria had already relegated him to the least interesting thing in the room.
She gazed into the small reddish-brown vial with an expression that Astarion had seen only once before.
It had been on the face of a young man who had gazed at him with eyes that blazed with hope and fear and desire, as if Astarion might be the answer to the dreams he’d never even had.
The memory curdled his stomach. “Enjoy your scab,” he said shortly, and let himself out. He was fairly sure that Dalyria didn’t even register that he’d gone.
* * *
“Speech?” Astarion said. “Why do I need a class on speech? I can speak just fine.”
His instructor sighed. It was a small room, and the sigh of an operatically trained dwarf echoed off the walls like a flight of startled doves.
“Because,” she said, pulling at her sideburns, “speech is important. Your voice can change how people react to you. Think of Lady Erikinia. If she sounded frail and frightened, would you react the same way as you do now?”
Astarion had to admit he probably wouldn’t.
“No, you wouldn’t. No one would. Society would hardly allow—” She stopped, the last words lost on her tongue.
“Allow what?”
The dwarf woman shook her head dismissively. “An unimportant distraction. In your case,” she said, putting her hands on her squat hips, “no matter how finely you are dressed, if you go into society speaking as you do, people will laugh behind their hands at the country bumpkin.”
Astarion flushed. His clothes were indeed very fine—silk that slipped over his skin like mist, kidskin gloves that felt almost buttery against his fingers, embroidered cuffs in all the colors of a peacock’s tail.
They had all been rescued from the upper attics and cut down to fit him, but the castoffs of previous generations of Ancuníns were almost absurdly luxurious.
Bajia and Astarion had been sent up to the attics the day after Astarion arrived, with instructions to “find something suitable for him to wear for now.”
Astarion had climbed up the ladder, itself a beautifully gnarled piece of druidic craftsmanship, and found himself gazing across a vast space the size of a ballroom.
Dust motes danced in the light of dormer windows, which illuminated enough chests, trunks, old furniture, suits of armor, and moth-eaten taxidermy to provide a respectable hoard for the more peculiar sort of dragon.
Nearly a thousand years of Ancuníns had accumulated an unbelievable amount of stuff, most of which had eventually found its way to the attics.
“Right,” Bajia said, cracking her knuckles. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
The first trunk contained old linen sheets, the second trunk held letters between two long-dead lovers, and the third trunk proved to be locked.
Bajia reached into her pocket, pulled out two thin pieces of metal, inserted them into the lock, and popped it open in the space of a couple of breaths.
Astarion was immediately diverted from the stuffed bulette he’d been coveting. “Did you just pick a lock?”
“I did indeed,” Bajia said, sitting back on her heels. “And I have uncovered a trove of…old silverware.” She held up a tarnished salad fork. “How nice.”
“Can you do it again? And show me how?” Astarion had read books where dashing rogues picked locks, but the authors had never gone into detail. He’d been half convinced it was some sort of magic spell.
“Your great-grandmother probably wouldn’t approve of me teaching you.”
“Pleeeeease? Please, please, please?”
Bajia sighed. “Fine, but if I find out you’re using it to get into places you shouldn’t, I’ll have your great-grandmother put a geas on you. This is the pick, and this is the tension bar…”
It turned out that it wasn’t as easy as Bajia made it look.
You needed incredibly sensitive fingertips and a great deal of patience.
She had probably expected him to give up in disgust within a few minutes.
But he wanted to impress Bajia as much as he’d wanted to impress his old teacher, and the single-minded focus of a child on something he genuinely cares about is the bane of parents everywhere.
When the lock actually clicked open, Astarion was so surprised that he fell over backward, then began giggling wildly. “I did it! I actually did it!”
“Well done,” Bajia said. “And the chest contains…oh, these are some rather nice velvets.” She pulled them out and shook off the dust. They smelled of cedar, but when Astarion ran his hand over the fabric, it was like stroking the fur of some gloriously exotic beast.
“Looks like these were tunics.” Bajia held one up to Astarion’s shoulders and snorted when the fabric pooled on the floor at his feet. “Still, we can have them cut down to fit.” She nodded to his lockpicks. “Now, let’s see if you can find some silk to go with it, hmm?”
By the time they had assembled the makings of a suitable wardrobe, most of a tenday had passed, and Astarion could pick both a pin tumbler lock and a warded lock, which turned out not to be magically warded but to have a complicated system of metal walls to prevent keys from turning.
Bajia gave him his very own skeleton key, which he treasured above all his other possessions.
It was a glorious tenday of luxury and illicit learning. Unfortunately, at the end of that tenday, the speech tutor arrived, and Astarion learned the downside of being a noble.
He wanted to be angry at the dwarven woman. He wanted to say that it didn’t matter how he sounded.
Nevertheless, it was true that when he spoke, he could hear the broadness of his vowels compared to hers, Bajia’s, and those of the other upper servants.
I sound like my father, he thought, and winced.
His instructor touched his shoulder. “Listen to me, Astarion. I am not here to make you feel badly about yourself. In many other places, your accent would be thought charming. But society is full of bullies who will turn on you if they perceive the slightest weakness.
I am here to make certain that when you go about in society, there is nothing in your voice or your speech that they can use against you.”
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Astarion drew a breath and let it out. Part of him still wanted to be hurt, to nurse that hurt within himself and pick at the pain like a half-healed scab.
But another, more adult part of him whispered, Do you want to stay in this world of silks and chocolate and grand houses?
Or do you want to sulk and refuse to learn and go back to spreading cow shit on the dirt under the grapes?
He straightened to his full height, which was only a few inches taller than his instructor. “Teach me,” he said. “I’m ready to learn.”
The dwarf smiled. “Let us begin with the proper terms of address for people of rank, starting at the top. Repeat after me: Your Majesty…”
* * *