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Chapter 1 Cirri
The hours until the wedding were ticking away, and the bride-to-be had smeared herself all over the room.
Eldest Sister Sifka stood in the doorway, taking in the ruined carpet and the blood soaking through the cracks in the floor. She trembled, not from grief or disgust, but from pure rage.
I waited in silence with another maid, not relishing the work to come. It was our misfortune that we were the first to answer the frantic summons, unaware that a body awaited us.
The Eldest Sister stared at the scene, her fingers drifting to her temples to massage away a headache.
“Very well, there’s nothing to be done for this.” She curled her lip at Antonetta’s stiffening body. “Clean it up.”
I hurried in, falling to my knees and spreading my cleaning rags to soak up the deepest puddles, ignoring the thick scent of copper and the unpleasant, congealing coolness of the blood on my hands. Antonetta’s head had tilted onto her shoulder in death, blonde curls now as crimson as my own, so that she seemed to be watching me with puzzlement as I worked around her feet.
The other maid, a new girl named Ellena recently brought in from begging on Argent’s streets, had turned a pale greenish color and audibly swallowed. She clenched and unclenched her hands, breathing rapidly as she stared anywhere but at the body. “Eldest, I can’t—”
“What use are you, then?” Sifka bared her dull silver teeth, showing a strip of gray gums. “Go fetch Sister Aletha!”
I kept my head down, working in silence as I stripped the linens from the bed and began spreading those across the floor around the dead girl.
Poor Antonetta had possessed three qualities which doomed her: she was a junior Librarian in the Silver Sisters’ Library, not quite yet ascended to the full rank of anointed Sisterhood. She’d also been pure-blooded Veladari, and, as of the previous evening, rather pretty.
These things combined had made her the perfect expendable warm body, marked for a fate she considered worse than death: marriage to the Lord of the Rift.
Which was supposed to take place in three hours.
They would have to find a new bride on short notice, one the Silver Sisterhood could afford to lose. Their ranks had been falling in number since the Blood Accords had been signed, when vampires and humanity put aside their long-lived hatred to drive the wargs of Foria out of Veladar.
The Blood Accords had saved us all. I’d been fifteen when the last of the Forians were sent back over the border, and to this day the tolling of bells still sent a deep chill through me, a primal fear that no Veladari in this generation or the next would ever forget.
Bells meant wolves. They meant teeth and claws at your door.
It was a fear ingrained in us by mythical monstrosities. Wargs, the men who shed their skins to become wolves, had been children’s fairy tales for centuries. It was only forty years ago, when King Radomil of Foria decided to take Veladar’s fertile lands for himself, we discovered that they were all too real.
Real, and just as horrific as the stories claimed. After three decades of losing ground, ravaged by the Forians’ animal appetites, the high nobility of Veladar had elected to turn to our old enemies: summoning the vampires from the depths beneath our feet, offering everything we had for their protection.
They had accepted the agreement, eager to escape an eternity of darkness in the underground.
With their aid, we had won against the Forians… but at what some considered too great a cost.
Antonetta had clearly been one of them.
The vampires had allied with us with conditions that seemed like lesser evils at the time, when the common sight of a Forian warg meant tolling bells and families lost: from the day the Blood Accords were signed, the Four Lords of Veladar would be vampires, then and forever.
The human nobility who had held these seats—the Lord of the Rift, the Lord of the Moor, the Lord of the Vale, and the Lord of the Rivers—had given them up, though not without extreme dissent and anger.
But they’d taken their petty vengeance on the vampires. The vampires might rule this country now, but the Blood Accords were clear: within ten years of the declaration of peacetime, each Lord was required to take a fully human, pure-blooded Veladari bride, to ensure humanity’s voice at their tables. If they failed to do so, the seat would revert to human hands… and we all knew the vampires wouldn’t allow that.
They couldn’t allow it. Not with our fraught history.
Today was the tenth a
Soft footsteps sounded in the doorway, along with a frustrated sigh. “She couldn’t face Lord Bane, then?”
I knew Sister Aletha from her rough, broad voice alone, but kept my eyes down. My hair was covered, but I was taking no risks.
“Obviously,” Sifka snapped. She took a calming breath, and her voice gentled. “They do say he’s monstrous. I’ve glimpsed him myself, and I can’t imagine he’s gotten any easier on the eyes since then. Antonetta was a flighty girl. Clearly an unwise choice.”
I wasn’t sure ‘flighty’ was the proper adjective for a girl sold to a vampire who was reputed to be more beast than man. My stomach flipped as I grabbed another rag, my composure over this mess fading rapidly.
I tried to distract myself with selfish thoughts. Like the fact that there was now an opening in the Librarians’ roster, if they would have me. I had applied last year and been rejected, but this year, with our numbers so low… maybe I stood a chance.
“Hmm.” Sister Aletha sounded doubtful. “Well, she’s left us in a bind, Eldest. We can’t spare any of the younger Sisters, not with these recruitment numbers. And most of them are Forian by-blows, regardless.”
The good thing about being an indentured servant in the Sisterhood—rather than a Silver Sister myself, which was doubtless my parents’ original intent when they’d left me to their care—was that people talked openly in front of me. I heard all ma
It was an open secret that recruitment had dropped drastically after the Blood Accords, when vampires had gone from bogeymen to heroes almost overnight. The Silver Sisterhood, once the protector of humanity against their bloodlust, was on its last gasp, and Eldest Sister Sifka was clinging to relevance by the skin of her teeth.
When it was a
The thing was, although these vampires were the heroes who had driven out the wargs, few humans actually wanted to marry them.
The vampires who had taken the seats of the Lords were no normal vampires. There would be no handsome, deathless husbands for these brides. Women had not lined up for the honor, even if it would give them a rank of nobility above all others.
Eldest Sister Sifka had drawn the short stick. She’d been furious that the vampire slayers would be the ones to provide, though the other Guild leaders had been relieved they would not have to give up one of their own to a monster.
The head of the Spicer’s Guild had reputedly laughed, claiming that the Sisterhood had enough young women to give the Lord an entire harem if he pleased.
But, according to the requirements of the Blood Accords, they did not. In fact, the other Guilds might have had an easier time producing a candidate.
While the Silver Sisterhood took only women into their ranks, they did not discriminate based on rank, titles, or nationality. Every Sister, whether she was born in silk or scooped from a gutter, was equal in the eyes of the Lady of Light.
This meant most recruitment had, in fact, come from the gutters and alleys of Argent. Most of the Sisters had a bit of Forian in them; after three decades of occupation, with the mad wolf-men raping and pillaging their way across Veladar, a lot of the younger recruits were of mixed blood.
The Blood Accords were quite clear that the bride had to be of pure Veladari descent. There were barely a handful of women in the Sisterhood who met that requirement, and of those they were further whittled down by the enhancements all Sisters underwent during induction to their higher ranks.
One had recently been fitted with silver teeth, a not-quite-cosmetic change they called ‘anointing’; unless the Sisterhood wanted the Lord’s lips bubbling and blistering with the first kiss of his bride, that brought the potential pool of candidates down to three.
The Eldest Sister seemed to be following my train of thought. “Sister Gisele was just anointed last month.” Her tone was sour. “And we can’t spare Nadia, she’s too valuable in her current position. If I weren’t afraid of insulting that bloated leech, I’d give him Risna, but she’s…”
“Ugly,” Aletha volunteered.
“Yes. Well…” Sifka paced the narrow section of floor where no blood had spread, sucking her teeth as she thought. “He’s no beauty himself. Perhaps with a little face-paint…”
“No, Eldest.” Aletha was serious, her arms crossed over her chest. “If he is insulted, that will rebound entirely on us, and we’re in a precarious enough position as it is.”
Ellena returned with clean rags and a bucket of soapy water. She left them next to me, departing in a hurry before she could be told to get to work.
I mentally sighed, pulling up the sodden linens, and began composing my letter to the Mother Librarian in my head. I was a perfect candidate, with a list of qualifications as long as my arm, and only one small hurdle to overcome.
“What about Brigit?”
“A Forian grandfather.” Aletha shook her head. “I know it pains you, but it must be Nadia, Eldest. Risna might be ugly, but she has the intelligence to take Nadia’s place with the right training—and unlike half of the new girls, she knows which end of a sword to hold. We can recruit again in the spring and make up for Nadia’s loss.”
With the linens moved aside, the pool of blood was quite diminished. I took the straight razor Antonetta had used to perform her last deed and carefully folded it before dropping it in my bucket. If I was lucky, no one would notice its disappearance, and I could clean it off and keep it for myself.
Morbid, perhaps, but I couldn’t afford such fine steel on my own. When my parents had left me on the Cathedral’s doorstep, they had pi