Page 9 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

With her paperwork concluded, Olwyn turned to find me hoodless, and Cirrien frozen like a doe before the hunter. From long experience, I knew she was resisting the urge to slap a hand to her face.

“Well, she didn’t scream,” my advisor said brightly. “An auspicious beginning!”

The Eldest Sister let out a harsh laugh that echoed through the empty cathedral. “This one doesn’t scream. I think you’ll find that this one doesn’t say much at all.”

Chapter 3

Cirri

We were rushed out of the Cathedral, the Sisters unwilling to entertain a vampire in their midst for any longer than it took to marry me off to one.

I walked at Lord Bane’s side, trying and almost succeeding to keep my breathing slow and steady. The top of my head failed to clear his shoulder. The vampire took up almost the entire hallway with his bulk, and I felt crushed inwards by his presence, nothing more than a speck of dust drifting in his wake.

A carriage, hitched to ebony geldings, waited for us in the stableyard. It was massive, clearly designed to hold a fiend—lacquered blood-red, only a few shades away from black, with the crest of Ravenscry detailed in gold on its side. Dust had coated much of its splendor.

The driver was another vampire. He was no fiend; his face was handsome in a pretty, boyish sort of way, skin as smooth and poreless as porcelain, eyes gleaming green and cut vertically with thin pupils. When he smiled, tipping his hat to me, he revealed two long, neat incisors.

It was hard to imagine that the Lord of the Rift had once looked anything like that.

I licked my dry lips as the driver held the carriage door open, and my husband gestured, his black claws catching the midday sun. Each claw was the length of one of my fingers.

“After you, my lady.”

I had heard many voices in my life described as ‘deep’. The choirs of the priesthood boasted bassos whose voices seemed to hum in my bones.

Lord Bane’s voice went beyond that. When he spoke, my bones hummed, but my heart also raced. He sounded… hardly human, not like the smooth-spoken vampires I’d seen in Argent. There was a savage roughness overlaying the rumbling bass of his voice.

When he showed me what lay hidden under the cloak and hood, I understood.

He spoke through a mouth full of fangs, with a forked tongue.

I signed with one hand, a quick and nervous gesture of appreciation for his manners, and the bell on my wrist chimed, filling the air with its sweet sound.

There was an almost imperceptible flinch in the vampires’ shoulders.

The Sisters had not given me a choice in my wedding attire; they’d insisted on the bells and the rowan crown, and the red wedding gown of Veladari custom. No human bride in this country would ever marry in a color other than scarlet.

The tradition dated back to the days of the Red Epoch. Too many women were stolen from the marriage altar by vampires; it was thought that a bride wed in red would show that she had already been bitten and sampled, making her a less attractive prize to them.

The Eldest had laughed as she set the crown of rowan on my hair, knowing the scent would be harsh and unpleasant to the vampires. And then she’d brought out the bells.

I hadn’t realized just how painful that sound might be to him. Like his voice, with the removal of his hood, many things became more clear.

I climbed into the carriage, doing my best not to move my hands any more than necessary, and slid into a seat of pure luxury. The interior was rich, paneled with dark wood and the seats thick and velvety. The ride to the Rift would be made in more comfort than I’d ever experienced in my life.

I was followed by the bloodwitch, who sat next to me. She appeared to be in her late thirties, though the ages of bloodwitches, like vampires, were deceptive. Her ash blonde hair was twisted into a tidy chignon, an expensive pair of gold-framed spectacles perched on her nose. Her own nails were nearly long enough to be called claws, and capped with gilded filigree sheaths.

The Sisterhood had also provided me with a lady’s maid, as befitted someone with a lai in her name—they had not wanted to tip off Lord Bane to the fact that his new bride was an indentured servant herself, though that would become apparent soon enough.

But Ellena stood outside the carriage, taking in the small space, her mouth pinched. “May I ride with the driver?”

I knew that she did not like the idea of being trapped in here with a fiend. She had cried when the Eldest Sister ordered her to accompany me to the Rift and attend to me, but that was not her only job.

But Lord Bane merely rolled his shoulders. “Do as you please.”

Ellena exhaled an audible sigh of relief, and climbed up on the coachman’s bench.

Which left Lord Bane himself to enter the carriage, squeezing his broad shoulders through the door. The entire contraption groaned as it took the weight of the fiend, and he settled himselfon the seat opposite me and the bloodwitch, pulling the door shut behind him and locking it in place with an iron bar.

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