The Gift
“Smile,” my father had said at the gates. “If you cry, they’ll smell it.”
So I smiled.
I smiled as the doors of the Obsidian Hall swung open and three hundred vampires turned to look at me. I smiled at the red silk they had sent me to wear, the colour of the blood their soldiers had spilled across Solmere for six long years. I smiled as I walked toward the man who had ordered my brother’s head mounted on the walls of Kael Ford.
Halfway down the aisle, I passed the cage.
It stood in an alcove along the wall, black iron, the kind they use for hounds. Inside it, a dozen figures knelt in chains with their heads bowed: the King’s blood stock, brought up from the cellars for the night’s old custom. I made myself look away.
But one of them was not kneeling.
He stood at the back of the cage, very straight, his feet set apart and his chained hands still at his sides, the way my brother’s soldiers used to stand on the parade ground when our father rode past. A silver muzzle covered the lower half of his face. Above it, his eyes were dark gold, like the last light of a fire.
“Isolde of Solmere,” the herald cried, “Princess of the South, bride of the King.”
Three hundred heads stayed where they were. Only his moved.
At my name, he looked up, sharply, as if someone had struck a bell he knew. His gaze found mine through the bars. And for one heartbeat I felt something I had no word for: a small, sharp tug at the inside of my wrist, where my pulse beat, as though someone had tied a thread there and pulled it taut across the hall.
Then the crowd closed behind me, and I walked on.
Cassius Varn, King of the Night Court, waited at the end of the aisle.
I had imagined a monster. Instead he was beautiful, the way a blade is beautiful. Tall and pale, black hair swept back from a face carved too perfectly to be real, eyes the grey of a winter sky. They moved over me once, from my crown to my slippers, the way a merchant looks over a horse he has already paid for. The chestnut hair my maid had spent an hour pinning. My mother’s blue eyes. The freckles no powder had quite hidden. All of me, small enough that he had to tip his head down to take it in. Then he looked away, bored.
He slid the iron ring onto my finger without once touching my skin.
“It is done,” he said. Not to me. To the room.
The feast was worse.
They seated me at his right hand, before a plate of pheasant no one else would touch, while their goblets were filled with something that made the hall smell of copper. Cassius spoke to his generals and his treasurer as if I were furniture. When the musicians began, I lifted my hand for the bridal dance that tradition demanded.
He walked past it.
He crossed the hall to a woman in liquid black, with hair like spun moonlight, and led his mistress onto the floor while his wife of one hour sat alone.
“Won’t the queen be lonely, sitting by herself on her wedding night?” a young lord called, loud enough for everyone.
Cassius didn’t even glance at me.
“She is queen,” he said. “She can stand alone because of her title.”
Laughter rippled through the hall like wind through dry leaves. My nails bit into my palms beneath the table. I did not cry. I would not give them the scent of it.
And through all of it, every time I lifted my eyes, I found the gold ones in the cage. Watching me. Not the way the court watched, waiting for me to break. Steady. Patient. The way a guard watches a door.
When the dance ended, the woman in black sank into a curtsey before me.
“Lady Seraphine,” the King said. “She will serve as your lady-in-waiting.”
Her red lips curved. “I’ll make sure you want for nothing, Your Majesty.”
At midnight, the music stopped.
“The Gift,” murmured the lord beside me, and every head turned toward me with new hunger.
I had read about it on the journey north, in a book of their customs my father’s scholars had found for me. On her wedding night, a queen of the Night Court chooses one servant from the King’s blood stock. One creature who belongs to her alone, by law, until death. Not even the King can take the Gift back without dishonouring his bride and her house.
In my case, that meant breaking the treaty.
Guards opened the cage and led them before the high table on chains. Pretty human girls with marks on their throats. Young men with hollow eyes. Lesser vampires with their fangs filed down. One by one they knelt in a line and bowed their heads.
All but one.
He stood at the end of the line as he had stood in the cage, and the guards holding his chains kept as far from him as the chains allowed. Silver bound his wrists and throat, and the skin beneath it was blistered raw. His shirt was torn, his body marked with scars, old and new. He should have looked broken.
He looked like a soldier waiting for an order.
“Choose, Your Majesty,” said the Master of Ceremonies. “Something gentle, perhaps.”
“The second girl sings beautifully,” Seraphine whispered at my ear. “I chose her for you myself.”
I didn’t look at the second girl.
“Not that one, Your Majesty,” the Master of Ceremonies said quickly, following my eyes. “He’s only here by mistake. He killed his last three handlers.”
Beside me, Cassius went very still. It was the first time all night he had paid me any attention at all.
“Choose another,” the King said quietly.
It was not a suggestion.
The whole hall waited. My father’s voice whispered in my head: Smile. Don’t make trouble. Survive.
But I had spent the whole night in a room full of creatures who wanted to watch me fall. Every one of them had looked at me and seen prey, or a joke, or a treaty in a dress. My husband had looked at me and seen nothing at all.
Only one person in the Obsidian Hall had looked at me all night as if I were someone worth guarding. And he was the one in chains.
The thread at my wrist pulled again. Faint. Certain.
I stood. I lifted my chin.
And I pointed at the man in silver.
“I want him.”
