1. Chapter 1 #4
They called these victims of the chalice sacrifices made in the name of survival.
Selfless sacrifices to honour life. But before the pact with the vampires, witches had been offering payment, blessings, and magic to the poor in exchange for a sacrificial soul a year—a life for as little as a bag of grain, for as little as a bottle of medicine.
Sacrilegious offerings that were tainting the earth, our faith, our very honour.
Yet no one questioned it. No one questioned everything.
It was how things were. It was how things would always be.
I wondered for how much longer could we stare at ourselves in the mirror and not see the disfigurement, the stains, the horror leaking from our pores.
“As you know,” Agnes said, dramatically landing on her emerald velvet sofa across from me, “Sunstead is in a few hours. The Blood Pact requires honouring before we can drain the vampire for the Bloodletting.” She ran her fingers back and forth along the long scar that started just below her neck and disappeared down her bodice.
“Tragic. So very tragic, my dear Willow.”
Witches who were to be offered in the Blood Pact were groomed by Agnes from a very young age.
They were given the title of a red maiden.
Offered valour, and a cosy upbringing full of richness and rest while they prepared for their new life.
A red maiden would be taught about vampiric family customs and traditions.
Taught how to serve the families they were bargained into.
Anything to ease the new life they were about to join.
Anything to please their new vampire masters.
They were merely glorified servants and breeding stock to their husbands.
“It will be Moira this time, right?” I asked, itching the tip of my nose and hoping she’d come to the point quickly because I was incapable of small talk.
“Well, yes. She’s in line to graduate from being a red maiden.”
I nodded, already bored. There were bodies I had to get to, pages of research I’d been reviewing, my own research to write that was being published in a few scientific periodicals. I was no use to anyone up here. “Who will she marry?”
“The Duke of Darkheim.”
I loudly sipped on my tea, itching for her to get to the dratted point. “Never heard of the name before.”
“No red maiden has married into the Duncan family.”
“Ever?”
“Ever,” she echoed, a little too merrily.
“Where do I come into it?” I asked, my foot practically vibrating against the stone floor.
Her gaze drifted away from my face, scouring the distance for something interesting as she hesitated over the next few moments. “An...acquaintance of mine managed to send me word from Mortdale earlier this week. They told me Harriet Merit—or Derby now—is dead.”
Harriet had been one of the best red maidens to have graduated; an extremely talented witch who’d trained under Agnes herself and even served in her close court for years.
She’d been wed last year to some ancient vampire aristocrat at only twenty years of age.
“How?” I felt compelled to ask due to the way she was looking at me to carry this conversation forward.
“Illness, they were told,” Agnes sighed, filling herself a teacup full of sherry.
Illness.
Illness.
I dreaded to know what this illness looked like. If it looked like bruises and blisters and cuts on her body. If its strength made her bleed internally. If it had made her beg and cry in her final moments, or if it had been a slow torment, collected in weeks and months of silence.
Her head dropped back as she ran her long fingernails through her curls. “That’s not all. My resource tells me that Harriet seems to not be the only one to have died of this mysterious illness. In fact, there’s been many over the years. Of an almost identical affliction.”
Something in her tone made me sit straight. “We would have known. The agreement is that they would hand our sisters to us for burial after they pass. A witch must be married and buried in Meridian soil. Those were the conditions.” I itched the tip of my nose again. “As far as I remember.”
“Please,” she mused. “When is a vampire to be trusted?”
“We have a pact. It’s one of the conditions.” Vampires were not disloyal. When they swore on their saintly Chronicle, sealed it in blood, they would stand true to their word. They took that stuff pretty seriously.
“They seem to have found their way around it, as baptised witches are buried in their soil. They are under no obligation to give them back then. It is in the fine print.”
“Baptised?”
“Forcibly, I presume. No half-honourable witch would take their vows of magical abstinence. That’s self-inflicted horror.
” She braced her hands on the tea table, slowly crawling closer to me.
Her dark brown eyes paced between mine as she put a finger to my chin and raised it.
“If only I could get someone in there to see what this mysterious illness looks like.”
I shook my head. “No one would make it even past the Silver Wood. There are hunters stationed by the edges of the forest looking for witch meat to sell on the black market.”
Or so Ethel had told me. She’d come across one herself in one of her many drunken escapades.
And for someone who doesn’t terrify too easily, that one encounter had frightened her straight.
Silver Woods was essentially a strip of no man's land.
Uncontrolled by any guard or police. Unmanned and unsubjected to any laws.
It was finders, keepers, slayers and shooters in there.
And even if you could make it past the woodland, there was another more pressing matter.
Though vampires and witches had been sharing a border and a pact for hundreds of years, they had not been entirely peaceful hundreds of years.
There was no trade of ours passing through their lands besides the weapons we sent to the vampire king, and most of our kind caught on their lands almost always ended up being sent back cut up in tiny little pieces and boxed up neatly in the finest of silks.
Their king had a grisly sense of humour for someone so extremely pale.
“Besides,” I added, “tampering with the pact would mean tampering with peace. We’d start a war with the vampires.” Though we both knew that if war came again, the Blood Chalice curse would be the lesser evil.
She stood and stopped by a window, tucking a long dark strand of curls behind her ear. “That is not what I meant, Willow.” She sighed as she traced a line down the fogged glass. “Moira isn’t marrying the Duke of Darkheim tonight.”
I blinked fast. “Which red maiden is marrying him?”
“You are.”
The mirror above the mantelpiece cracked in half, breaking the stiff silence that fell between us.
A nervous laugh slipped past my lips before I could seal them shut.
I stared at her, my mouth a little agape.
“M-me?” For some odd reason, despite the madness of it all, my eyes dropped down my dress.
I wasn’t scared of vampires, or worried about an unhappy married life—not even taking into consideration I didn’t know exactly how much of it I had left.
But I wasn’t homely, and I was surely not handsome.
I’d started turning grey at a very young age.
My eyes were a little too big, I'd been told. Too unsettling and a brown so dark so they looked black, so I’d eventually taught myself not to stare at things for long.
And I didn’t think I owned a single proper gown.
Everything I wore had been modified for comfort, to help me move around my work room—not to mention stained with blood, bile, formalin, and whatever else only Lady Death knew.
I had never thought I’d be anyone’s wife.
I didn’t even look like I could be anyone’s bride.
The closest I’d gotten to a man that I’d not examined posthumously was to pay the carriage fare.
I didn’t know how to talk to them. How did one talk to them?
They were entirely untalkable creatures, grunting and groaning all the time.
I couldn’t grunt or groan for the life of me.
How would I ever communicate with him? Lady Death!
I’d never speak again. Sure, I’d spent time with a vampire before.
But the vampire had been long dead, and the only conversation I’d managed to have with it was an autopsy report.
The only words I could muster were, “I am not a red maiden. They’d know something is wrong with me.”