The Bloodhaven
NOX
Seven Years Ago
Two years in Morrath and she still hasn't forgiven anyone for it. The palace that taught her Morrath was a kingdom of monsters. The tutors who nodded solemnly over maps they'd never seen. Ryaran, who might have told her, and who had the poor manners to die first.
She went into the pit expecting death. Instead she was hungry.
"She knew," Axar says. "She would have told you eventually."
"How convenient for everyone."
He lets it pass. He never wastes words trying to improve reality, which is the single best thing about him.
"Do you know what a feeder can do to a Yorali king?"
"No."
"Compel him."
She lets that sit.
Sometimes. Briefly. At a price. But enough that Orsin would have chained one beneath his throne if he'd ever gotten his hands on it, and enough that her ignorance is the only reason she ever walked out of that palace.
Nox laughs, and it comes out ugly.
"So my choices were to become my father's favorite weapon, or my father's greatest fear." She counts them off anyway, because they deserve the ceremony. "Neither of those lasts long."
"No."
"Then I suppose I should thank her for dying."
"You should thank her for the shielding," Axar says. "The rest was luck."
Life in Morrath falls into routine. Learn, feed, fight, sleep, repeat. She becomes very good at surviving, good enough that it starts to feel suspiciously like living, and she dislikes that intensely. Living suggests permanence, and she intends to outlast Orsin of Yorali by about an hour.
Then the Witchward finds Ryaran's daughter.
Alive. Veiled. Hungry. Small enough that every room looks borrowed around her. Hands on her that have no business anywhere near her.
Nox watches without blinking, and the witches take the silence for indifference.
It's arithmetic. Distance, guards, escape, power, all of it weighed against everything that girl is standing in the middle of.
She comes up short. Everything she has comes up short.
When the vision ends she puts another coin on the table.
"Where does one become stronger?"
The oldest witch finally looks at her.
"Bloodhaven."
“Absolutely not,” Axar says when she asks him about it.
"You have been a feeder for seconds."
"I've been breathing for years and I'm dreadful at that too."
"It takes away memory."
"It'll be taking things I was happy to lose."
He studies her. "You don't believe that."
"No." She smiles. "But I'd rather lose pieces of myself than lose to Orsin."
Bloodhaven disappoints her immediately.
She expected fire. Instead it feels like warm breath, red haze curling over her skin while humans scream and feeders feed and witches stand at the edges counting. It all seems terribly organized for damnation.
She drinks because that's why she came. The girl trembles and keeps apologizing between screams, which Nox finds interesting. Some people apologize even while they're being devoured.
Then she notices him.
He's at the edge of the haze with his back to the wall, and he's been watching her the entire time she fed. Watching like it's a thing worth doing. His hands are still. Everyone else in the room is busy with a mouth or a throat and he's simply looking, and looking, and the looking has weight to it.
She's been in Morrath two years. She's never once been looked at like that.
She sets the girl on the floor, alive, because it costs her nothing, and crosses the room.
"You've been watching."
"I have."
"See anything you liked?"
"Yes."
Not what she expected. She reconsiders him, and finds he's let her catch him, and enjoys being caught.
"You could have joined."
"I don't."
"Ever?"
"That isn't what I'm here for."
"What are you here for, then?"
He almost smiles. "You'll want to be more specific."
Nox laughs.
"What are you?" she asks.
"Rathmor."
She waits for more. There isn't any.
"That's a family, not an answer."
"It's usually enough."
"For whom?"
"Everyone I've met until this evening."
The haze shifts between them, red and slow. Someone behind her finishes and someone else starts, and neither of them turns to look.
"You haven't fed."
"No."
"There's a room of it."
"There is."
"And you're standing here."
"Yes."
She has met men who were dull and men who were evasive, and she has a reliable sense for which is which. This is a third thing. He answers everything she asks and gives her nothing, and she can't tell whether that's discipline or amusement.
She's still deciding when he says, "You were slow with her."
"With the girl?"
"You could have taken it in half the time. You didn't."
"Would that have been better?"
"I didn't say better."
She takes the pipe from the table beside him without asking. Draws on it. Blows the smoke somewhere in the vicinity of his face.
"You'll want to tell me your name eventually."
"Will I?"
"Everyone does. It's the vanity. It gets them all in the end."
"Sevrin."
She takes another draw and doesn't hurry it.
So that's the man. She'd assumed she'd meet him on her own schedule, walk into Rathmor Palace announced as a Yorali princess, which she is, and take the measure of him across a table with both of them lying politely.
That was a plan for a woman who was ready.
It was going to happen in a year, possibly two, after she'd stopped being something Morrath was still teaching.
Instead he's here, and she has blood on her chin, and she's four days from losing whatever she decides to say to him.
"Something," Sevrin says.
"What?"
"Your face did something."
"My face does a great many things. Most of them are lies."
"That one wasn't."
"No." She hands him back the pipe. "It wasn't."
He leans in.
Nox catches his lower lip in her teeth and bites until she tastes him, holds it after he goes rigid, and keeps holding it.
Then lets go.
"I'm not like most princesses."
"So I see."
"You'll want to adjust."
"I'm adjusting."
"Tell me what you like."
"You won't like the answer."
"I doubt I'll care."
So he tells her.
Nox considers it. Not what she expected, and not what she'd have chosen, which is the first time anything in Morrath has managed either.
"Fine," she says.
Afterward he's quiet a long while.
Then: "You hadn't done that before."
"Is that a complaint?"
"It's a question."
"No. I hadn't."
He sits up. In the red he looks younger than he did across the room, and his face has gone formal, like a door opening onto a corridor he was raised in.
"Then when we leave here, you'll marry me."
Nox laughs before she can stop it. "You don't know my name."
"I know you're Yorali, and a princess, and that your father is a monster, because you told me all three in the last four hours. I'm not a man who takes a thing like that and disappears.”
"You won't remember taking it."
"I'll remember that I owe something. I always do."
She sits with that. It's the most useful thing anyone has said to her in two years, it's worth nothing, and she's going to have to spend it anyway.
"What if you've gotten pregnant?" he says.
"I'm a feeder. The odds are small."
"Small."
"Small."
He lets it go, which she doesn't expect, and which she understands much later to be the first thing he ever gives her.
"I can't marry you," she says. "And you need to hear the rest while I can still say it out loud."
"Say it."
"There's a girl at Baron Dyvarin's manor.
She's veiled. She's my sister, though she doesn't know it and no one in that house knows it, and she's being used badly.
" Her voice holds. She makes it hold. "When you find her, you're going to want her.
I don't know how I know. I know it the way I know my own hands. "
"Then I'll have her."
"You can't marry her." She takes his wrist. "My father doesn't count girls in manors. He counts queens. Crown her and he'll know exactly what she's worth, and he'll come, and everything I was made for happens on schedule."
"What were you made for?"
She tells him that too. She's said it out loud once before, to Axar, and promised herself she'd never say it to anyone who would keep it.
He doesn't speak for a while.
"Your brother," she says. "Or any man you trust. Someone has to marry her and get her out of that house. Promise me."
"Nox."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
She lets go of his wrist.
"You should know what she is, before you find her. She's beautiful. She's clever, more than anyone's let her be. And she's fertile, which in the end will matter to more men than the other two put together." Her mouth twists. "Everyone will want her."
"And in the end, who has her?"
"I don't know."
He takes that in. "And you?"
"What's left for me is uncertain." Her voice is even. "I can only tell you what I want."
"Then tell me."
"I'll sit the Rathmor throne. Or the child we make will sit it." She holds his eyes. "One or the other. It doesn't have to be me."
"Why Rathmor? You're Yorali. Yorali is yours by blood. It's the one thing your father can't take back."
"Because not one corridor of it is clean."
She lets the silence hold, then goes on, and her voice changes.
"And because whoever seats Rathmor seats Morrath. That's the true power. It's the only protection from Yorali that has ever existed."
Sevrin is very still.
"He takes his power from Morrath," she says. "All of it. He wants Sarenal, because that's where so many of Morrath's creatures come from. That's why he wants the amulet as badly as he does."
"What amulet?"
Nox shakes her head.
"Don't carry that one. You won't remember it anyway, and if you did it would only get you killed."
He sits with all of it. When he speaks again there's an edge under it.
"So all of this," he says, "only to tell me I'm to wait, and want your sister, and never have her?"
Nox smiles.
"I didn't say you'd never have her. I said I don't know whether you will."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have." She shrugs one shoulder. "I know you'll come near to marrying the other sister. I don't know whether you go through with it. And if you don't, I can't tell you whether that's because you want my sister or because you're waiting for me."
He looks at her a long time.
"Do you care?"
"I have one purpose. One thing I have room left to care about, and that's keeping what's left of the people I love out of my father's reach.
" She says it without heat, which makes it worse.
"By the time I'm finished with him he won't be able to rape or kill or torture anyone again.
Not anyone. Least of all my sister." She draws in a breath.
“She is the last thing I have left to protect.”
On the last night in the Bloodhaven, he lies back and looks up into the red.
"Bloodhaven takes memory. I may not remember any of your...instructions."
"We may not remember each other at all."
"Then what?"
"Perhaps we'll meet all over again. Or, perhaps some part of you will do what I've asked without understanding or remembering why."
"What do you get, in this thing you've seen? What's left for you?"
Nox thinks about lying to him again and finds she's used up the last of it.
"Our daughter."
He turns his head.
She doesn't explain it. He doesn't ask.
Neither of them carries it out of the Bloodhaven.