Chapter 2
Wroth
“Wroth, are you listening?”
I grumbled assent, opening my eyes a crack to watch my sanguimancer pace across the room. “I’m listening.”
“Oh? Then what did I just say?” Bram whirled around, robes flying, his dark hair askew from running his fingers through it.
I wriggled in the velvet chaise, getting more comfortable.
This room had been Kajarin’s parlor, the whispering room of the Tower of Sky, where she entertained circles of noblewomen and fucked her various paramours.
It was the one room in Owlhorn that was hers alone, the one she would’ve fought tooth and nail to keep me from, and now that she was in the cold ground…
I wriggled again, shedding fur on the crinkled burgundy velvet of the chaise.
Ha.
“You said…” I laced my arms behind my head, gazing at the marble mantelpiece. It was carved with nude women. How atypical of my late wife, who’d never met a cock she didn’t like, much to her despair. “Er...”
“Your star is waning, Wroth. Impressive, given that it never waxed fully in the first place.” Bram dug his fingers into his hair again.
“For the ancestors’ sake, the lais are in the tea houses, openly whispering treason.
Do we want a repeat of the lai Orros debacle?
No. No, we do not. You must marry the lai Auvray girl now and put an end to this before their whispers become concrete plans.
A lavish wedding will satisfy her father and mollify the rest of them, give the commonfolk and merchants something to talk about, and we can have peace for another fifty years or so.
We’ve ignored this problem for far too long. ”
I glanced at the sheaf of papers he clutched—the Blood Accords, specifying which woman I was expected to marry. Sixty years ago, it had all sounded so innocuous. In order to retain my position and title, I would have to marry a pure-blooded Veladari woman, of sound mind and good health.
So simple. And yet I had underestimated the hatred of these people for my kind; the nobles of the Rivers loathed vampires, and sixty years had not banked the coals of their animosity, but fanned the flames.
Rather than my brother Bane’s exasperating give and take with his Rift-kin, or the Vale’s peaceable unspoken agreement to simply ignore the fact of their lord’s existence unless they required his intervention, or even the Moor’s vicious pride in Voryan, I had nobles who openly recruited for their humans-only fellowship in the streets with the kind of fervor usually reserved for religious maniacs.
“Bread and circuses.” I considered the cost of a ‘lavish’ wedding. The agreements had been hammered out with Nathanael lai Auvray; the man was sickeningly wealthy, and had turned his fortune toward ensuring his only daughter would wear the crown of the Lady of the Rivers.
My bloodwitch buried his face in his hands, sinking onto a settee. “Yes. The girl is here with her retinue, so perhaps you should stop lounging about and go look her over in person—”
“Were I to marry tonight, they’d still talk treason.
” I closed my eyes again. “That’s all they do, ungrateful, treacherous worms that they are.
Of course she’s already here, crawling over this place like lice.
She wants gold. She wants power. She’ll probably bear a few more bastards to skulk about under my roof.
Tell me, Bram, is there some irony in the Soulbreaker having his soul broken?
When I accepted that name, was there some god out there laughing at me? ”
“I really couldn’t say.” His voice was muffled by his hands.
No, he couldn’t. Who could know what the gods laughed at? I had gone from being a Jarl in the utmost North, to a Lord on a gilded throne, and was finally cast down by my own hubris.
The worst had happened—I had wed, and lost my wife. And yet the worst was the greatest relief of my life.
One month ago today, Kajarin lai Orros, Lady of the Rivers for the past fifty years, had died with a curse on her lips in this very room, now my favorite room in the castle.
A bed had been in that far corner, empty now but for dust. She had laid in its expanse like a fragile, withered doll, her skin loose over the lumps of the tumors within her body.
Once considered a great beauty, her strawberry-blonde curls had gone brittle and shed. Raw, open sores glistened on her skin. Even aged, she might have retained her delicate good looks if not for the venereal pox eating away at her from the inside.
Then her mind had slowly fled. The once-sharp woman had become sappy by turns, querulous at others. By the time the convulsions began, it was clear, even to her, that she was dying. She had contracted the disease from a sailor; one of her many laughs at me became her last.
In the end, during one of her brief moments of lucidity, Kajarin had called for me. I’d sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at the wreck of her body, and she’d stared up at me with gummy, faded eyes.
“Who could have loved you?” she’d whispered. “Who could love a beast? Who could respect him?”
“Not you,” I snorted, with a wide grin. I would not let her venom eat at me. “Do you think you’ve won, Kajarin?”
Her breath had come fast and shallow, her claw-like hands clutching at the sheets.
“Your sons will never inherit,” I whispered, leaning over her.
“Your life will be erased and your name forgotten. Everything you were will go into the ground with you. In the end, you’ve feasted on misery and harmed none but yourself.
I told you before, and I meant it—I would have let you go. I would have freed you.”
I’d seen the barb strike home. But Kajarin had given me her own slow smile. Her breath stank of the grave.
“No, Wroth. I’ve already slid the knife into your back. You only have yet to feel it.” Her hand had gripped mine with terrible strength. “When everything you love comes tumbling down, you will know who to thank.”
“What viciousness.” I’d studied her withered face. “Sometimes I wonder what your life would have been, had you not wed me. Would you have been happy? A better person? Or would you have been a vengeful bitch to any man?”
“Man?” She coughed, laughing. “You are not a man. You are an abomination. And like an idiot beast, you’ll die wailing under the spear of justice.”
I had tilted my head, watching her hack out laughter.
The Spear of Justice, the emblem and namesake of the human loyalists. They painted it on walls, wore it pinned to their lapels. In the decades since I had wed Kajarin, they had grown more and more bold with each passing year, and yet they still lacked the bravery to face me like men.
“You’ll die knowing you were never loved. No woman could look upon you and feel anything but horror.”
“I’ve heard this all before. You begin to bore me.”
“This should have been mine!” she hissed. “My uncle was the proper lord of Owlhorn, you bastard creature! You ruined him!”
“I exiled him in far greater comfort than he deserved.”
“You took what never belonged to you. And one day you will lose it. There will be another to replace me, but Wroth—you will never again sleep soundly. The woman who sleeps beside you will be plotting your death. The knights on your walls will wait for their moment to strike. And one day, your head will be mounted over the throne, and a human Lord will sit in his rightful place, with his heels propped up on your pelt—”
I stood up and brushed off my jacket, weary of the same old diatribe. “I see your imminent death by misadventure hasn’t put a damper on your enthusiasm for treason.”
“Treason.” She spat the word. “No. Try loyalty. Try courage. For honor and purity, Wroth, we will never stop.”
“From where I stand, it all looks quite similar to treachery and cowardice, with a broad streak of prejudice for flavor.”
She drew back from me, curling her hands over her stomach and gazing at me with mad eyes from the mound of pillows. “Do you remember that girl, Wroth? Your filthy little bleeder?”
I nodded slowly, an uncomfortable prickle running down my spine.
Her name had been Ashren, and she was a villager from the southern Rivers. Twenty years ago, in the midst of the darkest despondency, I’d paid her handsomely to allow me to drink directly from her, the taste of sweet blood from a warm, smooth throat, and she’d been…kind.
Kinder than I deserved. Enough to make me look forward to the bloodthirst, when I would carefully hold her and feel her muscles tighten in my hands, listen to her breathing quicken as I drank.
She never pulled away too quickly. Her eyes were bright when she exposed her throat. She would simply wipe the blood away with a bow, and return to her other duties, but she always had a pleasant word and never sneered.
I might have made her my wife in time. A politely pleasant marriage was better than the endless bitter war I’d lived through with Kajarin. I didn’t love her, but…at least with Ashren, I could take a few moments to pretend that Kajarin had never existed.
She made it possible to get through the endless days. A single bright speck in the night of my life.
But Ashren had taken her gold and vanished without a word, and I’d returned to the thin, weak blood of the prisoners below Owlhorn. Never again had I paid a kind woman for her blood. It hurt too much to lose decency and tenderness, even if it had been purchased.
I supposed that was the lot of a fiend in the Rivers. To have to pay for a kind word and a smile. I hoped she had used her gold well, and lived a good life.
“Do you really believe she made it back home?”
Kajarin studied me carefully, her eyes alive with malice.
I thought of Ashren, vanishing in the night without a trace. I hadn’t chased after her. It was not love between us, after all, but gratitude on my part; her blood was bought and paid for, and whatever kindness was between us had gone no further than my need for sustenance.
The prickle became a creeping dread.