Chapter 18
Wroth
Nikos, my longest-serving knight, and a veteran of the last ill-fated expedition into Liuridar, dipped out a cup of hot bloodpowder tea and sipped it, contentedly staring at the far wall as he squatted before the fire. “Like being home,” he said, apropos of nothing.
“Eh? Is that what you’d call it?” I stared into my own cup, half full, terrible and tasteless after the rich, hot warmth of Jesamin’s blood.
She was curled in her bedroll, snoring softly, visible as nothing but a puff of dark wavy hair emerging from under her blanket.
Clean and relaxed, sleeping well with the venom in her bloodstream.
It was best that I drink it. Glut myself on bloodpowder tea until I couldn’t hold another drop. Jesamin needed hers where it was, but now that I’d had one taste…I wanted more.
And it was not to be done in front of my knights.
What we did in the shadows was one thing, but I could not curl Jesamin on my lap right here in front of the fire and drink from her as I wanted to while my men went without.
I would be considered unconscionably rude at best, and a stinting, unworthy commander at worst. In the dark times, when humans were captured as livestock, they were shared out, and some of my knights were old enough to remember those days. Nikos was certainly one.
And even if that were not so, I doubted Jesamin herself wanted to be lost in a haze of ecstasy in full view of our crew, as much as I adored her unfiltered whims.
Nikos comfortably shrugged one shoulder, pulling my thoughts away from the previous night. “Home. I’ve got a nice fire, a comfortable bedroll, and I’m pulling the first watch. It's better than it was the first time.”
Glancing at him with interest despite myself, I forced myself to take another gulp of the bland tea. “Did you make it this far the last time?”
Nikos’s handsome face was almost always in a state of serene neutrality, but now he cracked a brief smile, edged with bitterness.
“Hardly. One of the men managed to open a door. We were thinking to take shelter, but the door closed behind him. It never opened again, and nothing cuts through that damn Fae metal. Magus Olwyn declared all habitation restricted. As far as we were concerned, this whole damn city was just a trap waiting to snap on us, and every street was funneling us into another killing bottle.”
“But you emptied it all. Killed the leftovers.” I finished the tea, running my tongue over my fangs to suck away the bland taste, and refilled the cup with a silent sigh. At least we had shelter this time, thanks to studies finding that a variety of touches could operate the machina.
“As many as we could find.” Nikos looked into the fire’s depths, serene once more.
“All the way to the Gates. But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
” He waved a hand to encompass the dark, strangely organic walls.
“We cleared out what remained. But how many hid within these walls? We may have left a decimated population and sealed the door, but in all the years since, who knows what these things have been doing? Perhaps some of us should have stayed behind and finished the job. These ones feel…smarter. They’re not swarming like they used to. ”
“Oh, I’ve wondered, for a long, long time.
” I rose from my crouch, uneasy at the open discussion of the dark thoughts that had haunted me since I knew we’d have to come Below.
“I’ve known for years that the playthings of the Fae were never extinct.
But how do you exterminate a species in a place like this?
The very environment nurtures them, and pushes us back.
Best that we pack every surface tunnel with black powder, and forbid the breaking of new ground. ”
If only it were that easy.
It was commonly known that the Fae themselves were dead and gone.
The architects of this city, the masters of twisted creations, had vanished millennia ago, during the Migration Era, and Liliach Daromir had killed those remaining few beneath the Rift, asserting her dominance over her creators. We would never need to fear them again.
But we had told the world their relics were gone as well. Some had truly believed it; Bane was one. He was not only a romantic, but something far worse: an optimist.
His horror at the knowledge that his wife had been brought through old mining tunnels, with the fresh scent of living Fae relics in the still air, had haunted him for years.
And even then, he found it difficult to believe that they could have survived in any real capacity, but Bane, still considered young and inexperienced in those years we lived Below, had never ventured below the levels of the bastions.
He had never seen how the things here nested, buried in earth until they awoke with a hunger, decades or even centuries later.
Voryan would know; he had spent many of the long, long years of his life alone in the abyssal regions of Veladar.
But he was a killer and a hunter, almost Fae-like himself with his insatiable need to cause harm.
I had wondered at times if there was something to the bloodlines that made us as we were.
Bane’s physical similarity to Liliach Daromir; Voryan’s unusually twisted appearance and sadism.
When a vampire chose to go fiend, did the ritual carry something of our progenitors in it? It would not surprise me, not now. We were close, relatively speaking, to the cradle of our creation.
Somewhere to the north, only a couple hundred leagues away, was the abyss where Mother Blood had tinkered with the alchemy of our blood and bodies, warped them with her occultism, and created what we were now.
Thurn Hakkon, the highest acolyte of Wargyr, had also confirmed that the birthplace of both our species was somewhere deep in the heart of the earth beneath the Rift, and Cirri had been digging in ancient texts for years to not only corroborate that, but to find more on precisely where the other Fae had gone.
Sometimes I was unsure if I wished for my all-too-curious little sister to decipher anything more from the vampiric High Tongue records. It was enough to know that we were kin to the terrible things that hunted us.
I glanced at Jesamin’s sleeping form once more, wondering what life would be like if I were simply the man I’d once been.
But I didn’t entertain it for long. For one thing, I’d be long dead, nothing but dust in the ground. For another, I had been a jarl in Nordrin, fighting, fucking, and feasting my way through each day, and I doubted Jesamin would be impressed by such a man as I had been.
She liked me as I was now, and so did I. Unlike Bane, who had felt he was a monster, I enjoyed being what I was. It filled a strange gap inside me to find someone who could look at me and speak to me exactly as I was, and appreciate those qualities rather than disdain them.
And I needed to not bask in that joy, because our agreement broke when the sun shone on us once more.
It would be Esteri up there waiting for her dowry and jewels, not the half-Forian Artificer who laughed when she looked at death, and followed her heart and honor deeper into the depths, when her head and instincts told her to climb to the surface.
The woman who touched me like she couldn’t get enough, like she needed me as badly as the air she breathed.
“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath, and forced myself to look away. She was mine for now, not forever.
I couldn’t dig too deep. It would mean nothing in the light, gods damn it all.
Marrion rose from her bedroll, a little paler than usual, her hair freshly rebraided. She flexed her bruised arm, frowning at it as she came to the fire for her own cup of bloodpowder tea.
“Drink as much as you can,” I told her. “I don’t care if it makes you feel sick. You’re wearing yourself down to the bone.”
“Good morning, Uncle Wroth. I love you, too.” She rolled her eyes, but she drank off her first cup quickly and refilled it. It was disgusting, but Marrion spilled her own blood in vast quantities, and much of the supply had been earmarked for her alone.
The knights waking from the previous evening’s shift were stirring as well, and Rasmus let out a groaning snore as Aleyn stepped over him like he was a rock in the path.
I shifted closer to Marrion. “Can you put a geas on the boy?”
She raised her brows, eyeing me sleepily over the rim of her cup. “That’s a serious violation of bodily autonomy and ethical standards. I’ve already put a few toes over the line with the prisoners.”
I stared back at her, unblinking.
“Fine. Yes, I can.”
“Good.” I picked up the poker and stoked the fire, looking for something to do with my hands in an effort to stop myself from going to Jesamin and waking her with a kiss.
“Ethics will have to wait until after we’ve found Alvar.
I don’t need his brother leading us into a trap.
There’s too many blind corners here, too many places for a man to hole up and wait. ”
Marrion fiddled with her braid, wincing with disgust as she took another sip of tea.
“I understand your concerns, Uncle, but I don’t think the ambush was planned, if that makes sense.
It felt more like…like we surprised them.
They just happened to have the more defensible ground, and then that thing woke up and all was chaos. ”
I shrugged. “Perhaps not, but I’m not willing to risk you or Jesamin.
Rasmus wants her, for certain. Whether on a personal level, or because Alvar put him up to it, I don’t know, but I do believe that whatever they’re doing, they’ll be a thousand times more dangerous with either of you working for them. ”
Marrion scoffed quietly, her eyes drifting to the two humans in our midst. “I would boil the blood in my own veins before I allowed them to use me,” she murmured.