Chapter 21
Watching, and, better yet, judging.
The flowers, and everything else—the common people, far below in the fields, with their horse-dirtied tunics tucked into belts; the snobby nobles, women in floor-length gowns, slogging up the castle’s hills in carriages, and worst of all, the members of the Maroven clan, immediately recognizable from their black cloaks, black skirts, black hats, all in the summer heat.
They were collected like a wasp’s nest in the castle courtyard, drinking ‘wine,’ as they were told to refer to it as, and ‘entertaining’ a group of nobles from a far away place.
They did this every month or two. A group of well-dressed people would arrive from quite some distance, the clan would invite them for an innocent soiree, business dealings would be made, and the group would leave, none the wiser that they were now thralls—red eyed and mindless.
She’d seen the pattern so many times that looking at it all bored her to death.
She was just about to finish the rest of the alcohol and tuck into a book when something jumped out to her.
Not literally—nothing got this far up, save one of mother’s hawks—but far below, in the courtyard.
There was a stranger there. Undoubtedly.
Not a stranger as in one of the mortal strangers, one of the victims, but a vampire stranger. One of their own, except not.
Sylvia’s heart stuttered, and she felt an emotion that she hadn’t in many years. Excitement. She’d felt its cousin—fear—many times over, everyday, but this one felt new in her chest.
Almost as if sensing her, the stranger looked up.
Brown eyes peered out. Big, docile ones. Like a deer. Woman’s eyes. And woman’s skin. Tanned, like soft leather. It was rare to see a complexion like that in the valley. The mixture of it all was as captivating to Sylvia as watching a bird devour a mouse.
Something about the woman made her want to pounce.
Sylvia’s gut twisted. As soon as the thought had come, she’d felt her mother’s presence in the back of her mind.
Women do not want for women.
Women especially did not want for tan strangers from the Iberian.
Unless she has a title, Sylvia daydreamed. Maybe a duchy. A duchess.
The Holy Roman Empire was a dynasty kept alive by appearances, and when appearances failed, land or blood would do. But none of those things mattered unless Catrina approved. She was, after all, the shadow governor of the entire Habsburg family.
They were a family of thralls, and the Maroven clan was their masters.
So marriages, deaths, assassinations—they all went through her first.
And her only daughter? Well.
You can imagine.
Sylvia leaned back, and sipped from her mead, feeling a buzz building in the back of her skull.
Still, that didn’t mean Sylvia couldn’t have her fun.
***
Sylvia intended to be the first to greet the stranger, so she Suggested the doorman—a thrall, one of their oldest—to let her take over his duties for the hour. He agreed with a shrug, taking Sylvia’s leftover mead and shuffling over to some other dark corner of the castle.
Even at her young age, Sylvia’s powers of manipulation were nearly equal to her mother’s.
But Sylvia’s methods for honing them to that degree had unfortunately earned her more beatings than they had praise; her favorite hobby was not enthralling strangers, but breaking them out of their trance.
It was her way of undermining her mother, by freeing her favorite pets.
An unintended side effect of honing her Suggestion this way meant that she got very good at memory alteration.
Enthralling was essentially a dressed-up synonym for memory suppression, so to break someone out of it meant to release all of those repressed thoughts at once—a very delicate art.
If you did it wrong, you could injure your subject’s brain forever.
A mistake she’d made only once. The sight was so harrowing that she’d attempted to alter her own memory to forget it. But enthralling yourself was a circular endeavor—you only made the memory bigger, scarier, more present. She had not tried again since.
A knock struck on the door, and Sylvia jumped.
She’d been minding the entrance for over an hour, and all of the usual suspects had already wandered in.
The foyer of the Maroven House was bustling with conversation, and Sylvia had begun to wonder if maybe the stranger had left before ever coming inside.
It wouldn’t be so unlikely—vampires occasionally tried to gain an audience with Catrina, only to be turned away.
But I won’t turn her away.
That had been her plan, at least. The doorman would have potentially alerted Catrina to the stranger. But Sylvia would not. A bad idea, maybe. Other vampires could spell trouble, after all. But Sylvia craved trouble. Well—she craved anything that would trouble her mother.
So when she heard the rapping of knuckles against metal, Sylvia whisked it open, just a crack. Enough for the guest to see Sylvia and for Sylvia to see the guest, but for no one in the ballroom to get a good look.
Oh, wow.
The stranger was even prettier at this distance. She was wearing a snugly fitting black doublet over a dark green houppelande, its long, hanging sleeves dripping toward the grass. Around her middle was a black, jeweled belt, with a sheath, for what looked like a dagger.
A dagger.
The woman was carrying a weapon. And making no effort to conceal it, either.
It sent a shiver down Sylvia’s spine. Fear, but also, undoubtedly—
“Gott zum Gru?e,” the woman said quietly, her accent curling delightfully around the ?. The greeting was standard, but not nearly as polite as the Maroven family would typically require. The doorman would have turned her away six times by now. The red flags were piling up in spades.
Automatically, Sylvia replied, “Seid mir gegrü?t, edle Dame.”
The young woman’s mouth snickered in a way that made Sylvia’s stomach turn.
She so rarely saw women allow their lips to make expressions that were so…
opinionated. Noble women were supposed to keep their mouths in obedient little lines.
Emotions were better concealed that way, secrets more easily protected. That’s what women were, secret keepers.
Yet, on the contrary, it looked as if this woman was mocking her. Openly so.
It was completely enchanting.
“Noble lady?” The stranger chuckled. “Please, don’t call me that. It’s a lie.”
“Then what should I call you?”
Against her better judgement, she opened the door even further, and stepped out into the summer night, her body demanding that they be in closer proximity.
The stranger’s smirk faltered in response, caught off guard now that she could see Sylvia in her full glory—black dress wrapped around a tight waist, unbrushed brown hair falling in chaotic tufts around her shoulders.
She finds me pretty, was the story Sylvia’s oversized ego told herself. When the stranger’s eyes dropped briefly down to her chest, Sylvia couldn’t help but grin in that wolfish way her mother would slap her for. Scratch that. She finds me irresistible.
Okay, perhaps that was a push too far. She knew she was at least partially inventing fantasies. Even if she herself was born with a penchant for the same sex, she guessed that few other women shared her proclivity—or none, if you were to ask her mother.
“May I ask you a question?” the stranger said, and her voice had gone all quiet.
Sylvia’s answer to that question, she would realize much later, was the singular thing that made the difference between her living and dying that night.
But in that moment death was about the farthest thing from her mind.
She leaned up against the doorframe and said something entirely stupid instead, “Anything you’d like, gorgeous.”
The woman skidded brusquely past her deliberate flirting, although she at least did Sylvia the service of looking for a moment flustered by it — her tan cheeks coloring prettily — and said, “Do you know if Wilhelm von Greifenfels is here tonight?”
Sylvia frowned. There was nothing erotic about that man. Her mood soured even darker when she considered that maybe this woman was not only uninterested in her, but here to court a different member of the Maroven family.
“Are you in search of him?”
The woman seemed to consider how to answer. “Yes,” she said. “I am.”
“Why?”
“I have business with him.”
“Well.” Sylvia huffed. “I do hope that business is murder, because any other business would be a dreadful mistake on your behalf. He’s an oaf and a predator.
If you marry him, he’ll drink himself into a daze before finding a lady of the night to squander in your bedsheets.
His balding head belongs under a guillotine. But yes, he is here.”
The woman’s eyes widened in what seemed like surprise, or maybe even terror, which only made Sylvia more further disappointed. This stranger carried a dagger, for Hell’s sake. A little joke about death shouldn’t have even moved her.
“Are you serious?” the woman said, and something in her voice made Sylvia pause. It wasn’t scandal — or horror — she had misread her — the stranger’s tone was hopeful. As if Sylvia had dangled something promising in front of her and then threatened to take it away.
“About which portion?” Sylvia waved her hand before the stranger could answer. “Actually, it doesn’t matter which. I am serious about every bit and detail. In fact I will only let you inside if you promise to kill him. I will sleep easier with his head lolling around on a stake.”
At this point she was only kidding — disappointment made her say mean, ridiculous things — but the stranger’s answer was as fast as a whip crack.
“I promise.” She sounded almost eager. Her tongue was swiping along her lips. “I promise I will kill him and if you don’t mind, I intend to do away with the rest of the House, as well.”
Sylvia froze. Her fingers pressed into the cold metal of the door and she just studied the woman for a moment, expecting her to backpedal on such an insane statement, but she didn’t. She looked at Sylvia as if she meant it. Truly meant it.
And Sylvia believed her.
And for a moment, Sylvia imagined a future in which it was true.
A version of her life that was lived in the way she intended it, free of Catrina’s influence.
Because as long as Catrina was alive, she would corral Sylvia like cattle.
She would ensure Sylvia was a stranger in every city, unwelcome at every inn, like a dog herding sheep back to the den, she would ensure that Sylvia never left her sight — never made good on any of her aspirations.
Sylvia scanned the horizon for unwanted listeners. Finding none, she looked behind her, then lowered her voice to a whisper. “You will die if you attempt that.”
The woman chuckled. Chuckled, as if it was funny. “Are you concerned for my well being?”
It was with great offense that Sylvia realized she wasn’t wrong.
Beyond her initial attraction, there was something about this woman — most likely her threat to murder her mother, which was always an endearing quality in a potential friend — that felt like meeting a twin flame.
Perhaps it was her unusual accent, the way it colored German to make it sound pretty in a way that Sylvia never thought it could, or her straight-forward way of asking questions, or, perhaps it was just that they were both strange.
All her life Sylvia had felt like an outlier. A stubborn stain in the carpet of the 15th century. It was bizarre and disorienting to find in front of her someone who existed equally in her wrongness. A second stain, resistant, refusing to bleed out into the wash.
But if Sylvia wasn’t stubborn, she’d simply die. “Of course I’m not.”
The woman laughed, as if she didn’t believe her. “Well then.” She put her hand on the door. “In that case, I see no reason for you to not let me inside.”
“Not without a name. I want to know who it is I will be thanking when it’s over.”
The woman bit down on her lip, then shook her head. “You are quite unbelievable.”
“So I’ve been told. Now, out with it.”
The woman laughed again, and Sylvia was beginning to grow all too used to the sound. It would be a real pity when she was soon dead.
“You can call me Aster.” She seemed almost sheepish when she said it, which Sylvia immediately frowned at. Because it was a beautiful name. Delightfully different from anything else Sylvia had heard. “Aster Castelmar.”
Sylvia hummed, then, with reluctance, returned the favor, “Sylvia Maroven.”
The wind blew shrilly past both of their ears, and Sylvia could hear shouts from inside for her to close the door, for fear of a draft.
This little perfect bubble of theirs would be popped soon, and Aster would enter, and perhaps she’d try and kill her family, and most definitely she would die.
But in that moment, at least she was alive, and at least Sylvia could have her for a moment.
“I think we’re going to be friends, Sylvia Maroven.”
Sylvia laughed, and turned her head toward the party. “You’d be the first to ever try.”