Page 90 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

You deserve a few days to sleep, I signed to him, focusing on my movements, on the position of each finger. Based on Glyn’s crooked smile, I had a feeling some of that had been wrong, or more simplistic than the signs a fluent speaker of the priests’ tongue would use, but it served my purposes well enough for now. I switched to speaking. “You’ve earned every bit of gold promised and more, Brother. I hope you choose to remain a while longer, and not only for my sake. It would be ideal for my court members to learn as well.”

If there is gold, I am your man, Glyn told me.My old chapter will be able to fund the fortification of the Vale with these lessons.

It was a reasoning that made his mercenary heart so much more relatable; while no Silent Brother would work without pay, at least the gold I poured into his hands went to a good cause. The Silent Brother chapters of the Rift were already well-funded, and it did me no harm to ensure my brother Andrus’s territory was protected.

Go on, Glyn said.Let it sink into your brain. You’ll be no use here if you cram like a boy studying for an exam. Every mind needs a rest.

“Enjoy your nap,” I told him, and the Silent Brother nodded, tired but contented with what he’d managed, as I left him.

Indeed like a boy studying for an exam, but in this case, the grade was my wife’s respect and admiration, an altogether more important and perilous thing.

Released from my lesson an hour early, I made my way to the library, eager to see her. Raising my toe claws so I walked only on pads, I prowled silently to the door, peering in.

She was bent over her desk, books open before her, her back to me. That red hair was plaited into a thick, messy braid that hung over her shoulder; there was an ink spot on her skirt.

She didn’t look up as I stepped into the library, her tapping pen the only sound as she examined whatever it was she was looking at.

I didn’t want to disturb her, not while she was deep in thought. She had been eating, sleeping, and breathing these books for days now, to the degree that I knew when her thoughts drifted to them; her eyes would go all dreamy and unfocused, gazing off into the middle-distance, and I knew her well enough by now to understand that at these times, she was translating something in her head or pondering a translation that still eluded her.

As I watched, the golem she’d named Rose emerged from the lower stacks, carrying two heavy books. The golem deposited them on the table, and Cirri signed the words ‘thank you’ without looking up.

Thorn remained where he was, stationed to the side of Cirri’s table; his head had swiveled around fully to look at me in the door, but he’d made no movements otherwise.

They were eerie things, but brilliant; I had to give Wyn credit where it was due. Over the last week I’d had time to observe them, how my wife slowly adjusted from refusing to put her back to them, to trusting them implicitly to keep an eye on things while she lost herself in a world of words.

At night, though, they were exiled to the Tower of Spring. Cirri might trust them now, but neither of us wanted them standing over us as we slept, watching us with those eyeless faces. Some things a man had to draw a line against.

The golems nodded to me, but didn’t interrupt Cirri as I slipped into the stacks myself, to await the final hour until I could pull her from her work for dinner.

It had been a long time since I’d simply wandered in here. When I’d first taken Ravenscry, I’d given the books a cursory glance at best; at the time, my thoughts were all on the battlefield, how I might turn the rest of the keep to my advantage. When the war was over, and I was trapped in this new and deadly body, I had thought it a place to begin my studies on our history, a way to fill the long years ahead of me.

And when my interest in that had waned, brought to an abrupt halt by the lack of progress, I’d shut the library up and not stepped foot in it since.

But here, I remembered these shelves; books so old the binding had frayed, the colors bleached to unrecognizable shades of their former selves. They were not all in Veladari; I recognized the stark runes of Nord, the tongue of my former life, a language that was guttural and harsh when spoken, and the flowing script of Serissan, which was beyond me.

Pulling one of the Nord books from the shelf, I opened it carefully, reading the poem with some difficulty at first. It had been many years since I’d read anything in my mother tongue.

It was a pastoral shepherd’s poem; not something I was keen to remember. If there was one thing I remembered from my former human life, it was that sheep stank, and were stupid—in my young mind at the time, all the more reason to run off from home and join the jarls for the glory of battle.

I smiled to myself; I hadn’t made it to the jarls, but by the ancestors, Ihadwaded knee-deep through blood and gore.

Turning the page, I found the Shieldmaiden’s Lament, and then another short poem on the stony heather of that country. None of it exciting, though I was a biased reader; had I not thrown myself into battle with the first warg I’d ever laid eyes on, determined to either kill it or find myself in the halls of Valholl? At the time, the halls of the dead had seemed a more exciting prospect than the endless stone, lichen, and sheep of my home.

I paused several poems later, snorted while reading the page, and circled the stacks until I emerged in the bright portion of the main room, Cirri now ahead of me.

“There in Valholl’s garden, there was a girl so fair,” I read aloud, my voice echoing through the empty room.

Cirri twitched, then looked up at me in surprise. The golems tilted their heads.

“She had roses in her lips, and fire in her hair.”

My wife tucked a lock of hair behind her ear with a smile, listening even as she made a notation in her journal.

“The circle of her arms was soft, her hunger deep and bare. She burned me all throughout the night, her lust without compare.”

A flush rose in Cirri’s cheeks, pink at first, quickly becoming a fiery red. She looked down at her journal, letting her hair fall forward to hide her face; the golem Rose put the back of her hand to her forehead, swooning dramatically.

I couldn’t prevent the tips of my fangs from showing in a grin. “I vowed to steal her from the gods during the fateful ride. She gave her heart and stole my soul, and kept me by her side—in the fields of Valholl, with my lusty Valkyrie bride.”

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