Cirri looked up at me, her jaw set. What is this ritual? 

“I don’t—”

Describe it. Now, please.

“Come back inside.” I managed to lead her back into the tent, out of sight of the burning barn, and resettled her on the chair. Wyn had set the pup in a supplies basket, and offered Cirri a beaten tin cup of tea.

“It’ll settle your stomach,” she said. “Drink up. Not one of us hasn’t turned our guts inside out after finding something like this. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Wyn’s no-nonsense nature seemed to help more than my apologies. Cirri drank, but she gave me an iron-hard stare over the rim of the cup.

“The ritual, then.” I swiveled an ear at a distant shout from Visca, but she was calling for more fuel. “Well.”

“It’s terrible,” Wyn said, scowling grimly as she prepared another cup.

“First, understand that none of us have seen it happen with the wargs.”

Cirri nodded, still drinking. The pup had ambled out of the basket, all wagging tail and bright eyes, and she scooped it into her lap one-handed.

“It… requires death, obviously.” I shifted uncomfortably, the heat of shame and guilt rising in me. The ritual… it was the last thing I wanted to speak of, something far too close to my own past. “A bad death. As much suffering as can be inflicted at once. Blood shed with hatred, tears shed in pain.”

Some of the empty shock had faded from her eyes, and she listened carefully.

“Those are requirements. Without the two, there can be no rebirth. The murder must be committed in a frenzy of rage, with no clear thought. I’ve heard the candidates starve themselves for weeks beforehand, so they’re hungry when the time comes.”

Cirri licked her lips, closed her eyes, and took a deep swallow of tea. She nodded for me to continue when she opened her eyes again.

“Then they must eat. When the blood and tears have been shed, they feed, and if Wargyr has deemed their offering of rage appropriate, they shed their own human skins.”

I knew her thinking look, that distant stare with her brow lightly furrowed.

“Is there something familiar in that?” Please, let her say no… but she had the book in her possession. It was only a matter of time before she translated enough runes to read about the fine details of my kind.

Cirri tilted her head, still petting the pup, and finally shook her head. Nothing definite, she said, her hands halting. But… perhaps something. I’ll dig deeper in the translations.

“See?” I forced myself to smile and squeezed her hand, warmed from the mug. Better by far than the icy, limp feeling she’d had earlier. “You can’t call yourself useless.”

She didn’t smile; she was still staring through the crack left by the door flap, still thinking. But is it going to help? she asked. What does it matter how they’re born, if we can’t stop them?

There was a question there was no answer to.

“It’ll help,” I told her firmly, and then the door opened. Visca poked her head in, soot added to the smears of blood on her face.

“We could use you, Bane,” she said grimly.

I nodded, and touched my wife one last time. Then left her here, on the outskirts of a defeated battlefield, to go bury the misery I’d caused.

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Chapter 35 Cirri

With my stomach empty, my throat sore and raw, and the chill creeping through my cloak, I slunk out of Wyn’s tent, the basket with the laika under one arm, my journal in the other.

The vampire legions had already brought down the terrible pillar of limbs. They’d dragged the bodies from the snow, leaving nothing but dirty crimson and brown smears behind. In the distance, the barn was collapsing in on itself, its blackened, skeletal frame illuminated against the hungry flames.

Most of the town square was quiet. They had dug pits in the wide field around the barn, my husband among them, doing their best to arrange the dead with respect.

I exhaled, my stomach clenching again, and settled on a large rock fallen from the wall, with a view of the square before me. I put the basket by my feet, giving the pup a scratch behind its pointed ears.

Poor little thing, all of its siblings now consumed.

You’re very fortunate, I told him. Then I pulled out my journal, flipping to the index in the back.

There it was—the symbol I’d translated as Wargyr, that had made my hand shake and sent pins and needles through my fingers as I wrote it. It matched the massive symbol painted in blood across the church’s front.

I turned back a few pages, and began to sketch the church, down to the wolf’s head, the stick-figure-like emblems of people marching into its maw, the symbol clasped in its jaws.

Then I drew the tree of limbs from memory, and wrote what Bane had told me of the conversion from man to warg. The ritual of blood and tears… blood shed with hatred, tears shed in pain.

It was so similar to the ritual I was translating, but why would the vampires have detailed a ceremony on the creation of wargs, their ultimate nemesis?

I added a few details to my sketch, frowning at the page. Despite the similarities, it might not be the creation of wargs at all. They had nothing to do with thorns or roses, and I was positive those translations were accurate.

If there were answers at all, they would be at home in Ravenscry, contained in those ancient documents. But it seemed unlikely at this point. What were the odds that another perfect Silversun Fragment had escaped the burning Arks that ended Liliach Daromir’s reign?

They had to be low. The good luck of even having a priests’ book was unprecedented, not to mention the clear parallel texts I already had. Instead of mourning the lost knowledge, I should be grateful I had that much.

But it was difficult to summon any gratitude while sitting on a frozen rock, looking out at the remains of what had been one of the largest villages in the Rift yesterday. While I was lost in the throes of passion, these people had been in the throes of agony.

It didn’t seem fair, but then if there was one thing I knew, it was that life wasn’t fair at all. Bane would want to blame himself for taking a soft hand with his people, for accommodating their beliefs, and yet it was a fine line between being a strong-hearted leader and a tyrant.

I scuffed my foot in the snow, absurdly glad I’d worn fleece-lined boots. It felt wrong to be happy for such a simple thing in the midst of all this, but there was no going back, was there? What had happened, had happened, and now I would keep living and be grateful for warm boots.

Next time, I told myself. We can stop this next time. 

I turned back to my lexicon, shaking my head.

Wargyr.

A circle of thorns.

Tears and blood.

All so familiar, and yet completely incomprehensible in how they related. No matter how I turned it over, I couldn’t make a ritual with the Mother’s sacred imagery align with Wargyr in any way.

Finally, I sighed and shoved my journal in my bag and scooped up the basket of pup. There were no answers to be found in staring at a page, nor any likely to be found here, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least try.

The barn was gone, which would have been my preferable destination. I would’ve been willing to risk puking up my own stomach lining again to check for any signs of thorns amongst the wreckage.

Instead I went to the church. The dead woman had been taken away, imprints left in the snow where her legs had been.

There was still a horseshoe of cold iron nailed into the door, frosted strands of dried primrose draped over the window sills. I pushed the door open, the laika panting in the cold air as I stepped over the threshold.