39
Bajia left him on a bluff half a mile from Baldur’s Gate, overlooking the river. He gazed into the eyes of his old teacher and mentor and friend, who had taught him how to throw a knife and pick a lock, and did not know what to feel.
“Astarion…”
“Thank you for the escort,” he said. “It was appreciated.” He recognized his own voice as the one he used when speaking before a magistrate: calm and measured and remote.
Bajia wrung her hands. He turned away, one hand on the horse’s reins, and she said, “That’s the worst of this. You take the shape thinking it’s a game, but then you meet people, and you get involved in their lives, and you learn to love them, and you start to forget…”
“I wouldn’t know.”
The horse jerked violently, and behind him, he heard the sound of wings.
He waited for a time, until the horse had calmed, then turned. Far across the river, he could see a dark V, much larger than any bird, flying toward the sea.
He reached into the breast pocket of his tunic and took out the skeleton key. He turned it in his hand, seeing the places where it had been rubbed shiny by a child’s nervous fingers.
It vanished from sight long before it hit the waves.
He turned his attention to Baldur’s Gate. It was far larger than Silverymoon, with shantytowns built up along its walls. Even from here, he could see the differences between districts, the contrast between grimy docks and shining stone.
A big city. Big and vibrant and filthy and alive. A city of silks to be touched and laws to be circumvented.
Astarion Ancunín touched the letter of introduction still in his pocket, took a deep breath, and started down the road to his new life in Baldur’s Gate. And this time, he vowed, no one would take it from him.
It would be another dozen years before the irony of that vow caught up with him, and more than two hundred before he was finally able to keep it.
* * *
Time passed, as even the gods could not stop it from doing. Days flowed across the sky and turned to night. A tenday later, Astarion judged it safe to return to the Rat’s Run.
The clothes he had left behind were waiting for him, neatly folded, with his daggers on top. They would need laundering, but most of them were salvageable. Third from the top was an absurdly pink silk dressing gown.
Astarion lifted it in his hands. The silk was still slippery under his fingers. It smelled faintly of soap and even more faintly of spice.
He smuggled it into Szarr Palace that night and put it in the secret hiding place where he kept velvets and far superior silks.
Cazador’s victims came and went. He had never bothered to remember most of their faces, but now they became a blur of open mouths and hungry eyes, as if he were walking through a gallery of painted screams that hung still and silent on the walls.
A month or two later, Cazador carved a poem onto the back of each of his children, using a silver knife that burned like acid and left complicated scars in its wake.
It was agony, and Astarion screamed until his voice was raw, then listened to the others screaming as well.
He might have gloated over Dalyria’s and Violet’s pain, but by the end, he was so wrung out that he could not bring himself to feel much of anything at all.
The pain was bad enough, but knowing that it lay on him like a brand, his beauty marred by the marks of Cazador’s ownership, was somehow even worse than the two round scars on his neck.
The first person who commented on his back did not make it to Szarr Palace at all.
After that, he joined Aurelia for a few tendays, clubbing men over the head in dark alleys.
The violence helped a little, even if their blood smelled like glory forever out of reach.
Cazador said nothing about the change, but Violet moved back into the favored consort rooms, and Astarion returned, with great relief, to his own.
One night, when it was pouring rain and no one would be in an alley for any reason, Astarion and Aurelia played dragonchess at a private table in the Rat’s Run. She beat him handily twice, to his minor annoyance.
“You’d think I’d be better at this game,” he muttered. “I’ve been playing it for nearly two hundred years.”
“Your strategies are too complicated.” Aurelia picked up a rook that he had sacrificed early on.
“You make these elaborate plans that would work on someone who was also making elaborate plans, but they’re useless against straightforward assaults.”
She paused, studying the piece as if it were the most interesting thing in the world.
“That’s why Violet gets the better of you sometimes.”
Astarion paused with his glass of wine at his lips. “I beg your pardon?”
“You’re much smarter than she is, and far more patient. But she still gets the better of you now and again. It’s because you plan for a hundred assassins, not one berserker at the gates.”
Astarion started to argue the point, then remembered the thunderstone. He would never have thought that anyone would do something so careless and so likely to get herself caught or bring the cavern roof down on both of them. But she had, and he hadn’t been prepared at all.
He drained his glass. “It pains me to admit it, but you might—might—have a point. What a lowering thought.”
She smiled faintly. “You’ll catch Petras every time, though.”
“I suppose there’s that.”
He pulled the privacy screen back to signal for another drink. The sailors were drunk, and someone was trying to get a sea shanty going. He could see at least three likely targets, and the thought of going after any of them was so exhausting that he wanted to lay his head down on the table.
“Do you never get tired?” he asked.
Aurelia waited until the fresh bottle of wine had been delivered. “I am tired,” she said. “Sometimes I think I’ve been tired my entire life.”
He raised a glass to that and drained it.
He did not feel the need to be so cautious about his sobriety around Aurelia.
She would not kill him for her own reasons, and if Cazador required it, she would simply walk up to him and cut his throat in the middle of the great hall.
It was as close to trust as a vampire spawn could ever have.
Sometimes Astarion wondered if he was like den Suriel in some respects and Aurelia thought that he made the world more decorative, or more interesting, or something like that. Most of the time, he had no idea what she was thinking at all.
I suppose it’s possible that she has been playing a long game for two hundred years and will someday betray us all spectacularly, but if so, she’s played it well enough that she deserves to get away with it.
“The copper dragon,” he said abruptly.
Aurelia paused in the middle of setting up the pieces. “Yes?”
He shouldn’t care, but he asked anyway. “She’s not a woman named Bajia, by any chance, is she?”
“That’s not the name I know her by.” Aurelia set up the pieces again, one by one. “Odd you should ask about her, though.”
Astarion searched her face. Aurelia never said anything without a reason. “Odd how?”
The queen slid into place with a soft ivory click. “When I met her, she was standing over your grave.”
Astarion’s eyes dropped to the board so that Aurelia could not see how she had shaken him. Probably she knew anyway.
Bajia had come back to check on him. Too little and far, far too late, but she had remembered him.
He did not ask any more questions. He did not dare. She must think he was dead, and that was almost certainly for the best. But the knowledge quivered under his heart like a blade, and he did not know whether it was cutting him open or lancing a wound.
He drank too much, as he had been doing lately, forcing himself into something like drunkenness. She saw him back to his rooms. On the threshold, which she could not pass, they both paused.
If he had been sober, he would have said something light and wry and amusing. But he was not sober, which is why he turned and put his arms around her and buried his face in her shoulder.
Aurelia was clearly startled. She would have been within her rights to throw him across the room, and at another time, she might have. But instead, her arms came up around him and held tight, and it was by the strength of her grip that Astarion realized he was trembling.
He did not cry. He had lost the knack somehow, somewhere along the way. But his head ached with wine and the tears he couldn’t shed, and his voice came out muffled. “Tell me this will end someday. Lie to me if you must.”
“I don’t have to lie about this.” She moved her hand over his back, slow and soothing, as if he were a child and not the one person who had suffered at Cazador’s hands nearly as long as she had.
“This will end. I don’t know how or when, but someday, this life of ours will end.”
She made a soft sound, half serious, half amused.
“You and I have already outlived several immortal gods, have we not? And if they can die, surely we can as well.”
Surely Cazador can as well.
The words hung between them, not needing to be said. Astarion’s breath went out in a deep sigh. He allowed himself another moment, then stepped back. Aurelia did not try to hold him. She had always been very good about that.
He did not apologize. She had clung to him in just such a fashion after her drawings burned, and again after Cazador had imprisoned her underwater for nearly a month to see how long it would take for a spawn to stop drowning when they tried to breathe.
Astarion had gone to her after the year in the mausoleum.
So long as they never acknowledged it, it could not be used against them.
Instead, he said, “Good night, sister,” and went to his bed, tired and wretched and lost but comforted that someday, somehow, this desperate half-life would end. Whether he lived or died, became a vampire or stayed a spawn, it hardly mattered. All he had to do until that day was endure.
And try to look good doing it, he thought, and laughed at himself against the pillow.
A little ways from the palace, past docks and taverns and watching eyes, the River Chionthar flowed on, carrying the blood of a dead god. It slipped and slid through the currents, neither dissolving nor breaking apart, a single black tendril finding its way, inevitably, toward the sea.