4. Mytharo #2
“They knew the cost in the theoretical sense.” She looked at me steadily. “They paid it, anyway. They paid it because Morvanna was a queen and the kind of woman who does not accept no for an answer. They attempted for her the one thing they had never attempted. True permanence. Immortality.”
“And what they got instead…”
“It was not what any of them intended. She did not die. She also did not remain what she had been. What woke up could not tolerate sunlight. Fed on blood. Could pass its condition to others. She turned her sorcerers first. Then her commanders. Then anyone who struck her as useful.”
“Vampires are generally difficult to kill in fiction,” I said. “I imagine a vampire queen is worse.”
“Substantially worse,” Caen agreed. Caen’s voice thinned on the last word. “She and those she had turned possessed strength no living soldier could match. They did not tire. Did not fear. Did not hesitate. It took years to push her back.”
“Years?”
“Years. Entire towns abandoned. Fortresses fell. Villages burned. Newardia’s armies could not destroy her. Morvanna could not destroy the armies of Newardia. Morvanna realized she could not break through a prepared defense without exposing her forces to daylight. The war changed shape.”
“A line was built.” Caen gestured toward the map on the wall.
It was hand-drawn but legible, the outpost line marked clearly.
“Five fortresses between the Zhaduun Mountains and Newardian territory. They keep her forces confined to the mountains and this valley. They intercept raiding parties before they reach the villages. They also deny her army the blood that amplifies them.”
“Amplifies?”
“Blood does not sustain them. That is the common misunderstanding. They can survive without it. What blood does is amplify. Blood fuels speed, strength, healing. An unfed vampire is already faster and stronger than any living soldier. One that has fed recently is something substantially more dangerous.” She held my gaze.
“The line denies them that. Her forces have been contained.”
“So the line isn’t just containment,” I said. “It cuts them off from the fuel that amplifies their abilities.”
“Yes. Slow. Imperfect. But real.” Her expression shifted.
She had arrived at a harder piece of information.
“She is still feeding, however. Not freely, but enough. Sorcerers who serve her move through the kingdom. They take people—travelers, isolated families, people whose absence takes time to be noticed—and bring them alive to Druvenfall. They are drained to the edge of what the body can survive, allowed to recover, and drained again. It sustains her inner circle.”
“There are people in those mountains right now?” I asked.
“Yes.” She did not look away. “There are. The line holds that number to a trickle. Every year that the line holds is a year her army remains weakened.”
I looked at the map.
Nobody spoke. The fire took a log apart. I wasn’t sure what question came next. There were too many.
Skip pushed off from the doorframe.
“That is enough for one day,” he said.
I looked up.
“You need quarters. And clothes suited to this world.”
His expression shifted into warmth.
“You are safe here, Meghan. Whatever else is uncertain, that is not.”
***
Skip led me from Caen’s tower into the keep.
It was warmer inside than I had expected. The kind of warmth that comes from a building heated continuously for years, until the stone itself begins to hold it.
Hearths stood at regular intervals along the corridors, each one large enough to matter.
The walls were dark stone, worn smooth where many people had brushed past them and rough where nobody did.
Tapestries hung between them. Flames appeared again and again in their woven patterns.
This was a symbol I now understood carried religious significance.
As we walked, Skip pointed out the places I needed to know without breaking stride. The great hall. The infirmary. The armory. The war room.
Then he stopped beside a door slightly larger than the others.
“My quarters,” he said. “If you need anything in the night.”
His gaze lingered on me for a fraction longer than necessary.
“Anything.”
The smile that followed suggested he was aware of how that sounded.
For one deeply unhelpful moment, my imagination supplied several possible interpretations.
I swallowed.
Compose yourself, Meghan Callahan.
The room announced itself the moment the door opened—unmistakably his.
A hearth burned low and steady, casting warm light across the stone. A heavy desk sat near the wall beneath a collection of maps and neatly stacked papers.
And then there was the bed.
It was massive.
Wide enough for a man of his size and then wider still. Certainly not a narrow garrison cot. I cataloged the details automatically—solid oak frame, reinforced joints, generous proportions.
I imagined him there. Armor gone, firelight painting every hard ridge of muscle across his chest and abdomen.
I pictured the two of us on that bed. Me on my hands and knees in front of him. His hands on my hips with that same authority he brought to military command. The heavy oak frame creaking steadily under the force of each thrust.
My body registered its opinion of this mental image with enthusiasm.
I dragged my attention away before my imagination could continue embarrassing itself.
Compose yourself, Meghan Callahan. Right fucking now.
“Noted,” I said, in a voice I considered reasonably professional.
He moved through the keep.
I kept up.
He then stopped at a door on the upper level and pushed it open.
The room was small and warm and honest. Stone walls with the same dark, worn quality as the corridor. A hearth—smaller than the ones downstairs but present, already lit, doing its job. A bed that was narrow but real. A window facing east.
“It’s modest,” he said, from the doorway.
I looked at the hearth. I looked at the bed. I looked at the desk with its single candle and thought about the field I had woken up in four hours ago.
“This morning, I only had a field. This is wonderful. Thank you for this.”
“You are welcome. If you need anything,” he said, “tell me.”
“I’ll make a list,” I said as playfully as I could.
“I imagine you will,” he said, the corner of his mouth lifting. “I will have someone bring you clothes later.”
***
With Skip gone, I had some time to myself in my new quarters. More importantly, I finally had time to think.
The more I thought about my situation, the more it resembled the world I had spent the last three years studying.
I had spent three years studying ancient military history in a world that had evolved past everything I had studied. Drones. Satellites. Hypersonic missiles. Cyberwarfare. A soldier in Nevada could ruin a terrorist’s day from six thousand miles away while drinking a Mountain Dew.
My knowledge had been a love of the past. I found dead generals more interesting than living ones and had constructed an entire academic career around this premise.
Here, the dead generals might actually be useful.
I sat with that for a moment.
Then I became aware of how tired I was.
The adrenaline that had carried me through the day was finally running out.
I had been transported to another world, interrogated by a magical truth-reader, briefed on a forty-year vampire war, and introduced to a man who looked like he had been engineered in a laboratory for the specific purpose of distracting me.
I decided sleep was the appropriate response.
The sweater came off first. Then my jeans.
I folded them with automatic neatness—a childhood habit that had apparently survived interdimensional travel.
They were the last things I owned from my world—the red sweater, the jeans, the dead iPhone, the notes, the steel Casio on my wrist that had stopped working, and the glasses I had straightened by reflex approximately forty times today.
I set them on the desk.
Then I got into the bed.
It was narrow, and the blanket was wool, and it smelled like woodsmoke.
The mattress was extremely comfortable.
It was not my memory foam mattress at home. Nothing was my memory foam mattress at home, which I had spent four hundred dollars on in my second year of graduate school and considered the single best financial decision I had ever made.
That said, it was comfortable. Supportive. The comfort of something that had been doing its job for a long time and was good at it.
The hearth threw warm amber light across the ceiling.
Outside, distantly, I could hear the sounds of the garrison. Voices, the clanging of metal, the low hum of a place that did not stop.
I closed my eyes. I surrendered myself to the warmth of the hearth and drifted into sleep.