Chapter 6 The First Cup #2
He held her gaze a breath too long, and something in his eyes told her he was not sure he believed her, and something else told her he did not care enough to press a League bride in front of his aunt's hall.
He released her hand and smiled. "Soft as a hymn book," he said, to the tables, and the hall laughed with him this time, warmly, because the young lord of the Vex house had named the bride harmless and the houses were glad to agree.
Lira smiled her practiced smile and folded her hands in her lap, and under the table her thumb pressed once, hard, against the vial through the cloth, to be sure it had not shifted.
Then she set her hand back on the cloth and let Serel wear the proper, pretty proportions of a frightened girl, because fright was the costume the house had decided to dress her in, and a good costume should never be wasted.
The first cup came when the plates were cleared.
The countess rose from the dais, and the hall went quiet in a way it had not gone quiet all night.
Not the shallow hush of courtesy. The deep silence of a room that knows a rite is coming.
Mirelle Vex walked the length of the hall alone, and a servant followed her, a young man in the grey of the Vex house with a silver ewer held before him in both hands.
He was human. Lira knew it before she saw his face, in his step, in the softness of it that had not learned the patience of the old blood.
He set the ewer on the bride's table and stepped back, and Lira looked at him once and had to look away.
He was young, not much older than she looked.
His collar sat high, and at his throat a thin silver torque caught the candlelight, and he stood with his hands clasped and his breathing even, and his eyes were not the eyes of the broken things the League's lessons had promised her.
They were calm. Patient. He looked at her as a man looks at a locked door he has the key to, and Lira could not name what that meant, and she put it away with the other things she could not yet explain.
"The first cup," Mirelle said, and her voice carried to every corner, "is the house's gift to the guest it means to keep.
The old houses do not drink from strangers since our lord's peace.
We drink from our own." She lifted the ewer and poured, high, so the liquid fell in a dark ribbon and misted, and the smell of it reached Lira before the cup was full.
Warm. Iron-sweet. Human, and warm, and the cup that had stood empty at her place all evening was suddenly full of it.
"My Marek gives it freely," the countess said, with a smile that did not touch her voice. "He has kept our cups warm for seven years, and he gives the way a good servant gives everything. Drink, Lady Serel, and be one of us."
Every eye in the hall turned. The silence had teeth in it.
Lira sat at her island of white cloth with the dark cup steaming in the candlelight, and she felt the weight of the room settle on her like a hand on the back of the neck.
Refuse, and she had insulted the house that poured for her, and the countess would carry that grievance to the treaty table wrapped in courtesy.
Drink, and she had taken their blood into her mouth, the blood of her own kind, warm from a living throat, and she would be one of them in the way the old blood counted such things, and Oris's voice in her memory said the guest who drinks the house's cup belongs to the house.
Two doors, and both of them locked.
She looked up, not at the countess, but past her, at the hearthstone at the side of her own table where the white-haired lord had tipped his cup an hour ago.
The stone was dark with old pourings, glossed by a hundred years of the dead being remembered.
And Lira remembered what she had been taught in a room with no windows, by a man who trusted no one: the old houses poured the first of their cup for their dead before the living drank, and a guest who poured for a house's dead honored that house more than any toast could.
She stood. She let her hands tremble a little, as a girl's hands tremble when she is doing something braver than she knows. She took the dark cup in both hands, and the warmth climbed her palms, and she carried it to the hearthstone at the side of her table, and she poured it out.
The blood hit the hot stone and hissed. Steam rose, and the smell of it rolled through the hall, and Lira set the empty cup down and folded her hands and said, to the stone, in a voice small and clear enough for the whole room to lean in and hear: "The house has given me its first cup, and I give it to the house's dead, who gave the peace its long road.
In Vess we pour for those who are gone before we drink to those who remain.
I hoped your house kept the same remembrance. "
For one breath the hall did not know what it had seen.
Then the old white-haired lord raised his cup, and drank, and said, "Well remembered, little bride," and the murmur that went around the tables was not the countess's murmur.
It was warmer than that. A few of the old blood nodded to her, the way old blood nods to a guest who has done an old thing properly, and Lira understood that she had poured her way out of the trap and into something the countess had not planned for at all.
She had honored their dead. She had made herself, to the most traditional of them, the right kind of bride.