If there had been bodies in here, they were gone now. But the pews had been smashed to pieces, the walls battered from the fight that had taken place, the floor stinking of iron and salt and soaked through.

I knelt in the mess, using a splintered piece of wood from one of the pews to poke through the crusted slurry of snow, blood, and dirt left on the floor. I unearthed a silver coin, shreds of cloth, even the horrible discovery of a clump of hair ripped out by the root with a bit of scalp still attached, but not so much as a single thorn.

Dropping the wood, I scowled across the floor and petted the shifty pup.

Perhaps it was a mistranslation, and I was searching for the wrong things. There was a chance I had plowed ahead blindly, so convinced I’d had the proper translations that I’d allowed a single mistake to compound into multiple errors.

I blew out my cheeks as I left the church, knowing this would mean hours of double- and triple-checking past work. I needed to send a letter to the Head Librarian of the Cathedral and ask for a second opinion, as well as a clear copy of the Silversun Fragment.

Dear Sister Loranin, I might have irrevocably fucked up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to translate the High Tongue due to my own inflated ego. Please put a pin in my bloated head and bring me back down to earth. Yours, Cirri. 

No. I might have made a mistake, but I did have faith in my memory of the runes. This was merely a setback, and these documents were ancient, regardless.

Who could have said what the vampires of the Red Epoch were thinking when they wrote the book? The vampires of today were so divorced from the cultural mores of the Daromir reign that the translations might not remotely reflect their modern rites. There was every possibility they were bastardized from a completely different ritual.

Blaming myself for a mistake wouldn’t make any progress. I would write a proper letter to Sister Loranin, ask for her eyes and the runes, and start over from the beginning.

As the Eldest Sister had been fond of telling us, humility was the greatest of teachers.

Or perhaps she meant humiliation. Either one worked, in this case.

Besides… as I looked down and saw an uprooted tooth ground into the dirty snow, I figured being alive to experience humiliation at all was a lovely gift.

“Carting it around like a pet, now?” Miro was leaning against the broken wall, arms crossed, cheeks reddened with the cold.

I looked down at the bright-eyed laika and shrugged. What else would I do with a pup?

“You should release it into the forest. Give it a chance to make its own way.”

I hauled my journal out, resting it one arm to write as I drifted closer to Miro.

Why would I give it a death sentence? He’s still got milk teeth.

“He’s Forian.” Miro snorted. “He’ll survive.”

I’d rather give him a chance in the keep. 

“Why?” Miro rubbed his cheek, smearing the soot there. “So the vampires can keep another Forian minion around and walk all over it when it pleases them?”

I gazed up at him, tipping my head. Do you really believe that’s why you’re treated like a nuisance?

“Of course.”

Maybe you should spend some time in self-reflection. 

“Or…” He leaned in. “You could release the pup. Give it a chance to go back to its own people. Being a Forian in Veladar… I don’t wish that on anyone. Always treated like an outsider. Always considered lower. He won’t even be considered a proper hunting dog, not by the Master of Hounds there.”

It could be worse. I shrugged again, unable to summon even irritation. My emotions seemed trapped behind a wall, separated from the rest of me. He could’ve been a meal.

Miro’s mouth twisted. “Just so long as you know what you’re doing. Consigning him to a lifetime of being dragged along on a leash. That’s all that’s done to Forians here.”

Aren’t we all? Everyone has a leash. Everyone owes something. I paused to scratch the laika’s soft back. What do you know about wargs?

Miro was obsessed with his Forian heritage, hellbent on complaining how it brought him down. If he was so in love with it, perhaps he knew something more about the ritual.

It was Miro’s turn to shrug, frowning. “Creatures of great strength. Fast, powerful, furious.”

What about their creation? Have you ever heard tales of that?

Those pale jade eyes focused on my face, flicking from my eyes down to my mouth, and back again. “That’s a rather gory interest for a lady to take.”

Indulge me.

“Very well…” He leaned back against the wall, brows furrowed. “I’ve heard you need to be committed. Utterly, absolutely. Saying you want it isn’t enough. You need to believe, down to the marrow.”

I watched his eyes move to the church wall as he spoke, his fingers tapping.

“You need to eat a feast of flesh,” he said quietly. “And it must be terrible. It must surpass the bounds of pain and horror. I’ve heard… some of them ate their own children. The ultimate betrayal, the gut-wrenching knowledge that the thing that trusts you most in the world is ruined by your own hand.”

My stomach turned over, a slow flip-flop, and bitter saliva flooded my mouth. I swallowed hard.

I had asked, after all, and now I was indulged.

“And the whole time that’s happening, you must keep the faith. The belief that you are Wargyr’s claws, his fangs, his hands on this earth.”

Have you heard anything about thorns being involved? I wrote. A circle of thorns?

Miro’s brows crinkled further. “No, of course not. They’re sacred to the vampires’ Mother, not Wargyr. Where would you even get that idea?”

I worried my lower lip, thinking. Just a misconception.

“Hell of a misconception. No, blood and flesh are sacred to Wargyr. Pain. He is the god of torment, of being forged in a crucible of agony and emerging in your most powerful, primal form.” Miro glanced towards the field of pits. “A little like the fiends, in fact.”

How so? I didn’t believe that for a moment. I couldn’t picture Bane lifting a finger against any of his loved ones.

“He never told you how they took that form?” Miro snorted.

I’m sure he didn’t tell you, either.

The man grinned, showing his white teeth. “No, but he didn’t need to. My mother told me. There are some interesting parallels, though. To be born, a warg needs to emerge washed in blood. Just so with them.” He nodded towards Bane. “You think the vampires feed all pretty now in their blood shops? They had to cause epic suffering to go fiend. She told me…” He leaned in closer. “It took thirty deaths before Bane could make the shift.”

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 funny.” Miro followed my gaze. “They hunt the wargs for being what they are, and yet between the four of them, they killed over a hundred people at once to become fiends. You could argue that they are the exact same coin, on different sides. Neither is born from love and rainbows, I can tell you that. What makes a warg any different from a fiend?”

The fiends don’t hunt and eat innocents and children, to start with.

“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.