Chapter Three: Lila’s Story
Rhode Island Colony, 1682
CW: “academic” discussion of slavery
So you see, the vampires were not our ancient enemies. The clash that first brought our kind to life was not between living witches and undead blood-drinkers, but between two mortal tribes. Our gods put us into conflict.
I know, I know, in the modern day we do not call them gods. Even by the time I was born, we no longer worshiped the elemental power who gave us our magic. But at the beginning, what else would we call an immortal force that granted visions, strength, magic, and prosperity?
In my day, we knew the tale of the two sisters, bright and dark, who first wielded our power. The story persisted for thousands of years, passed down not just by unreliable word-of-mouth, but maintained unaltered through visions.
It has passed from common knowledge now, as none remained capable of seeing the past once I was gone.
But in 1682, when I was nineteen years old, I knew the story. I knew too that, at other times in history, shapeshifters have been our allies. I did not believe in evil as a blanket judgment, and I saw no evil in Kaleo.
He took care not to let me see it.
At first we walked in the town, as a couple courting might, excepting the fact that I deliberately refrained from mentioning him to my family. Unfettered by human customs of propriety, Kaleo likewise had no interest in pursuing legitimate approval of a suit. Clearly neither of us intended this to be more than casual dalliance, an exploration driven by a mutual love of music and casual curiosity into the Other.
Later, he took to accompanying me as I walked in the forest, gathering what herbs and fruits grew wild there. There was a clearing where we could picnic in the dappled sunlight.
I was surprised, later in my long life, when I heard someone say that vampires were creatures of the night. Kaleo always seemed made for sunshine, or perhaps made of sunshine. If ever he would eschew the day, it is only because the moon appears brighter in the darkness.
There in the privacy of the woods, and we spent long hours there, surrounded by trees and by a net of magic to ensure no wandering swineherd or woodsman stumbled upon us. Kaleo played his violin, and taught me to play when he realized I had an interest. He shared music of his own invention, as well as sonatas by Biago Marini of Brescia, Dario Castello, Salomone Rossi… even the names sounded fantastical to me, as they spoke of far-off people and places. New books were a rarity in our corner of the world, but Kaleo might show up on any given day with anything from Aristotle to Shakespeare and Molière. We read together, occasionally howling with laughter at bawdy and outrageous scenes, and debated philosophy from over a millennium of human civilization.
No one would call Kaleo a gentleman. True “gentlemen” do not read Dom Juan or Tartuffe—plays so controversial the writer was arrested and viewers threatened with excommunication—with young, unmarried ladies in secluded, sun-speckled groves without the knowledge of their families. They would certainly not ask, “May I?” before pulling said young lady onto their lap to demonstrate positions for bowing a violin.
But that “May I?” is what makes me want to call him such.
Please know, when I say I did not know where this was all headed, I refer to the end of our affair—inasmuch as it ever came to an end. I was no avian lady, so ignorant of men that I couldn’t tell when I was being seduced. Though my kind was aware of human norms, and wary to more or less appear to follow them, we never preached that a woman’s value was determined by her modesty and chastity.
I did not tell my family because I did not want to hear what they would say about my dallying with a vampire, but they suspected I had a beau and warned me only to be careful what I revealed of myself to an outsider. There were no concerns about “ruination.” If I became pregnant, and chose to bear the child, there would be no shame or judgment from my kin. To avoid the condemnation of our Puritan neighbors, my family would help me relocate to one of the other fishing villages, to move in with “uncles” and a story about a husband lost to the sea. It wouldn’t be the first time a woman of our kind chose to pass down her power and name without a husband.
That was one reason I always knew my affair with Kaleo could only be temporary: I did want children, and a vampire could not provide them. Besides, despite the fervor of our relationship, and the intensity of his attentions, I was well aware that he had walked the world for centuries at least. I was one partner in a line, not the first, not the last.
But oh, I was in love with my gentleman-vampire.
I was in love with his music, with his laughter, with his wit, and with the way he asked “May I?” before he touched me. He was a believer in active, enthusiastic consent hundreds of years before that term would enter common parlance.
He freely admitted that he believed women were at least the equal of men, capable of the same brilliance of thought and agency and only seeming to lack because human society insisted on keeping them ignorant and repressed. He claimed that was why he fell for me, for a witch, because I did not feel bound by the patriarchal chains that held most women in that era.
So it went, as chaste walks became shy kisses, and then more. It was twilight verging on full dark, later than I usually stayed out with him, when I turned my head briefly to catch my breath and felt his lips move down to my throat.
The darkness and the sensation combined abruptly to remind me what he was, remind me that I was here in the woods with him alone and certainly in no position to gain an advantage should I need to fight. My power sparked instinctively and my body tensed.
Immediately he froze. He paused for one beat of my heart as he processed my reaction, and then he took his hands from me and stepped back, saying simply, “Never, Lila. Never without your permission—no, without your invitation. I would never take your blood by force, or surprise, or subterfuge, any more than I would take any other part of you.”
“And if I offered?” I asked, an unwise question driven by the restless energy that followed my spike of instinctive prey-fear.
“I would be honored and delighted,” he responded. “But I will not steal that which isn’t offered. And I won’t ask for that which I know you will decline.” True to his word, he paused a moment longer, seeming to assess the situation and the change in the mood. And when he asked “May I?” again, it was to offer to walk me home, for the night had come on quickly and my kind did not see as well in the dark as his.
And then he asked if I would still see him the next day.
My answer to both questions was yes, as he knew it would be.
The first sour note in our relationship came after more than half a year, when in our discussions Kaleo mentioned that he had invested in property nearby. In response to my alarm that he would choose to live at the same shore as all my hunter-kin, he assured me he had chosen land far back from shore. Farmland. Plantation land.
When I asked him warily who worked his land, and expressed outrage on behalf of the human slaves I knew toiled in such places, he quirked a brow and dismissively asked me if I knew where most of the cod the men of my kind fished went, and if I knew how the sugar and molasses purchased in exchange were produced. He pointed out that my father and uncles worked alongside slaves at the wharf, and most likely benefited from their labor at times.
Slavery in that area had been outlawed in 1652. I knew it was a law on paper and rarely enforced, but it mattered. “We make an effort,” I said, straining the word because I knew he was right that it probably wasn’t enough, “to live in a way that does not abuse others. We’re here, in a land that actively reviles witchcraft, because we refused to claim dominion over others. We could have set ourselves up as gods in some human town. Instead we live among humans.”
“And humans,” Kaleo replied, “in every civilization and in every age of history, have owned other humans.”
“That isn’t true.” I bridled at the accusation, pushing away from him as I sat up, prepared for the argument it didn’t take a seer to predict.
“It has been true in every place I have ever been since the day I was born a citizen of Rome, hundreds of years before the birth of the human Christ. Even in places where laws are passed claiming slavery is illegal—like this one—it remains, either conveniently hidden by a mutual trading partner, or under names like serf or peasant.”
I must have touched a nerve. He didn’t often reference his age so frankly, or attempt to use it as leverage in our discussions.
He may have forgotten exactly who he was talking to. “Clearly you’ve been favoring the wrong civilizations,” I retorted. “I might not have walked this earth as long as you have, but one of the powers of my line is viewing the past. My line has often lived in lands free of the blight of slavery.”
“Then educate me,” he challenged. “I am willing to learn. Convince me that civilization has ever thrived without one group of people subjugating another.”
It turned out not to be an easy task, and to my shame I will admit the discussion diverted me from him and his actions to the kinds of general philosophy discussions we had engaged in so often before. We debated how we could work to change the system, to free the captives and stop the influx of new ones, or even to remove ourselves from its benefits without completely leaving all civilization behind. I spoke honestly, impassioned; he spoke theoretically, a man who has not only always lived in places with slaves, but who I would later learn had always owned them himself and felt no shame or discomfort about the situation other than what he feigned for my benefit.
At the time, though, I was able to convince myself that our discussions had swayed him to another type of thinking. He assured me he would instruct the steward for his land to treat the people working there well, and that he would research how to grant them their freedom without throwing freed men, women and children destitute onto the streets.
I accepted the promise, feeling triumphant. I believed I had accomplished something, beyond balming my own guilt and righteousness.
That so-called accomplishment felt good, especially compared to how I floundered when discussing the history of my own kind.
I shared with Kaleo the origins of my kind. I intended it to be an example of a civilization without slavery, where even the women were equal to the men. I told him the ancient story of Sunbone and Nightcry.
He looked at me and asked me, with carefully-chosen words, if I thought being forced by our gods to war with a tribe we had never met before under threat of sickness and death was perhaps not the best example of freedom in all of history.
On that, he was right. From the very start, my kind has never been totally free. We were not slaves; it would be gross arrogance and naiveté to equate our origin to the abduction and abuse that word describes. But neither had we asked to be soldiers, before we were set to war by a power greater than ourselves.
Chapter Four: Birth of the Macht Witches
Sun raised her bow again and took aim at the nearest beast. If they came at her one at a time, maybe… no. If they came at her one at a time, it would only take her a few moments longer to die.
That didn’t mean she wouldn’t fight, though.
She stepped back to put the mouth of the cave around her, to ensure none of the cats could pounce on her from above. A wash of warmth enveloped her, a hot draft that swirled from somewhere deeper in the cave. Almost she glanced behind her, wondering if a yet-larger animal stalked her from behind, but if it did it was already upon her so turning away from the enemy before her would accomplish nothing.
She kept her aim steady as she moved. Taking down one of those massive beasts with an arrow would not be easy. It would be like shooting moose, except that moose bodies were held higher, the torso exposed to a shot. As they stalked toward her, the big cats walked low, so her best target was the head.
Sun’s bow had been crafted by long hours, the wood taken from the slender, knot-free trunk of a young elm and treated with stone, fire, and blood. The arrows she drew were topped with bone heads that had likewise been seared and dedicated to the gods. All that gave them strength and accuracy, but it did not give them the power to cut through dense bone. If she hit anywhere protected by the skull, even her arrows would bounce off without doing significant damage.
Night gained visions and the knowledge of healing from the goddess. Sun, like her line before her, had been taught how to hunt. So it was with a prayer that she let a second arrow fly.
This one pierced the eye of the next largest cat, the one vulnerable spot she had been able to sight.
But it didn’t fall, not immediately. It howled and staggered toward her.
She had drawn another arrow before it stumbled… to its knees, as its body changed to human form. The woman revealed by the change was not dead, but she voiced rage and pain as she hunched, a hand to the arrow still embedded gruesomely in her face.
One of the others leaped toward the injured one, took human form for the benefit of hands, and dragged her away over the rocks. Sun tracked them with a drawn arrow but didn’t attack; she would let them take their wounded. She didn’t know if the hurt woman would live or die. She didn’t know what these creatures were.
She knew they were backing away, though. They must have thought she was harmless after her spear broke, but now they knew she and her bow were still dangerous.
“I don’t want to hurt any of you,” Sun shouted, hoping her words would be understood, fearing it was too late even if they were. “Let us complete our errand in peace, and—”
Wings buffeted her face as one of the owls dove directly at her, its talons grasping at her bow and driving it down to the rocky ground.
Sun had been focused on the cats; she had forgotten to watch the sky. If she hadn’t been standing with her back to the cave mouth, forcing the massive bird to approach her from the front, it could have done worse than strike her bow.
As soon as its talons struck the ground, the creature shifted, and Sun knew it was over. The jaws of the impossible feline loomed in front of her. She scrabbled for a knife, but the beast was on her, its front paws driving her back as she freed her blade.
The world went red with blood and pain.
And fire.
Sacrifice, the voice whispered again, as the cat’s claws raked Sun’s skin.
Pure magic like magma flowed up from the wounds. In the fading lights that existed at the cusp of darkness and the cusp of death, she felt the goddess rise as a vengeful wildfire. Through Sun, she reached toward the shapeshifter and, with a single flex of power, sapped the heat from its body and the blood from its veins.
It was too much for a mortal body to survive, too much for a mortal mind to comprehend. Unconsciousness or death took Sun deep in their embrace.
She woke to weeping, pleading, and heat.
She was no longer at the mouth of the cave, but somewhere that shuddered with the light of banked coals.
“I’ve done it,” Night was saying. “Please. Save her. Heal her. Help me heal her.”
“Will you swear yourself to my name?” The goddess’s voice echoed in the cave, edged with a tone like the sizzle raw flesh made when put to heat. “Will you swear your blood and your sacrifice to me?”
“I already have,” Night replied. “I have always been yours.”
“Here,” the goddess said. “Here in this sacred place where the earth bleeds the substance of its heart, swear to me.”
“I swear,” Night said.
“I accept your sacrifice, and your vow. And what of you, hunter? Will you still make your kills in my name? Spill your sacrifice at my altars?”
Sun tried to speak, but there was no air in her body to form words. She wasn’t sure if she was truly alive, or if the goddess was holding her on the cusp to claim her vow.
But in her heart she said it: I swear. I too have always been yours. So have all the fathers and mothers and children of our tribe. You did not need to do this to prove our loyalty.
For she had decided what the test was: faith. Would they go to war for their goddess?
What choice did they have? She was their guiding light, the embers of their fire that kept the darkness away in the long, cold nights. She was what kept the wolves—and perhaps lions—from their camp.
“I accept your sacrifice as well, and your vow,” the goddess said. “And I will return to you that which you need.
“Once you recover, bring your tribe here. This is my place, the altar of my power. Claim it. Guard it. Make your sacrifices here, and I will give you my strength.”
Sun did recover, and she recovered well. In the aftermath of the battle, both Sun and Night burned with magic. Night discovered she could touch a person and not only sense the wound or illness that afflicted them, but direct the body to heal. She was able to cure the wasting disease with her hands alone.
Sun’s power was the opposite; whether she was hunting for food or patrolling to protect the tribe from danger, she could sense the lives of her prey in the forest around her. She could cast out her power to track them, and drive it like a spear to strengthen her attacks when she struck.
When it came time to journey to the winter campground, the tribe divided. Only half of them went to the place where the fish would run thick and the seals congregate, where they would gather for celebration and tale-telling, and the women would find partners to bed from other tribes so their bloodlines would mingle. Sun and Night would have to go eventually, unless they decided to choose mates from their own tribe, but that first year they had other responsibilities.
For the first time, half their tribe remained to guard their new, permanent camp at the fissure that the goddess had claimed as her altar. In that spot, the earth split, and below one could see the bubbling, molten blood of the earth. Heat poured from it even in winter, so on the bitterest nights when no fire could burn strong enough against the chill, they could call the dogs inside and gather close, warmed by truly ever-burning fire.
Hunting was scarce, but Sun’s magic made survival possible, as she could predict the paths of the moose and reindeer. The shapeshifters who had previously claimed the caves had been exclusively carnivores, and had left trees and plants heavy with summer bounty, more than enough to carry a small tribe through the winter.
“If our gods did not demand that we fight,” Night sighed once, as she patched Sun and two other hunters up after a battle, “I think we would be able to live in peace. We eat differently. We hunt differently. We live differently. But that just means we do not need to compete. There is enough for both of us.”
But their gods demanded blood, and sacrifice. So they warred, coming together in clashing battles that each side dedicated to their own face of the divine.
Modern Reflections
Many thousands of years later, scholars who studied elementals would finally have theories about the origins of the Macht witches— so we became known, down the ages. They would connect our magic to the elemental Leona, and recognize that she or one of her disciples had gravitated to our tribe.
Elementals thrive on worship. It is literally what defines them, what gives them shape, and what sustains them. They also thrive on sacrifice, which can be metaphorical or physical.
Each elemental is tied to a particular aspect of nature, and strengthened by a particular form of mortal worship and sacrifice. Fire elementals claim to have taught humanity the skill of kindling flame, of making fires capable of keeping us warm, chasing away predators, and searing our food with smoke or flame to cook it, preserve it, or simply season it. All of this was early worship, early sacrifice. But they are also fed by blood, the blood of their worshipers and any blood spilled in their name.
The shapeshifters we warred with, the cave lions and owls, were tied to another fire elemental. Our two gods clashed for power, and as part of that battle they pitted their human and semi-human servants against each other. The cave had been a place of easy, ready strength, where a gap in tectonic plates left a place where magma bubbled, slowly seeping, a dying almost-volcano that sustained the tribe for a century before it finally went dark.
By then, the cave lions had disappeared, some lost to battle and some having left behind their claws and wings and joined other tribes where the gods did not demand they throw their lives away battling for a chasm in the rock. Their bloodlines continued, but their magic faded as they abandoned the worship of the elemental who had been willing to destroy them all.
And Leona, she who claims to have taught the first human how to make a spark, rose to power as our tribe grew and our bloodlines spread.
Night’s descendants, as you might guess, became the Smoke witches. They swore themselves to healing, and through their work, the tribe gained strength and health. Others joined with them, even some of the disillusioned lions.
That detail is important, to other stories: The cave lion/owl shapeshifters are said to be extinct, but their descendants yet walk this earth, wearing human skins that they cannot slip for animal forms. It is only their elemental who was subsumed, weakened by her battle with Leona and her worshipers’ abandonment until she lay in a state of dormancy.
Sun’s descendants became the Vida line, those dedicated to hunting and the defense of the tribe. And, as I have said, they were not first sworn to kill all vampires; we did not know what vampires were. And if we had…
Well, I wonder what we would have done, back in the age when we worshiped the elemental as a god. Because after all, the goddess of the first Macht witches is also the goddess of the vampires. The power that gives us our magic is the same power that gives them immortality, only in a slightly different form. Our prayers to her, our worship, our sacrifice, and indeed our battles with the lions, are what gave her the strength to walk corporally and eventually share her blood with the first of their kind. If we had not existed, if Sun and her daughter Vida had not spilled blood in Leona’s name, their so-called enemies the vampires could never have walked the earth in the first place.
Chapter Five: Lila’s Story
“Do you glamor it?” Kaleo asked casually, as he tangled fingers in my disastrously-tousled hair.
“No glamor,” I answered. “That kind of spell-work takes concentration and energy to maintain. It’s easier to use natural means to dye it darker.”
“Pity,” he sighed. “A glamor could be dropped for a moment. I imagine the true color is lovely.”
I teased, “Implying this color is not?”
“You are beautiful and you know it,” he assured me, one of the casual compliments he never hesitated to offer. “You would be beautiful if your hair were white as snow or dark as ink or missing completely.”
“Flatterer.” But I enjoyed the flattery, and he knew that as well. “The natural color is too flamboyant,” I added. “It draws the wrong kind of attention. I have enough trouble with my eyes.”
I met his black gaze. My own eyes could be mistaken for brown… in dim light, if I kept my gaze downcast and avoided ever looking directly at another soul. In truth, they were as golden as my hair naturally was, a bright color not naturally found in human beings. Seeing it made humans sense there was something other about me, enough that a glimpse was sometimes enough to force me to cast a minor charm to dissuade them from following the chain of thought further.
I liked that I could meet Kaleo’s eye without fear, and see myself reflected there in all my glory, beautiful and proud and powerful instead of meek and careful and shadowed.
I could forgive him many things, because of the way he made me feel, and because I knew I would not keep him forever.
In fact, the end of our time was coming quickly. He was immortal and had all the time in the world to pursue a fling, but I was mortal, my body was aging, and there were some things I wanted in life that he would never be able to give me—nor would I want him to. Even still lost in the glow of passion, I knew there were irreconcilable differences between us.
“What’s wrong?” Kaleo asked, when my gaze on his lingered overlong, and I sighed.
I couldn’t put it off any longer.
“I need to tell you something.”
Was the late afternoon of deep summer, as we lay together as naked as the first man and woman walked through Eden, the best time to have this conversation? Absolutely not. But if I waited until I thought it was a good time, I would never say it. And it needed to be said.
At that time, we had been lovers for almost a year. In my mind, our affair was coming to an end.
He heard the seriousness and heaviness in my voice and pushed himself up on one elbow, immediately focused and concerned. He made no jokes, let out no laughing, “Oh dear!” but looked at me and asked only, “What’s wrong?”
I drew a deep breath, trying to find the courage to say the words. The first time, I had to release the air silently, because my throat tightened around it. My heart pounded.
He waited, patiently alarmed.
“I have a suitor,” I managed to say.
There is a particular stillness that a vampire can manage that no mortal can. When startled, or focused, or contemplating, they can simply stop. The air in their lungs, which they take in and out by habit and to speak, freezes. Humans twitch and shift constantly in even the tiniest of ways, bodies ever adjusting, heartbeat and rushing blood causing minuscule movement in the surface of the skin, but in these moments a vampire is a statue. There is no more evidence of life in them than there would be in stone.
For too many beats of my heart, Kaleo paused in that simulacrum of art, a carving that had come to life briefly but was now returned to its inanimate state.
Then he breathed out, forming the question on a faint exhalation, “Pardon me?”
“I have a suitor,” I repeated.
It occurred to me at last to gather our blanket around me, not for modesty but because it would be better to cover myself while discussing another man.
“A suitor for…” He trailed off. There was only one kind of suitor I was likely to be discussing, but his gaze begged me to say something else.
“Marriage,” I answered. “My brother and I are the only two of our line. I’ve told you before that we would both be expected to have children, to pass down our blood. And I want children. You know that.”
Voice sardonic, he said, “You’ve also told me the women of your kind often get children by choosing men they find attractive enough for a dalliance, seducing them, then moving on to another town and claiming widowhood. I believe your exact comment was that, in many ways, the women of your kind have more freedom than the men, for a woman knows when a babe is born and can raise it as hers, but a man needs to be careful not to leave a bastard who might be raised by humans who do not recognize or know how to nurture its magic. In all that conversation, I don’t recall you ever discussing a husband.”
“Well, that…” His tone was wrong—a strange, chilly amusement. I had expected disappointment, or resignation, but not this. “You’re right,” I admitted, “that is the way of it, for some. But it’s not always best, not if there is someone willing to…” I lost my train of thought, again taken aback by his expression.
I started gathering my clothes, wanting them on me like armor. I should have had this conversation at the start of our meeting that day, not after we had just made love.
I had not expected him to be jealous, I realized.
I had not expected him to care that much.
I assumed he had other women, maybe dozens around the globe.
Oh I was so wrong, so stupidly wrong.
“He’s human?” Kaleo asked. At my nod, he asked, “How does a witch snare a human man without his fearing for his immortal soul? Or do you bespell him to compliance?”
“No! After all our conversations about freedom and slavery, do you think we would ever do that?”
“In all our conversations about freedom and slavery, it’s been clear your kind is a bit hypocritical on that subject, so I wouldn’t presume to guess what you might do or not do.”
“My father met him on a ship they worked together,” I bit out, feeling the need to defend myself and the honor of my kind. “They came to respect and trust each other over the season. My father thought he might be a good match, so he gradually revealed his magic and eventually explained what we are, and more recently asked if he would like to meet me. The only magic involved is the preparation of a…” I fumbled for words. “We call it a Walk-Back. It’s a protection spell, in a way, that causes a human to forget or reconsider a short portion of time. So if we reveal something and they react badly, we can…”
I trailed off in the face of his incredulous expression. “And you wonder why someone might accuse you of bespelling your potential spouse? When you’re willing to meddle with his mind and memories if he disagrees?”
“It isn’t like that. We wouldn’t use it just because someone disagrees with us. But if they panic and threaten to turn the crew against one of us, or to call a magistrate, then yes. We have the right to protect ourselves.”
“Naturally.” The word was cutting, and this time I perceived that it was intentional. I had hurt him with my words, and now he would do the same to me.
So instead of rising to the bait, I went back to the point of this conversation. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you understood this would happen. I am nearly twenty.”
“I’ve known ages where twenty would be considered an old maid,” Kaleo replied, “but this is not one of them. Even among the humans, the women in these colonies often wait a few more years. And your kind has more young and healthy years than the average human.”
“I said suitor,” I pointed out, “not husband. My father has told me of him, but we haven’t even met yet. There will be time for courtship and engagement. I thought it would be fair to tell you as soon as I knew.”
“And will you tell him of me?” Kaleo asked. “I know I am your dirty secret from your family. Will you tell your spouse that you had a lover before him? Human men can be finicky about such things.” He raised a brow, challenging. “Or did you plan that we would continue together while he is at sea? Surely a sailor will have his other women in other ports. Would I be your side-piece that you dally with while your husband is away?”
He was trying to pick a fight, but it was a fair question. I gave it a frustrated yet honest answer:
“I had expected that you would be bored of me long before it became an issue,” I said, pouring my heart into the confession. “I love our time together. I love you. But you have two thousand years behind you, incalculable time before you, and have surely had countless other women in your life, and possibly men too. I am a proud and confident woman, but I am mortal, which means I know in the scope of your life I can be nothing but a brief moment. Hopefully one you will remember fondly, but…”
I trailed off, my voice running out, because the expression on his face was stricken. He stared at me for a few seconds, the cutting barbs of a moment ago replaced with silence and a deeper devastation.
Softly, he said, “That is not the way I see our relationship.” Unsaid but implied was his hurt that I had assumed such things.
I didn’t know how to respond. There was such a fundamental mismatch in our situations that I couldn’t imagine how he did see it.
Wary and unsure, I said, “Were you planning to offer marriage?” I tried to keep my voice even, not shocked or dismissive. He had to know that would never work. But maybe he didn’t.
Maybe I was the one who had made awful assumptions. Maybe he had expected he could hold my hand and stay by my side as I grew old and frail. As for children? He hadn’t objected to the idea I might get pregnant by whatever man I might choose, only to the threat now that I would wed one.
“I was planning to offer you my blood.”
The words fell into a chasm between us. I waited for him to say something, anything, to express his understanding that I would never accept such an offer. He knew how important my family, my lineage, and my magic were to me. He knew I envisioned having children of my own and passing my heritage down to them. He knew that every plan I had for my future life was incompatible with immortality as a vampire. I waited for him to tell me he understood that.
He didn’t.
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Chapter Six: Building the Hawk’s Keep
After many years, I have decided that Kaleo’s love and passion were genuine—inasmuch as he understood such things. When I told him of my suitor, and that I had expected him to move on from me, he took it as a betrayal because he truly believed he loved me to the depths of his immortal heart. He had planned to offer me eternity, and I had spoken as if he were a sailor’s wife-in-port.
That does not excuse his unforgivable behaviors later. I mention it only because I have spent much time pondering why, as I have tried to understand all that transpired.
He never spoke of other lovers with me, but I learned of some later, and even met a few: Theron, and Brina, and later Nissa, though she wouldn’t be born for nearly two more centuries. I am of the opinion that Kaleo indeed felt he loved each one of us desperately and exclusively and forever.
In his defense, I suppose he still does. But despite all his talk of equality and respect for powerful women, he does not understand how to love a woman without controlling her. He felt I betrayed him because he never imagined that I would value my own life and my own desires for my future higher than I would value his love. I have no idea if he would have had the same relationship with Theron, if the two had met when the other man was mortal, instead of after both were confidently settled in immortality.
I only know that day was not the beginning of the end between us—it was the end of the beginning.
It was perhaps fitting that the end of my line mirrored the beginning: with an impossible affair between fundamentally incompatible partners.
Hawk’s Keep, Centuries Before the Kiesha’ra
Have you ever heard the phrase “to watch something like a hawk”? I do not know its true origin, but it could be applied to the way the royal family of the avians supervises its young to ensure they are never exposed to “improper” people or behavior.
If you have heard of Danica Shardae, this is a story she would have considered long-ago family history and scandal. By her day it wasn’t quite old enough to become myth, but it was close, especially since it wouldn’t have been told often—not in that war-torn, survival-focused time.
This was an era of change. Fields around the modest Hawk’s Keep had been cleared to make more space for crops, as the population of avians was booming. At that time in history, a modest human village—the one where the first avian queen, Alastair, had been born—still bumped against avian land. The humans would fade away over the next century, coalescing with their own kind and moving further from the conflict between the avians and serpiente, but at that moment in time the civilizations interacted frequently and openly.
It was also an era of construction and innovation, as the grand wooden palisade that ringed the rocky plateau known as Hawk’s Landing gave way to the base of what would become a massive stone keep.
The first ring of stones had been laid, and human, avian and witch stoneworkers cooperated to build it higher. They expected that their alliance would continue for generations, and the keep was meant to be a monument to all three groups, one that would give them a safe place to trade and to shelter in the case of attack or natural disaster.
The placement of the grand entrance, an archway that overlooked the farming valleys and winding streams below, had been measured and prepared. Some of the stones for it had already been cut, and some were still being hewn from the nearby mountains or from the base of the plateau itself. What nature had begun, mortal hands—human and non—would make grand.
The descendants of Nightcry and Sunbone had done well for themselves, and their lines were known and respected within the human village their tribe was allied with. Night’s descendants had honed their healing skills, and with their herbs, knowledge of anatomy, and magic, it was said they could heal any harm that did not kill a man before the witch could reach him. Sun’s descendants had likewise grown stronger, but their power was raw and aggressive, focused on tracking and hunting prey to provide food for their kin and neighbors, and defense when their land or their people were threatened. There were wolves and other predators in the area—natural ones, not shapeshifters—but few true threats.
Ivy Vida was a hunter in a land that was more and more dedicated to agriculture, and a guard in a time of relative peace. Oh, there was a tribe of snake shapeshifters to the east, and there were occasional scuffles as avian hunting parties ran afoul of them, but at that moment in history the avians and serpiente lived in a state of subdued animosity maintained by the space between their two territories.
So Ivy also worked as a stonecutter. Her magic, which could guide a knife, bow, or spear with deadly accuracy and extraordinary power, could also be used to drive a chisel through stone. Her strength, greater than any human, was of use when the great stones were rolled along logs and lifted into place with pulleys.
It was a task she was good at. It was a necessary task, one where she was useful. It was a respected and appreciated task, one that continued to build their relationship with the humans and shapeshifters they lived among.
It was not a task she found exciting or fulfilling. It was, in fact, a task she found as dull as… well, as dull as rocks. And cutting rocks. And lifting rocks. And stacking rocks.
All day, rocks. At night, she dreamed about rocks.
Her only reprieve was the time each dawn she had to herself, when she practiced her fighting forms. Occasionally she sparred with her sisters or with the avian guards, each honing their skills against the other. Fighting opponents who could dodge and take to the air, or attack in a nearly soundless dive, brought back ancient memories of fighting the owls who were her line’s first enemies. From the avians, she and the others of her line learned the perfect emotional control that allowed one to focus entirely on the fight and the moment at hand, undistracted by anxiety or discomfort.
In exchange, it was good for the avian guards to practice fighting against someone whose body was heavier and denser than their own. A blow which might stagger a light-boned avian would often not be sufficient to budge a sure-footed witch—or a serpent.
She threw herself into those practices, eager not for the fight specifically, but for the excuse to get away from stone. She gained the respect of the avian soldiers, including the leader of the Royal Flight, and eventually earned the attention of the royal Shardae line.
“Vida.” She looked up from sharpening a long, slender blade—one of the weapons favored by the avians, as opposed to the smaller, shorter knife or heavy spear her own kind still preferred—as the leader of the Royal Flight said her name.
“Yes, sir?” She put her work down carefully and stood. She wasn’t one of his flight, and wasn’t obligated to show him such deference, but the other avian soldiers seemed more at ease around her if she did not insist on setting herself apart from them by her behaviors.
“I have a favor to ask of you.”
By contrast, his language and tone at that moment acknowledged the distance between them. Whatever he was about to ask, he wasn’t sure if he had a right to ask it.
“I’m at your disposal.” Especially if it doesn’t involve carving rocks.
The other day, she had missed a five-day hunt tracking a pack of wolves that had become too bold and started harrying the village because the architects had been assembling a finicky portion of the keep and wanted her there with her chisel to help correct any errors in the cut stones.
“The Tuuli Thea has asked me to recommend a tutor for her oldest son, Kared Shardae. He will be our liaison to the human villages, and she wants to make sure he understands their ways and is prepared to treat with them.” He added, “I believe she is also hoping, if he gains comfort with you, you might act as a guard when he visits the human village. You would be in a better position to identify possible sources of danger.”
Ivy knew what he was not saying directly: Despite their alliance, avians saw the humans as somewhat volatile, overly affectionate and demonstrative with their emotions, overwhelmingly effusive and therefore exhausting. Avian guards trying to keep the prince safe among them might have trouble telling the difference between human friendliness, and prelude to an assault.
“It is of course your choice,” he said, when Ivy did not immediately reply. “I told the lady Shardae that to my knowledge you were free to make this decision yourself and would prefer an informal request rather than a formal audience, but if I misjudged please take no offense. The Tuuli Thea is willing to meet with you herself, if appropriate.”
Ivy shook her head. “That isn’t necessary.” She made a decision quickly. “I would be willing to meet with the prince, to see if we can come to terms about a course of study.”
Thankfully, the emotional reserve continually practiced by the avians meant he wouldn’t notice her trepidation about the offer. She would be glad for an excuse to get away from stoneworking, but until she met the prince, she didn’t know what to expect of him. If he turned out to be spoiled and whiny, or standoffish and elitist, she might decide she preferred stone.
#
The royal line of hawks rarely interacted with anyone outside their own kind, but Ivy knew their names and roles. The Tuuli Thea had three children, two girls and a boy. By tradition, the oldest female child would inherit the crown, and her siblings would act as advisers on key issues. Apparently this generation had decided that improving their relationships with the human village was important enough to dedicate one of those hawk-children to.
Kared Shardae was twenty, two years younger than Ivy and four years older than his intended fiancée, a raven shapeshifter named Edilyse. Ivy knew Edilyse because the princess-to-be was a respected wood-carver. After Ivy and the other stonecarvers placed and secured the massive blocks, and the carpenters followed with the great beams that would delineate the interior sections and provide additional support, Edilyse sanded, smoothed, carved and stained the exposed woodwork with elaborate and beautiful designs featuring climbing vines and flowers.
Edilyse knew her fiancée well, but there was no great passion between them. Unlike the humans, who would have been wed and bred by that age, they might easily wait another decade before saying their vows unless the young lady decided she was ready and eager to marry and start a family. In the meantime, their relationship was formal and courtly, polite but not particularly affectionate.
It was, to an outsider’s view, very odd.
It was not taboo for them to be alone together, as it would become among unwed young humans in later centuries, but they essentially never were. As far as Ivy could tell, an avian couple would decide they were ready to formally declare their pairbond once they wanted to sleep together—or perhaps once they already had?—but no one was ever allowed to talk about or acknowledge that fact. They could be alone together whenever they desired privacy, but if they so much as held hands in public it was considered crude and inappropriate.
Among the non-royal avians, everything was a bit less circumspect, but the overall expectation seemed to be the same: maintain a polite distance, never touch in public, never discuss or give any sign of physical attraction where others might see, and assume the pairbonded couples would figure it all out on their own in private. Or perhaps after what had to be an exceptionally awkward “here’s how it works” conversation between the young man and an older male relative or close family friend.
#
It wasn’t until Ivy met Kared Shardae, the first time in history one of the royal hawks had interacted closely with a witch of her line, that Ivy realized one reason for all the caution and physical reserve: in addition to shapeshifting abilities, the Shardae line had magic from one of the immortal Powers in its blood.
Eons past, Leona had struck out against another of those immortal powers, using Nightcry and Sunbone as her first weapons. It had been a bloody feud that had taken many lives over decades of war.
More recently, Leona had faced another challenger, and had solved it another way: instead of sending her chosen to slaughter them, she had sent one to woo them. Using what she had learned from the lions, she offered the challenger’s chosen the magic of shapeshifting. She claimed them as her own, taking their power into herself and besting their elemental gods without ever spilling a drop of her own blood.
The avians still held a fragment of that power, though it was broken and useless to them. Passion might have flickered it to partial life, like hot embers not quite extinguished by sand, then raked up and exposed to air.
Chapter Seven: Lila’s Story
Life continued. That is all I have to say about the next year of my life: it continued.
I turned down Kaleo’s offer of immortality—heatedly.
We fought. He accused me of toying with him, accused all my line of using men for our own purposes without showing them any respect. I accused him of fundamentally misjudging me, of disrespecting my commitment to my line and my heritage, and of claiming to respect women but still expecting one to drop everything she ever aspired to the moment he offered himself to her.
We shouted. We flung the kinds of insults at each other that only heartbroken lovers utter.
I feared we might come to blows.
At last, he disappeared, using a vampire’s power to bring himself instantly anywhere in the world, that power I had envied more than once. He used it to get away from me.
In the aftermath, my family noticed my despondency. My mother assured me that, if I did not care for the suitor my father had chosen, I did not need to accept him. My mother was human, but one reason she had willingly joined herself to an ancient lineage of witches was that we were not humans, to treat our children like chattel and foist our marriageable young women off on whatever man offered the best value.
Tentatively, she asked about my secret beau, the one everyone knew I had but no one had ever met. She asked if I had hoped for children by him, and when I shook my head vigorously, she reminded me that infertility issues in men could often be corrected by the healers of the Smoke line. Discreetly, if he were sensitive about it; had our fight perhaps been about that issue, given we had been lovers for almost a year without my becoming pregnant?
As I’ve told you, my kind has always dealt with these topics frankly, without shame.
When I again assured her that was not the problem, she asked if he had perhaps responded badly when he learned what I was. She tried to talk to me about her own misgivings when she had first been told.
I left the house, unable to form words, not wanting to talk. I went to the backyard and silently screamed my pain out through a stream of magic I had held back when I fought with Kaleo. Past-sight is one of the talents of my line. We also have some of a Vida’s ability to channel our magic into fighting, and some of a Smoke’s ability to heal. But our greatest talent is with fire. In a rage, I could have charred Kaleo to ash where he stood.
Instead, I drove that wild, furious magic into one of the few spaces that might possibly contain it: the pottery kiln in the back. On another day, I could have set the fire and maintained it at the proper temperature with my magic until the glazed pottery within was glossy and finished, needing far less fuel than any human ceramicist. Today I threw my magic into it because the alternative was flinging that deadly magic into the woods and creating a wildfire that would destroy the entire village.
Every carefully-formed bowl, plate and pitcher inside cracked and burst, hundreds of hours of my work exploding in an instant that no one in my family would ever ask about or chastise me for, even though the “fluke accident” with the kiln would trigger a few whispers of witchcraft. The whispers weren’t aimed at anyone in particular, just the general, “Perhaps it was bewitched.”
And when I returned I informed my mother that I did not want to talk about my lover. That relationship was over. I was pleased that my father had found a man he thought might be a good fit, and I was looking forward to meeting him and deciding if we would suit.
#
Peter Weatere seemed a good enough man. I cannot say a great and unending passion blossomed immediately between us, but I can say that we rubbed along well enough. It was clear he was somewhere between intimidated by and in awe of my magic, but he was not afraid of me and he did not seem likely to turn against me and my kin, and that was enough.
Our conversations when we met mostly focused on day-to-day things: what life was like on the ship, versus at home on shore. He asked politely interested questions about pottery and how did I like gardening, and occasionally tried to stumble into casual questions about my magic, which revealed an unassuming good humor in him. He took no offense at my occasional amusement at his misconceptions, and he never seemed defensive if corrected.
We never delved into politics or philosophy or history or art or music, but that was fine. Realistically, we would spend little time together. Our arrangement was a convenient one; together we would make the children we both wanted and society expected, I would keep a home for him when he came to port, and he would provide a name that our neighbors would recognize as legitimate.
I missed the violin.
It’s over, I told myself. Time for the next adventure.
That next adventure was mostly as expected: Peter and I wed, and by the time he left on his next whaling trip, I had my wished-for child growing inside me. The only surprise of the whole thing was that it wasn’t a singular child, but twins, a boy and a girl. Peter was thrilled that I could know the number, health, and gender of the children within weeks of their conception. My kind is not immune to miscarriage, but with a Smoke witch as a midwife, I did not need to fear an unexpected stillbirth. Even with my limited ability to heal I was able to use my power to sense the life inside me, and I would have known if it were in trouble.
I could feel it, and I loved it. Loved them.
The boy, Peter and I agreed to name after his father, Alexander. It would be his true name and his use name, which felt a bit odd to me, but it was lovely enough and it seemed important to Peter that the name remain in the family. The girl would be Risa, called Rachel in public. The Puritan humans had strict conventions for naming, which we needed to follow on paper and among them; having another name, which we used only among our own, was one of the little ways we rebelled and kept our own ways alive.
Even in the womb, I could sense that both had power, though I suspected Alexander in particular would be extraordinary. Oh, Risa would blossom in whatever aspect of our magic she chose to specialize in; my line could choose to apprentice as healers, hunters, or crafters, instead of specializing by birth and destiny like the Vida, Smoke, and Arun witches.
By luck, almost all of my loved-ones were home when the babies were born. Peter paced and worried like any human father, unsoothed by anyone’s assurance that my kind does not lose mothers or healthy infants at birth, and we would have known weeks or months ago if the babies had some condition that would make them unable to survive outside the womb. My father and my younger brother Mair waited with him while my healer-cousins attended me, assuring me that yes the babies were a bit early but that was not uncommon with twins, that they would be able to do just fine, that I was strong and ready for this.
Their magic dulled much of the pain, but it was still a long and exhausting birth. My mother would have liked to be with me, but it wasn’t safe for a human to be so close to my birthing bed. One of my Vida cousins had the unenviable task of holding my hand magically, and absorbing the bursts of errant power I threw into the world around me as I labored; without her help, I surely would have burned the house down around us, and quite possibly the village and woods along with it.
In the end, both babes entered the world proudly, with strong cries that announced their birth to whatever powers may be. My line had never been prolific, so it was just myself, my father, and my younger brother who welcomed the newborns to our line, and gave them the traditional blessing:
“May light shine within you and upon you. May you find your own destiny and walk your own path, and may that path always bring you home again to your kin. May your power be a blessing to the world.”
I do not know the exact blessings spoken over a newborn child in the Vida, Smoke, or Arun lines, but I suspect they say nothing of finding one’s own path or destiny; for those children, the path is foreordained. But while our lines are close, and call each other cousin or sister or brother, uncle or aunt or what have you, there are traditions that we do not share except with our own. Not even Peter was allowed to hear those words, for like my mother, he had married into the family and did not carry the blood.
As soon as he was allowed, though, Peter asked to hold his children. As I watched the glow of his face, and saw the way he greeted each with pride and astonishment and joy, I decided I did love him, at least a little. I loved that he could laugh at himself when his human upbringing betrayed him on the subject of magic, and that he had the courage and the independence of thought to defy so much of his upbringing, make his own decisions, and join this extraordinary family of his own will. I loved that he was every bit as pleased by his girl-child as by the boy, for I had been warned that humans especially were sometimes funny about that, carying more about the latter. I loved that, for as long as he could afford to stay home with me, he did so, holding or rocking the babies or fetching whatever I desired. He did not object that a witch’s child rearing practices were more hands-on and compassionate than those in style among humans at the time, but trusted us to know what we were doing to keep the babes healthy and strong.
When the men went back to sea, I still had plenty of help, but it is an undeniable truth that infants are exhausting. Having two at once is especially so. It was not our custom or the custom of the area to use a wet nurse, and it seemed that the moment one child was done eating and ready to nap the other was awake and looking for food. All the help in the world—cousins willing to help cook and clean and tend my garden and take care of the chickens and other odds and ends of the household—could not seem to win me more than two hours of sleep at a time.
Human mothers at the time tightly swaddled their babies to a board to help them settle and ensure their limbs grew straight, but there were two good reasons I needed to tend to my children more closely: one, I could not stand to hear them cry and feel through my power how they were feeling; and two, if they became too distressed, they would literally set their cradle on fire. An essential part of raising a witch was teaching self-regulation from an early age, which was not effectively accomplished by ignoring them.
So I had slept little since my children were born, and I was not at my best when one of the most elegant ladies I had ever seen in my life strode into my backyard, bedecked in the height of Parisian fashion and dripping disdain.
Chapter Eight: Building the Hawk’s Keep
Hawk’s Keep, Centuries Before the Kiesha’ra
“Will you teach me to fight?”
Ivy had carefully delineated what she thought she could teach Kared Shardae about the norms and customs of the nearby human villages, with a specific focus on where they differed from avians. Though the three groups—human, witch, and avian—collaborated on the Keep, their specific duties tended to be separate. Witches and humans who knew a smattering of the avian language acted as foreman when necessary. At the end of the day, workers went to their own homes and own kind, not mingling once their tasks were complete.
As they spoke casually about what the avian royal house wanted to know about their human neighbors, Ivy was shocked to realize the depth of the avian’s—and thus the prince’s—ignorance. She explained that she could teach him the language the humans and witches spoke among themselves, but that it would take time and some concepts might be difficult to translate. And language was the least of what he needed to know, if he wanted to truly understand his human neighbors. Among other things, she warned Kared that some behaviors taboo among avians were acceptable to humans, and vice versa.
She asked if he had any questions.
And he asked her to teach him to fight.
When she blinked at him, trying to decide on the best, most politic response to a question that had nothing to do about the subject at hand, he elaborated.
“I have a basic understanding of self-defense,” he said, “but mostly I have been taught to run if I am threatened.”
“You are a prince,” Ivy pointed out. “Your safety is paramount.”
“I understand that,” he assured her. “I also know that, were I to delay running for the sake of pride or a desire to fight, my lingering would put those who protect me in greater danger. I do not intend to go out and start a battle. However, if a threat arose, wouldn’t I be even safer if I knew something of fighting to defend myself? What if I were injured and grounded, or trapped, and could not run? What if the attack was unexpected, and my guards were not immediately at my side? It would be better for everyone if I were at least somewhat capable of protecting myself.”
She considered his words. She certainly could teach him to fight. But should she?
“I was asked by your lady mother to teach you about humans,” she reminded him.
“I know you are more than a language and etiquette tutor,” he scoffed. “You train with the royal flight. I will learn what my mother wants me to learn. I will do what she and my sister want me to do. I want to learn about the humans for my own reasons as well. But as long as I am here, I would also like to learn to fight.”
#
So the lessons began. Each day they met either in a garden-clearing in the woods, which tended to include benches and a place to study, meditate, craft, or whatever else dutiful avians did during their hours, or in an airy, inside room protected from the elements by wooden beams and topped with thick thatch.
First, they reviewed any language and ideas they had covered the day before. Ivy had never tried to teach someone a language they had not grown up knowing, so they had a few false starts, but after a handful of days Kared started making slow progress.
She went through, discarded, and revised plans to review culture with him a half-dozen times before deciding first to take him walking through the human village so he could see the way they behaved. Even if he didn’t understand their words yet, it would take exposure for him to understand things like the exultant screaming of children as they ran, chased dogs and chickens, and tackled each other in the mud, or the affectionate greetings that could mean acquaintanceship, friendship, familial affection, romantic love, passion—and could lead to violence if offered inappropriately, or rejected unexpectedly, or misjudged or misunderstood.
Human body language was an utter mystery to the prince, who in exchange was read as being aloof or hostile by the humans who observed him among them.
It was a challenging gulf to bridge, especially once Kared’s deep-set prejudice started further muddying the waters.
“They’re as bad as serpiente,” he exclaimed once, after a trip to the market, “forever groping each other and vomiting their emotions in each other’s faces.”
“You’ve never met a serpiente,” Ivy pointed out. “And you did not see a single person grope anyone else today.”
He glared at her, and asked, “What about the women with the beads?”
Ivy damped down her urge to laugh. “Sisters, I think, showing fondness and joy. I had the impression one has been gone a while. The word ‘grope’ implies something sexual.”
He sat back, for a moment losing the air of an arrogant prince and becoming a petulant child as he muttered a response.
“Excuse me?” she asked. “I didn’t hear that.”
He shook his head and dropped his gaze, and she realized he was blushing.
So it was one of those questions.
She reminded him, “I will not chastise you for anything you ask me, even if it is inappropriate by avian standards.”
They had needed to establish that rule early, the first time she had realized he was utterly boggled by something she was trying to explain but hadn’t considered it polite to ask for clarification.
“I said….” He drew himself up, pulling on the avian reserve his kind used as a shield. “How am I supposed to know the difference? That isn’t part of my life. It isn’t likely to be part of my life.”
This time, it was Ivy’s turn to utilize the skills she knew to hide her reaction. She did not want him to feel judged or belittled. That would set back much of the progress they had made. Without the context of body language and expression, she also wasn’t sure if his words were simply a statement of experience—or lack thereof—or interest or revulsion.
If he hadn’t wanted a response, he wouldn’t have restated the comment, but she wasn’t sure what he was looking for.
“You do have a fiancée,” Ivy pointed out. “It’s my understanding that you are expected to be private and discreet, but that behind closed doors you are encouraged to be as…” She hesitated, not out of personal embarrassment, but because she wanted to avoid embarrassing him. “… as attentive of each other as you want to be.”
Kared shook his head, then asked, “Do humans manage their relationships like this? Pairing off as children, and always… like this?”
There was something in his voice, something that went beyond avian reserve and was almost too careful. There was a reason he desperately wanted this answer, and absolutely did not want to be perceived as wanting it.
“Humans, as you know, are a good deal more open about their relationships. The matriarch of a family gives input into who might wed whom, but the young people have some say as well. They marry and hope to have kids at an age most avians would consider unseemly, because their lives and particularly the years when they can produce healthy children are shorter.”
The answer didn’t seem to satisfy him. He went quiet.
Eventually, he glanced toward the sun’s position near the horizon and asked, “Will we spar today?”
Since the first time he had asked, she had let lessons in fighting and defense act as a reward: If he would tolerate the discomfort of putting himself among humans, and challenge his own biases, she would teach him what she could. She had given him a knife, since he wouldn’t be expected to carry a sword or bow but could get away with a knife. It was her line’s chosen weapon, and she well knew how to use it.
She pushed him that day, pressing the attack and forcing him to block and defend. Their skills were not evenly matched; if she had wanted to win cleanly she could have, but the point wasn’t to crush him. It was to teach him. So she let her moves be larger and slower than they normally would be, to give him a chance to think and respond.
“Getting better,” she praised him, honestly, after he correctly recognized a feint and executed a block he had been struggling with.
He drew air in deeply but slowly, nothing so uncouth as panting but the avian version of needing to catch his breath. “Thank you.”
“If it interests you, we can talk more about human courtship and relationships tomorrow,” she offered, referring back to their earlier conversation. “Take some time tonight to decide what questions you want to ask.”
She wondered if she might be able to discreetly sound out Edilyse. Was she considering refusing Kared? Did she have another lover?
If there was some kind of relationship problem between the prince and his fiancée-since-birth, Ivy was absolutely the last person the avians would probably want to “help,” given her own opinions about courtship, marriage, and sexuality. Her best advice in almost any situation she could consider would involve encouraging one or both of them to do something the other avians would probably consider utterly scandalous. She knew all that, but she also wanted to help Kared, if he wanted help; for a brief unguarded moment, he had seemed so desperate.
Also, she was now absolutely, inappropriately, wildly curious.
The next morning, she contrived to work at the Keep near Edilyse. The raven was focused on transforming a rough timber into a decorative lintel to fit atop the entryway. Ivy didn’t expect any grand disclosures in such a public place, but there was no harm in getting to know Edilyse better.
Watching the raven work turned out to be a hypnotic pastime in itself. Ivy had intended to start a conversation that might give her a clue about the royal relationship woes, but she found herself more interested in the exquisite care Edilyse took with blade and rasp, and how she revealed designs within the wood.
“How did you learn to carve?” she asked.
“From my mother, at first,” Edilyse answered. “She gave me the tools, but when it comes to the larger designs, I am self-taught. It is something I’ve always done.”
Edilyse didn’t turn as she spoke, but kept her eyes on the long vine that was coming to life under her blade.
A moment later, though, the tool skipped out of its careful, winding groove. Eilyse snapped her hands back, carefully out of the way. She frowned at her carving tools, the slight expression the avian equivalent of intense exasperation, and asked Ivy, “How do you keep your tools sharp?”
The blade she held up had dulled to a point where it wasn’t sliding as fast or as accurately as needed. Dull tools were not only harder to use, they were dangerous.
Ivy admitted, “Magic.” The avians had slightly better tools than most humans, and were willing to trade them to the human villages at times, but neither was able to cast a metal blade that held an edge as well as a witch-empowered tool.
“Can you magic mine?”
Though tempted to say yes immediately, Ivy hesitated. Her kind did not casually share their tools with those who did not hold their blood, their magic. Though their tribe had long ago moved on from its worship of the power that had given them their strength and abilities, they still respected her. Tools enhanced with magic dedicated each cut and each drop of blood drawn to that power.
Wood did not bleed.
But it would be observed, and admired, for far longer than a hunted beast. That too was a type of respect and offering.
“I would need to check with my matriarch,” Ivy said. “I might be able to, but I do not know if it would be allowed.”
Edilyse nodded, and carried her tools over to the sharpening rock. As she walked, she asked, “Is your matriarch the same as the one the humans answer to?”
It was almost the topic Ivy had come to broach. “The humans don’t have one single authority,” she answered. “Each family unit has a matriarch. If there is a conflict between families, another unit mediates between them, and if there is a problem the village needs to address as a whole, the matriarchs meet together. There is a Smoke matriarch and a Vida matriarch among them.”
As she drew her blade across the whetstone, Edilyse said, “That will make a stronger alliance between us more complicated, won’t it? It seems we will need to win the favor of a good many people, instead of just communicating with a central leader, like the Tuuli Thea.”
“Are you expecting to be closely involved with the alliance?” Ivy asked. She wasn’t prodding for information about Kared, but was genuinely curious. Would Edilyse set down her carving to engage in avian politics? Was that expected of her? Ivy had spent so long talking to Kared about how the humans ran their village that it hadn’t occurred to her to ask if his pairbond would be expected to join in his political assignments or stay behind and continue doing her own work.
Perhaps there was more than one reason they had not yet wed, if Edilyse wanted more time for her own pursuits first.
“I—” Edilyse hesitated, notably so. Even her hands on the blade paused for a fraction, a microexpression that Ivy might not have noticed if not for her training as a hunter and soldier, which taught her to look for every tiny flicker of intent or thought on her prey or opponent. “I do not know yet. Kared shares much of what he learns with me, as much as we have time and he understands well enough to explain. And—” She hesitated again, but this time it was in thought, before she continued in the language of the village, “—he teaches me this.”
The words were slow and careful, but understandable.
“You are always welcome to join us for lessons,” Ivy offered, puzzled why the raven wouldn’t have asked, if she wanted to learn. Between Ivy’s lessons with Kared, the other lessons Ivy knew the prince had during the day, and his assigned duties, he and Edilyse couldn’t have much time to study together. Perhaps Edilyse worried Ivy would be offended if she did not fully dedicate herself to the task. “You would not need to stay the whole time or attend every day. I know your work is important to you.”
“My work.” Edilyse looked toward the beam she had been carving, her expression perfectly neutral and unreadable. “I enjoy it, and it will remain on display for longer than I will grace this world. That pleases me.”
There was another gap in their conversation, a moment of almost. Ivy could feel and see the way Edilyse gathered herself, as if she wanted to ask or say something important. Then the raven glanced around them, taking in the others working in the area, and the moment passed.
“Or the two of us could meet,” Ivy offered, “before or after my lessons with Kared.” Kared might feel their relationship was less than ideal, but if he was sharing what he learned with Edilyse and teaching her the humans’ language, they must be comfortable spending time together. Right?
“Perhaps I will,” Edilyse answered. “May I stay for the language lessons, but not go to the village with you? I am… not ready for that.”
“Of course.” Ivy suppressed her curiosity. It wasn’t her place and this wasn’t the time.
Answers would come later.
Chapter Nine: Lila’s Story
The vampire that strode into my garden looked ready for an evening at the French court, dressed as she was in blue brocade silk, with a mantua overskirt pulled to a bustle in the back, an underskirt every bit as rich and elaborate, and a stomacher that frothed lace trimmed in gold thread. Her ink-dark hair was piled high on her head, bedecked in more ribbons and lace.
She had a regal bearing as she appeared by the kitchen garden’s back gate and swept her gaze over the modest plot, and over where I was sitting on a blanket near my infant children, keeping one occupied with a silver rattle—a newborn gift from an aunt whose own children were too old for it now—while the other slept. It was a rare, peaceful moment where neither two-month-old child was crying or eating.
I did not want to disturb them.
I did not want them disturbed.
Without moving, I gathered my power inside me, in case this vampire’s intentions were not friendly.
“Can I help you?” I asked, keeping my voice calm and pleasant so it would not rouse the sleeping Risa or make her brother cry.
By answer, the vampire walked nearer, her gaze traveling up and down me in frank assessment.
“I should warn you,” I said, “there are at least two hunters who have probably already sensed your arrival, and will be here within minutes. And I myself am not helpless, no matter what it looks like.”
“I haven’t come here to fight you,” she replied. Like her gown, her voice held polish and flair, and a European accent that seemed to fall somewhere between French and Italian. “Besides, what would be the point? You look half-dead already, skinny and sallow like a corpse.”
The words took me aback, not because I found them devastatingly insulting, but because it was so unexpected. Who was this stranger to walk in and speak so to me?
“Strange words, to come from a walking corpse,” I pointed out. “What are you here for?”
I still hadn’t bothered to stand. If I stood, Alexander would cry. More importantly, if I stood, it would probably mean it was time to fight.
She looked affronted that I had asked.
“You don’t know who I am?” she exclaimed.
I shook my head. “We do not tend to meet many of your kind here.”
There had, of course, been the one. It seemed likely she was here for some reason related to Kaleo, but I had no idea what that reason might be.
She walked closer, asking, “He told you nothing about me?”
I held up a hand, warning. “Stay back. Until I am sure of your intentions, I will assume you mean violence if you come near.”
Her back straightened and she tensed with affront, but she stopped moving closer. “I know who you are,” she said. “You’re the witch.”
“And you’re a vampire,” I answered implacably. I assumed the “he” she spoke of was Kaleo. I didn’t know enough vampires for it to be anyone else, unless this was a case of bizarrely mistaken identity. “Would you like to give me your name? I can’t know if Kaleo said anything about you if I do not know who you are.”
She had stopped when I warned her to stop. I hoped that meant she wanted to avoid a fight. Once my cousins showed up, she would most likely disappear. In the meantime, I would keep her talking, and hopefully learn something to help me understand why she was here and if she was likely to cause trouble.
The vampire tilted her head thoughtfully, sending a ringlet cascading down her cheek. “I suppose you might be too stupid to recognize me, even if you have heard of me.”
“I can tell you,” I answered, “I do not recall Kaleo ever talking about a rude and pompous churl who would storm into a lady’s back yard, sling insults, and make demands without bothering to even introduce herself.”
She recoiled as if I had slapped her. Based on her manner and dress, I had guessed that an insult to her station and etiquette might hit harder than anything else.
“You call yourself a lady?” she spat. “You are an English exile and miscreant, a port-wench fishwife whose mortality is already showing.”
If I had in any way been ashamed of being an English exile and miscreant, wife and daughter of fishermen, and mortal, those words might have stung. As it was, they made me sigh. I was fed up with this, and Alexander had started to fuss.
“You have three choices, vampire, and you must decide now: Introduce yourself and state your purpose in being here, leave, or fight.” I rose to my feet, gathering my power in a hot wind around me. Alexander let out a squeal of delight and lifted one little fist to try to “catch” the magic. That would keep him happy for a few moments, but then I knew he would become impatient and start to cry.
She flinched as if she wanted to step back, but then held her ground and said with her head held high, “I am Lady Brina di’Birgetta.” She paused, looking at me as if awaiting a response.
“And your purpose here?” I prompted.
Her eyes widened. She had expected me to recognize the name.
From the back gate, one of my Vida cousins called, “Do you need any help, Lila?”
The vampire’s eyes flickered toward the other witch, briefly.
“I don’t think so,” I answered, trying to pitch my voice so it would carry but wouldn’t disturb the children. “Are you here to do violence, Lady Brina? Or shall we part on peaceful terms?”
“One ugly, dried-up witch isn’t worth fighting.” Brina tossed her head dismissively, turned dramatically on her heel, then disappeared in the silent, undramatic way her kind had of instantly transporting themselves to another place.
“What was that about?” my Vida cousin asked.
“I honestly have no idea,” I answered. Clearly this was another woman who knew Kaleo, but despite her apparent expectations, he had never discussed other women with me, much less one of her name or description. I doubted he had sent her to check up on me; if he had wanted to, he would have done so himself.
I recounted the story to my cousins, leaving out only references to “him.” I told them Brina seemed to expect me to know her, but I had never seen or heard of her before, which was true.
I don’t know if anything could have ended differently if I had told them the entire truth. I had put my affair with Kaleo behind me, but thoughts of him still ached a little like an old scar may do in the cold. I didn’t want to detail our ashen relationship to my kin, and I didn’t think it mattered now anyway. Whether Brina was a jilted lover or a current fling, Kaleo had not sent her to me. He was gone from my life, stung by my choice to pursue my own mortal life, and I did not think he would come back.
I did judge one thing right: I trusted that, if Kaleo were concerned about me, he would check on me himself.
I had not considered that the imperious vampire who showed up at my doorstep that day would go back to Kaleo and report all she had seen and all she had assumed. Now that I know Brina better, I don’t even need my visions to know exactly how the scene played out: She went to Kaleo, and told him I was a wreck. She told him I looked exhausted and worn down, brittle and broken by motherhood. She told him that my mortality was showing, that my newborn children were sucking my life out of me and that my days were numbered.
She told him what she thought she had seen, with no acknowledgment or even recognition that I was strong and healthy. Yes, I was tired, but that is often the lot of a new mother. It was a thing that would change.
That is what mortality means, after all: change. Mortals go from child to adult to elder. Along the way our bodies change, sometimes in ways that make us stronger and more confident, and sometimes in ways that make life harder. Some of the changes are part of normal development, and some are the result of the lives we lead.
At the same time, our minds change. We learn and discover new things about our world, and about ourselves. We take different perspectives and learn new ways of thinking. We suffer traumas and triumphs, and who we are changes.
It is my opinion that it is not just the body that stops changing when one becomes a vampire. I believe the mind gets equally arrested.
Oh, vampires can learn new things. Kaleo learned to play the violin, which had never existed when he was mortal. He learned new languages and geography and mathematics. But all those are things; they are facts and figures and skills.
I do not believe a vampire could learn to appreciate the beauty in music if they had not already possessed that understanding as a human. I do not believe one with a bedrock belief in a particular faith can totally shake that belief, even if they change the names of their gods or are confronted by science that makes their religion seem flimsy and irrelevant. And I do not believe one who was raised with the belief that some people are better than others, and in particular that some are born to rule others, will ever fully develop into someone who believes in equality and democracy.
Human beings can learn. They can change even the core concepts of their being, the fundamental faiths and unspoken biases that control their everyday behaviors, through learning and effort.
I do not believe vampires can.
Brina is terrified of death. So she saw a woman who was tired and focused on others, not currently at the height of her beauty and grace, and decided that was the beginning of the end, an inevitable and immediate slide into decay and death. The idea of recovery was impossible for her to imagine. Further, she could not understand why anyone would choose a path that allowed for such a shift, so could only assume my children were stealing my hours and my strength, rather than benefiting from my willingly-given love and time.
And Kaleo?
Kaleo believes he knows what is best. He believes his passions and loves are definitive, and that his view of the world is more complete than any woman’s.
So he heard that I was dying–from Brina–and when he came to see me, he saw that I was indeed tired. He saw that I was frustrated, though it was hard for him to grasp that much of that frustration was with him.
Kaleo appeared in my kitchen shortly after I had put the twins to sleep just two nights after Brina had come calling. I had decided to celebrate the fact that both children were sleeping at the same time by making myself a cup of tea. I knew I might be choosing less sleep myself, since an infant asleep may not stay asleep long, but at that moment I wanted the relaxation and comfort more than immediate rest.
I sensed him appear behind me, and refused at first to turn. I set the kettle on the stove.
He waited quietly for me to acknowledge him. I had no choice but to do so, unless I wanted to wait for my cousins to arrive, which would only make the situation more drawn-out and awkward.
“So,” I sighed, turning to face him, “was I wrong? Did you send Brina to check on me?”
“I did not send her,” he said. “She was jealous. She wanted to see the woman I speak of so often, and miss so much.”
Jealous. And what relationship did Brina have with him, I wondered… but not deeply enough to ask. Whether she was an old lover, a new lover, or a would-be-lover he had rejected, I had no need to know.
“She did not appreciate learning that you had not spoken of her to me,” I said. “But I will tell you something I told her: My cousins have spells woven into this house, as they do the houses of all our local kin. Whether I want them to or not, they have already sensed that you are here, and they are on their way.”
“That, too, Brina helpfully explained to me,” Kaleo replied. “That is why I know I cannot linger. How are you?”
I stared at him incredulously. “I am fine. I…” I trailed off, because my mind warred with two responses and neither was what I wanted. Part of me wanted to say, I am glad to see you. I had missed him. Of course I had. I loved him, and I loved how I felt when we were together. But he had slung insults at me and then stormed off in a huff without even saying a proper goodbye, and made no attempt to contact me since then. So my other impulse was to say, I want you to leave immediately.
“I’m sorry,” he said solicitously. “I can tell you’re exhausted, and my visit is a surprise. Perhaps we could go somewhere more private to talk?”
I shook my head, this time more certain. “I’m married now, Kaleo. My relationship with you was over even before I took those vows, and it is certainly over now that I have. Beyond that, I can’t wander off and leave the twins alone.” Peter was at sea, and even if he hadn’t been, the twins were my responsibility by both Puritan expectations and witch ones. I drew a breath and said firmly, “If you have something brief to say, you may say it, but then you should leave.”
I expected arrogance and irritation, like I had seen when I told him of my potential suitor.
Instead, I saw pity and concern in his eyes. “As you’ve just told me, you have family who are on their way, and who can watch out for the children,” Kaleo said. “You don’t need to feel beholden to the babes every moment. You can take time to care for yourself.”
“I do not need your permission to—” In her cradle, Risa started to whimper, in the way that indicated she might be soothed back to sleep by quiet singing and a gentle touch, as long as it came before she was fully roused. I cut off what I was saying to Kaleo, waved a hand at him dismissively, and moved toward my child.
Kaleo, fool that he was, stepped between us. “Lila, this is what I—”
He didn’t finish the words, because I had no patience for them. I didn’t slow my step, but raised a hand, pressed my palm flat against his chest, and slammed into him with my power.
It was what I should have done the first time we met.
I could have shaped my power like a blade and sliced cleanly through his heart, a killing blow. Instead my magic was a crate of stone, an impossible weight that hit him and slammed him to the rough wooden floor with enough force to break bones and crush organs.
“Never,” I hissed, stepping over him, “get between me and my children.” I lifted Risa from her cradle and snuggled her to my breast without taking my eyes off Kaleo’s dazed and prone form. “Now get out of my house. You are not welcome here. Not because of my husband or because of my children, but because of me. I do not want you here. I do not want to see you.”
I murmured the words in a sing-song whisper, knowing Risa would only understand the cadence. I did not want to frighten her. Kaleo could understand my words, and could see the look in my golden eyes and how the flames of my power danced there in wild threat.
The vampire pushed himself slowly to his knees, moving with aching care as his body healed swiftly, but not as instantly as his kind was used to. He disappeared before he had fully risen.
Chapter Ten: Building the Hawk’s Keep
Hawk’s Keep, Centuries Before the Kiesha’ra
Edilyse was not always able to join Kared and Ivy, but attended lessons as frequently as she could. She was a quick and motivated learner who asked questions and seemed to consider carefully what she was told.
Edilyse still chose not to come to the human village, but she would join them after they returned. Kared would share his observations with her, a discussion that helped them all learn more about both avians and humans. Edilyse’s avian background made her more likely to question things Ivy dismissed as unimportant, giving them all prompting to discuss the difference, why it was so, and whether it was important to Kared’s goals of forming a stronger alliance with the humans.
Edilyse seemed especially interested in how human family structures and relationships worked, and how young people came to know their place in society. How did they know if they were to be a farmer or a hunter or a weaver or a gatherer? How did they decide who to marry? What if the relationships didn’t work out?
Were young women always expected to grow up to be mothers? What if they chose not to?
Did humans ever break from the path their family expected?
Her questions were not asked back to back like that, of course. She found a way to work them in naturally to conversations about other things, such as a discussion of how the son of a farmer would usually become a farmer himself, or how childbirth was harder for humans than it was for avians. Edilyse was in fact able to be quite discreet and circumspect. But for all that, there was a clear thread to her interest that Ivy couldn’t fail to notice.
Ivy waited until a day when she was with Edilyse alone, while Kared was attending to other duties, and asked, “Are you planning to marry Kared?”
Edilyse’s eyes widened, just a tiny bit. The bare fraction of change suggested intense shock on the face of an avian lady.
“Of course,” she answered. “I was promised to him as an infant. We have always known we would wed.”
Ivy shouldn’t get involved.
The last thing she should do was imply that a woman engaged to the prince of a civilization on whose good will Ivy’s kind depended might want to follow her heart or some other emotional nonsense… but she couldn’t keep herself from saying, “You seem very curious about the options humans have, and how they respond when someone strays from an expected path. I thought that might indicate a desire of your own to do something else.”
She tried to keep her words open-ended, not accusatory. But if Edilyse did not wish to follow through with her royal engagement, and Kared knew of it, it might explain the prince’s expectation that his relationship would never become romantic or passionate.
“I…” Edilyse trailed off, looking notably flustered. “Kared is a dear friend of mine. My best friend.” She looked at Ivy directly as she explained, “He knows that I have considered other options. He also knows the only way I could pursue them would be to leave the avian court entirely.”
Leave the court entirely?
Would breaking the engagement cause that much scandal? Ivy knew it would be distressing to many, but she had heard of pairbonds who had been promised as small children who separated before their official wedding because they decided they would not suit. It disappointed the families sometimes, but everyone seemed to agree that the young people should not be forced into a relationship that did not please them. Was it so different because Kared was a prince?
“Do you fear the Shardae line would be offended?” Ivy ventured. That was the only reason she could think why Edilyse would feel she needed to leave entirely, especially if Kared supported her decision.
“It isn’t as simple as that,” Edilyse replied. “The life I want to pursue isn’t one my family would approve of, or understand. That is why I want to learn more about the humans, to see if I might find a place there instead.” She dropped her gaze, and admitted, “It is why Kared started asking questions about them, enough so that his mother decided to give him a liaison status and find him a teacher. He has become genuinely interested in the subject as he has learned more, and looks forward to working with the human villages and expanding the relationship between his people and theirs, but his first interest was feigned for my benefit.”
Ivy nodded, taking in what Edilyse was saying, as well as what she had not yet explained.
Ivy said at last, “You have asked me many questions over the last weeks. Are there specific questions you have wanted to ask, but haven’t asked because you feared they were too revealing?”
It seemed a less threatening question than asking, “What is it you want to do that your family will think is so awful and inappropriate?” Ivy could think of plenty of things an avian lady wasn’t supposed to do, but assuming and guessing seemed a less than tactful way to approach the problem.
“You…” Edilyse trailed off. “From what you have told me, most women born among the humans aspire to have a pairbond—a spouse, a partner—and that their bond is an alliance between the household of her birth and the household of his birth, and that between them they produce children.”
She paused, as if awaiting confirmation. Ivy took a moment to parse the awkwardly phrased words, then just nodded, because Edilyse did not seem finished.
“But not all women do that,” Edilyse continued. “Some never form a pairbond, but might instead dedicate themselves to an art or a skill. In that case, they and their work are still respected by their family. If they choose not to bear children, that is accepted, and instead they might follow the same path some of the men follow—following the migratory creatures during the hunting season, for example, and traveling.”
Again, she paused, and again, Ivy nodded, biting back all the questions that came to her mind: Are you hoping to avoid a pairbond entirely? Are you worried about the relationship? Or just not interested? Or do you want a relationship but not children? Are you afraid of childbirth?
She didn’t know if an avian couple had options, if they wanted an intimate relationship but chose not to have their own children. Did they practice any contraception among them, beyond abstinence and waiting until they were ready to be parents?
“Among the humans,” Edilyse said slowly, “is there ever…” She paused. “I don’t know how to ask it. It hasn’t come up in our talk, and I have never heard anyone say anything about it among my own kind. It isn’t talked about. It just…”
Ivy was horrified to see a tear slide down Edilyse’s face, such a breach of avian reserve that she might as well have been sobbing hysterically. Whatever she was trying to say, the depth of her emotion about it was too much to bear.
Even without knowing the problem, watching that tear, Ivy knew she would offer her the moon and the stars, would promise anything, to fix whatever was wrong.
“Whatever it is,” Ivy said softly, because Edilyse seemed to be stuck, unable to form the words, “I promise I will accept what you tell me. My kind has even more choice and freedom than the humans. If you cannot stay among the avians due to some truth you cannot even speak to them about, then I will help you find a place where you are accepted.”
It was a bold promise to make when she did not know what the dreadful secret was, but Ivy didn’t believe that Edilyse could have done anything truly vile. There were myriad things the avians considered crude and inappropriate—such as holding hands—that the humans and witches considered a matter of course.
Edilyse took a breath to compose herself, and forced her expression back to one of reserve before she asked, “Among your kind, or among the humans, do you know if there has ever been a child who everyone saw as a girl-child—the midwife, the mother, everyone—but as that child grew up, he knew inside himself that he wasn’t? That he had been born somehow in the wrong skin, the wrong body?” She shook her head and let out a frustrated scoff. “I’m sorry. I sound like a fool asking it. I’ve only ever tried to explain it to Kared. I don’t think he fully understands, but he believes me. He understands why I cannot stand to be his lady, his princess, protected by an alistair like a…” She trailed off.
Ivy blinked. She had been listening for Edilyse to pause, but realized she could have cut him off and spared him the uncertainty of waiting for a response.
“Yes,” she said simply.
Edilyse’s gaze flew up, seeming almost as alarmed as hopeful.
Ivy clarified, “Among my kind, and among the humans, yes, a baby might at birth be assumed to be female, but grow up and assert that he is a man. Or the other way around. And there are more options than that.” She paused, considering. “In all the time I have worked to teach Kared the humans’ language, it never occurred to me that their language has words for more genders than the avian language does. If I had thought of it at all, I probably would have assumed avians were simply different, and were only ever male or female as defined by their bodies, without the variability found in humans or witches. I apologize. I’ve been remiss in my teaching, and it has left you in distress for longer than you needed to be.”
“Please, do not apologize,” Edilyse said. “You didn’t answer because I never asked the question I needed to. There are really others like me among the humans?”
“Yes. And most likely there are others like you among the avians as well,” Ivy pointed out.
She tried to consider how other avians would respond if Edilyse tried to explain his situation to them.
Among avians, there were many roles that either men or women could occupy equally—women could be soldiers or field laborers or otherwise complete almost any task a man would—but there was still a rigid gender binary that was reinforced particularly by the pairbond expectation between an avian lady and her male protector. Particularly among the upper class or the royal family, a woman was a lady, always, before anything else. No matter how she excelled at a trade or as a scholar or even as a soldier, society viewed her with a kind of deference. She was expected to have an alistair, whose job it was to defend her from both danger and dishonor, as if she could not be trusted to do so on her own.
“Do you understand why I feel I need to leave?” Edilyse asked, after several moments had passed in thoughtful silence. “It’s… it’s like having a flaw in a piece of stonework, one that everyone stops to stare at and draw attention to. Some of them even compliment the flaw, but that’s even worse, because they are praising a mistake. I am the only one who seems to recognize that the body they look at and call a woman’s is wrong. My skin crawls every time I am treated with the deference due an avian lady, but I know they would never allow me to live as I truly am.”
“I understand,” Ivy said, the words woefully inadequate. She wished she could offer to advocate for the raven, but that wasn’t her role. She was a tutor to one avian prince, not an adviser to all their kind.
She did not have the power to reshape their society.
But she had made Edilyse a promise, and she had no intention of breaking it.
Chapter Eleven: Lila’s Story
Two nights after Kaleo visited me, there was a fire at the meeting house. It was a minor thing, perhaps started by a stray candle left unattended, but a corner of the wooden building was severely scorched before it was extinguished. I had not yet returned to regular attendance at services since childbirth, but somehow, my name came up during the discussion of how the blaze had started.
One of my cousins warned me, when she came to visit next, that I needed to be careful how I presented myself.
The next day, a fishhook snared in a child’s toe, in a place in town where there was no reason for a fishhook to be. I wasn’t there to see the incident, but one of my cousins was; she was close enough that, when people looked around, they saw her.
It should have been lucky that she was there, because her healing power could have minimized pain, ensured infection didn’t set in, and helped with the removal of the embedded hook in the hysterical child’s foot… but instead, my cousin saw the looks and knew to duck her head and fade away.
Later that week I received a letter from Kaleo, expressing concern. The steward of his Rhode Island property said there was increased anxiety about witchcraft in town of late. Kaleo said he wanted to warn me and my kin. He offered to help me move somewhere safer.
I scowled at the letter. Did he really think we who had lived here for decades would not be constantly alert for such things? Did he think we didn’t have plans and contingencies in place?
And had he really heard the rumors while checking in with the steward running his local property, or was he deliberately lingering nearby, keeping his eye on me and mine?
The next day, my house was searched for paraphernalia associated with witchcraft.
I had already hidden anything questionable in a concealed nook beneath the kitchen floor, which was further concealed with spells, but the invasion of my home by individuals who suspected me of a crime punishable by death—a crime I was guilty of, even if my form of witchcraft had nothing to do with Satan or the dark rites the locals feared—was unsettling.
They searched my home, then examined my children, who were healthy and strong despite having been born early and together.
I heard one of them say something under their breath about how “unnatural” it was that my children were thriving, when there were other children in town struggling.
Kaleo came himself the next day. He kept well back from me and said, “I’m worried about you. You’re already not at your best. If the humans rise against you and your kin, I fear for you.”
“Fear for yourself,” I warned. “I told you what would happen if you came back here.”
I was tensed and ready to follow through on my threat.
“This situation is only going to get worse.”
For an instant, I thought it was anxiety I heard in his voice. I thought he had heard the whispers and, knowing how fast witchcraft hysteria could spread, now feared the worst.
Then I realized it wasn’t apprehension I heard and saw in him: It was threat.
“You,” I whispered. “You haven’t been hearing the rumors. You’ve been creating them.”
Wisely, he took a step back from me. “I only want you to realize the danger you are in. I know you are powerful, but you are also fragile, and mortal. I can’t stand to see—”
I lunged at him, striking with my power. This time I would not bother with a warning.
He disappeared before I reached him.
I hissed a curse under my breath.
What would he do next?
A week later, plague struck. Specifically, smallpox broke out, starting with a ship docked in the harbor and racing through the town.
Even Kaleo could not control the spread of a virulent disease that made its way up and down the eastern seaboard for decades. However, his rumors had done his work: Not only was my family not able to easily step forward to offer our services as healers, but folks looked at us, at our untouched skin and healthy children, and started to point fingers.
We needed to move elsewhere, but in the midst of a smallpox outbreak it was hard for even a witch to find passage and settle in a new place.
I rode with unladylike speed, siphoning power into my mount to allow for greater haste, and found my way to Kaleo’s plantation house that evening, intending to demand that he stop his work.
I found him in his parlor with his violin at his shoulder, working on a new composition.
While my world burned with fever, he played.
Nero indeed.
“What you have done is causing humans to die,” I snapped. “Do you understand that?”
He nodded, and admitted, “And were I to die tonight, it would not undo that damage. I think it would in fact worsen the accusations.”
He had already laid his trap. Unless I found everyone he had planted his accusations with, and found a way to undo the vampiric suggestions he had surely embedded deep within their consciousness, killing him would not make my kin safe.
We could move.
Anywhere we moved, he could follow.
“Why won’t you let me go?” I asked.
“I can’t stand to see you die,” he replied. His voice was so forlorn, you would think I was laying before him on my deathbed, in pain, instead of standing before him healthy and furious. “I would rather you hate me forever if it means you will live.”
I turned and left.
My husband had returned home while I was away, but he was not the only one there when I arrived. He was being arrested as I walked through the door.
If they took my human husband and put him in their pestilence-infested jail, he would catch the fever. It could kill him. My kind was better at healing injury than illness, but I knew my magic could keep the man I loved alive through this disease, if I was was allowed to be with him. It was far easier to stop a disease from taking root or to support a mostly-healthy body in fighting one than it was to turn the tide once illness had ravaged a human system.
And then there were my children.
And my cousins.
I could cloud the minds of these men, and we could still flee, but Kaleo’s words haunted me:
I would rather you hate me forever if it means you will live.
I was more than willing to kill Kaleo, but he had made it clear his death would not be enough. Even if my kin escaped the poison he had planted among the humans of this town, there was the rest of his kind to consider. He had mentioned once in passing that the woman who changed him was still fiercely protective. He also had friends. And political connections. Other allies.
How many might avenge his death?
I did not fight the men who had come to arrest my husband. That would just escalate the situation. I knew who could fix this.
I knew who would fix this.
I sang to my children, tucked them in, and bid them goodbye with the assurance that I loved them, and that their father loved them. I promised them that their father and all the rest of their kin would ensure they never lacked for anything. Once they were both asleep, I called one of my cousins to watch them.
Then I returned to Kaleo’s home.
He was waiting for me. He had known I would come.
“However you worked your mischief, whether it be by bribes or whispered rumor or vampire wiles or a combination of them all, you will undo it,” I declared. “You will see that my husband is freed and exonerated. You will ensure that there is never a whisper of suspicion against my children ever again.”
“I will, will I?” Kaleo asked, voice idly curious.
“You will swear to me by all the gods of your ancestors, and every god who has walked this world since, that you will undo the damage you have caused and you will never meddle with the affairs of my kin and my children again.”
“Should one of your hunter kin stroll into my parlor intent on murder, I’m sure I shall swear to let her leave,” he quipped by reply. “Do you intend to tell me why I would do any of this?”
He knew what I would say. He had, after all, engineered all of this so I would say it.
I knew when I had been outmaneuvered.
“You swear all of that, by all the gods—no, more, swear to me by your muse and your music, by your hands and your voice—and then and only then will I accept your blood.”
He hesitated. Kaleo may have walked away from all his gods many years before, but he was superstitious enough not to swear such a vow lightly.
“And if I break my word?” he asked.
“You will have made me immortal,” I pointed out. “If you break your word, ever in our long lives, I will know. And I will kill you. And then I will find and burn every manuscript, every composition, every piece of parchment you have ever set your mark to. For good measure, I will set ablaze every instrument I have reason to believe you ever set your hand upon. Nothing you have created will remain.”
I waited for him to decide. I hoped he would back down, that he would decide I was too dangerous to turn into a vampire, but I wasn’t bluffing. I knew I couldn’t play his game. If I tried, someone I loved would pay the price, and that was not something I could allow.
Once more I saw that impossible, immortal stillness. He considered.
Then he nodded gravely and said, “Then I so swear. By Jupiter, by Melpomene and Urania and Calliope, by my own blood and my music, I will rescue your kin from their current predicament, and then leave them alone, in exchange for your permission to save your life. I will even go one step further, and assure you I will grant your desires according to what I believe you mean by them. I will swear not to split hairs and quibble over language in the future, like some kind of folktale witch. You may hold me in good faith to my word.”
It had not occurred to me that he would so bicker. It certainly had not occurred to me that I would have tolerated it if he did. He knew exactly what I meant. I would hold him to that.
But, as always, he chose the drama and the “high road” of supposedly doing more than I asked.
“Fine,” I said. “Go get my husband out of jail, now. I will wait here.”
At least he made no attempt to dissemble or pretend he had not deliberately arranged the arrest—and indeed the entire recent witchcraft anxiety. He never for a moment attempted to convince me recent events were anything less than his deliberate, cold-blooded blackmail.
“As you wish.”
He went on his way toward town.
I didn’t watch. I can never say I trusted him, but I trusted him in this case to do as he said he would. It was part of his image for himself: He was the gallant hero, the man who would rescue me from myself. He would fulfill all my desires, no matter how irrational or inconsequential he thought them, in his undying quest to please me.
While he was completing that task, I let my tears flow. I wept, in a way I had not allowed myself to do in front of my so-sensitive infants. I had left them sleeping peacefully, not frightened by my grief.
By the time Kaleo returned, I was again dry-eyed. He, too, would never see me cry.
I hoped, after that night, I would never need to see or speak to him again.
Chapter Twelve: Building the Hawk’s Keep
I did not learn how completely I severed my lineage until much later. I thought I left my children with a living uncle and grandfather of the Light line who could guide them as their powers grew, as well as plenty of Vida and Smoke and Arun cousins who could instruct them in more specialized skills if their interests leaned toward healing or hunting.
I knew if I stayed I would put them in an impossible position. Half our kin were sworn to hunt and kill vampires on sight. They might not be our ancient enemies, but they are predators, and the Vida and Arun witches had long ago decided their protective mandate extended to the blood-drinkers.
I told myself I would let my children come of age without muddying the waters with my poor decisions. I did not want their paths to be decided out of a need for vengeance against Kaleo, or a blind compassion for me that left them feeling they could never honorably train to the hunt. I did not want them to feel divided from their kin out of loyalty to me.
And, as a new vampire, I worried that my blood-lust would put them in danger. A fledgling of days or weeks or even a few years old cannot be trusted to live day in and day out around mortals. A moment of lost control could mean my child or husband’s end.
I thought they would be safer if I stayed far away.
Instead, when I let Kaleo give me his blood, I ended the Light line.
Let me now tell of the line’s beginning, to make the circle complete, and then we can move on to the next part of the story—for this, the birth and death of a witch, is only the first half of what I intend to tell.
Hawk’s Keep, Centuries Before the Kiesha’ra
Ivy’s lessons with Kared and Edilyse continued, though now they had another form. Plans and true expectations were out in the open, so questions could be asked that weren’t asked before, and language practiced that had been less essential before.
Edilyse was determined that, by the time he stepped into the human village, he would be able to walk among them without being seen as “other.” He did not intend to hide what he was from them, but he did not want them to know him as the odd foreigner who stumbled over their language and bumbled through their traditions. He certainly did not want them to know him as an avian lady before they knew who he was as a person.
In short, he wanted their first impression of him to be how he saw himself.
He just needed to discover what that really was.
Some days, they practiced the humans’ language, the three of them together having conversations about household chores and daily activities, about trade, and about the avian court itself. Other times, Ivy and Edilyse specifically reviewed what skills and knowledge he could bring to the village when he moved there. Some days, Edilyse practiced what he knew on his own while Ivy and Kared sparred.
They often spent the midday meal together, though as often as not Edilyse went to work on carvings for the Hawk’s Keep while Kared and Ivy shared the luncheon.
It was friendly and companionable. When Ivy realized it was also intimate, that she was perhaps getting a bit too fond of the avian prince, she had a moment of guilt.
Then she paused to reflect, and wonder why she felt guilty.
The woman Kared was promised to flat-out did not exist. There was no avian lady in love with him, expecting his loyalty and his protection. Edilyse played that role in public still, but hated every minute of it. He was not pining for Kared; he and Kared were instead working together every moment to find Edilyse a safer place to live, where he could be happy and accepted.
Ivy still tested the waters carefully, unsure if her attraction was even reciprocated, and unwilling to hurt either of her friends.
Kared shook his head when Ivy asked if he wished things were different in the avian court, and he and Edilyse could be bonded while still respecting who Edilyse was. He said, “I do wish things were different in the court, and that Edilyse felt he could be happy here, but I haven’t had any expectations that our pairbond would work out since we were small children who didn’t know any better.” He paused, searching for words. He switched to the human language, where they had more precise language for relationships and gender and sexuality. “I know I am defying so many expectations by helping Edilyse, but I am in other ways a product of my upbringing. When it comes to attraction or romance, I find that I am only interested in women. Edilyse looks like one sometimes, because he needs to pass, but I know he isn’t one and something in me just… can’t picture him in that role.”
He switched back to the avian tongue to add, “I’ve spoken to him about it, more than once, because I feel my role as an alistair binds me to do what is honorable—as does my role as a friend. If he wanted me to take a stand in the court, I would. And if he ever indicated he was interested in fulfilling our parents’ promise that we wed, I would. But he isn’t interested. Most recently, he told me quite sweetly that I’m very dear to him as a friend, but he has a great deal to figure out about himself and the last thing he is interested in dealing with in the meantime is a pairbond.”
He quirked a smile, and Ivy could almost picture the scene, where Edilyse tried to assuage any potential hurt feelings while also making clear his lack of interest.
Airing the words was as necessary between Ivy and Kared as it had been between Kared and Edilyse, though. Hearing them wrought a change in both of them.
The next time they sparred in the woods they practiced having Kared break from various holds. Wrists crossed, chest to chest, Kared paused halfway through a motion he had performed several times prior… well, not quite flawlessly, but well enough to demonstrate progress.
This time, Kared hesitated as their eyes met and bodies brushed, hesitated in a way that had nothing to do with lack of confidence with the move. His pupils dilated and his lips parted slightly.
Then, avian gentleman that he was, he dropped his gaze, blushed, and leapt back from her without a single ounce of the skills they had been practicing. She released him, taken off guard by his obvious discomfort, but far from offended.
“Apologies,” he said. “Give me a moment to catch my breath.”
She did. She turned away, giving him time to decide if he wanted to acknowledge the moment or not. The fact that they were both unattached—he in fact at least, if not in the views of his people-and he knew her very non-avian views of relationships and sexuality did not mean he wanted to pursue any mutual attraction they might feel. As he had admitted, he was still an avian gentleman, and going against one’s upbringing was rarely easy.
It was the beginning of an inevitability.
Out of deference to Kared’s upbringing, Ivy deferred to the avian prince’s comfort level. She carefully avoided crossing any new boundary unless Kared initiated it.
Any avian would have told her she should have set her own firm boundary, reminded him of the difference in their stations and expectations, and rigidly maintained her distance. She knew that, so she didn’t ask. She had been raised to believe romance and sexuality were individual decisions and not a source of shame. Further, she had recently lost a lot of respect for avian society, based on how Edilyse needed to hide and live in fear of discovery.
Well, she didn’t ask anyone except Edilyse, who was more than happy to encourage them to pursue whatever level of fling they wanted.
Edilyse was almost ready to start his new life in the human village when it all spiraled out of control: an unexpected visit by Kared’s mother—along with her alistair and two guards—caught the two of them in a more than delicate circumstance.
Without giving up Edilyse’s secret, it was impossible to convince the Tuuli Thea or any other avian that Kared hadn’t betrayed his promised pairbond in a crude and vicious way. No one among the avians or the witches was willing to believe Ivy hadn’t taken advantage of the innocent prince, and in the process destroyed his relationship not only with his fiancé, but with his entire family.
Ivy was called to trial before her own kind, and couldn’t find it in herself to offer much of a defense. The trial was a sham anyway; her own kind didn’t agree with all of her decisions, but she hadn’t broken any of their laws or even violated any of their traditions. To keep the peace, she volunteered to accept punishment, however. The matriarch of the Vida line ritually turned her back on her wayward progeny, disowning her as the only way to maintain their alliance with the hawk shapeshifters.
The three of them “fled” the community, supposedly in disgrace. That was how the avian history books would describe it, anyway: a witch outsider viciously seduced and ruined their young prince, and she and the prince were then exiled in shame.
With some discreet support from Ivy’s kin, the trio settled among a slightly more distant tribe. Between Ivy’s skills in hunting and healing, Edilyse’s artisan talents, and Edilyse’s and Kared’s strength and ability to use their wings to range far afield to track prey or search for other resources, they were welcomed.
In the oral tradition of that tribe, “the witch and her two husbands” were a slightly odd trio, with strange ways they brought with them from far-off lands, but their descendants were powerful and respected, marked by the molten-gold hair and eyes of the Shardae line, and the simmering power of the Vida line.
As a trio, they decided they would give up not only avian binaries and absolute emotional reserve, but also all rigid traditions that demanded adherence to expectation and roles assigned at birth. Instead, they embraced a path of choice and individualism. Some of their descendants chose to hunt, and others to heal; some mastered a bit of both. Only one of their three children was born with a winged second form, and her children were all flightless, but all inherited skill with fire and visions of the past, quirks of magic released in the interaction between Shardae and Macht blood.
So the Light line was born, weaving the fiery magic of the hawk shapeshifters into the power and control of the Macht witches, and creating something new.
Part Two: Dare Seize The Fire
“What the hand, dare seize the fire?”
Chapter Thirteen: Politics and Consequences
The town had first been called Nowhere, by which I mean it hadn’t been given an official name, so the unofficial nickname the locals called it became the truth. It had been founded on land that Silver had claimed as his territory long enough ago that even the local tribes considered it his–or at least, they considered it an unlucky forest inhabited by a blood-drinking monster.
In the bend of an oxbow river, the small town was home to perhaps five dozen humans, mostly adult men and women who had fled or been driven out of more “civilized” spaces. Several had been plucked from areas around the world, favorites or companions of the vampires who ran the town; they spoke a wide variety of languages and practiced a range of traditions that would have boggled the staid Puritans in their villages a few days’ ride through unbroken forest away. Others had come seeking the mysterious “outlaw” town, where one might go to be away from the laws of mankind.
They quickly discovered that there were still laws… just different ones.
Scuffles and minor feuds were fine, but any disturbance sufficient to summon the landowners–for so the immortals who ran Nowhere were called there–was usually avoided. If they were disturbed, the response was immediate, and severe.
They were not absentee landlords and they were not vicious overlords. They made sure the town had the resources it needed to run. They accepted requests and complaints through a handful of liaisons who lived among the human population, some known and some unknown, and ensured their people’s needs were met with a minimum of fuss.
And in exchange?
They asked for blood.
They did not consider the humans within Nowhere theirs. They owned the land, not the people who worked it and lived upon it; the people were free to come and go as they pleased, as long as they brought no trouble to Nowhere. They demanded no coin in exchange for lodging and resources, only blood, and only what an individual could spare. Those who stayed considered it a fair exchange.
Other vampires who came to Nowhere saw the mismatched houses and people, heard the discordant languages, and listened incredulously to the very limited list of laws, and called it chaos. Madness. Mayhem.
Nowhere changed name again as the landowners claimed the new label. “Mayhem” was a point of pride, a deliberate contrast to the rigid human structures many of the immortals scoffed at now that their own mortal days were done.
I claimed one of the smaller cabins in Mayhem, one probably intended as a human residence.
I chose Mayhem for three reasons: There was an ample supply of willing blood-donors; I did not need to worry about paranoid, superstitious humans pounding my door down with accusations of witchcraft or worse; and it was the one place Kaleo would not go.
Mayhem was not the only alliance of blood-drinkers in the world. On the other side of the continent, another band of far younger vampires had claimed territory and was attempting to create their own place. Those who chose to ally with them were not welcome in Mayhem. Even Kaleo’s obsessive interest in me would not make him cross Mayhem’s landowners, some of whom had walked the world for thousands of years before he had even been born.
I had taken Kaleo’s blood. I never wanted to see him again.
In the years after my death, I settled into my new life—existence—slowly. As I have said before, the vampiric mind struggles to move on. If not reconciled before death, losses and traumas faced during mortal life leave indelible scars. In the same way a vampire’s body might change with aching slowness over centuries, scars in the mind might fade given sufficient time and motivation… but seventeen years was not sufficient. Not after all I had given up.
My husband and children. My family.
And even more. All that had made me witch, made me Light, was torn way. My magic didn’t entirely disappear when I took Kaleo’s blood, but it changed into something I did not recognize and could not control. I hoped I could master it once more, but that too would take time.
I broke from my thoughts as Kaei, one of my few companions in Mayhem, cajoled, “You could come out tonight. You do not need to hide in here.”
The young, dark-haired woman bore no physical resemblance to my own children, but she was nearly of an age with them. I had watched her grow up, as I couldn’t watch them.
Very few children were born and raised in Mayhem, as Kaei had been. She didn’t need my protection, though; Jager, one of the landowners, had taken her under his wing when she was still a toddling thing. Indeed, he had seemed fascinated with the young child, intrigued by how she changed and learned.
As Kaei came of age, she became one of Mayhem’s undeclared liaisons.
She was not exactly a spy. That implied her role was an antagonistic one, where she watched the other humans and reported back on their misdeeds. Instead, most of what she watched for was wants and needs. She listened for people discussing what resources they felt were short, or what would make the town more desirable—a new type of loom for the weaving group that produced most of the town’s textiles, additional seed after a late frost had killed many of the early crops in the fields, or new breeding stock for a man who was determined to breed better, hardier sheep.
I was not invited to the councils where Mayhem’s landowners met to discuss these needs, quibbling over whether or not the humans truly needed them. My impression was that requests were often granted not because of careful logic and planning, but because of whim. One of the ancients would find the item and produce it, rather like a small child playing with a dollhouse. As a result, the town was an odd mishmash of frontier roughness peppered with random luxury. Mayhem, true to its name.
Of course Kaei didn’t only share needs with her patron. She was particularly protective of the women of Mayhem; there were relatively few of them, since they were less likely to brave the wilderness to come to Mayhem on their own, but they were safe and they were respected. If Kaei heard of one who had been abused, she would demand an accounting. Fala, ever happy to make a bloody example, was usually the one to respond first to those complaints.
But today, Kaei was watching over a festival—a harvest celebration of some sort, I thought.
The Puritans had forbidden most holiday celebrations, calling them pagan and worse, so I had come to Mayhem unfamiliar with elaborate holiday rituals. But the landowners were largely pagan, of course–or at least had been during their own lives, whether or not they still believed in their gods—and they had no objection to their people celebrating their faiths as they saw fit, as long as they refrained from killing each other or burning down the town.
There were no official temples in Mayhem, but individuals or small groups built shrines or dedicated spaces throughout the town to meet their needs.
I wasn’t sure what or for whom today’s celebration was, but everyone seemed to be invited to a communal feast. I could smell a pig roasting, which meant our Jewish occupants weren’t hosting, but that was as much attention as I had paid to the whole affair.
Kaei was still looking at me expectantly. My mind had wandered. That too seemed to be a trait of the recently-changed.
“You don’t need to keep yourself so isolated,” Kaei added. “Isn’t the point of this town to give your kind a place where you can come out of the shadows and live without fear of discovery?”
I was fairly certain the point of this place was so some of Silver’s line could play house. I don’t think fear of discovery drove any of them.
I said, “Is this you talking, or Jager?”
The elder vampire knew I did not like to be pushed into anything. He mostly left me alone, but had made it clear he was respecting my space, not ignoring me. More than anyone else, I often felt Jager was the architect behind Mayhem.
Yes, Silver was its creator. He had given the land and hired men to help clear space and build the first houses. He had dug the well himself, for himself, before any humans settled here. But Jager was the one who had ideas about how the place should run, beyond, “If we bring humans here, we probably shouldn’t have them all freeze and starve to death in the winter.”
“It’s me and Jager,” Kaei admitted freely. “You know he will ask me how you are. And I will tell him you seem isolated, but by choice, and he will nod and tell me to let him know if there is anything you need.”
Jager had learned in a heated tirade–I had literally accidentally thrown fire at him–that I did not want any man or any vampire to come “take care of” me.
I looked at Kaei again. Had it really been near to two decades since I had left my home?
“You have told me,” Kaei said softly, and slowly, “that you feel your kind does not learn new habits or recover from mental wounds taken during your time as a human without conscious and repeated effort. I know you grieve. I respect your grief. But am I right that, according to your own theory, your grief and pain and isolation will never lessen unless you yourself do something to break out of them? You have told me yourself that simply waiting to feel better will do nothing for your kind.”
Vampiric memories are perfect, and in sleep we re-experience our definitive moments, so when we wake in the evening any loss or harm–even one suffered centuries before–feels fresh and new.
Aubrey wakes from the sacrificial altar where he learned sorcery. Ather wakes having thrust a knife into an abusive lover’s heart. Jeshickah wakes from a filthy cell where she awaited execution. And I wake having walked away from my infant children.
“You’re right,” I told Kaei. Since she had been old enough to help me ponder such things, we had conversed often on my theories of magic and vampirism, and how the two were connected yet so different. I sighed and pushed myself away from the window. “I know you’re right. What are they celebrating?”
“A few things,” Kaei answered. “For most, it is a celebration of the fall and the harvest. I think there are at least two specific religious festivals in the mix this week, but there hasn’t been any fighting over it so I haven’t been involved beyond confirming whether the heretical public is invited to join in the feasting and dancing.”
Heretics, feasting, and dancing. That was Mayhem in one short descriptive sentence. In this case, Kaei said the word light-heartedly. There were some holy celebrations the inhabitants of Mayhem hosted where they wanted only their own people in attendance, out of respect for their god or gods; there were others where the community at large was encouraged to attend, regardless of their individual beliefs.
So I made my way into the crowd.
My presence made some nervous, at first. They recognized what I was, and worried that I had come to their celebration due to some trespass.
Once they learned that I was not there to dole out punishment, however, the crowd relaxed around me again. Mayhem’s people had a healthy fear of the landowners, but did not live in terror of them.
After that evening, I let Kaei regularly cajole me into going among the people of Mayhem. Many nights, it took nearly the same conversation to remind me that this was something I wanted to do.
I didn’t plan to kill myself; that meant I planned to live a very long time. I had spent nearly two decades isolated, supposedly working on my magic, but if I ever wanted things to change I needed to face the reality of my new life. I needed to decide what I would do with myself.
Eventually, I set my will to becoming a leader in Mayhem, someone people could look to for advice and support. The residents soon knew me as well as they knew Kaei, and but while she was a quiet spy who could report on what was said when the other humans did not know their landowners were listening, I was a direct line to the powers in charge. If an issue came to me that I could not address directly, I brought it to Jager.
I was told Silver and the rest of his kin were delighted to have me wading through the chaff to minimize how often they were bothered by human needs.
As part of my decision to live again, I even bought a violin. Kaleo had brought me joy with his music and by teaching me to play, and when he had disappeared I had missed the hum of those strings. I was determined not to abandon all joy and music just because they were associated with loss.
Sometimes I played for hours, mournful concertos that put all I felt into sound and could make the humans near me weep, but I tried to broaden my repertoire so I could provide dance music and other entertainment for festivals. Those sounds felt false to me still, but over time, I hoped they would come true.
Modern Reflections
At this point, I will step back from the story for a bit, and focus on other tales. The events that transpired next were ones I did not directly witness; I saw only their aftermath.
I was their aftermath.
As I have said, I was not the founder of the town of Mayhem. That role belonged to Silver and others of his line: Jager, along with his blood-sister Ather, and their fledglings Fala, Moira, and Aubrey. I do not fully know how each of them came to be, but I know where their stories cross my own, even tangentially.
As Kared Shardae fell for a Vida witch, and in doing so founded my line and twined the fire-magic of the avian shapeshifters into the controlled power of the Macht witches, so later on would another Shardae make an unlikely pairing. Along the way to her love, she would encounter the Frektane pack of wolves.
And in her aftermath, she would make way for the start of another story.
Chapter Fourteen: Silver’s Line
Frektane Territory, after Wyvernhail
Lameta stirred the coals. Her back itched and pulled as it healed, and her bruises were still stiff, but maintaining the fire was her task and she would do it.
As she did it, she would stare into the coals and consider what needed to happen next.
Ever since he had returned from his foray into the southern lands, where the snakes and birds had their great cities, Velyo had been even more unpredictable than before. His temper had always been a thing to watch for, but now it triggered at the least offense, and sometimes for an imagined offense.
He was losing his mind.
Oh, he wasn’t ill. Wolves who were ill, whose minds tricked them into sadness or confusion or other ails, were tended to with love and compassion. At least, that was how it was supposed to be.
Betia was one of those, or should have been. Her bouts of melancholy and confusion had been well known. Sometimes such things happened. With care, she would have recovered.
Instead, Velyo’s abuse had driven her away from them.
His attempts to recover her had failed.
And when he had returned, he had been mad—not ill, in a way that needed to be treated and cared for, but driven to paranoia by his own need for power and control, in a way that needed to be feared and avoided.
She rolled her shoulders, and again felt the bruises. She hadn’t intended to cross him.
She turned the packets of starchy roots, berries, and deer meat that were steaming in their own juices, wrapped in thick leaves on stones near the edge of the fire, then adjusted the blaze a little to keep it at the proper temperature. The movements were harder than usual.
Their kind healed quickly, but not immediately, and for some reason she healed slower than most. They said it had something to do with the sparks of intuition she also sometimes had. Those sparks could have been tended if she wanted to pursue the path of a seer or a shaman, but she had no interest in those positions. Not in this pack. She did not want to be an adviser to the Frektane pack leader, a position he might see as a contender to his throne.
She felt destined for another role.
In the evenings, after the pack had eaten and the fires were banked to coals for the night, it was in pursuit of that other role… that half-glimpsed almost-intuition… that she walked in the woods each night. She felt certain something was waiting for her there.
Velyo did not mind if she returned to his tent near to midnight, for he tended to come to his bed late as well, after walking the borders of their territory and checking with the sentries. Her intuition served her well, and she was usually able to return to the tent minutes before he did—just long enough to remove the heavy fur cloak she wore to protect her from biting wind, rain, and snow. Velyo never noticed that it was still cold and sometimes even dripping.
Last night, he had noticed, because she had been late. She had been sure she sensed… something, something that made her hackles rise, almost as if she had caught the scent of a predator on the wind. She had followed it, but it had eluded her. She had tried to explain that to Velyo, and he had demanded to know if she thought she was better at watching out for such things than his personally-chosen border guards, if she thought to second-guess his judgment, or if perhaps she had in fact been meeting with someone else when she knew he was busy.
The accusations had only worsened from there.
It had been the worst episode so far.
Oh, Frektane had always been quick to use his fists, claws, or teeth to back up his authority, but there was a difference between harshness and brutality. His father had been harsh but efficient; since he had murdered his father and taken his place, and especially since he had driven his last lover away, Velyo had crossed the line into viciousness. In his rage, Lameta knew he had come close to killing her.
It was not compassion or restraint that had saved her, but simply fatigue. Once she had stopped resisting, stopped moving, Velyo’s rage had burned out and he had lost interest and gone to bed.
She didn’t intend for that to happen again.
She hadn’t come up with a good plan to kill him yet, but how hard could it be to murder a man when you slept in the same bed? All she needed was a blade long and sharp enough to kill in a single blow, and the nerve and the aim to drive it true the first time. If he woke before the deed was done, there would be no second chance; he was powerful and would best her in any fight, and would kill her without hesitation if he caught her trying to fulfill his paranoia-fueled belief that his people were turning against him.
Not that it was paranoia these days.
He used to be respected enough to keep his people in line. Even those who did not love him had believed in his ability to manage the pack’s needs. Then he had gone to the land of the snakes and birds. Something had happened there that set a seed of doubt and fear in his guts. As it grew, his behavior became more erratic, his judgment more self-serving, and his temper more explosive. His own terror of betrayal had become a self-fulfilling prophecy as his behavior turned even his most loyal allies against him.
That night, Lameta again caught a trace of predator scent. She hadn’t heard Velyo say anything about it after his nightly rounds, and hadn’t heard any of the other border guards raise the issue either. Why was she the only one who sensed it? Her only theory was that the scent might not be a physical thing, like woodsmoke or coyote musk, but something made of magic.
If she could catch it, she might then report back to the camp’s witch, but Lameta hadn’t gotten along with that esteemed individual well for any part of her life and didn’t want to bring a vague sense of “something” as a report. Velyo would scoff and everyone else would follow his lead, and she would have wasted her time.
She tried to analyze if the odd sensation was anything like the magic she had sensed on the wyvern princess who had come among them recently, but she couldn’t feel it well enough to be sure. Lameta didn’t think it was her, or one of her kind, though they certainly had reason to be here. If they ever discovered how their princess had been treated in Frektane lands, they might feel the need to avenge her.
She didn’t make it far that night; her healing body slowed her down, and she returned to the Frektane tent just barely before the time when Velyo made it back. She collapsed in the bed, exhausted through and through, and was asleep before he returned.
Velyo let her sleep.
In fact, he did not return to bed until nearly dawn himself. The second half of the night had been spent searching the woods for an unknown threat, after one of the border patrol was found dead, pale and cold, in human form, and without a visible mark on him.
As she stirred the fire that day, managing the center of the camp as was her daily task, Lameta debated if there was anything she could say to anyone. She had only just healed from the last beating; she didn’t want to experience another, as she surely would if she tried to tell Velyo she had been sneaking into the woods, and she had sensed but not reported something dangerous in them.
It didn’t matter that her report would not have changed anything. Velyo, who would have ignored her if she spoke earlier, would be furious now that he had tangible evidence of a threat.
To his credit, Velyo knew better than to vent his temper on the remaining guards. Instead he did what needed to be done. He changed the rotation and assigned shifting territories for the border guards, put them in pairs, and set up check-ins during the night. He cautioned them to wariness.
He asked the pack witch if she knew anything. The witch shook her head, but said she would try to use her power to divine what had happened.
With the new guard rotation, Lameta knew better than to go into the forest that night.
She did anyway, pulled by forces she couldn’t understand. She was convinced beyond measure that there was something achingly powerful in the forest.
She didn’t find it that night. They didn’t lose another border guard that night, but one returned weak and shivering, with a story of a creature he couldn’t quite describe with strength as implacable as a mountain and teeth like a serpent’s.
“Was it a snake, or wasn’t it?” Velyo demanded, as the guard made his incoherent, terrified report. “The serpiente might be trying to taunt us. They could hide among the trees, dozens of them, tangled in branches or crouched under brambles in their second forms, waiting a moment to strike.” His eyes had gone wide. Lameta saw the guards around him shift nervously; they had come to recognize the look that came into Velyo’s eyes when he contemplated how some unknown enemy might stalk and torment him.
“With respect,” one of the other guards said, “we know serpents don’t do well in the cold. They’re used to their plush temples and hot fires. During your father’s time they used to war, but now they’re—”
He didn’t finish his statement before Velyo was on him, unable to tolerate dissent in that moment, especially when paired with a reference to his father.
That third night, Lameta finally found her quarry. Or perhaps it found her.
He found her.
She traveled a trail she did not think she had followed recently, one that led to a copse of trees, and was startled to find a campsite. The first thing she saw was a fire pit dug from the winter-hard, root-strewn soil and lined with rocks, but when looking further she found a well-woven hammock lined with furs strung between two dense pine trees so it would be well-protected from the elements.
At first she thought the camp must be deserted, or still in the process of being set up, for there were no smells of food. There was ash in the cold fire pit, but there was no sense that anyone had eaten anything near it.
She would almost think someone had built it in an emergency, in an attempt to warm themself before moving on, but the fire pit was too well built. Besides, no one afraid of freezing would sleep in a hammock in the frigid cold. It would lose too much warmth to the surrounding air no matter how many furs one lined it with. Even Lameta’s kind, despite dense fur and wolf’s metabolism, knew to curl into a protected hollow or snowdrift to conserve heat if they were caught out in the bitterest days of winter.
She had shifted into her human form and was examining the hammock more closely when she heard a voice behind her say, “There are many wolves in this forest who are seeking me, but you are the only one who has been hunting me.”
The hackles on the back of her neck rose, despite the short hairs there from her human form. She swiveled to face the strange creature, only belatedly catching a whiff of the power she had been sensing intermittently through the previous nights.
If one had been able to capture the glint of moonlight on snow and give it life, one might have ended up with a creature such as this. Its skin was pale, far paler than any of Lameta’s kind, but that word couldn’t fully describe something that went beyond the normal range of fair-to-dark that Lameta had ever seen on living skin. It did not seem organic, did not seem it should be malleable. In the moonlight, its hair glistened, also fair, almost sparkling. The garb it wore was more suited to the southlands, woven fabrics that would barely cut the winter wind, including soft-looking pants the color of chestnuts and a silky tunic in varying shades of turquoise with gold ties at the throat.
The only dark part about it was its eyes, which had no color Lameta could see, as if its pupils had expanded to fill the entire iris, to make use of every glint of light in the darkness.
“What are you?” Lameta asked, stepping toward the creature.
She knew she should probably be afraid. She could sense his power. If he weren’t the creature that had already killed one wolf and attacked another, it would be an impossible coincidence.
Her eyes told her she stood before an almost-frail young man whose slender body couldn’t possibly have the power to slog through the deep snow, much less assault a fully-grown wolf shapeshifter who also served as a border guard. But her other senses told her other things: for one, he didn’t smell human, or wolf, or snake, or bird. His scent was muted, almost imperceptible even at this close distance with the breeze blowing toward her, and instead of being the musk of a creature alive it was more like smoke and lightning. It was the smell of static about to burst into the frigid winter air.
And when he walked, moving toward her with languid grace, he didn’t make a sound. He did not crackle bits of ice on the frozen ground. She couldn’t hear his breath or heartbeat, and in the stillness at this distance she should have heard both.
At this distance.
She started, realizing he had come very, very close while she watched him like a bird hypnotized by a snake.
A growl rumbled up from her throat and she tensed, prepared to push him back if necessary.
He lifted one eyebrow, and said, “I don’t know, actually. I’ve only ever met one other of my kind. I have lived long, and still have no word for us.”
That struck her as unaccountably lonely. To not know what one was called.
She was Lameta, of the Frektane tribe. She was a wolf, a shapeshifter, a woman, a tender of the fire. She could describe herself in a dozen ways and roles and names.
“Do you have a name?” she asked.
He answered, first with a word she did not know, and then again: “Silver.”
The second version he gave was in her language, so she knew its meaning. She nodded; of course this creature would be called Silver, for that had to be what he was woven from. Silver and moonlight. Perhaps he belonged to the fairy-folk of the far west. She had heard them spoken of, though she knew nothing else about them.
“What was the first word you spoke?” she asked.
He looked amused by the question. “The same name,” he answered, “as I was originally called, in a now-dead language you would not know.”
This time she spoke her thought aloud: “That seems very sad.”
For some reason, the statement made him laugh.
“You pity me?” He asked it with intrigued amusement, not the offended irritation that often accompanied such words.
She considered the words, turning them over in her mind. “No,” she decided. “I don’t.” She decided not to follow that line of conversation, but to ask her own question instead. “Are you the one who killed the wolf two nights ago? And attacked another last night?”
“Yes.”
No denials, no questions, no sense that he felt anything about it except perhaps a vague curiosity as to how she might react.
“How?” No one knew how the first wolf had died. It would be convenient if she could murder Velyo the same way.
She had been planning to kill the pack leader in his bed at night, with a blade, but that would be messy and would necessitate fleeing afterwards so she would not be executed for his murder. If she could find a sure way to kill him that left no marks, and could perhaps be blamed on a mysterious stranger in the woods, she could claim ignorance afterward.
“Why?” Silver asked sardonically. “Did you have a wolf you planned to kill?”
His words were clearly meant to be a taunt. She surprised him when she answered, “Yes.”
Again the laugh, followed by the challenge, “Come closer and I’ll show you.”
That was a fox’s challenge to a mouse. “If I do, I wonder if I’ll walk away again.”
Voice soft, almost a lover’s purr, he said, “Dear wolf, you would not even make it out of this clearing if I chose to chase you.”
“Lameta,” she provided. “That is my name.”
Again, she had startled and perhaps amused him.
“I will make you a deal,” he offered. “Go back to your pack. Murder your wolf, if you can. I’ve found many people think they have the stomach for killing, right up until the time comes to actually do it. If you succeed, I’ll share my secrets with you.”
That wouldn’t help her kill Velyo discreetly, but since she planned to dispose of the Frektane leader at the first opportunity already, she wasn’t committing to do anything she wasn’t already intending. So she nodded, and said, “Agreed.”
His lips curled in a smile, and he said, “I’ll feed elsewhere tonight, then, so as not to spoil your hunt.”
He disappeared, leaving behind a swirl of icy powder that briefly moved in the empty space he left behind.
Lameta returned to camp and found a knife.
Chapter Fifteen: Politics and Consequences
Aubrey Karew had never wanted to be a politician, never wanted to play any role that involved fighting to protect a system of government or a group of old men in power.
As a human, he had wanted that role so little that he had defied every social norm put before him, nearly landed himself as a permanently indentured servant, and ended up sham-wed to an Athenian sorceress. She had given him glimpses of her magic, exchanging her knowledge of the arcane for the two things she lacked: a man’s body and a man’s name, both of which were needed in that era and city to claim property and manage other mundane tasks that were not considered the province of women.
She didn’t tell people where he was from or how he had found his way into her garden, and he didn’t tell people he had arrived in the middle of a ritual blood-sacrifice that had nothing to do the gods, and everything to do with her desire for power and immortality. He managed her properties and lived well off her wealth, and as long as he never attempted to claim husbandly “rights,” she called no authorities on the Spartan who had abandoned his military, country, and duty to his family and defected to the enemy.
So how, nearly two millennia after his death, had Aubrey ended up in a role where he had to debate policy and laws and convince others to have common sense—or at least a fear of retaliation—to avoid utter disaster?
He had spent most of the centuries after his change walking through lives, immersing himself in other civilizations and roles for as long as it interested him before he moved on. He had a knack for language strengthened by vampiric blood and the accompanying ability to read thoughts, so it wasn’t hard for him to study a people for a short time, then decide to join them. He put on and off roles, an actor and an anthropologist.
He saw civilizations rise and fall. Sometimes he participated, not encouraging the topple one way or another but intrigued to understand how the end happened. The one thing he never did was become overly invested, because he had learned from his earliest days that that was the way of society: it rose to prominence like a beautiful rose, sprawling and beautiful in the midsummer sun. Over time it spoiled, that same rose gone gangly and fallen, unkempt and heavy with years of undenied growth. And eventually it fell, and rotted.
So how had he ended up forming and running a town full of humans and vampires, most of which were his even more ancient elders, and now playing some kind of absurd liaison role to yet more vampires?
He didn’t want this authority.
Yet he had offered to go west, to visit the vampire stronghold there and decide if it should be “allowed” to continue. It seemed a ridiculous fool’s quest, even more ridiculous than their attempt to hammer out common laws for their kind, but Silver had a strange way of discussing that somehow led one to nod and agree and then walk away wondering why.
Aubrey wasn’t entirely convinced the vampiric elder wasn’t able to cloud and manipulate the minds of his fledglings and descendants just as casually as Aubrey could snare a human’s mind. Still, Aubrey had agreed, and he wasn’t entirely sure it had been against his will—after all, yes, there were unsettling rumors coming out of that area.
There had been unsettling rumors about Katama ever since Siete, the creator of all the vampiric lines, had changed her. Or, to be more accurate, there had been unsettling rumors about Katama’s twin sister Jeshickah. Supposedly, Katama rose early from her first grave and gave her blood to her twin before she had even fed. The act had nearly ended the potentially-immortal life Siete had just bestowed upon her. It had also been in violation of the one direct order Siete had given her.
Siete believed the sister was dangerous, and should never have been allowed to live.
For the first century, though, the two had lived peacefully at a manor-castle. They claimed to be the ladies of the manor and managed the estate profitably. They allied with some of the local shapeshifters, the lions—who had been nomadic and struggling for many generations—and together they seemed prosperous. Certainly human authorities would have railed against them, considering them demons or worse, but their actions seemed no more vicious or cruel than any other feudal lord. Their skirmishes with neighbors over lands or resources were no more common or bloody than humans’ skirmishes with each other; in fact, they were often less brutal, since they were resolved with quick efficiency. Vampires and shapeshifters had little trouble countering a human siege.
Then the Inquisition had come. Somehow, the church had captured one of the lions, and those shapeshifters had turned on their vampiric benefactors. The Liadan manor was attacked by “holy” forces that would not back down to fear or reason.
Rather than throw themselves against the madness of the Inquisition, the ladies of Liadan relocated. They went with a handful of shapeshifter groups, who traveled north and east over bridges and water to territory the Catholic Church had no power over, made whatever alliances they needed to make with human civilizations in that new land, and started their manor anew.
The shapeshifters they accompanied included snakes, birds, and wolves. But no lions. After the lions’ betrayal, the ladies’ wrath against them had not been extinguished until every last member of that species was gone.
It was the first hint that Siete might have been right.
#
Now, Aubrey stood before a vast beast of a building. In structure, it seemed part castle and part ranch: it was shaped like the keep of a castle, with a central courtyard surrounded by square rings, but it was low and sprawling, a single story in most places, with no turrets or parapets.
Architecturally, it was odd, unlike any building he had seen before, but impressive in its functioning and design. As he explored, he could see the hand of Grecian or perhaps Roman architects. Or maybe Aztec? He wasn’t an expert in architecture, but he had walked through many worlds over the years, and he recognized that the use of cisterns and aqueducts built into the building’s upper level was not European in design. This was not a place where waste would be thrown through the windows and rooted through by hogs in the streets.
This was not a place with windows at all.
If there had been only vampires inside, there would not have been much need for sanitation. Vampires did not sweat, and most substances fell off their skin rather than sticking. They did not need to urinate or defecate, or even cook, since they did not need to eat anything but the fresh running blood of their prey. When they did need to bathe, it was easy to get to a place where facilities were available. There was no need therefore for elaborate systems of sewerage.
Yet here it was, clearly, because there weren’t just vampires inside.
As he watched from a distance, Aubrey saw humans and multiple varieties of shapeshifter. Avians and serpiente he knew from old; they had fled here and been offered shelter and support by the ladies of Liadan. For a minute Aubrey thought the feline shapeshifters he smelled were the lions of before, that perhaps some had been spared, but then he saw one change and realized their second forms were the smaller, leaner mountain lions of this area, not the heavy-bodied and maned felines who had allied with the ladies in Europe. There was also an unmistakable glitter of magic around them.
There was an unmistakable glitter of magic around all of it. The building was bespelled, as were areas of the grounds, which had been planted and maintained by a master gardener.
He could see the hand of the artists’ line, Kendra’s descendants in the architecture, the murals that covered the outside of the building, the selection and maintenance of the garden, and even in the careful crossing of plants that must have been required to grow some of these specimens. For example, near the door there grew a rose so dark a red that even his vampiric eyes had trouble discerning the tint in the moonlight.
Those roses seemed to symbolize everything before him: so much time, so much effort, had gone into creating this facade of strength, beauty, and power. But come winter, these roses would be bare and black, carrying rosehips instead of their showy black blooms.
He was still observing, not intending to interact yet, when he saw a raven shapeshifter rise, consult briefly with other avians arranged formally on the roof of the building—sentries or living statuary, Aubrey wasn’t sure—and then fly directly toward him.
The raven transformed into a woman in her middle years, wearing a uniform of black slacks and loose white shirt under a wine-red top that was closer in style to a man’s vest than a woman’s bodice. Avians tended toward such practical stuff, including slacks on their women as commonly as trousers, so that didn’t surprise him.
What did surprise him was the direct way she landed in front of him, gave a half-bow, and said, “Mistress Jeshickah extends her invitation to join her at her salon for introductions.”
Equal parts surprise and amusement took him. “Does she indeed?”
The raven did not seem discomforted by his response, but simply sketched another bow and asked, “May I take your name, and your card if you have one, and let her know you will be in presently?”
“I suspect I will get there before you,” he pointed out.
“I would believe your kind can run faster than I can fly,” the guard agreed affably. “May I take your name back to her?”
It was not the first time Aubrey had encountered well-trained servants, and faced equally-unflappable butlers or doormen or whatever title this bird claimed.
“You may tell her Aubrey Karew, of Silver’s line, is here to visit her,” he offered.
“Yes, Sir.” The raven gave another bow, then changed shape again and winged toward the building.
Aubrey shook his head, and moved the not-muscle in his power that would let him travel the same distance instantly. All this pomp seemed ridiculous, when he could appear inside the same door without—
Magic slapped back at him, crawling over his skin and through his veins, and forcing him back where he had come from. He felt the parts of his being, rather than coalescing gently where he wanted to be, sizzling back into place where he had previously been.
The sensation was more acutely unpleasant than actually painful, but this was the first time since his change he had been denied immediate entrance to any location he could consider in his mind. It was irritating.
Unnerving.
He wished he remembered more of the sorcery he had learned. He could see magic, but when he had taken Ather’s blood any spellwork he had known had been transformed into raw power, not control. He was no witch. So he had no way of knowing if any other surprises awaited him inside Midnight’s ensorcelled walls.
You gave your name and accepted the invitation, he reminded himself. You will certainly be judged a fool and a coward if you decide you are too scared to walk through the front door.
#
Chapter Sixteen: Silver’s Line
Wolves are creatures of seasonal migration, and true to her nature, the immortal Lametia continued to roam after her change. Her territory grew larger.
She didn’t want to stay among any of the shapeshifters, so she sought out human city-states. There she took a new name for herself, one she felt was more fitting, based on the word the Greeks used to describe the pure essence that the gods breathed: Ather. It was how she felt, filled with new blood and new life, and free.
About two and a half centuries after her change, it was the sorcerer who first attracted Ather’s attention in Athens, not the sorcerer’s apprentice.
Cressida was twenty-one, and lived on a combination of the generous dowry she had been given upon marriage to her first husband and her inheritance from said first husband.
The man she lived with and called her husband was not only not her first husband, but was not a citizen or even an Athenian. Their neighbors didn’t seem to note this fact, which was surprising, since the man brazenly eschewed Athenian social norms and spoke a Doric dialect of Greek. Magic served as disguise.
It was a type of magic Ather would be quite interested to understand.
The first time Ather came to call, the false-husband arrived home from the market to find them socializing in the andron, a room traditionally reserved for men entertaining their male guests. He paused at the doorway and looked at Cressida, raising one brow in question. She nodded at him, and he passed by without another word. Ather heard him continue on to the kitchen, where he gave instruction to the slaves preparing food there, a task that normally would have belonged to the woman of the house.
Perhaps noticing that Ather’s attention had strayed as she listened, Cressida remarked, “If a woman wants to maintain a household and property, it is necessary to have a husband. I caught this one sneaking through my back yard one night.”
“I don’t believe that’s the traditional manner of finding a husband.”
Ather laughed, intrigued. She had come to Cressida because she had heard whispers of a sorceress who made her way independently in this city, which was so unilaterally ruled by men, and wanted to see if she might enjoy independence in the same way.
“I didn’t care for the one my father found for me. Once Aubrey dropped himself in my lap—figuratively speaking—I decided it would be expedient to replace him.” Cressida shrugged. “None of the slaves objected. My first husband treated them as badly as he treated me.”
She waited for Ather to respond, her gaze steady and challenging, clearly wanting to know if Ather would object to the implied murder.
“I’ve changed my fortune in much the same way, in the past,” Ather acknowledged instead.
The acceptability of slaying their mates obliquely noted and agreed upon, they moved on to more important topics.
“I assume your magic keeps the neighbors from noticing the switch?” Ather guessed.
Perhaps tired of banal chatter, Cressida asked, “What are you?”
How often Ather had wondered that herself, since she had first asked those words of Silver in the woods. In her wandering, she had encountered myths and stories of demons that drank blood, but none fit her reality or that of the man who had given her this immortality. She was no scorned harlot hunting infants or mothers for vengeance, or unable to let go of a lover; neither did she have body parts of a crow, lion, or donkey.
“I am what I am,” she said. “I’ve found no word or story to describe my kind. I believe we are too rare. The one who created me didn’t know where our power comes from either.”
“Hmm.” Cressida took a sip of her wine—awful stuff, in Ather’s opinion, and worse when watered down in the Greek fashion—and seemed to consider. “Would you like to know more?” she asked. “As you know, I’m a scholar of power. I learned my art from my mother and I’ve studied a decade further on my own to achieve what I have. But almost everything I can do through sacrifice, ritual, will and concentration, you have through some innate gift of blood. Perhaps we can help each other.”
Ignoring the politely-offered wine at her own elbow, Ather sat back and considered. “What are you asking of me?”
She didn’t know this sorceress well enough to want to grant her immortality, if that was the request.
“A chance to study you,” Cressida answered. “I do not want to be what you are. I have no desire to tie myself to an eternity as an undead thing drinking nothing but blood. But if you will allow me, I might be able to tell where your power comes from, and in the process I might learn more of how to wield such magic.”
Despite the modest magic she had been born with, Ather was no sorceress or witch herself. She was intrigued by the offer, as such investigation was beyond her own abilities. Any risk of betrayal by the human sorceress seemed low.
She knew nothing of elementals, or why standing before an altar to one and offering blood bound to another might go badly.
The family altar in Cressida’s courtyard was dedicated to Enyo, the sister of war, the goddess of destruction who brought whole cities to ruin during battles. She was Cressida’s family god. To Enyo Cressida’s family had always made their sacrifices, and from her they besought favors. She was the root of their sorcery.
Like all such stories, it is impossible to know whether the Greek worship of this goddess brought the elemental into being, or if the elemental existed already and was drawn to the humans’ worship. Regardless, Cressida had bound herself to one of the immortal powers, which wore the guise of one of the Greek goddesses and asked for sacrifices in exchange for power and mercy.
Cressida invited Aubrey to the courtyard for the ritual as part of their agreement: he would pose as her husband for legal reasons and accept the unorthodox arrangement of the household, and in exchange she would instruct him in the ways of power and sorcery.
Cressida cast a circle of protection and control, with herself, Ather and Aubrey inside, and then called the attention of her goddess. Rather than sacrificing the blood of an animal this time, she used a knife consecrated to Enyo to cut along the flesh of Ather’s forearm and let that magical blood spill onto the altar. Her intention was that the powerful sacrifice would grant her not only understanding, but a boon as well.
Cressida, Ather, and Aubrey knew nothing of the lion-eagles and the birth of the Macht witches. They had never seen what happens when one elemental invades another’s place of worship. They could not know what danger they courted.
Power shot through the blood, through the altar, through the sorceress bound to Enyo and the once-wolf blood-drinker twice-bound to Leona. Of the two, Leona was far stronger by that time, but this was a place dedicated to Enyo and the circle had been drawn in her name, so she had an advantage.
The battle left both women sprawled, scalded and battered, neither elemental a clear victor but both enraged.
Ather, without needing any prodding from Leona, assumed betrayal and turned toward the sorceress with a snarl.
Cressida pushed herself up on one trembling arm, saw the blood-drinker’s threatening posture and croaked, “I didn’t mean to—”
She broke off and grimaced, hunching in pain. A wave of hostile energy whipped through Ather at the same time, pulling at the power in her veins, which screamed at the insult.
Cressida waved a hand to break the circle and dismiss the magic, but the wall remained as solid as stone. Enyo had no chance at beating a child of Leona if that child had access to Leona’s full power, but within this circle, Enyo could win.
The knowledge reached all of them, intrinsic.
Enyo did not count on the pride and honor of her sorcerer. Cressida had invited this guest into her home and into her circle, and one does not betray a guest or allow one to be harmed.
“What do you need?” she asked Ather—and asked also the elemental who was howling inside her, cut off from most of its power by the sorceress’s circle.
The question was a formality. The answer was obvious.
“Blood.”
Cressida was an honorable hostess, well versed in the Greek value of xenia, but even if her blood hadn’t been bound to Enyo, she was not about to offer her throat to a furious and starving vampire. Not when there was an alternative.
It turned out her apprentice and pseudo-husband could have one more use. It would be a pain to replace him, but desperate times and all.
Many Athenian men would disagree, given the agreements he had made and his willingness to disregard social norms, but Aubrey was not an idiot. He could predict what was about to happen. Unfortunately he was also unable to break Cressida’s circle of power, and a mortal will never be faster or physically stronger than a vampire.
If he and Cressida had allied, they and Enyo could have fought back and won, but as a good hostess to an injured guest Cressida instead stepped back and gave her blessing. She closed her eyes and focused on reigning in Enyo’s power as Ather turned her attention on the mortal man.
Having learned to wrestle and fight from the time of his earliest memories, Aubrey scrabbled out of Ather’s first attempted hold, and nearly broke from the second.
She growled, a sound that shot through him as eerily as a tiger’s, rumbling his bones. When next she gripped him, it was with a fierce, bone-crushing strength that left no leeway for escape no matter what strategy one attempted to exploit—there simply weren’t any weak points to the hold, because Ather’s muscles had gone hard as iron.
One hand went from his hair to his cheek, aware that he would willingly rip out his own hair to get away from the predator’s grasp. Her other arm wrapped his waist, pinning him against her with one arm pressed against his side.
That left one hand free, but what little leverage he had was useless, and he quickly discovered that her flesh was impervious to scrabbling fingers and nails. Even her eyelids seemed made of stone.
And her teeth were a serpent’s fangs. They sank effortlessly into the large vein at his throat, piercing it without spilling a drop anywhere except into her mouth.
In her injured, magic-scalded state, Ather made no attempt to cloud his mind. There was just her vise-like grip, sharp teeth at his throat, and the clawing, burning sensation of blood being drawn from his body. He fought against the imprisonment, the pain, and the certainty that she would kill him this way, as desperately as the fox had fought to escape the boy’s shirt in the old Spartan parable.
And Ather showed just as much care for his struggles.
Only once his struggles had slowed to the fluttering gasps of a butterfly, and his heart had started to skip beats in a bubbling cry for help, did Ather’s hold on him lessen at all. Without releasing him, she relaxed her own body so she was sitting and did not need to support all of his weight any more.
He knew with certainty that she intended to pull every last drop of the red humor from his form and, spider-like, leave him a dessicated corpse.
He also knew, somewhere in the last sparkling vestiges of awareness left to his blood-deprived brain, that Cressida had left the ritual knife on the altar—which was now within his reach.
He had the thought. Ather heard the thought in his mind. Her grip on him started to tighten, but her satiation slowed her, and he was able to reach for the knife before she could think to gain control of his free arm.
By the time she did adjust her hold, he had the handle in his hand.
He turned the blade on her, slicing cleanly down the meat of the arm that reached to stop him. The knife was not as powerful as some he would hold later, but it had been imbued with magic that was now especially hostile toward Ather. The wound did not immediately heal.
It bled.
He drove the knife toward her body, aiming for a killing stroke, but even without her vampiric speed he was fighting against the blackness that rode his vision and the weakness in his muscles. He was dying, whether or not he won this fight.
With a hiss, she released his throat and dodged his attack. Rather than a body-piercing blow, he cut open her shoulder.
Now the scent of blood reached him—not his own, but the rich blood of the immortal who had tried to kill him. Had successfully killed him. Death was imminent. But more pressing was thirst, that singular thirst that takes a vampiric victim who has been brought to the precipice through loss of blood and then allowed to hang there.
Dropping the knife, all rationality gone, he lunged.
Ather, either too surprised or too distracted by the elemental and the other buffeting magics to fend him off, failed to keep him from grabbing her wounded forearm and bringing it to his own lips.
What little sorcery he knew, he applied toward lulling her for a few moments. Just to let him… he wasn’t sure what his goal was, he wasn’t rational enough for goals… he needed… this.
And after those few moments, Ather decided on her own, Fine.
Silver had taken Ather in the same way, had brought her struggling and desperate to the brink of death before offering his blood. Later, he had explained to her that he had done so with mortals close to a dozen times—and only one other had survived.
She would give Aubrey this one cast of the dice.
She relaxed, sat with her back against the wall of power, and let him drink.
Chapter Seventeen: Politics and Consequences
It was an unlikely gathering, one that happened only every few decades at most—less often, if any one of them had their say. Silver was the only one able to call for such a meeting and expect every member of his bloodline to show up.
Aubrey had never particularly liked his own father—he had barely known the man—and he didn’t think he liked Silver much better, but he did respect him. Sometimes. At least, he acknowledged that he was sometimes worth respecting.
So he was there, on one of the mismatched seating options that ringed what in another town might have been a meeting hall. It was a warm, comfortable room, though not a beautiful one; the furnishings and decor were as eclectic and mismatched as the vampires that utilized them. Aubrey had chosen a couch where he could lounge comfortably and alone, a la the Roman style.
Ather, his blood-mother, had claimed a more formal, hard-backed chair carved of mahogany. It was almost throne-like in grandeur, though it had no gilt or cushion.
On a Chesterfield couch nearby, Fala sat with her two lovers, Moira and Jager. Moira lay sprawled across Fala’s lap, her feet up on the tufted leather arm of the couch. Jager leaned on Fala’s other side, one arm across her shoulders.
Though that trio bickered plenty, Aubrey had missed the truly contentious part of their relationship by a few hundred years. All three of them were significantly older than he was, and they had settled from bitter rivalry into a companionable arrangement long before he was born.
Aubrey thought he had learned Jager’s true background one night when, drunk on shapeshifter blood, Jager had let slip that he had been all but a prince in Egypt before a new king had risen and chosen Set as his patron deity rather than Horus. Jager’s family, part of the cult of Horus, suddenly found themselves destitute and vilified.
The only reason Aubrey doubted the story was that, five minutes later, Jager had contradicted it and suggested the change went the other way around: he had been a pauper on the edge of ruin before the new king, and suddenly…
In neither version did he share Fala’s story, though Aubrey had the impression Jager had met her not long after his own change, in a similar place and circumstance.
Moira had been born half a world away. Supposedly she had been a witch, child of a line of witches that had been isolated from the others by thousands of miles and an ocean between after some cranky vampire tried to teach a hunter a lesson. Yes, that was the extent of the history as Moira told it: “Some cranky vampire.”
The last of them in attendance was Kala, Ather’s second fledgling and the youngest of their line. She had a tendency to refer to herself as a plague bird, making light of the fact that she was one of a handful of immortals who had been snatched away from a particularly devastating outbreak of that disease in Europe and given immortality—Kala in their line, but others in Kendra’s and Katama’s and among the Triste witches.
The world was becoming full of immortal predators.
Abruptly and without intending to, Aubrey found he had met Silver’s gaze.
Most of them could walk into a human village and pass for human, as long as they avoided the witches and other practitioners who could sense auras and see what they truly were. Silver had left that easy camouflage behind.
In the thousands of years since his change, he had come to resemble his namesake: skin more like moonlight than flesh, and hair the very fair blond most children grew out of. Aubrey had asked him once if he might be related to the falcon shapeshifters, since that would explain both his power and his coloring, and he had calmly pointed out that he had walked the world millennia before the Nesera’rsh had been born to dance in worship.
Silver claimed to have lived in a time where ice covered places that were now land and sea, and where the beasts who roamed the snow were larger and fiercer than any left alive today.
He also claimed to have killed dozens of mortals in his attempts to share his blood before he finally succeeded with Jager. After much fatal experimentation, he had decided that magic was a requisite. Each member of his line since had been powerful even before their change: sorcerer, witch, or shapeshifter.
It was easier to pass their blood on now, as if the power that made them immortal had become stronger over the years and generations rather than being diluted as their numbers grew.
“That is what we are here to discuss,” Silver said, as if picking up a conversation. “There are starting to be too many of us, and those who have been born in the last few centuries are not content to be solitary predators. They want to be kings.”
“Queens,” Aubrey interjected. Silver’s world had been cold, and Aubrey was fairly sure it had also been patriarchal. He had trouble adapting whenever some portion of the world went through a swing where women had power.
Silver shot him a glare at the interruption. “I was speaking in generalities.”
“I don’t believe Katama and Jeshickah would approve of your generalities,” he replied. “Since you asked me to go there to get a better impression of the situation, I thought you might want my input. Would you prefer I wait until you’re done being dramatic?”
Silver might be ancient and powerful, but Aubrey had never hesitated to kick a metaphorical hornet’s nest out of fear, and despite his eternal life, he had no patience for Silver’s posturing.
“Go ahead, Aubrey,” Fala yawned. She enjoyed these meetings even less than he did.
“The rumors that say they are founding an empire are correct,” Aubrey answered. “It’s more than a handful of vampires playing queens and kings out there. They have three of the shapeshifter nations completely subjugated, others allied as trading partners, and are reaching yet further. They have witches on their side; I don’t know how many but there’s magic woven into every stone of the keep, which incidentally is architecturally brilliant.”
“Please do not bore us with details about buildings,” Fala pleaded. “I assume if we’re here it’s because we’re deciding if we should kill them or not. Can we skip to that?”
“I mention the building,” Aubrey added, “because it’s evidence of how many allies among our kind they have. I could see the work of at least a dozen members of Kendra’s line as I walked through those halls. I assure you, Jeshickah doesn’t know the first thing about how to design drainage systems or prune hedges or paint a fresco. She is…”
He trailed off, momentarily at a loss for words. How to describe the self-styled Mistress of Midnight?
“Jeshickah and her fledglings have power beyond what they gained from the change,” he said. “I think Jeshickah made an elemental bond at some point in her human life.” He glanced at Fala, who like him had studied sorcery before her change, and knew the kind of power those deals could give. “It makes her unnaturally charismatic. She and her fledglings call what they do art, but it’s the most unnerving kind of destruction I have ever seen in my life.”
“Quite a statement, when spoken by a man who danced when Nero fiddled,” Kala remarked.
“You know Nero played a lyre, not a fiddle,” Moira corrected idly. “The fiddle is a recent affectation of the human bard.”
“I’m a fan of the bard,” Kala replied. “So Jeshickah and her fledglings break things?” she prompted.
“They break people,” Aubrey clarified. “I’ve seen slavery, in dozens of forms and from both sides of the ownership line. But I have never seen a creature as hollow inside as one of the poor wretches Midnight calls its ‘masterpieces.’”
“Can we please just agree to kill them, and get on with this?” Fala suggested again. “I don’t need all the details. If you think we should get rid of them, I’m game. Let’s do it.”
Aubrey shook his head. “They’re entrenched already, with dozens of allies. If we kill them, we’ll face the backlash.”
“I do not want to set a precedent that we kill our own kind when we dislike them,” Silver added.
“Then get a witch to do it,” Moira suggested, blithely proffering the services of her long-distant relations as if they could be hired for coin. “There are scores of them up and down the eastern colony just waiting for some evil thing to stumble across their path so they can kill it. Point them at this Midnight, and if it’s as terrible as you seem to think, they will recognize it as a threat and turn their blades against it.”
“They are not likely to stumble across an empire that is thousands of miles across uncharted wilderness,” Kala pointed out.
“Uncharted by you,” Moira replied. “Uncharted by the English and Spanish and French. Others cross that land all the time.” She looked at Jager. “Can you get your new friend to give them a hint?”
Jager scowled. “She isn’t a friend. All I did was give her permission to stay here.”
#
As you have doubtless already divined, Reader, I was not present at this meeting. I heard the details many years later, mostly from Aubrey, though Jager and my own power filled in gaps.
If I had been there… oh, so many things would have been different. Instead, they considered and dismissed me, not just at that moment but again later when even the briefest thought turned my way would have altered the course of so many fates.
#
At that time, Jager added, “Besides, Lila is still in mourning her old life. She won’t go back to the witches while relatives who knew her are still alive.”
Moira sighed, thwarted.
“There are other ways to drop hints,” Ather suggested. “It shouldn’t be too hard to find the witches. Once we do, we’ll let them hear a bit about this Midnight, and make sure they find a guide capable of crossing the distance. As long as we are subtle in our work, no one needs to know we set it in motion. The witches can fix this problem for us, without any vampire ever raising hand against another.”
She looked at Silver, who nodded, then looked at Aubrey. “You’ve been there. Do you think it will work?”
Aubrey could only shrug. “As Moira has said, that’s what witches do. They hunt down the hunters who threaten humans. If they see what Midnight is, they will throw themselves against it. I’m just not sure if they’ll win.”
“There’s no harm in trying,” Fala said. She dumped Moira off her lap and shrugged out from under Jager’s arm so she could stand. “It sounds like a plan. Ather, thanks for volunteering to start that rumor going. I’m going hunting.”
She disappeared, dismissing herself from the meeting without waiting for permission.
Not that Silver would give “permission.” He knew he didn’t have that much control over them.
Silver sighed and gave a simple nod. “I suppose it is what we will try, for now.”
“I’ll find a guide who can conveniently offer services to get the witches where they need to go,” Moira volunteered, before she too disappeared.
“I’ll join Ather hunting witches,” Aubrey found himself saying. Why not? It would be palate-cleansing, after the bile of Midnight.
Chapter Eighteen: Katama’s Line
There was a macabre race running, with three contestants:
Contestant one was the illness that had lurked deep inside her for many years, at first manifesting as bouts of fatigue and aching legs at night, and progressing to fevers and a cough that brought up rust-colored phlegm. Until recently, it had seemed certain to end her life, probably before the next year was out, but now it had fallen behind.
The next contestant was a newer illness, evidenced by the red streaks running up and down her arm from a rat bite on her hand. She had tried to shoo the thing away in the middle of the night, and it had nipped at her. Bereft of anything else to do, she had held her opposite hand over the wound until it stopped bleeding, but now the bitten hand was swollen and painful. The wound seeped foul fluid, and she had lost control of most of the fingers on that side.
She never would have let the wound get to such a state, but there wasn’t much she could do to treat an injury while locked in a prison cell.
And that was the third contestant for her life’s end: a noose, or a fire, depending on what charge the master of Liadan manor decided fit her best. Would the charge be theft and poaching, to be punished on the gibbet, or heresy and witchcraft, to be punished at the stake?
The rope seemed swifter and less painful, and she might have been granted that, if she hadn’t assaulted the lord of the manor and threatened to curse him and all his progeny to a slow death if he dared set a hand on her sister. Those words—and the knife she had managed to plant in his leg before they overpowered her—would probably earn her a death by fire.
If they made the decision soon, before the blood infection took her.
It would surely spoil their fun if she managed to die tonight, before they could hoist her up before the crowds and execute her.
Jeshickah shifted in her cell, trying in vain to find a position that didn’t hurt. Trying to find a place to sit that wasn’t filthy from the previous inhabitants of this cell, and the animals and insects that scurried through it.
Her head ached. Her eyes ached. Every joint and muscle in her body ached. The fever raging within her should have scalded the dirt below, should have raised steam and lava.
She closed her eyes, and thought, “Where did you go, Leshan?”
Sometimes in her fever-dreams, she danced with a magical creature that called itself Leshan. He had been her frequent companion since the first time a serious illness had nearly claimed her life, when she had been barely fourteen. Before Katama had brought her to Dinah Alina, and Dinah had healed her.
“I never should have left there.”
She was too restless to stay and study with that witch. She had meant to go back, someday, but seasons turned and then she had ended up here…
A hand brushed the back of her cheek, cool against her fevered skin. “Leshan?” she asked.
She tried to open her eyes, but it was hard. The lids felt heavy, and even when she had them up, her eyes were dry and hard to focus.
“No, it’s me.”
The whispered voice came from a woman whose face had once been a mirror to her own—before her own had become so haggard and drawn by illness.
“Katama?” She gasped the name, then coughed. Her breath abandoned her, and the coughing continued until she could do nothing but gasp and spit bloody mucus on the floor before her. She weezed in a breath and managed to say, “How did you get here? I—don’t. If you’ve escaped, run. I can’t—”
More coughing took her.
She hadn’t been able to run. That was how they had ended up here in the first place. Katama could have disappeared into the woods, as their younger sister Acise had, but trying to help Jeshickah had slowed her down.
“I did it,” Katama said. “I finally convinced Siete to help me. I had to all but disown you to him, but I knew you would forgive my lying words.”
“What?”
She couldn’t make sense of what her twin was saying. The words swam through her awareness.
“I don’t know if I can save you,” Katama continued, “but I’ll try. I mean to give you my blood, like he gave me his.” There was a tremor of nervousness in her voice, which finally focused Jeshickah’s eyes. She didn’t need to ask the question aloud, though. Katama said, “Yes, it’s dangerous. For both of us. He said I would be weak at first, that I would need days of rest and feeding to gain my strength. He said he didn’t think he could change you even if he wanted to, that you were too ill and wouldn’t survive it. So we might both die tonight. But I don’t see we have any choice.”
Jeshickah followed just enough to understand.
She knew Katama had been courting the Lady of Liadan’s immortal visitor, Siete, a man who supposedly had been that lady’s first love and who still visited her now that she was declining in her elderly years. Katama had identified Siete and deliberately caught his eye, and then had done everything she could to keep his attention, to woo him and finally to convince him to share his magic.
Jeshickah didn’t consider saying, “You’re safe now. Go and live without me. Don’t risk yourself for me.”
She knew Katama would not leave her behind. It was not a conversation worth wasting.
And even if Katama would, she could not. They had been bound magically, fates and lives entwined, years before. It had been the only way to save Jeshickah’s life then, just as this was the only way to save both of their lives now.
“What do I need to do?” Jeshickah asked, instead.
“Just don’t fight me,” Katama said. “This might hurt. I’m sorry.”
She lifted Jeshickah, demonstrating impossible strength in her frost-cold arms, and bared her throat.
Jeshickah had seen Siete feed before. She knew what to expect.
She felt Katama shudder, and gag once, doubtless at the taste of the foulness in her blood. But she continued, until the pain started to subside in favor of a vague sense of loss and lightness.
Far away, a body was in pain. Far away, a fever burned, and a heart struggled to beat. So far away…
Dizzy and nauseated, yet drifting, dreaming, she accepted when her sister offered new blood in return.
She could feel the power flutter between them, unsure of its course, unsure there was enough magic in it to sustain both of their bodies.
I am here, as well, Leshan whispered.
Somewhere in the magic, Jeshickah felt a struggle, like two rams caught with their horns locked. They shoved at each other, shredding the ground beneath them… only in this case, the ground was Jeshickah’s and Katama’s bodies.
Eventually they both fell, limp and spent.
They were found there in the morning when the bailiff came to bring Jeshickah for her execution.
It would have been fire.
Instead, they were buried in a pauper’s grave, far outside the bounds of the town to avoid transferring any contagion to the serfs within.
Thankfully, it was a shallow grave. Four days later, when Jeshickah woke, she was able to scrabble herself free of the earth. She fed on the first living beast she stumbled across, a stag in its prime, then unburied Katama with her bare hands, and roused her under the starlight with the freshly spilled blood of yet another deer.
They both washed, then returned to Liadan, hungry for something more filling than venison.
The Lady of Liadan, Siete’s fond companion, had died naturally and quietly in her sleep during the previous four days.
Her son, the Lord of Liadan, died slowly and painfully over the next four months. Jeshickah would have made it last longer, punishment for what he had done to her and to her sister, but she did not yet have the art she would learn in later centuries and humans were such fragile creatures.
Eventually they tracked down their sister Acise, and Katama made her immortal as well. Together, the three of them took over the manor that had tried to claim them. Katama had a knack for managing property, and Jeshickah had a knack for commanding people. Acise performed most negotiations with other lords and kings, as well as tax-men and highway-men alike, even when that meant donning a man’s garb and passing as the other sex to perform her tasks.
Under them, Liadan prospered and its people thrived.
Jeshickah ruled with a light hand, trusting those she led to manage their own tasks, and being careful not to take so much from the serfs who worked the land that they struggled to survive and might be tempted to rebel. It seemed the best way to maintain the lands and the people on them, including the lion shapeshifters who eventually came to join, bringing skills as artisans and knights.
The manor ran beautifully; crops and people flourished; and the three ladies who ruled lived busy but luxurious lives.
Until betrayal burned it to the ground.
Chapter Nineteen: In the Forests of the Night
The next stories fit together around another you may have already heard: the story of a young woman named Rachel, who was given a black rose and with it was brought into a world of creatures she had never imagined and never wanted to join.
You know now how she and her brother were born with powerful magic in their veins, yet raised by a man who was perfectly human, in the heart of one of the most superstitious and potentially violent eras in the world.
It is a miracle that they made it through the 1692 witch trials intact, without anyone pointing a finger toward them due to the odd mishaps that sometimes occur around untrained witches–those of my line being particularly prone to fire–and of course their brilliant, beaten-gold hair and eyes, legacy of a hawk ancestor whose wings were not passed down to them.
All that time, I kept away from my children, afraid my presence would taint them and expose them to the very world I left to protect them from. I never considered how cruel a sense of humor fate truly has.
Their father did his best to protect them. He could not teach them how to control their power, but he knew ways to suppress it.
By the time my daughter was nearing womanhood, her gift had been tamped down to a deep ember, one unlikely to spill out without dedicated time and training. My son still had occasional mishaps, ones he was mostly able to hide, but which his father had recognized for what they were. Peter had decided to swallow his pride and try to find my kin, to ask their help.
Too little, too late.
Meanwhile, the uncontrolled, secret power left Alexander desperate.
It seemed a godsend when a woman approached him and said she could help. It was a godsend, or so she claimed.
She called herself Priscilla, and claimed to be the widow of a preacher. She claimed that a still, small voice—God’s voice, speaking to her during her prayers—had told her she must help him, so she would.
They started simply, with exercises to control breath and mind and body. She taught him to recognize and regulate his own pulse.
More than a century before, the playwright William Shakespeare claimed, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” Alexander would never have seen or read that tale, but he knew that temptation comes in many forms, some beautiful. Still, his innocence and desperate need could not compete with her determination and guile.
His teacher was none other than Pandora, one of the most powerful Triste witches—a lineage that has more in common with the vampires than they do to my kind—in the world. She used another name, feigned piety, and worked with Alexander carefully, so he would not associate the skills she taught him with the evil in the scripture he read nightly and heard at weekly meeting.
If Pandora had not eventually doomed both of my children to the life I never wanted them to lead, I might have been grateful to her. In a way, I suppose I still must be. Without her intervention, Alexander probably would not have survived to adulthood without killing someone dear to him, destroying something that could not be explained away as a freak accident, or being accused of witchcraft and hanged—more than likely all three together. His power was too strong, as it had been since he was an infant.
Pandora sensed that strength. She wanted it. And so she claimed him, undeterred by the fact that were he asked bluntly Alexander would have chosen death before witchcraft.
Did she know who he was? Who I was? I have to imagine she did, but Pandora would not have troubled herself over the opinions of Macht witches or vampires. Even if she had wanted to seek me out, she would have been barred by the ancient vampires who claimed Mayhem as their territory.
She tried to avoid such confrontations. The alliance between the vampires and the Tristes was like a treaty between lions and jaguars, a peace preserved only by the ocean between their native lands.
“To try” is a funny, ironic, and sometimes devastating word. It goes well with the quote, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry,” a line I would not have been alive to ever read if not for how very awry my life had gone.
#
The world is a wide and varied place, and sometimes two people—or creatures, if you’re the type to argue whether or not that word applies only to natural humans—but sometimes two people encounter each other out of sheer coincidence. It must be that way, for otherwise stories would never happen.
That said, it is also true that power is drawn to power.
As Leona was drawn to the cave lions and owls, forcing my ancestors to clash with them; as the hawks and witches were drawn together; as a Triste witch was drawn to an abandoned but powerful witch child; so too are vampires attracted to latent power, even if they do not always recognize it as such.
Some of them can sense magic independently, for they studied sorcery in their youth, but even those who cannot perceive it consciously may catch the flavor of power in the air and desire it.
Aubrey was one of the former: he recognized magic when he felt it, and he felt it immediately in the young woman who walked demurely through Boston, with her molten gaze politely down and a cap failing to entirely cover her impossibly golden hair.
The magic in her was deeply subsumed, but it lay there like hot coals, ready to be breathed to life.
He had come to Boston looking for witches, but this wasn’t what he had expected.
She smelled like a witch. She glowed like a witch, with an aura that despite being suppressed by her own instinctual fear was only as well-hidden as her hair under her bonnet. Yet she walked like a human.
When he put himself deliberately in her path, she was startled. For an instant, she looked up at his face, and her eyes met his black ones. Hers widened further, but with surprise, not recognition. She did not know what he was.
Then her gaze dropped and she murmured, “Excuse me, sir, I must not have been watching where I was going,” before stepping back and moving around him as if she had been the one in error.
She had no idea what power bubbled in her veins.
She could be made aware.
Since his youth as a human, Aubrey had been unable to resist reaching toward a burning flame. No matter how many times he had burned himself, he had never learned the lesson.
He resolved to be cautious this time, and to get a better sense of this should-be witch before meddling too much, but he had no intention of leaving her alone. He listened while she spoke with her father, who had come with her to town. Aubrey didn’t care about most of the conversation—cod and fertilizer and molasses and such—but he listened until he knew what town she came from.
She was with her father, a man named Peter whose body held the marks of a fisherman turned farmer. He had none of her glow; her power must come from her mother, who was not in evidence. She had to be dead or otherwise gone from the family, or else she never would have let her child get to such an age without mastery of her power.
As he listened further, there was some talk of coming to this area to try to reconnect with old cousins, but it seemed they were not in port that day. Were those absent cousins on his side, Aubrey wondered, or the mother’s side? Was he trying to locate relatives?
It would be a wise thing to do; an untrained witch could be dangerous.
Unluckily for him—but luckily for Aubrey’s plans—there were few if any Macht witches left in Boston, as Aubrey and Ather had discovered as they started poking about looking for them. The area was apparently too contentious for them, and they had been exceptionally conspicuous during the smallpox outbreaks. Even their attempts to heal and care for their neighbors had brought only suspicion. They had mostly left the Massachusetts Bay Colony entirely, and gone north to rougher lives on less-settled coastlines on the northern shore or as far up as Maine.
Aubrey would follow up on that, and find the assassins they intended to send west to Midnight in due time, but first he wanted to explore this mystery.
Rachel. He caught her name at last, when her father asked her a question. A few minutes later, he learned the surname, Weatere. Not a witch name, but then, they didn’t use their true names out among humans anyway.
I will see you later, Rachel Weatere, he thought.
He didn’t intend to send the thought her way, but some fluke of his power or hers carried it from where he stood to where she was. She looked over her shoulder, frowning, and tensed when she saw him.
This time there was an instant of recognition, partly from earlier when their paths crossed, but partly as her power flared in response to his presence and her instinctive recognition of danger.
Chapter Twenty: Katama’s Line
Their new empire was thriving.
It had taken a few decades to find an equilibrium, but the serpiente and avians had deferred to Jeshickah’s and Katama’s plans for where to establish their new territories, and how to specialize their farming and trade goods.
A central marketplace gave them somewhere to trade not only with each other, but with human and shapeshifter groups from further away. Confident they would have a place to sell what they created, they could specialize as they pleased.
Through Midnight’s central markets, everything flowed: pigments, cocoa, raw silver, and sugarcane from the south; supple creations of leather and fur, truffles, and carved wood from the Shantel; fine porcelain, ceramic, and worked silver and gold from the avians; and the best wool, linens, paper, inks and dyes from the serpiente.
For its side of the deal, Midnight provided a safe, secure place to trade, and the assurance that there would always be sufficient cornmeal, flour, peas, dried smoked meat and fish, and all of the other basic foodstuffs a civilization needed to survive and thrive.
Shapeshifters who did not mesh well with their own kind—often those who had been exiled for crimes, or for other social ills that made it impossible for them to stay—were allowed to work as hands in Midnight’s fields. They had contracts that specified their hours and their wages, which took into account the fact that Midnight provided housing but also ensured that they remained satisfied and did not feel abused.
As long as they, and everyone else, abided by Midnight’s rules.
If they didn’t, of course, penalties were harsh.
It was how Midnight maintained order.
And as their empire grew, it became obvious that they needed more eyes and more hands. Katama managed the business end, ensuring trade goods and foodstuffs were produced in sufficient quantities to meet demand, and ultimately made it to their final destination—which was sometimes on the other side of the world. Acise was the go-between to the shapeshifter and human nations, but she also had her own projects; the wanderlust they had all been bred to had never left her, and she couldn’t stand to spend all her days in one place, even if that “one place” comprised the territories of a half-dozen nations.
And Jeshickah managed the living and not-quite-living elements: the contract servants and the permanent slaves, human and non-human, that worked for and within Midnight; the witches who provided services for a fee; and the many immortals who lived within or contracted with Midnight.
It was a busy, complicated balancing act, and as it grew even she decided she needed additional hands. They would, of course, need to be absolutely loyal to her; if they weren’t, they would be no better than the vampires of Kendra’s line, who were allied with Midnight only as long as it continued to produce the best source of art supplies, appreciative audience, and admiration.
So over two decades, she produced her trainers: the two half-brothers, who were taken to study their differences and eventually decide there were none; the runaway; the half-acknowledged son; and the trader in love with the sea.
#
She started her search in 1624, in the colony of Virginia, at one of the most successful tobacco plantations. The owner was a man named Elliot Ashe, who invited Jeshickah into his home with curiosity and avarice.
Humans were meddling with a new kind of slave trade of late, importing their own kind from far across the sea to work. They claimed such people were better suited to the role, that by nature they had been created as slaves, meant to serve their white owners.
Jeshickah had walked through the fields before bothering to introduce herself to Mr. Ashe, and other than a difference in skin-color and language spoken, she had not been able to recognize any particular difference. They all smelled of human blood to her. They all seemed to sweat and function in the same way.
Still, she sat with Mr. Ashe to hear what he would say. She feigned attentiveness as he boasted of “his” success and the wealth he had made, and explained to her as if she were an ignorant child how the complex economy worked with slavery as its backbone. African slaves had only been brought to Virginia within the last two decades, of course, but even then he had been able to predict the way the world was going and get ahead of the trend…
He took her for a tour of his grand manor and his lands, pointing out individuals and aspects of the manor he thought she might find interesting.
Most of the technology on the plantation was outdated, compared to what she already had; after all, she had the benefit of an entire world and all of history’s knowledge to pull from. The slaves were overworked, some so exhausted they were ready to drop where they stood. Some were ill. There was a repulsive thread of neglect.
Worse, though, was the moral veneer he tried to paint on it all.
She had no objection to the strong controlling the weak. After her attempt to be a gentle lord of the manor had failed on Liadan, she had become a harsh Mistress—but a predictable one. A fair one. There was no point in spoiling what one had, or abusing people to the point where rebellion was their only hope of survival.
Further, she knew her desire to control Midnight rested on two simple facts: she wanted power, and she had the ability to take it.
Mr. Ashe prattled about the Bible, about Cain and Abel, about civilization and “savages.” Did he truly believe such filth? Did he need the excuse to get him through the day?
He introduced her to a young man who he claimed had been born on the ship on its way from Africa. His mother had lived and worked for several years after that, and even produced another male child.
He admitted this with a kind of self-depreciating humor Jeshickah didn’t quite understand the source of, until she caught sight of the second boy: a blond-haired brat, about twelve, who had a few of his father’s features despite clearly having been dismissed by Mr. Ashe as “the child of a slave” and therefore not worth acknowledging.
Taro and Varick, the boys were called.
When she left the manor, after having feasted on Mr. Ashe’s blood and having decided he was an ignorant man who knew nothing worth knowing about biology, technology, economy, or religion, she took the two boys with her.
Over the next years, she decided her first impression had been right: black or white, all humans bled red. The two boys had the same potential.
As the boys became men, she won them to her in loyalty, then broke them to her will, and then at last gave them her blood and elevated them to lords in Midnight.
#
The next human she chose was a runaway, a clever man who evaded the slave-catchers a while, until he practically fell across her one evening as she hunted.
The combination of her being alone in an isolated place, yet dressed in rich garments as if prepared to attend the opera, confused him. He wasn’t sure what she was or how to respond to her, whether she was a wealthy lady or a prostitute; both would have been dangerous to him, but in different ways. As he recovered from his surprised confusion, and attempted to determine if he could escape without her raising an alarm, he bantered in a way that both amused her and made clear his swiftness of mind.
She brought him back to Midnight with her.
He was a grown man at that time, and she was perhaps not as thorough in binding him to her as she had been with Taro and Varick. After his change, he seemed less inclined to work in her realm, but swiftly gravitated to Acise’s instead.
So Nathaniel Stevens became the third of her fledglings, and the second of Midnight’s mercenaries instead of the fourth of her trainers.
#
She had not intended to increase her brood again, and had not been looking for another fledgling when she visited Esteban de Fiaro. Their trade relationship was an old and useful one even if Esteban himself was an arrogant fool.
However, Esteban had a son—not by his wife, but by a shapeshifter woman—who he hadn’t bothered to give a proper name, but just called by his animal form. Jeshickah had never met “the brat” when he was a child, because Esteban mostly kept him out of the way, and only bothered to raise and educate him at all because he had never otherwise produced a healthy child, much less a male one. Esteban was still hoping he would produce a proper heir, but first he would need to find a third wife.
The Jaguar was nineteen when met him, unexpectedly. She could tell immediately why Esteban had taken pains to keep them apart until then: Jaguar was brilliant, brazen, and utterly without fear of his own self-destruction. He responded to her like a moth diving toward a candle.
She took the invitation.
Esteban, naturally, objected. He hated “the brat” but recognized him as his most likely heir. Jeshickah humored the man’s belief that the Jaguar was under his control only enough to adhere to her own laws: Esteban sold the boy cheap once she laid out the price of refusal, and in exchange she allowed him a quick death.
Jaguar was quite upset, but only out of jealousy; Esteban had been far from a loving and gentle father, and Jaguar had entertained many fantasies over the years of killing him himself.
This one, Jeshickah knew, would become everything she wanted.
It was clear from the first that Jaguar had an unerring ability to see inside a person, to deduce what gave them their drive and what strings he could pull to make them jump. It was a talent she wanted to nurture, not destroy; she wanted to put it to use.
Unfortunately, that meant the entire time she had him in her cell, his full attention was on her. The idea of placating her to keep himself safe never occurred to the masochistic, self-destructive fool, and she had never before had someone bring her so close to killing them out of sheer fury and frustration.
#
When she stormed away from him one evening, looking for a quieter night where she could get some simple, necessary tasks done, she found Gabriel Donovan.
In a port-town simply called Dockside, she went looking for a merchant who could transport a shipment of furs and textiles on a chancy but profitable mission. Numerous people pointed her to Donovan, who had recently inherited the family ship, and was by reputation “probably mad enough to sail anywhere and for anyone, given the right motivation.”
Gabriel Donovan’s first love was the sea, because unlike the men and women around him, he knew he would never master it. He knew he could spend his whole life battling the ocean, and that one day it would win.
At first, she had no intention of bringing him back to Midnight. He was too valuable an asset where he was, and she already had Jaguar to contend with. So instead their relationship developed, not precisely as equals—aside from her sisters, she did not believe she had any equals—but with him as a free man. Their attraction was fierce and mutual, and their affair intense and profitable.
He asked questions, and eventually on a whim she brought him to Midnight, showed him her empire, and offered to make him immortal. It was the first time she had ever given anyone the choice. She did not explicitly specify the price, but seeing Jaguar still in chains did perhaps make him wary.
He declined.
Making the offer had been a whim, but making him one of her kind was not. She had thought he would accept, but the refusal didn’t entirely shock her. It certainly didn’t dissuade her.
In many ways, the two men were similar. Like Jaguar, Gabriel had an unerring, almost uncanny ability to reach into a person’s mind and soul and ring them like a water-glass. His self-control was better than Jaguar’s, when he bothered to utilize it, and his ability to identify and strike at sensitivities—verbally or physically—was about even.
As a result, Gabriel managed the one thing Jaguar had repeatedly tried and failed to do: Only a few days after Jeshickah had finally made Jaguar immortal, Gabriel pushed her to lose control, far enough that she killed him.
She brought him back with her blood, and he became the last of her fledglings. Her trainers, with whom she would rule the world.
Chapter Twenty-One: In the Forests of the Night
Aubrey followed the untrained witch and her father back to their village.
Power. Long ago, another woman with magic had spoken to him of power. She had been of the opinion that power granted its own laws and rights.
He observed the household from the rooftop, lounging with his eyes on the night sky as he listened to conversations within. They mostly spoke of simple things: the day they had passed, and the tasks that needed doing in the near future. It seemed the girl had a brother, who had gone to help with urgent repairs to a neighbor’s fire-damaged barn while his father and sister ran their unsuccessful errand in Boston. A younger sister had gone as well, to mind the neighbor’s small children.
Aubrey wasn’t interested in the brother or younger sister. He was interested in Rachel. What would he have to do to taunt that fiery magic to the surface?
He was considering the best way to approach her when another of his kind appeared on the roof: the vampire who had given him her blood nearly two thousand years prior. They had separated hours earlier, after agreeing they wouldn’t find the hunters they sought in Boston and deciding to continue their search another night.
“Did you need something?” Aubrey asked, as he continued to listen to the conversation inside. The mostly banal, domestic conversation was easy enough to hear and dull enough to follow that he had no objection to splitting his attention.
“Yes,” his maker spat, the tone sufficient to make him turn his attention away from the untrained witch’s magic, and to the aura of the vampire beside him.
He sat up, asking, “What happened to you?” Ather’s power was muted and torn.
“A witch,” Ather snapped.
“This witch?” Rachel was potentially powerful, but ignorant and essentially helpless. She couldn’t have left a scratch on Ather’s vampiric skin, never mind put her in this state. Belatedly, he added, “Or did you actually find the witches we said we would look for?”
He hadn’t forgotten. He was just more interested in other things right now.
“What?” Ather frowned, irritated by the question, then asked, “What are you doing here?”
Finally he made the logical conclusion. The brother. He asked, “Was your witch perhaps a young man with very gold hair and eyes?”
Maybe Aubrey had made a mistake focusing on the sister.
Ather tossed her head in a way he recognized as impatient. “A Triste,” she added. “Only partly trained, as far as I can tell. He took me by surprise as I was feeding.”
That was enough to command his Aubrey’s attention. “Whose student?”
Some Tristes spent generations courting their students, gently weaving their power into their chosen families until they found one who was strong enough to manage their magic and worth making immortal. Others picked a vessel who already had some potential for power and trained them carefully over a period of years. Finally, there was one who picked up children like this, with latent magic or at least rigid self-discipline, and poured her own magic into them without regard for whether they lived or died.
Unfortunately, that willingness to risk their death by her hand did not mean she was willing to let one of Aubrey’s and Ather’s kind meddle with or threaten those students.
“I didn’t ask,” Ather answered.
“What did you do with the boy?” As he asked, Aubrey wondered what he would do if Ather had picked a fight with one of the stronger Triste witches. Did he feel like fighting on her side, if they came to avenge one of their own?
Ather just glared in response.
Aubrey relaxed. If she had killed the Triste, she would have boasted of it, wise or not.
“I came here,” she said. “The human he objected to me feeding on was some half-sister of his. She was thinking about the rest of her family being at home here tonight.” Her gaze dropped toward the roof, as if she could see through it to the humans within.
Aubrey turned his attention back to the interior. Rachel and her father were settling in for sleep.
“What do you think would make the best statement?” Ather pondered aloud. “Fire? Blood? I’d say both, but one tends to conceal the other. The boy plans to return tomorrow, so I’d like to have a nice display ready.”
“You can’t kill the girl,” Aubrey objected. “I have a prior claim.”
“I have blood claim.” Ather turned her body and gave a half-shrug, showing him the back of her shoulder, where a not-quite-healed slash shoed through a ragged gash in her blouse. It wasn’t bleeding any more, but the wound appeared raw and angry, and it was surrounded by dark lines of poisonous power.
Only a blade forged and slaked with a Triste’s magic could have made a wound like that. It would scar even vampiric flesh.
“The brother did that?”
“The witch did that,” Ather replied, “before I was able to turn and throw him off me. I know I can’t touch him. But the rest of this family is forfeit. The boy’s teacher will probably thank me for freeing him from his human attachments.” Her eyes narrowed. “But the boy will remember who he crossed for the rest of his immortal life.”
Ather jumped down from the roof to pace around the house. The windows were dark and shuttered, and the lamps inside had been blown out and the hearth fires banked low.
“I think blood,” Ather decided aloud. “And I have all night to put together a grisly show that he will never forget. Would you like to help me?”
“No.”
She turned, startled by the finality in his tone.
Blood claim was a law among them, one they had established through the kind of careful, stupid, annoying negotiations Aubrey hated so very much. It was a cornerstone of the agreements their kind was working to make, to keep from having chaos and violence spill across the world. Alexander had drawn Ather’s blood, so by Silver’s law, the boy’s blood was forfeit. All his blood-kin was Ather’s to claim, if she liked.
Even Aubrey recognized that there needed to be some laws, some kind of organization, to keep their kind in check. He didn’t even know how many vampires walked the world in that modern day—dozens, at least, all with the potential to slaughter cities or try to conquer the world, like Jeshickah and her mad kin.
That meant Aubrey probably shouldn’t arbitrarily and blatantly ignore one of the first laws Silver had set out for their own kind.
Damn politics.
“No?” Ather repeated. Then she shrugged. “Fine. I thought I would invite you, but—”
“I mean, no,” he interrupted, “there is a better way.”
“Oh?” She raised a brow, listening.
Aubrey chose his words carefully, trying to frame what he wanted in a way that would make Ather agree. “If you kill her,” he said, “the boy’s pain will last until his teacher teaches him to repress it and move on. She won’t let him dwell. Alternatively, you could take her. Make her one of us.” He shrugged, dismissive, as if the thought was an almost-idle one. “She’ll be powerful, a credit to our line, and she will be an undying reminder of his failure to protect her. A reminder that will haunt him the rest of his potentially very long life.”
Ather paused, head tilted thoughtfully. Her lips curved into a slight smile, and he knew the idea appealed to her.
“We’ll still need to set the stage,” Ather considered, though she was calmer now, more thoughtful. “Make sure he knows what he has done and what the response has been. If she’s just gone when he gets home, he won’t know for sure what happened.” With a frown, she conceded, “If we wait for him to return to act, we’ll need to make sure she comes outside to us, as well. If we go in while he is here, his teacher may take it as an act of aggression.”
So they set their stage. They waited for the half-trained Triste to return home, then deliberately revealed themselves. On a whim, Aubrey gifted Rachel with the black rose he had taken with him from Midnight, a gift when he had remarked on the effort that must have gone into producing it.
Modern Reflections
Reader, this is a familiar story to you, one that to my shame I was utterly unaware of.
I had isolated myself in Mayhem, the town where Silver’s line resided, because it was a place where I did not have to hide what I was and I had easy access to willing prey—and because it was a place Kaleo despised. Where he was unwelcome.
I had not explored Midnight, and I did not intend to. I stayed away, thinking of it only as his.
Later, I was told that I had even been mentioned when the vampires of Silver’s line debated what to do with Midnight and settled on using my once-cousins as their weapon.
If I had been there…
If I had agreed, and gone with Aubrey and Ather to look for witches…
If I had been more active a member of the vampiric community, instead of avoiding them whenever possible, so they might have thought of me when they discovered two orphaned witch children with hair that shone like liquid sunshine…
Well, you know what people say about If.
#
Concord, 1701
Alexander did not need to be told what Aubrey Karew was or what the rose he brought signified. He did not need to be invited outside that night, either; he sensed the vampires nearby and confronted them as impulsively as he had attacked Ather in the first place, thinking only of what was right or wrong.
Predictably, his twin noticed, and followed him when he sneaked from the house. She paused in the doorway, staying out of sight and out of Alexander’s awareness—but not far enough back that the vampires could not smell her power and hear her heartbeat and know she was there, eavesdropping.
Like Silver, Ather enjoyed her dramatic performances, played this evening for an audience of two. She invited the sister to join them.
“Does this creature truly mean so much to you?” Ather asked of Rachel. The teasing wasn’t meant for Rachel, of course; she wanted to make sure Alexander knew that his actions had brought them here, and his sister’s love for him was what would bring her to ruin.
“Yes,” Rachel answered. In her anger and fear, her power started to flicker around her. If Ather didn’t cut this off soon, she might get a faceful of witch-fire for her trouble.
At that point they all—except Rachel—sensed another power in the woods, moving toward them rapidly. A Triste didn’t have a vampire’s ability to appear and disappear at a whim, but when they chose to run, they could move like the wind.
“That’s unfortunate,” Ather said dryly, disappointed her games were about to be interrupted. “Aubrey, will you deal with that distraction?”
She gave a slight nod in the direction of Alexander and the Triste coming to rescue him.
Aubrey drew his knife, but didn’t expect to need to use it. Most Tristes were more practical than that.
Ather diverted Rachel’s attention as Pandora emerged from the woods, her hair wild-tossed by her run and her power high around her.
Alexander’s face lit up with arrogance and triumph when his mentor appeared; his confidence that she was there to rescue him and his sister was so blatant it made Aubrey laugh aloud.
“You should control your student,” Aubrey suggested quietly, never taking his eyes off Pandora.
Alexander was right that Pandora was no small foe. If this came to a fight, it would be messy and unpleasant and the healing afterwards could be slow. But Alexander was wrong in his assumption that she gave a damn about his sibling.
The Triste swept her eyes over the yard and took in the scene. A flare of her power warped the air around them, cutting them off from Ather and Rachel as if she had built a wall between them.
“You aren’t strong enough to fight these two,” Pandora told Alexander. “Come away before you get yourself killed.”
“If I’m not strong enough, then help me,” the boy pleaded.
“I agreed to help you control your visions and your magic,” Pandora answered, “not to help you start a war.”
“But Rachel—”
Alexander’s mentor tossed an almost trivial amount of power his way. She sighed and shook her head as he collapsed, a stringless puppet.
Then she raised her hands, calling power.
“What are your intentions, vampire?” She was ready to fight if Aubrey insisted on it, but was also willing to walk away peacefully. Aubrey knew Pandora; she wouldn’t care what happened to the rest of the boy’s family, as long as no one threatened her chosen student.
“We’re here for the girl,” Aubrey answered. “We know he’s yours.”
He put away his knife, and she dropped her hands, pulling back the magic that danced around her like an electric storm as she did so.
Aubrey had never actively fought a Triste witch. Sometimes he was tempted to try it, just to see how it would go. Their magic was unlike anything else on earth, unlike the sorcery he had learned as a human or the bred-in magic of the Macht witches.
Pandora looked at her unconscious student and said, “So much power, but so…” She trailed off, tossed her head, and said, “He’s young. He’ll learn, if he doesn’t get himself killed.”
She picked Alexander up as if he were a bale of hay, something awkward but not particularly heavy, and carried him with her into the woods.
In the meantime, Ather had Rachel well in hand. Some minor scorching was the best the untrained, might-have-been witch could manage before Ather subdued her. She probably didn’t even know she had done it.
Aubrey wished he could have tended and encouraged that power before this moment, but at least he hadn’t let Ather snuff her out like a sick dog.
Everything seemed settled, so he left on his other errands. He and Ather had found some leads about witches living along the coast of Maine. He needed to find them, then find a way to point them toward Midnight. With any luck—and the proper application of Vida and Arun witches—his line wouldn’t need to worry about Jeshickah and her sadistic, power-mad trainers any more.
It was a busy night’s work.
Chapter Twenty-Two: Lila’s Story – Aftermath
Now the two timelines in this story converge.
As Jeshickah was finding the first of her trainers in the Virginia Colony, my kin were making their homes on the shores of the newly settled Rhode Island. As Gabriel, Jaguar, and Jeshickah were vying for dominance, my father was growing up, learning his trade, and deciding to focus his magic on healing and reading wind and sea to predict weather and migration patterns.
And as Midnight was coming into its own, gathering power and influence, my brother and I were born.
As I debated the philosophy and ethics of slavery with Kaleo and he magnanimously agreed to “look into” freeing the slaves on his Rhode Island plantation, I did not know that a large portion of his wealth was already tied into an empire far to the west in which humans of any color were never more than chattel.
And when I disappeared?
I left a hole behind. Trapped in my belief that the best I could do for those I loved was to stay far away,I did not know how the story unfolded without me.
Rhode Island Colony, 1684
Peter returned home from the jail in the hours before dawn, filthy and frightened and exhausted. He saw the looks his neighbors gave him, and they were not friendly; he knew an accusation followed by acquittal was often preamble to more accusations later.
When he had chosen to marry a witch, he had accepted that he was turning his back on the covenants he had made with his fellows, but he had never felt it so deeply as he did that day.
He walked inside and discovered his wife’s relations gathered around the plain wooden dining table, speaking softly and urgently.
He caught words like “missing” and “where?” and “vampire” as he waited for them to acknowledge him.
He looked around, and finally asked, “Where are Lila and the children?”
None of them gave any indication they were startled. Of course they didn’t. He had been told that these men and women by and large were hunters; they were ever-aware of their surroundings. They had chosen to ignore his presence as they focused on their own concerns.
He saw the looks they gave him, and then exchanged with each other. They were irritated by his presence. By his question.
“Where,” he rephrased, “are my wife and children?”
He had been arrested. He knew the charges. Had Lila done something to free him that had put her in danger? Was she hurt? Imprisoned? In hiding?
Were they hiding her from him?
His brother-in-law Mair stepped in from the back and stood half through the doorway with a sleeping Alexander in his arms. Holding the door open with a shoulder so he could continue to monitor the yard, he said softly, “I have the children. The divinations were disturbing them, and the night is nice, so I took their cradle outside.” He nodded back the way he had come, an invitation for Peter to join him, then stepped back out into the yard.
Outside, Rachel was asleep in the cradle, which had been placed at the edge of the herb garden. Mair had kept her in his line of sight while he talked to Peter.
“We don’t know where Lila is,” Mair continued. “That’s what they’re trying to figure out in there.”
Peter asked, “Trying how? Who have they spoken to? The magistrate? Did the neighbors—”
“They’re hunters,” Mair interrupted, though he too sounded discontent with the answer. “This is what they do. Humans didn’t take Lila. They’ve sensed someone, something, at the house. There might have been a fight.” Alexander started to fuss, and Mair murmured, “Don’t you worry. You’re safe.”
Peter stared, incredulous. “Safe. How can you say he’s safe, when you don’t even know where Lila is? You say there were signs of a fight. Was she hurt? What do you mean, not human, not someone but something? A witch?”
Mair raised a brow, and Peter had a sense he had just offended the man. He said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
This time it was Peter’s turn to stare and blink at him in offended confusion. “What?”
Mair sighed, and this time when his gaze met Peter’s, there was a spark in the golden eyes that Peter hadn’t noticed previously—or that, perhaps, Mair had deliberately hidden from him.
“You are worried for your wife. I understand,” the witch said tightly. “I am worried for Lila Light, who is my sister, who is a powerful seer and fire-spinner, and who is expected to become the next scion of our line. I have only so much patience to give you right now.”
Peter knew the words were meant to tell him that Mair was trying to be compassionate, but had his own anxieties, but they communicated another message as well: once again, Peter’s relationship to the family was the least important. He was not witch-kin, not by blood. In a crisis, he was seen as an inconvenience to be managed and perhaps coddled, not a useful member of the family or even as someone who mattered for his own sake.
He had done his job. He had helped breed the next generation of witches.
Mair’s hand on Alexander suddenly seemed proprietary.
“How long has Lila been gone?” he asked. The question was somewhat afield of what he actually wanted to know. When he saw Mair’s annoyance flair again, he clarified, “The children are still nursing. They’ll wake hungry.”
“Tandy went looking for a wet nurse,” Mair answered, naming one of Lila’s many “cousins.” This one went by Tacita in her public life, where she worked with Lila making pottery. “I said I’d keep an eye on Risa and Aland—Alexander.” There was a strange hesitation on the boy’s name, a sound in there that wasn’t part of the name he had inherited from Peter’s father.
Another name, as all the witches had another name they used among their own kind. Even Lila had been Goodwife Lydia Weatere only on paper. Peter had understood and respected that.
He thought Lila understood and respected how much it meant to Peter that their son have his father’s name. Had she been humoring him while calling Alexander by this other name in her heart, or was it her kin who had rejected the classic, Christian name?
“I see.”
He did see.
And over the next few days, he saw even more clearly. If Lila didn’t return, Mair would be expected to take over the responsibility of raising the children as witches. It did not seem to be a role he relished, but it was one he took seriously despite his obvious despondency over his missing sister.
Peter stayed as close to home as he could, taking only day-fishing trips and working loading and unloading at the docks, as the hunters tried to track Lila. At least, they claimed they were trying to track her. A certainty grew in Peter that she was dead, and they knew it but refused to tell him the truth for some reason. In whispered conversations that were quickly halted when he approached, he started to overhear rumors of enemies that were far stronger and more dangerous than any he had been warned of when he had joined this family.
Then came the night when Peter and Mair argued over the twins, as had been inevitable. Mair was exhausted; there had been no witch or even witch-friend available to act as a wet-nurse, and Mair did not like concealing what he was and bickering with the wet-nurse about the proper care of infants. Peter knew Lila’s practices had not been the same as those practiced by others he knew—other humans—but Lila had been his wife, who he chose and loved and respected. He deferred to her when it came to childrearing, as was proper.
But he watched the way Mair manipulated the wet-nurse, watched the way her eyes went glassy when Mair had to once again clear her mind after one of the twins burst forth with a moment of wild power. He saw the moments when Mair, exhausted from late-night vigils with the children, would say to the concerned nurse, “Just trust me on this” with a voice that rang with power, and she would frown, look puzzled, and then nod and say, “Oh, of course. You’re right.”
If Peter hadn’t seen that so often, he might not have realized what had happened the night he suggested that Mair should sleep. Lila’s brother was exhausted. The twins were well fed; they had started to wean, in fact. The nurse was asleep, and Peter was confident he could manage the twins a while. He knew they needed affection and attention, or else their power might lash out, but he could provide those things. He wanted to. Between the nurse and Mair, he felt he hardly even had a chance to see his own children.
“You need some rest,” he told Mair.
Mair shook his head. “Risa has a tooth coming in,” he said. “She’s irritable.”
“I’ll manage,” Peter replied. “It doesn’t always take magic to soothe a teething child.”
Mair looked at him with weary eyes and sighed, “Just go to bed, Peter.”
The next dawn, when Peter woke, he came downstairs to find Mair playing with Alandi—which was what Mair called the boy when he didn’t think Peter would overhear—while Risa chewed on a silver teether that had been passed down in Peter’s family.
Mair nodded and said good morning.
Peter wondered how many times this witch’s power had sent him away like an errant child, without him even noticing.
He wanted to throw the man out of his house, but feared if he tried, Mair would stop pretending he believed Peter had any rights whatsoever to his own children. The witches would claim them, had already claimed them.
Lila had been unable to teach Peter magic, of course; that was something one needed to be born with. But she had taught him a great deal of herbcraft, and given him leave long ago to peruse her book of notes and recipes. The tinctures within were more powerful if prepared by a proper witch, but many had power based on the strength of their ingredients alone.
So it was that Mair slept very deeply that night.
The twins slept as well, their powers dampened temporarily by a mixture Lila had taught him shortly before the babes had been born, with the thought that he might sometimes need to care for them without her around. She had imagined a trip to visit a relative or something like that, a brief time away with a planned beginning and end once the twins were old enough not to need to nurse, but she had assuaged his fears: it was harmless. If given too often for too long, as an alternative to real training, it could suppress a witch’s power long-term. But as an occasional aid to a witch who might simply need a break, need to sleep without a child’s wild tantrum burning down the house?
Well, Lila had admitted, my own mother used it for that. That’s why she taught it to me. I went through a terribly irrational phase at three and four years old, impossibly destructive.
#
Peter took the children to another town, another state. He watched over his shoulder frequently for my relatives, but it was harder in those days to locate someone who had made an effort to disappear.
Mair probably could have tracked him, but Mair blamed himself. He knew it was his actions, borne of his despair and frustration, that had driven Peter away. He refused to help track the human man down. Others tried to do so, discreetly, but there was a new outbreak of smallpox and Kaleo’s rumors of witchcraft had left the community suspicious. There was danger in a witch tracking a human man, danger that he need only turn, point, and utter an accusation.
I have not spoken of Mair much before this portion of the story, but we had been close.
After losing me and losing the twins, Mair was not content to stay among his own kind, or the English colonists that had turned on them. He traveled the woods instead, isolating himself until he found a place among one of the native peoples who lived on this land long before England declared ownership. He, like me, turned his back on our lineage, but the birth of the Marinitch line is another story that will not be told in these pages. Suffice to say that the last of his descendants, centuries later, would rewrite the vows our kind first took to the elemental Leona, and change everything we had ever been.
And my children?
They were raised ignorant of all they were, by a father who wanted desperately to keep them safe, and most of all wanted to keep them. His greatest fear was that some supernatural figure would walk away with the children he loved.
Like me, ignorant and well-meaning, he created the very fate he feared.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Dare Seize the Fire
It had been Kaei who came to cajole me out of my misery, and who visited with me regularly to make sure I continued to bring myself outside. To tend to myself. To begin again to make a life for myself.
It was Kaei who turned my world upside down again, when she brought the news I had never wanted to hear.
She approached me near to dawn, interrupting one of my sessions with the violin. I had—foolishly—been trying to recreate one of Kaleo’s compositions, which had been stuck in my head for a time, needling me. The cruel memory insisted it wouldn’t desist until I had recalled it all, and so I had spent hours that evening, the entire time from when I woke at sundown until Kaei arrived, trying to recreate that piece with my vampiric memory and growing skill.
I had been a bit obsessive.
Okay, entirely obsessive. If Kaei had come to see me earlier that night, she might have pulled me out of it, but she had been busy elsewhere.
Now she let herself in; the door was never locked. What would be the point of such a thing? Locks would not keep a vampire out, and no human in Mayhem was foolish enough to break in. If they did, it wasn’t like I couldn’t defend myself.
Kaei heard the violin, and in the notes her human ears could pick up between the time she walked through the front door and when she found me in the room I had turned into a studio, she recognized the lament in the tune. She knew I was already in a dark mood, and she hesitated, wondering if she should wait for someone else to deliver this news.
Then loyalty and friendship drove her forward.
She knocked on the door to the studio, as she had not bothered to knock on the front door.
I set the violin down. Gently, because despite my frustration, it was a beautiful instrument and I would not abuse it. With vampiric strength, it would take only one moment of harsh treatment to snap the device to worthless kindling.
So I placed it down in its velvet-lined case with the elaborate care I had once used to put down my infant child.
Then I turned to Kaei, and saw the flush in her cheeks from running, and the wideness of her eyes, and the way she looked at me with an expression that was both stricken and afraid.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “What’s happened?”
My mind flashed to all the ills that could beset a human, especially those that the vampires could do nothing for: injuries or illness that would permanently maim a person, or leave them in agony until death was the only solution. I often feared such an event, because my magic had been faulty and unreliable ever since Kaleo gave me his blood, and I did not know if I would be able to help if called upon. I did not want to wait at the bedside of the dying, immune and immortal, but without a scrap of a witch’s healing power to offer.
“I…” Kaei trailed off. “I am so sorry, Lila. I saw—” She swallowed tightly. “I might be wrong. Oh I hope I am wrong. But I do not think I am wrong.”
Her stammering, so unlike her usual poise and control, sparked a terror in my own soul. This was worse than some sickness, somehow.
It was clear she couldn’t find the words. Instead, she reached out and took my hands, knowing that my visions, combined with a vampiric ability to read minds, would take over and let me know everything she needed to tell me far more efficiently than words could. If Kaei was wrong, I would know it immediately, with no time wasted in worrying over mistaken news.
There was no mistake.
That sundown, instead of coming to visit me, she had gone to investigate reports that Ather had created a new fledgling.
Through Kaei’s memories, I observed Ather’s home, which was set back from the bustle of the main town and painted black with white shutters in her own whimsical inversion of tradition. She kept the place comfortable and it made sense she would have used it to let her new fledgling rest, so Kaei had kept her vigil there, waiting to catch a first glimpse.
Through Kaei’s eyes, I saw the woman Ather had claimed as they emerged from the house together.
Kaei had spent many evenings in my company, and unlike Ather and Aubrey, she could not help but immediately notice the beaten-gold hair—the color of a hawk shapeshifter’s hair, or a Light witch’s. When the new vampire had briefly turned Kaei’s way, probably catching the scent of human blood on the evening breeze, Kaei had recognized the line of a jaw and the lift of a brow. She saw me in the girl’s face, and she knew.
She knew because she could not fail to see it, and because she understood even as a human that vampires are drawn to power.
She knew because she understood that fate was cruel.
And she came to my home to tell me, or warn me.
Through Kaei’s eyes I finally saw my daughter, grown to a woman and turned pale and black-eyed by vampiric blood, but unmistakably my daughter. My Risa.
A pit opened inside me, a gulf formed of all the anger and grief that had seeped through my veins since I had walked away from my family. Walked away from my life.
To keep them safe.
To keep Kaleo and his kind from ever touching them.
“Was there a boy, too?” I asked, uselessly, because I would have known already if Kaei had seen Alexander too.
“No, I’m sorry,” Kaei said. “I’m so sorry. Am I right? Is that your Risa?”
She knew my children’s names. She alone in Mayhem did.
I couldn’t answer.
I couldn’t form words.
Ather was not around. She, no doubt, was out with her new fledgling. Teaching “her” child how to hunt, how to feed, how to survive.
I found Aubrey instead. He was casually lounging on a settee at the back of Las Noches, a tavern at the heart of Mayhem where the vampires and humans mingled. It was the easiest place to go if one wanted to find a human willing to give blood that evening.
Aubrey was not alone, but was not yet feeding; he had been engaged in conversation with one of the locals. He looked up at me as I appeared.
His eyes narrowed in confusion, momentarily, before they widened in an equally brief expression of shock. Then recognition. Concern. Guilt.
He regained control of his expression in moments as I entered the room, my steps carefully controlled as I stalked toward him and asked, “What of the boy?”
It wasn’t that I didn’t care about my daughter. I did. My fury at her situation was simmering inside me as a seething, twisting thing. But it seemed very important to me just then that I know the full story, the extent of this travesty, before I responded to it.
Aubrey’s eyes flickered around me. He said briefly to the human near him, “Get everyone out.”
The human ran. I didn’t track him, though I had a vague sense of other movement around me. My attention had narrowed to the vampire in front of me.
“The boy is alive,” he said. “We didn’t touch him.”
There was a but hidden in his words. I knew there was. He was hiding something from me.
“Tell me the rest,” I said.
This time, Aubrey’s glance went not behind me, but above me. I saw the way his gaze flickered toward the rafters, but I didn’t follow it. I didn’t care.
“He’s been claimed by Pandora,” Aubrey told me. “It happened before we ever saw him.” When he saw the lack of understanding in my face, he added, “She’s a Triste witch. She–”
I think he said more, but I didn’t hear it, not at that moment. Tristes called themselves witches, and yes they did practice magic, but they were really just another kind of vampire. Both of my children had been struck down.
“How could my kin allow it?” I whispered.
Aubrey shook his head. “I saw no other witches around them,” he said.
What happened?
Had I given up everything, for no reason at all, just to have it end the same as it would have if I had stayed?
No, if I had stayed, I would have protected them. Even if Kaleo had raised the whole town against us. Even if I had needed to put a blade in that vampire’s heart, and through the heart of any ally of his who came to defend him. Even if I had needed to declare war against vampirekind, something I had avoided—and, which I would soon learn, Aubrey and Ather had also done for me.
Aubrey took a step back, then asked, “Are you able to control that?”
I didn’t understand the question. I was a creature made of rage and grief, and for a moment, language was entirely beyond my grasp.
He took another step backwards, but not from me. He warned me, “I think that ceiling is about to fall.”
I finally processed that he had been looking not at me but around me, and had been since I had entered the room. I noticed at last the brightness of the room, which was unusual in a place normally lit only by a few low lanterns. I noticed the heat. And the sound, like breathing.
I turned, and saw fire spreading from the place where each of my footfalls had touched the wooden plank floor. Fire now licked the walls and ate at the beams over my head.
Jager appeared among us, took in the situation quickly, and asked, “Aubrey, what did you do?”
“I kept Ather from killing her,” Aubrey said, to me, not sparing a glance away to Jager.
“Her, who?” Jager demanded. He looked at me, at Aubrey, and demanded, “Is Kaei all right?”
“Kaei is fine. I assume,” Aubrey said. “Can we bring this conversation somewhere less flammable? Fire won’t kill us but I’ve always found burning buildings very uncomfortable.”
I didn’t want to go somewhere less flammable.
I wanted to burn it down.
I wanted to burn it all.
I had been holding my magic in check with a thin, constant thread of self-control, one that had frayed but had not completely severed even in the midst of my boiling rage. Now I consciously snipped it, the third Fate calling the end of a life.
The magic struck Jager and Aubrey in a wave, too quickly for them to dodge. They both fled then, their forms blinking out, extinguishing like a candle flame—or in this case, the inverse.
The firestorm spread around me, searing the wooden frame of the Las Noches building and charring timber and daub to ash within the blink of an eye before it exploded beyond those walls.
I thought nothing of the mortals in the town.
I thought nothing, except fire.
It was hours later when Aubrey found me again. He had helped Jager evacuate the humans, then waited for my power to start to gutter before he came to face me. I was sitting with my back to the charred stones of the town’s central well when he came and knelt in front of me and admitted, “It’s a waste. A disgusting waste. I will freely admit that.”
I looked at him with the flat exhaustion that follows the most dramatic outpouring of emotions.
“She isn’t ready to be one of us any more than you were,” Aubrey continued.
I flinched, and finally found my words. “Why are you telling me this?”
He settled in front of me, unmindful of the way gray ash stained his clothes and skin. “Because…” He paused, thoughtful. “Because I recognize power when I see it, and I want you to know that I will not let hers be wasted.”
“Her magic won’t work any more.”
He raised a brow, and swept his gaze over the wasteland around us. “Like yours doesn’t?”
“She was never trained?” I demanded. “Never?”
“As far as I could tell, she does not even know she has witch blood,” Aubrey answered. “The boy might know. I can’t say what Pandora has told him, or what she might tell him.” He hesitated, as if wary of my reaction, but I was too exhausted to react at all. “Will you introduce yourself to her?”
I shook my head. “I can’t. Not yet.” Would she blame me for what she had been through? I had left her and her brother to protect them, not with the intention of abandoning them to ignorance and fear.
Aubrey shrugged, not arguing with my panicked decision. “I will keep an eye on her,” he said. “I can’t promise to be gentle, but I won’t let her destroy herself. She might never have a witch’s magic, but she will have power. I will make sure she finds it.”
I reached out my hand and he clasped it, making the words more than an empty assurance. By my power and his power, our magic, and our vampire blood, the promise sealed between us.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Dare Seize the Fire
Rachel, Risa, or “Risika” as she became—a name Ather must have pulled from the recesses of her fledgling’s mind, then reinterpreted in a language she found more familiar—did not return to Mayhem.
Of course, no one returned immediately. The town was nothing more than ash sitting atop cracked stone foundations after my firestorm.
Some of the humans who had inhabited the town before then left, but most stayed, and rebuilt. I helped rebuild, lending vampiric strength to cutting timbers and raising walls and roofs.
Ather and Silver considered Kaei at least partly responsible for the fire, for giving me “the news” so bluntly. A violent past history between Silver and the girl—one kept mostly a mystery from me—left the ancient vampire happy to blame her for disaster. Jager on the other hand admitted it could have been done more gently, but argued that no gentle padding of the words would have lessened their impact.
Eventually, Jager bloodbonded Kaei to strengthen his claim over her and keep her from Silver’s retribution. Openly, they both referred to the bond as a punishment and a means of control, but in reality, they had both expected Kaei would take one before much longer. So Kaei also joined in the rebuilding, gaining new prominence in the New Mayhem.
The fire weakened Silver’s line’s position, however; it was another century before they would have the footing to turn their eyes west to Midnight again.
I personally threw myself into rebuilding New Mayhem, both as penance for an outburst that could have killed innocents, and as a way to bury my grief. I also started taking my first wary steps toward joining the vampiric community. Despite having lived in Mayhem for a decade, I had interacted so little with my supposed peers that I had never even crossed their minds when they had discovered two lost, golden-haired witches.
I did not seek out my children during that time. Perhaps I should have, but I was terrified that they would blame me, and hate me for the choices I had made. I did not know how to begin to explain who I was or why I had left them.
Aubrey and Jager assured me that Risika had made it through the change, and through the days thereafter when the grief and melancholia and trauma could cause a newly-turned and unwilling vampire to choose self-destruction, either by seeking danger or simply by refusing to feed sufficiently.
I remembered those days myself. I was still in them.
I’ve been told that handling them gently can make it even harder for the new vampire to survive and thrive, and I suppose my centuries of self-chosen isolation are evidence to that statement. In vampiric terms, I still held an infant; I was not ready to face my children as adults, much less as powerful predators.
I needed to grow up first.
I needed to relearn who I was, and what my place was in the world.
While New Mayhem was built, I focused on getting to know those of Silver’s line who ran it. Few regarded me as friend, but we were business partners and amicable in that role. Despite his assurances that he would watch out for my daughter, Aubrey seemed to have little interest in me, and in fact seemed to avoid Mayhem whenever possible, so we were not close. Jager and I became close, and he facilitated my first contacts with some of Kendra’s line.
I was wary of the artists’ line. I had no interest in seeing Kaleo, or any of his ex- or current-lovers, such as Brina or Theron. That was easy. They were firmly allied to Midnight, and not likely to be swayed by our overtures.
Midnight.
I was aware of Midnight, yes. I knew it was a rival to Silver’s city and power. I knew it had allies, as Silver’s line did. I knew it occupied territory and engaged in trade and politics, as Silver’s line did. I knew the others spoke of Jeshickah and her kin as arrogant and power-hungry, a criticism I felt somewhat hypocritical considering the source. I believed the humans they “kept” were like Mayhem’s, owing the vampires loyalty in exchange for their resources and protection. When the others spoke of harsh punishments, I thought of what I had seen Fala do. In short, I believed Midnight was another version of Mayhem.
It was close to a century after my death when I realized how wrong I had been.
The word came from a vampire named Quinn, a soft-spoken, dark-haired individual who was newly changed and utterly overwhelmed by the reality of their situation.
They came to New Mayhem in 1763. They had made their living, so to speak, as a soldier in one army or another during the seven year conflict between Britain and France, but with that war over they had found themself at a loss. Their “discreet lover,” who had given them the immortal blood, had warned them never to speak of him and absolutely never to come to Midnight.
Naturally, when their lover had failed to visit for an extended period of time, they had started to feel concerned and neglected and had tried to seek him out. Instead, they had discovered a witch—who had tried to kill them, and then had spat eye-opening accusations about their kind.
From Quinn I finally learned how my kin had been throwing themselves against Midnight’s strength, again and again, for the last century. I learned how many had crossed the miles between our fishing towns along the Atlantic to the evil heart hidden in the woods there—and either never returned, or else returned as broken pawns who turned their hunters’ skills against their own kin for the amusement of their vampiric “masters.”
I confronted Jager, and he admitted that where once my kind had numbered in the scores, with strongholds up and down the eastern shores, decades of battle with Jeshickah’s line had thinned the numbers to a scarce handful.
Jager recognized Quinn’s bloodline and, combined with Quinn’s descriptions, recognized their lover as one of Jeshickah’s infamous trainers. It was possible the lover had been protecting Quinn from being claimed by Jeshickah, as all her trainers and thus all their progeny belonged to her according to Midnight’s law, but it was more likely the lover had been protecting himself. Jeshickah controlled “her” trainers’ lives in an absolute fashion, and would be furious that one had shared his blood with another.
Jager warned Quinn not to travel into Midnight’s lands, and to be wary to avoid Midnight’s allies.
Then Jager told Quinn to leave. He recommended Europe as a destination. When Quinn asked for asylum in New Mayhem, Jager bluntly informed them that they could not harbor one of Jeshickah’s kin.
I had no authority to give Quinn sanctuary, but once they were gone, I continued to interrogate Jager about Midnight. He was somewhat repentant, though not enough so for my liking. Not nearly enough.
My fire in Mayhem played a role, but I refuse to take all the blame for letting Midnight grow during that century on my shoulders, not when there were plenty of others—more powerful, influential, and knowledgeable others—who had plenty of opportunity to do something. Once I knew the truth, however, I also refused to be daunted by Jager’s claims of political complexity.
I could not single-handedly take Midnight down, but I started asking questions to see where leverage could be applied. Midnight has a long reach and sensitive ears, and my queries eventually reached someone who had been listening for just such an opportunity.
For once in my life, luck was on my side. Instead of bringing the wrath of Midnight down on myself, I attracted the attention of a mercenary who had been looking for a discreet way to reach Silver’s line with a proposition.
And so it was that I ended up in the circle that would come to be known as the Thirteen Archers. I never shot a bow that day, but I did lend my magic to the pyre.
I did not forget my children. I would never forget them, could never forget them. But for a while I recognized that there were issues greater than myself, and I threw myself into those concerns as my children established themselves as individuals on the path fate and folly had put them on.
So it was that I first burned and then helped to rebuild two civilizations. The witches wanted no help from me after Midnight was gone, but I did what I could to ensure they were left in peace as I became one of the more outspoken voices in Mayhem, setting the laws that would outlaw Midnight’s brutal slave-trade and stranglehold on the other non-human nations. Some of Kendra’s line came to Mayhem—Kaleo not among them. Those who joined us painted the murals, and transplanted the black roses that had become symbolic of our kind. They strengthened the town’s infrastructure and brightened it with their art.
I do not ask you to forgive or excuse me for becoming “distracted” for those centuries of time. Only to understand: I was, for a while, Lila Light the witch and Lila Light of New Mayhem, instead of only the mother of Rachel and Alexander Weatere. I regret I did not find the courage to make a connection with Risika and Alexander and get to know who they were becoming, but in all other ways, I feel I spent my long years well.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Resolutions
I believe that the world turns and returns, and that which is unresolved will always spiral back. For an immortal, the wheels of time are visible.
So at last, after so many years, my children found their way to me—though both, of course, were looking for other things at the time. My daughter came to challenge Aubrey, who true to his word had thrown himself against her growing power, needling her to fight and grow instead of hiding in fear.
If he had asked me, I wouldn’t have approved of his methods, but the result was that by the time I saw her she was breathtakingly powerful, and ready to embrace who and what she was.
And her brother?
A Triste’s apprenticeship can be long, and Alexander had made a few mistakes along the way, but he too had gone looking for his sister.
And as they face each other in Las Noches, Alexander speaks the words I have heard in my own mind a thousand times: I thought you would hate me for what I had done.
I watch them stand face to face, bright mirrors. I can sense power in both of them. The spectators to my daughter’s fight with Aubrey are lucky she only shattered mirrors, and did not send a firestorm through the room as I had centuries before.
I slip out the door, telling myself, I will speak to them. Later, in private. I will.
Aubrey waits outside the door, leaning against the wall next to it with his arms crossed across his chest. One brow lifts as he sees me and says, “Coward.”
“What did you do to her?” I ask, dreading the answer.
He rolls his shoulder, and I realize his arms aren’t just crossed; he is holding a cloth over one, where the knife wound still slowly seeps blood. “It might have gotten out of hand,” he admits. “I didn’t realize the damn brother was out there taunting her too. Also, go figure, but tigers bite.” He lifts the bandage, checks his wound, then says, “If you don’t catch them before they finish glaring at each other and walk away, it will be another half-millennium before you get the nerve to go find them again.”
I hesitate.
He says, “The beliefs and fears we hold strongest in the moment when we are changed are baked into us like hard porcelain when we’re reborn. What were you thinking the night you let Kaleo give you his blood?”
I was thinking I had failed my family, and that the only way I could keep them safe was to stay away from them.
I don’t answer aloud. I’ve always known Kaei reported the gist of many of our conversations to the vampires she served; Aubrey certainly knows I’ve discussed this concept with her, and he likely knows exactly what the answer would be. He waits just long enough for me to consider, then asks, “Has time proved that belief right?”
No.
I walk back inside.
Alexander has turned and is going toward the front door, his shoulders low and his head down. My daughter looks around speculatively, and seems on the verge of disappearing.
I call, “Alexander! Ri—Risika!”
I almost call, Risa, but the name I gave to a baby girl is not the one she claims as hers now. I will not diminish her by using it.
They both hesitate, and look over their shoulders toward me. Do they realize how alike they look in that moment?
I move closer as they both stare at me, turning to face me in full and clearly wondering who I am.
If I had been human, my pulse would have raced and my breath would have quickened. Risika would have been able to scent the fear in my blood and my sweat, and Alexander would have been able to feel it in my aura. It takes all my strength to stand there and clamp down my fear.
“May I speak with you both?” I ask. “Somewhere more private than this, perhaps?”
Alexander looks wary. He glances around himself, aware that he is a Triste witch and quite possibly a vampire hunter in a place owned and operated by vampires. He clearly fears a trap.
He also recognizes his own features when they stand before him, and is intrigued.
“Who are you?” Risika asks, more boldly.
If I say, your mother, I suspect she will storm away from me. Her energy is high—buzzing, almost drugged by Aubrey’s blood—and her power still whips around her as if it doesn’t believe the fight is over. The vampiric power and her anxiety both seek a new source of agitation so she can pick another fight.
“Somewhere private. Please,” I repeat, holding onto the mystery a few more moments. The mystery of who I am to them, and who they should have been to me. The mystery of my abandonment, my neglect. The mystery of whether or not they will forgive, or will curse me and turn their backs forever.
If Risika is able to calm enough to follow, I will be brave enough to answer then.
At last she lets out an impatient sigh and says, “Fine. No harm in it.”
Alexander also nods. He looks fragile to me, on edge, but he also follows as I bring them to a private room. I’m sure what I will say once I have them alone, but I will face them, and we will speak honestly of a past they were denied—things they should know about their own history and heritage, and how they ended up where they were.
How we all ended up here, rebuilt souls standing in a rebuilt town.
And who we wanted to be, separately and together, once the pieces were all set back together.
Amelia Atwater-Rhodes 