Page 39 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

All but one; a painting she had thought to give me as a reminder.

“You are still him,” she had told me, when the pain beneath my skin was still fresh and new, an agony of thorns. “This is to remember who you are.”

I clasped my hands behind my back, gazing into my own eyes, though not into a mirror. Edda’s memory had captured me perfectly, though I was twisting into a new shape as she’d painted it.

The man in the painting… he was handsome, cheekbones as sharp as knives, lips full and tilted in a smirk, amber eyes glowing, black hair a waterfall down his back.

How smug he was, how vainglorious, believing he was equal to this burden.

“You stupid bastard,” I whispered, reaching out to touch the painting, wishing for my claws once more. I wanted to destroy it so thoroughly it would be like it had never existed at all.

Instead I turned my back on him. He was a reminder, after all—not of better times, not of the noble vampire I had been, but of the cost of arrogance.

I turned away from the past’s mirror, looking out the window; Cirrien’s tower was opposite mine. Guardians traveledthe shadows around it, leaving no weak points for a warg to slip through.

Her windows were almost perfectly dark, but for the single candle flickering in one. While I brooded in this tower, she spent her wedding night alone and…

And what? Cirrien had not said so much as an unkind word to me, despite her clear terror. Was she really in there cursing my name, begging the ancestors to release her from this burden?

No. She was not. Maybe I was being the fool, but I didn’t believe that of her.

She had said the vows with strength. She had planted the binding thorns with care.

From the moment we had come for her, she had met this fate with her head held high, and I was the fortunate one. I had no right to lurk about, moaning and whining to myself, when she was doing no such thing.

I stared at that faint candlelight flicker, wondering what she was doing. Perhaps… writing in the journal? Putting those obscured thoughts into words?

My greatest wish in the world, greater even than the desire to return to my old body, was to understand her with clarity.

Please be writing. Please let me hear you, I thought, not daring to voice the words aloud. It was too precious a wish to be spoken.

I thought of her hands when she’d come to me, the words moving through the air as gracefully as birds, as softly as whispers. What had she said then, before her hands had moved in terrified shapes, the meaning obvious even if the words were not?

No. She had said no in the end, and because I desired her, there was no choice but to let her go.

Let me hear you, because I want you, and I want to love you.

I allowed myself to watch the candle for one more minute, and then I forced myself away. Away from the memories, down the tower steps, back into the room of the warg pelts where I had slept alone for many long years.

I couldn’t be the man she deserved, but I could try to be something she needed.

The keep was dark and still; the nobility who had chosen to travel by daylight were kept in the Tower of Summer, furthest from Cirrien’s room. Nobody was around to disturb me, the guards not giving me much more than a glance. They were well-trained to keep their attention on other shadows, deeper shadows that might hide a wolf rather than a fiend.

When I found myself straying too close to the Tower of Spring, which was now Cirrien’s from foundation to peak, I forced myself to turn away.

She had said no, and no it must be.

So I prowled restlessly, finally stalking outside the main doors of the keep to the cool wind atop the fortified wall outside. The scent of fresh pine on the breeze cleared my head, the mist drifting over the valley of the Rift like a white sea.

A small sliver of me wished for a warg to come; merely for something to do, something to kill. My release had satisfied only the lust, not the hum of frustrated tension in my veins.

But no wargs came to save me from my own discontent. Here and there the mist parted raggedly, revealing the needle-strewn ground far below, empty of enemies to slay.

If I could do something for her… but I had no idea if she had liked the book. If she even liked reading at all. I knew the paper would have been a small happiness for her, but perhaps the book had been outside her taste. Maybe she was interested in flowers, or sewing, or… or perhaps she thought that a book about vampires meant that I was trying toforceher to want—

“Why is it that every time I come up here, I find you brooding? Don’t you have better things to do?” Visca scowled at me briefly, but she kept her gaze outside the walls, ever vigilant. “There’s several supply wagons to be mended, if you want to keep your hands busy.”

“I was just thinking.” I stood a little straighter, shaking off the broodiness. “About what Cirrien might like. Everything here is new to her.”

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