Page 111 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

I dreamof a girl

With blood like wine

Sweet as nectar

A brilliant mind

As sharp as thorns

She will always be mine

I could imaginethe look on his face as he came up with this—half concentration, half embarrassment. But it made me smile so wide my cheeks hurt, clutching the journal close to my chest in a tight hug.

He’d written it in his native tongue for a reason. It was a secret between us; as far as I knew, only Visca could read it, and she wouldn’t pry through my things.

I kissed the page, closed the journal, and jerked at the sight in the corner of my eye, nearly falling out of bed.

Thorn stood by the door, a shadow within the shadows.

You scared me, I said, calming my racing heart. He signed in apology, but he didn’t move an inch, guarding the door with his life.

Rose emerged from the washroom, a dress draped over her arm and today’s hairpins—gold and amethyst—stuck through the petals of her skull.Come, she said cheerfully, and I listened. There was no fighting the golem.

I explored the Tower of Winter’s washroom as Rose put me in order. My wardrobe had appeared overnight, packed with dresses and slippers. So… Bane had finally decided that the Tower of Spring was redundant, when I never stepped foot in there anymore except to wash and dress.

I bathed cheerfully, feeling that I’d put my stamp on my territory; these were Cirri dresses in Bane’s tower, and it no longer felt like I was simply visiting him at night, to be banished back to my own tower in the morning. Perhaps I would leave some hairpins on the nightstand to fully claim my territory.

When Rose was finished with me, no one had knocked on the door. There was no Wyn waiting outside to drag me off for decoration or comportment lessons for Bloodrain, no Visca to give me hair-raising tales of how to behave around groups of vampires; perhaps they’d decided I’d learned all that was necessary.

Nor was Miro around for another portrait session. I waffled in the corridor for a moment, and finally slipped off to the library on silent feet, checking around corners as I went.

It felt like it’d been eons since I’d been allowed to work on the translations, though it was really days in reality. My books were right where I’d left them; I pulled down the small ritual book from the pile, opening it to the page bookmarked with a ribbon, and found the dictionary I’d been compiling in the back of my journal.

I had left off on a rune that had my curiosity aflame, because it made no sense in the context of the others.

In addition to the twelve runes the scholars of the Library had already translated, I’d added nearly eighteen more to the lexicon; at this point I could see from context that Bane had been correct: this was legitimately a ritual book, and the very first chapter contained a ritual that appeared quite similar to the ceremony we’d performed at our vows, except… off.

There was ‘given’, and ‘thorn’, the latter of which was known to me thanks to the Silver Cathedral’s single page. With the help of the parallel text on another page, I’d added ‘tears’ and ‘petals’ into the lexicon.

Combined with the gilded illumination of roses and thorns around the border of the text, I had decided that this was, if not the exact wedding ceremony we’d performed, then something very close—unless all vampiric rituals involved their Mother’s sacred images.

Except for the rune at the top.

It was an ugly shape, possessing all of the sharp edges and points of the High Tongue, but none of their flowing grace. There was, in fact, something vaguely lupine in the shape of it, a suggestion of sharp fangs and crazed eyes.

But maybe I was just seeing things, based on my suspicions. This rune had no place in the wedding vows, but I’d also found it in a parallel corpus depicting the wargs.

If the other text was aligned perfectly—and it was, in every other respect—then this rune meant ‘Wargyr’.

I compared the texts, including the charred, fraying scrap of paper that described a battle of wargs and vampires, including those ‘cursed by Wargyr’, and came up with a perfect match for that rune yet again.

Butwhywould it be over a ritual that appeared to outline the wedding ceremony?

I decided to add it to a new page for now, pending new discoveries. Maybe I was completely mistaken, and it would just happen to turn out that the other words aligned perfectly by mere chance.

Sure, Cirri, I told myself, inking the repulsive rune into my journal and adding a question mark after the supposed translation.You have an entire, intact parallel text and added nearly twenty new runes to the lexicon, but it was just chance.

It took a strange effort to form the rune in ink; my hand cramped as I wrote it. I hissed through my teeth as I shook my fingers out, eyeing the rather crooked rune balefully. Never had I struggled to form a symbol before, which made me even more sure that my translation was accurate. If Wargyr possessed the power to turn man into monster, no doubt his name held some of that same power.

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