I gave Visca an awkward curtsy, holding out my skirts, and quickly signed to her: It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I’m sure I’ll be no trouble at all.

After all, I wasn’t going to go tempt fate in the forest. Olwyn’s own dread at the prospect of a warg had made it quite clear that death could wander in on silent paws at any moment.

The commander was watching me with the same speculative look I’d come to expect from Bane and Olwyn. “Was the ride comfortable?”

As comfortable as it could be, given the threat of wolf-men wanting to rip my throat out and roll around in my guts.

“Huh. I haven’t the faintest clue what you’re saying, but we’ll rectify that shortly. More to the point, you seem to be of stronger constitution than we were given to expect.”

It was really beginning to sink in—these vampires had genuinely all expected hysterics, if not a full-on mental break.

As terrible as I felt for Antonetta, it was probably for the best that she was not the one standing here right now. I only wished she had chosen another way to extricate herself.

I will do what I must for Veladar’s sake, I signed, meeting Visca’s eyes.

“Dear, we really don’t have time for niceties.” Olwyn’s voice was strained, and she held a list in an iron grip. “They must make the vows by midnight or our contract is in error, and she cannot wear that dress.”

Visca’s cocky smile faded and she nodded to the bloodwitch. “Do what you must. I’ll be off to find a certain absent groom and make sure he’s at the altar.”

With another open demonstration of her predatory grace, she scaled the keep’s wall once more, swarming up the stone using only her sharp nails.

I’d barely managed to sign a farewell before Olwyn hurried me through an iron-fortified door. While there were obviously no silver bells or rowan here, they’d hung braided garlands of wolfsbane over every door and window, the purple blossoms drooping in thick swathes.

“Come now, my lady. We must prepare you for your true wedding.”

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter 6 Bane

There was warg-sign in the Rift, freshly carved into a tree. A beast marking territory that was not his to claim.

The bubbling hum of excitement in my veins died as my nostrils flared open, the powerful fiend senses consuming most of the rational thought in my brain as I studied his scent.

Young male. No more than twenty. Northerner—the thick taste of pine sap and minerals. Recent blood spoor, not his.

I crouched by the tree, closing my senses off once more. Coming back to myself, little by little.

The carriage was only three miles behind me. With my throat aching with unquenched thirst, the last thing I wanted was to be in the mindset of a hunting fiend when it rolled by, spilling the fragrance of the two human women into the air like a beckoning feast before a starving man.

Particularly Cirrien’s scent, which now seemed engraved in my forebrain, a smell I would recognize for the rest of my life.

I should have fed more heavily before bringing my bride back to the Rift. Wyn had encouraged me to do so, but with my vows looming like a tidal wave preparing to crash over me, I had foregone deep drinking. Soon Cirrien would be the only one I would want to taste.

At the time, my thought had been to cut myself off early. To become used to the ascetic lifestyle of a fiend married to a woman who wanted nothing to do with him. Options or not, I would do my best to uphold the vows before succumbing to need.

Thirst would be the defining quality of my future. Always parched, never satisfied.

Now, I thought… there might be a chance. The floral and musk scent of my bride was nearly overpowering to my senses, to the degree that no others had smelled as tempting since the moment I’d stepped into her presence.

If she allowed me to touch her.

Instead of counting slowly, as Wyn had encouraged me to do when the fiend wanted to rise to the surface, I replayed the hand motions the Brother had taught me last night.

A pressing of palms together: thank you.

The twist of a wrist, with a quick flare of the fingers upwards: cannot.

A soft wave, just over the forehead: dreams.

He had taught me over three hundred movements, drilling them over and over, and it had not been nearly enough. He had made it clear that a single night of practice was like dipping a toe in a shallow puddle, when an entire unseen ocean lurked beneath.

Perhaps if Cirrien stayed near me instead of locking herself in her tower, I would be able to piece together more of her language.

I had accepted that it was impossible to learn any of her signs fluently in one night—there was a limit to what one could learn over the course of eight hours. But now I would have a vantage point from which to begin.

With the sign for anger running through my head—a sharp jab with three fingers, palm inward—one of my ears swiveled to the south, the tip quivering.

Distant hoofbeats. Eryan was less than a mile away now with his precious cargo.

I rose to my full height, touching the warg-sign once more. Whoever he was, he had been sacrificed: Thurn Hakkon, the once-defeated commander of the Forian wargs, knew that this boy would not be returning from the Rift.

It was a suicide run. To kill me or the future Lady—whichever one he destroyed, it would be a blow to Veladar.

If I died, the seat would revert to human hands, unless another vampire was willing to make the metamorphosis into a fiend, with all the strictures that entailed… not to mention the horror of the process itself. The Rift would be left weak and undefended by their own monsters.

And if Cirrien died… well. The humans would provide me with another bride, another woman to ensure the Accords remained unbroken.

But I did not want another bride. I wanted her, the woman who stood up straight and dared to look me in the eye.

So the seat would revert to human hands regardless, because I would cross the border into Foria, and slaughter as many of them as I could before they took me down by sheer dint of numbers.

Neither outcome was acceptable. Hakkon had sent the boy to his doom.

The clatter of hooves grew louder, and I twisted my ears back as it came into sight, bursting through the mist on the road. Stepping back into the roils of fog, I allowed myself a glance at the window.

Cirrien. Just visible through the smoked glass, searching the fog.

For a moment I thought she saw me—but in the three seconds it took for the carriage to pass, her gaze focused on the tree marked by the warg.

Eryan still wore his tricorn hat. A sign to me, hiding in the mist, that he had seen and heard no sign of approach.

When they disappeared into the mist, I took another deep breath of the warg-sign, and lowered myself to all fours.

Agony rippled through my bones, spreading outwards like ripples in a pond. My skin shifted and oozed, accommodating the thickening plates of cartilage that would protect my vital organs and weak points. No wings. My business was on the ground.

Moving like a beast, I followed the trail of fresh wolf spoor.

He had moved back and forth, crisscrossing the road, but I picked up a clear trail heading north, so fresh I could almost taste his sweat.

So fresh I knew that he was still in pain from his first shift, frightened but determined, the scent acrid and filling my mind with a red haze.

His target was Cirrien.

He would never achieve his goal. Not while I lived.

Several hundred yards behind the carriage, the trail moved off the road. My tongue flicked out, the sensitive receptors tasting him in the paw prints left behind: distorted prints, somewhere between feet and paws, grooves gouged into the earth where his claws had dug in.