Page 209 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

Bane

Three weeks on Forian soil, and I felt that I was going to scratch my way out of my own skin soon.

There was nothing here for us. Nothing but the slowly listing remains of the tower and the hungry brambles.

I eyed those thorns, churning like a living being across the plain. Their bloodroses were fat and lush, every petal flawless, fed on blood and bone.

My wife’s blood, my wife’s tears. Two ingredients that were so simple, so ordinary, and yet together they created an ancient charm—one long forgotten by my people.

I stretched out a hand towards the wall, taunting the brambles as I did every day. They stretched out, thorns glistening with menace, always falling just short of their prey.

With the vines straining towards me, inches from my fingertips, thorns as black as poison, I considered the knowledge they had imparted to me.

To them, I was a warg, a being of great evil.

And I found that I no longer cared. The man I had been was long dead; the vampire I had been was overwritten by thecreature I’d become. I’d spent years mourning that loss, and for what? Nothing. It had brought me nothing but pain and misery.

It was acceptance of that evil, of the monster I’d become, that had saved Cirri.

The Silver Sisters might find me an abhorrence. The Silent Brothers might think me a distorted creature. The humans of Veladar might believe me terrible, and my own people, the vampires, might consider me a necessary evil, but I was at peace with it.

Cirri lived, and with her own blood and bravery she had bound the wargs into death. And she only lived because of what I was.

So all was well, serenity filling me. I would burn the slashed portrait in Ravenscry. I needed no reminders of what I had been. What I was now… it was enough.

I curled my hand away from the vines. They hissed, furious at the loss, but slowly slithered back into the whole.

I strode back to the tent where Cirri slept, wanting to watch over her as she dreamed. At times she jolted awake, forehead beaded with pearls of sweat, heart racing so loud I could hear it like a drum.

She couldn’t yet tell me what she dreamed of at these times, but I thought I knew. With love and acceptance, she would heal in time.

Cirri was neither sleeping nor alone when I swept aside the door, peering in. Wyn sat beside her, her hair once more a shining gold, the lines smoothed from her face and hands. In the time since Cirri had bound the wargs, there had been time to feed, time to sleep.

Wyn slept only three hours a night, the rest of her time devoted to tending Cirri’s lingering wounds and studying the brambles, not to mention the golems that had torn themselves free, fresh and renewed, from the ocean of thorns.

But she had fed from Visca, restoring her youth, because she was tired of slowly hobbling from tent to brambles and back again.

None of the fiends had fed, and the knights were beginning to thirst; blood was in short supply around the camp. We needed to return to the Rift, but Wyn had been both afraid to move Cirri before the worst of the injuries healed, and unwilling to leave the charmed brambles without samples and days of study.

Now she held my wife’s hands, gently palpating her through the bandages.

“Look, dear, he’s here. We can do this now.” From the barely-constrained tension in her voice, she’d been trying to convince Cirri to remove the bandages for some time.

Cirri looked up at me, her green eyes huge with anxiety. I knelt beside the camp cot, sliding an arm around her warm waist, and gazed up at her.

She was not the sort of woman to shy from necessary pain. Fighting off a shudder, I remembered her hands when I’d carried her through the field. The shattered bones, the bruised flesh. They had not been recognizable, and to Cirri, they were the part of her body she needed the most. It had taken Wyn nearly two full days to piece them back together, working as fast as she could against the healing nature of my blood.

“Do you fear that they won’t be the same? Or that they won’t work?” I asked, and she closed her eyes with relief, nodding.

So that was her fear, and it was understandable.

“I know you’re afraid to look at them and see what was done to you. I know it was… the worst thing you’ve ever felt.”

She opened her eyes again, gazing at me miserably, and I pressed a kiss to her bare shoulder—as the blood in me was consumed, the extra fangs had fallen out, and my lips nearly covered them again. I could kiss her once more.

“I think you would tell me yourself that what’s done is done, and now you must live with it. There’s only one way forward.”

Cirri stared at me, then a faint smile curled her lips. She took a deep breath, leaning against me, and offered her hands to Wyn.

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