Blood Oath

Dawn was the only hour Seraphine Valcourt truly despised, so she made her soldiers suffer through it with her.

Mist lay low across the training fields below Hollowmere, thin and grey as old milk. Two hundred vampires stood in it, shoulder to shoulder, breathing steam they did not need to make. The first light touched the eastern ridge, and every one of them flinched. They were old enough to fear the sun and disciplined enough not to run from it.

Sera walked the line with her hands clasped behind her back.

She did not hurry. Her boots, black leather polished to a mirror, made no sound on the frost. The long coat she wore, black wool lined with red silk, moved around her ankles like something alive. She stopped in front of a new soldier whose chin had dipped a fraction of an inch.

“Name.”

“Thomas, Commander.”

“How long have you been dead, Thomas?”

His throat worked. “Eleven years, Commander.”

“Eleven years.” She tilted her head. “And in eleven years, no one has taught you that the sun is only pain? Pain is a thing you can carry. You carry it, or it carries you.”

“Yes, Commander.”

“Then lift your chin.”

He did. Sera studied his face, the rigid set of his jaw, the sweat that should not have been possible on a dead man’s skin, and felt the small, bright satisfaction she felt every morning. This was what she was good at. Not the wine, not the whispers that followed her through the corridors of the castle. This. Taking frightened things and making them into a wall.

“Good,” she said, and moved on.

Behind her, a ripple of relief went down the line. She let it. A commander who was only feared was a tyrant; one who was never feared was a decoration. She had learned the balance long ago, and she had never let it slip.

She reached the end of the rank and turned to face them all. The sun was properly up now, a thin gold blade across the field. Two hundred faces tightened against it.

“Four more minutes,” she said, “and then you may dismiss and tell yourselves you are heroes. Until then, you are my soldiers, and my soldiers stand in the light.”

Not one of them moved. She counted the minutes in her head, calmly, like a woman counting coins.

“You’re enjoying it.”

Beatrice stood at the edge of the field, wrapped in a grey shawl, one hand shading her eyes.

She was the eldest of the Valcourt siblings, though to look at her one would have guessed she was no older than the rest. Like all of her blood, she had grown slowly through her youth and then stopped at twenty, and centuries had not touched her face since. They had touched only her stillness, which had the patient quality of a church window.

Sera fell into step beside her as the soldiers filed in. “I’m teaching.”

“You’re showing off.”

“Those two things are very nearly the same.”

“They are not.” Beatrice’s mouth twitched, though she did not quite let it become a smile. “You taught Thomas to stand in the sun, and in doing so you taught the other hundred and ninety-nine that you could. I watched them. They were not afraid of the light. They were afraid of you.”

“That’s the point.”

“Is it?” Beatrice looked at her sideways. “You were afraid of the light once. I remember you hiding in my wardrobe.”

“I was nine.”

“You were eighty-nine, and you screamed when a curtain moved.”

Sera laughed, easily, the way she only did around Bea. She looped her arm through her sister’s.

“You didn’t come all the way out here at dawn to scold me about curtains,” Sera said.

“No.” Beatrice’s expression shifted, and the stillness in it turned to something more careful. “There is a report. Captain Orsini brought it to me because he did not want to bring it to you.”

“Because I would shout.”

“Because you would enjoy it.”

Sera sighed. “Go on.”

“Three of our border scouts, in the northern passes. Found this week. Not torn, not drained. One cut each, here.” Beatrice touched the side of her own neck, beneath the ear. “Silver on the blade. The wound had not even bled before it burned.”

The humour went out of Sera like a candle snuffed. Something colder stepped in to replace it. “Hunters.”

“One hunter, Orsini thinks. The same hand every time. Patient. He waited for them to separate.” Beatrice drew her shawl closer. “The Order has been quiet for years, Sera. This is not quiet.”

“The Order of the Silver Dawn has been sending boys to die at our borders since before you were born. One more will make no difference.”

“This one is not a boy. Boys are clumsy.”

“Then he will be an interesting corpse.” Sera shrugged, but her eyes lingered on the northern ridge. “I will double the patrols. Orsini can have his report back, and my permission to stop hiding from me.”

“Thank you.”

“And you can stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I am a house on fire and you are trying to find the door.”

Beatrice said nothing. She only watched her, with that grave, patient, loving look that Sera had spent two hundred years learning to ignore.

The great hall was loud with breakfast, which meant it was quiet with blood.

Goblets of it stood in rows on the long table, warm, dark, faintly steaming. Sera took the seat beside the head, and voices rose around her, cousins and captains and old retainers, none of them quite looking at her.

All except one.

“Aunt Sera!”

A boy came skidding around the end of the table, nine years old by his face and some ninety by his blood. He was all knees and elbows, in a coat that was too big. His dark hair stood up in the back where he had slept on it.

“Elious,” Beatrice said. “Walk.”

“I am walking!”

“You are skidding.”

He skidded to a halt in front of Sera and gazed up at her with the naked adoration of a creature who had not yet learned to hide anything. “Did you do the sun thing? Mother said you were going to make them do the sun thing.”

“I did the sun thing.”

“Did anyone faint?”

“Not today.”

His face fell, with such tragic disappointment that Sera had to press her lips together. “Next time,” she promised. “Sit.”

He climbed onto the bench across the table. She slid her goblet toward him and he took a very serious sip, as if it were a sacrament. Beatrice watched from the head seat and opened her mouth, and then closed it, and Sera knew her sister had decided the day was too young for that particular argument.

“When I’m big,” Elious said, “I’m going to lead the army, too. And I’ll be better than you.”

“Will you?”

“Probably.” He frowned. “Maybe not better. The same.”

“The same is a good ambition.” She flicked his forehead gently. “Eat something.”

Down the table, an elder named Maurice cleared his throat in the pointed way of a man who had been waiting to be asked a question and had decided to ask it himself. “Commander. The arrangements for this evening. The lord of the Vesperine delegation arrives at dusk, and we had hoped, that is, the family had hoped...”

“That I would be present for dinner.”

“That you would be sober for dinner.”

Sera smiled. It was a lovely smile, wide and unbothered, the smile that made grown men forget what they had been about to say. “Maurice,” she said warmly, “I have been sober for dinner on three occasions in the last century. All of them were funerals.”

“That is hardly—”

“And one of them was your first funeral. You looked wonderful.”

The table broke. Even Beatrice shook her head, hand over her eyes. Elious laughed without understanding, only because the others were, and Sera ruffled his hair and let the sound wash over her.

She saw the look Beatrice gave her then. Not anger. Not even disapproval. Only sorrow, deep and clear and steady, the way a person looks at someone standing too near the edge of a drop.

She looked away first.

Night, when it came, was her kingdom.

The soldiers called it the Commander’s Hour, though never to her face. When the sky went black and Hollowmere lit its lamps, Seraphine Valcourt became someone else. The coat came off. The silk came on. There were parties in the east wing where musicians played until their fingers bled and wine from the old cellars ran like water, and guests from a dozen different courts, a dozen different species, drifted through the rooms like smoke. A fae diplomat with a mouth like a wound. A selkie with seawater in her hair. A werewolf from the northern packs, broad and warm and bored, who looked at Sera as if she were a fire he could not decide whether to stand beside or to put out.

She danced with all of them. She kissed some of them. She learned each by heart, in the dark, for exactly as long as it amused her.

It was always the same. Somewhere past midnight, with a hand at her waist and a stranger’s breath at her ear, she would feel it settle in, that old, quiet ache, so faint she could almost pretend it was nothing. A hollowness at the centre of the evening. A sense that the whole glittering room was a painting of a feast, and she was the only one who could see the canvas.

Nobody had ever said no to her. Not once. Not truly. Soldiers obeyed. Lovers stayed, then left, gracefully, and she did not mind. Family loved her, stubbornly, as one loves a storm that has taken up residence in the house.

She stood on the balcony as the party faded behind her, and the cold air touched her bare shoulders. Below, in the courtyard, the patrol lanterns were moving out toward the northern passes, small gold lights strung along the road like beads.

One cut each. Beneath the ear. Silver on the blade.

She watched the lanterns until they were gone. Then she lifted her goblet to the empty dark.

“Come, then,” she murmured. “Show me something I have not seen.”

The wind turned. It carried the smell of snow and pine and, very faintly, a long way off, of iron.

Seraphine smiled, and went back inside to the music.