Page 55 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

“From this moment on, it ends. If we require a night patrol, you will leave the safety of your homes and do what must be done.” I stared at a young man, who no doubt hid behind a hearth covered with cold iron charms and trinkets while my vampiric legions stood guard by moonlight.

I turned my eyes to one of the women. “The food shipments will not be wasted. I don’t give a damn if there’s a daisy mixed with the wheat or a four-leafed clover stuck to the driver’s coat, you will eat the food that is brought, or you will starve. I will notsend more.” She swallowed, her fingers curled around a beaded charm of holly and iron, but she nodded slowly.

Finally, I turned my eyes to Gilam. He, at least, had the stones to meet my eyes. “The old mines will be reopened, and I will not hear a word about ghosts from any of you. As you’ve endlessly hammered into my head, Tristone’s walls must be fortified. So, now we will fortify it—and if any of you fear the dead enough to shirk your duties, believe me…Iwill give you a reason for fear.”

Gilam nodded, face as pale as Cirri’s. I gazed at my wife as she folded a napkin, wiping the blood from her face. She was still moving slowly, her eyes on the broken pieces of slate before her. Wyn gave her a cup of wine, diluted with fruit juice, to calm her nerves.

Had Cirri ever been attacked in her life, living among the Silver Sisters?

I thought not. She had never truly been one of them, with violence expected around every corner. She had been a maid, an indentured servant—her experiences were with domestic duties and her studies, not with weapons.

I’d seen this reaction before, in the men who were young in the beginning of our rebellion against the invading Forians. In their first days of fighting—no longer running nor hiding—some of them had looked like this.

So, she was in shock. I imagined that she’d felt the cold touch of the ancestors’ fingers on the back of her neck as Derog plunged his knife towards her chest…

I inhaled, savoring the deep breath and the tinge of iron-sweet blood it brought to my tongue, and drove my mind away from that terrible thought.

Never again would I be able to look at Derog and not want to destroy him, his entire house, his family.

He had come too close.

“And from this moment forth, let it be known: if a hand is raised against the Lady of the Rift, that hand, and everything attached to it, is mine. You would not have tried to murder me—and the offense of attempting to murder Lady Cirrien is far worse in my eyes. She is neither Fae nor vampire. She is as human as you are.”

Derog’s tremors grew worse, bordering on violent shaking. My fingers tightened, so gently, only enough to hold him in place and not snap his spine.

“Derog… if you had only stopped to think,” I said bitterly. “I wish you had not done it.”

Cirri stopped wiping at her cheek, looking up. Some of the glassiness had finally left her eyes. She shook her head once.

I’m sorry, Cirri, was what I didn’t say, because it must be done.

“I… I thought she was Fae,” the man in my grip whispered. “I thought it had burned her.”

“After years of us telling you—from the experience of our own lives, our own eyes and ears and the things we’ve killed—that the Fae are dead and gone? And yet you still raised a knife to her and almost slayed an innocent. There is no excuse.”

Cirri shook her head again, harder, but Wyn laid a hand over her shoulder and squeezed, then bent down to murmur in her ear.

My wife signed something, her fingers still unsteady, but I couldn’t understand—and even if she’d still had the slate that had slowed Derog enough to save her life, there was nothing she could have written to change my mind.

“This man attempted to murder his liege, the Lady of the Rift.” I spoke loudly, letting my voice carry to them all. “The punishment is death. Let it be heard and carried out.”

No one spoke in his defense. Not for this.

Cirri tried to rise, but Wyn kept her in place. Visca strode towards them, thunderclouds on her face, but I twisted Derog’s arm behind his back and marched him away, past the crowds that remained.

He had been a man of honor before, so he would be given a modicum of dignity now, to die in privacy without his last throes witnessed by his people.

I brought him out to the forest, to a still, silent clearing where the fog wreathed the ground in playful tendrils and the pines stood as silent sentinels.

“Because I respected you, Derog, I will let you choose the manner of your death.”

The old soldier exhaled, looking up at the sky and the sliver of moon above. “I didn’t mean to, my Lord. I truly thought she was one of them. One of the faeries, with all that fire-hair and the mark on her forehead.”

“I know,” was all I said. I believed him.

I was also unwilling to let him walk free—to become an example for the Rift-kin, that they might try to strike at Cirri and walk away unpunished.

Derog swallowed. I heard the dry click in his throat, the thickness of unshed tears in it. “Will you make it quick?”

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