Page 1 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

Chapter 1

Cirri

The hours until the wedding were ticking away, and the bride-to-be had smeared herself all over the room.

Eldest Sister Sifka stood in the doorway, taking in the ruined carpet and the blood soaking through the cracks in the floor. She trembled, not from grief or disgust, but from pure rage.

I waited in silence with another maid, not relishing the work to come. It was our misfortune that we were the first to answer the frantic summons, unaware that a body awaited us.

The Eldest Sister stared at the scene, her fingers drifting to her temples to massage away a headache.

“Very well, there’s nothing to be done for this.” She curled her lip at Antonetta’s stiffening body. “Clean it up.”

I hurried in, falling to my knees and spreading my cleaning rags to soak up the deepest puddles, ignoring the thick scent of copper and the unpleasant, congealing coolness of the blood on my hands. Antonetta’s head had tilted onto her shoulder in death, blonde curls now as crimson as my own, so that she seemed to be watching me with puzzlement as I worked around her feet.

The other maid, a new girl named Ellena recently brought in from begging on Argent’s streets, had turned a pale greenish color and audibly swallowed. She clenched and unclenched her hands, breathing rapidly as she stared anywhere but at the body. “Eldest, I can’t—”

“What use are you, then?” Sifka bared her dull silver teeth, showing a strip of gray gums. “Go fetch Sister Aletha!”

I kept my head down, working in silence as I stripped the linens from the bed and began spreading those across the floor around the dead girl.

Poor Antonetta had possessed three qualities which doomed her: she was a junior Librarian in the Silver Sisters’ Library, not quite yet ascended to the full rank of anointed Sisterhood. She’d also been pure-blooded Veladari, and, as of the previous evening, rather pretty.

These things combined had made her the perfect expendable warm body, marked for a fate she considered worse than death: marriage to the Lord of the Rift.

Which was supposed to take place in three hours.

They would have to find a new bride on short notice, one the Silver Sisterhood could afford to lose. Their ranks had been falling in number since the Blood Accords had been signed, when vampires and humanity put aside their long-lived hatred to drive the wargs of Foria out of Veladar.

The Blood Accords had saved us all. I’d been fifteen when the last of the Forians were sent back over the border, and to this day the tolling of bells still sent a deep chill through me, a primal fear that no Veladari in this generation or the next would ever forget.

Bells meant wolves. They meant teeth and claws at your door.

It was a fear ingrained in us by mythical monstrosities. Wargs, the men who shed their skins to become wolves, had been children’s fairy tales for centuries. It was only forty yearsago, when King Radomil of Foria decided to take Veladar’s fertile lands for himself, we discovered that they were all too real.

Real, and just as horrific as the stories claimed. After three decades of losing ground, ravaged by the Forians’ animal appetites, the high nobility of Veladar had elected to turn to our old enemies: summoning the vampires from the depths beneath our feet, offering everything we had for their protection.

They had accepted the agreement, eager to escape an eternity of darkness in the underground.

With their aid, we had won against the Forians… but at what some considered too great a cost.

Antonetta had clearly been one of them.

The vampires had allied with us with conditions that seemed like lesser evils at the time, when the common sight of a Forian warg meant tolling bells and families lost: from the day the Blood Accords were signed, the Four Lords of Veladar would be vampires, then and forever.

The human nobility who had held these seats—the Lord of the Rift, the Lord of the Moor, the Lord of the Vale, and the Lord of the Rivers—had given them up, though not without extreme dissent and anger.

But they’d taken their petty vengeance on the vampires. The vampires might rule this country now, but the Blood Accords were clear: within ten years of the declaration of peacetime, each Lord was required to take a fully human, pure-blooded Veladari bride, to ensure humanity’s voice at their tables. If they failed to do so, the seat would revert to human hands… and we all knew the vampires wouldn’t allow that.

Theycouldn’tallow it. Not with our fraught history.

Today was the tenth anniversary of that peace, the Lord of the Rift was coming, and his bride-to-be was dead. I dropped a blood-soaked cleaning rag in my bucket and grabbed another.

Soft footsteps sounded in the doorway, along with a frustrated sigh. “She couldn’t face Lord Bane, then?”

I knew Sister Aletha from her rough, broad voice alone, but kept my eyes down. My hair was covered, but I was taking no risks.

“Obviously,” Sifka snapped. She took a calming breath, and her voice gentled. “They do say he’s monstrous. I’ve glimpsed him myself, and I can’t imagine he’s gotten any easier on the eyes since then. Antonetta was a flighty girl. Clearly an unwise choice.”

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