Page 186 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

Cirri

Iadded another line in my journal, making my letters tiny and neat.

It was more of a way to distract myself than anything else; if I focused only on the lines, on the faintness of the ink I had never refilled and the scratch of the nib on paper, then I could ignore the high cackles and snarls outside my window, the crack of bones broken open for marrow, the nauseating stench of rotting meat and unburied offal.

Tears shed in love,

To water the petals of the Mother.

Hakkon had allowed me to keep my journal and the ritual book—a busy lamb was a content lamb, he’d told me as he brought a plate of breakfast the next day.

I’d looked at the rough bread, the grayish meat floating in an oily slick of gravy, and my stomach turned over.

He assured me it was pork. I didn’t believe him.

My stomach grumbled as I checked my last translation, though it was growing quieter, my gut tight with pain. I’d given in to temptation and eaten a few small bites of the toffee from Miro, but then I thought of him as I chewed, those few flashes Iretained from our first night in Foria, and I knew I would never be able to taste it again without thinking of that.

Most of my memories were mercifully blank when I considered his mutation. I thought that perhaps my mind had emptied itself in one agonizing flash—an open, infected wound, purging itself to save the rest of the body.

I wasn’t sure how long I’d been here. Perhaps two days, but my sense of everything was wrong.

Exhaustion made my eyes bleary and sore, my head spinning when I stood up. The whole world seemed to tilt around me at times, and would snap back into place in a blink.

It was impossible to sleep. During the day, some of the wargs became people. They did… well,peoplethings, cooking in vast pots over campfires, crouching around the fires and speaking in low voices. But the smell from the pots and the middens was thick and rank enough to drag me from sleep, and the guards would come in three times a day anyway, bringing me more plates of food doomed to be wasted.

And at night… the wargs came out at night. Their high voices and howls would drift through the window, and just knowing they were out there, creeping around in the shadows, kept me wide awake and staring at the ceiling. The terror was constant, gnawing at my bones.

So I stayed awake day and night, and worked on the translations. Between my aching eyes and dizzy head, it had taken me maybe a solid day to decipher the most recent lines, and I wasn’t remotely sure it was accurate.

I wasn’t even sure I was fully awake. Perhaps I was dreaming it all. But I had half the ritual translated.

In a circle of thorns,

With blood freely given.

Tears shed in love,

To water the petals of the Mother…

I put my pen down, rubbing my sore eyes. The flesh around them was pink and raw from how many times I’d rubbed in the past few days. Tears smarted at the corners, threatening to sting the sore skin.

What was the point of any of this? Whatever this ritual was, it meant nothing now.

And eventually the blood sigil against pregnancy would fade. I had a lifetime of being livestock to look forward to.

A sheep, birthing wolves.

But they could not force me to give myself to Wargyr. I had already vowed myself to a fiend, given my blood freely in a circle of thorns, buried our shared bond to grow the bloodroses of the Mother…

I was his, and I would willingly die before they gave me to their wolf god. I touched the words I’d written, the translation that could mean anything. It was certainly not a way to become a warg or fiend; Miro’s sickening transformation had nothing to do with watering petals. I’d been wrong.

It was becoming more difficult to maintain a single train of thought, my thoughts were jumping from place to place in my exhaustion. Everything was muddled together.

I was so tired. Any day now, Hakkon would come through that door, and he wouldn’t be carrying a plate but a prisoner, another innocent woman, and he would tell me… we are all meat.

We must hunt or be hunted.

When that time came I would face it alone. Bane hadn’t come, my only happiness.

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