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The man gri
I didn’t know what to say. Without meaning to, I looked out at my husband, deep in the trenches, covered in blood and soot, his broad shoulders flexing as he shifted bodies.
Thirty agonizing deaths, to become what he was… but this was Miro speaking, and if I thought I understood anything about him, it was that he would twist any truth to his advantage.
“It’s kind of fu
The fiends don’t hunt and eat i
“No?” He raised his brows. “So… you’ve never seen Bane or Wroth raise a hand in anger?”
My pen was motionless in my hand, my mind flashing back to that night in Fog Hollow, how quickly he’d moved—that man’s arm nearly torn off, the warm, wet spray of his blood across my face.
The white-hot hate in Wroth’s eyes.
Bane, claws slashing through my side as he prepared to kill him.
He had reasons, I wrote.
“Ah, well then. Reasons. Were you there on the battlefield against Foria?”
I shook my head, a tendril of warm anger finally seeping through the numbness of my emotions.
“Some of the wargs were children,” Miro said quietly. “Do you think that stopped him from gutting them on sight?”
A long, taut silence passed.
“But I suppose you know everything, don’t you?” Miro smiled, with more than a touch of snide superiority in his tone. “Never been on a battlefield, grew up safe behind nice thick walls, but you know all there is to know about fiends. I’m glad you’re an expert and can correct the rest of us, who’ve been living under them for the last ten years.”
I sucked in a sharp breath, but Miro had already shoved off the wall. He gave me a mocking bow.
“Thank you for amending my errors, my Lady Silence,” he said. “I bow to your superior knowledge. Or…”
He came close enough that I felt his breath on my ear as he spoke. “Or you’ll see one day just how terribly wrong you are, and when that day comes, you’ll wish you’d listened. Two sides. Same coin. There is no difference between your husband and what he hunts.”
He left me alone in the cold silence, the wind kicking a flurry of snowflakes through my cloak, my toes frozen numb, my heart a stone. Finally, I forced myself to return to Wyn’s tent, making my notations from Miro’s knowledge and putting the laika by the brazier to keep him warm.
I still hadn’t thawed as the legions filled in the last of the pits. As the tents were packed, the wagons loaded, the horses saddled.
Bane’s shoulders were slumped as he emerged from the twilight, his hands filthy to the elbow. He bowed over as he walked, like the weight of the world rested on his shoulders.
I watched as he scrubbed them in a bucket of well water, scouring blood and dirt away with harsh soap.
“We’re going home alone,” he rumbled, his voice low. “The legions are spreading out, reinforcing where they can. We need to get Miro back to the keep. He’s going to run supplies south—it’s the most likely place for Hakkon to attack next.”
I nodded, unsure of what to say. How could I never have questioned before exactly how he became a fiend?
What else would force such a transformation but a sea of blood?
I examined him as he scrubbed, taking in the giant form I’d found so hideous on first appearance. The horns curling back over his skull, the long, dextrous ears, the crests of bone deforming his face. The bat-like snout, with those flared nostrils, turned into a despairing frown.
And yet I couldn’t find any fault in him now. He grieved as any man would, blamed himself.
Miro was only right in the broadest sense of the word. Bane had bathed in blood to become this monster. But he had a good soul. He had done it for good reasons.
Not even in my wildest imaginings could I fathom Bane doing what the wargs had done to Tristone. He only turned to that brute violence when there were no other options. When it was the only card left to play.
“What is it, lover?” he asked, a crooked half-smile on those distorted lips, and I blinked, realizing I’d been lost in thought while staring at him.
I’m ready to go home, I said, and meant it.
The ride back to Ravenscry was a blur. I only vaguely remembered entering the keep, stumbling to the stables and handing the basket of pup over to the Master of Hounds. My golems, joyful to see me again, Rose’s soft hands scrubbing away the ice and grime. Curling into bed with Bane, his warmth at my back, clutching me close to his chest.
I woke the next morning alone, as I had expected. With Bloodrain over, and the tragedy of the previous day, Bane would have a full plate.
As did I.
My books were precisely where I had left them, my desk in the library gleaming with welcome. I spread out my lexicon, opening the ritual book and the parallel text.
For the next twelve hours, I double-checked the runes so many times I lost count. I wrote three letters, asking Rose to give them to the steward for dispatch—one to Sister Loranin, two to scholars I had heard of in the Collegium of Argent.
I examined and cross-examined the parallel text, looking for the tiniest discrepancies, the most minuscule of mistakes.
And as the moon rose high outside the windows, I finally sat back, my neck aching and head pounding, and came to the same conclusion I’d reached before.
Unless there was something wrong with one of the initial twelve runes translated from the High Tongue, the parallel text was pristine. I had made no mistakes.
The symbol of Wargyr was incontrovertibly linked with the vampiric ritual, denoting ‘a circle of thorns’, ‘blood’, and ‘tears’.
I tapped my pen harder than usual, staring furiously at the page, my eyes red and sore. All that work for the same nothing. None of this helped.
I rubbed my eyes again, letting out a deep sigh. All I wanted was to be useful, and all I’d dug up was a load of nonsense.
Rose touched my back, her hand soft and hesitant.
I took my hands from my face. I’m fine. I just hate when things don’t make sense.
She tipped her head, and finally her shoulders rippled in a shrug. No fun, she said.
All too true.
Bane hadn’t come for di
He wasn’t in the tower, either. I put my books aside, my appetite diminished by my failure, and signed to my golems.
Would you two go to the library, please? I asked Rose. We’ll look in the Migration Era books next if you could pull them. And stay there, if you don’t mind. I’d like to be alone with him tonight.
Thorn bristled, his footfalls stomping a little harder than necessary as he obeyed my orders, giving me an accusing ‘glare’ over his shoulder, but Rose loved to pull books and organize them. She went rather perkily, hips swaying.
I looked forward to a night of privacy with Bane. But despite my exhaustion, my mind wouldn’t stop spi
I tossed and turned, snatching a few hours of restless sleep until the sky lightened with another misty day.
Bane hadn’t come to bed.
Except my journal was open to a fresh page. A bloodrose with thick, luscious petals, still beaded with dew, laid atop it.
Sweet dreams, lover
I ca
But I await the night
Sleep well, my burning flame
When the moon is high
I am yours again
I smiled widely despite the dragging melancholy of yesterday’s defeat and the mostly sleepless night, knowing he would’ve gritted his teeth to rhyme it as much as possible, and it warmed my heart.
The bloodrose I tucked behind my ear after I brushed my hair. I would press it in my journal tonight and keep it forever. In one year I would drink Bane’s blood, and a hundred years from now I would open this book and see this bloodrose and remember it all, as fresh as if it were yesterday.
Instead of going to the library, I decided to check our thorns and roses. The last time I’d laid eyes on them, they had been dug up a little to create the golems—and perhaps staring at the thorns would give me some small insight into what exactly that maddening rune meant, and how it tied in.
The keep was almost eerily silent as I stepped into the Bloodgarden, making my way to the alcove where our thorns grew. For a moment, I stood there in surprise, wondering if I’d wandered to the wrong plot.
But no… that was ours. I distinctly remember this spot. It was just that the thorny brambles looked as though they’d been growing for years, rather than a single month.
They had crept upwards over the column, covering it with a riot of black thorns, green leaves, and tiny red buds. At the very top, the most new and spindly tendrils were reaching for the Tower of Winter.
I bit my lip, suppressing a grin as I knelt before it and touched a glossy leaf. The Mother had blessed us. Or the ancestors, or hell, even the Lady of Light.
I sat there and looked at it, my grin slowly fading to a frown.
Mother Blood or the Lady of Light. A heretic scholar had claimed they were the same goddess, shaped by different cultures through the eons.
The High Tongue runes were so similar to formal Veladari. Comparable enough that a theory had been postulated that they came from the same root language, so many thousands of years ago that any record of it was long forgotten.
But there were other commonalities to consider, parallels that had kept me up all night.
The fiends’ process of creation was also similar to that of the wargs, the need for violence, for pain, for conviction. Their strength, their speed. The hunting prowess of a creature of the night. The need to consume blood.
I forced myself to breathe evenly, thinking it through. It was undeniable, the links between warg and fiend, a rite confirmed from two different sources.
With trembling hands, I slid the ritual book from my bag and opened it.