A Dowry of Blood (A Dowry of Blood #1)(7)

My savoir. My teacher. My guiding light in the dark.





I think, my lord, that this is when you loved me best. When I was freshly made, and still as malleable as wet clay in your hands.





I wish I had a better sense of time, or any sense at all. I wish I could insert dates and chart the rise and fall of our lifetimes exactly. But I was caught in the slipstream, washed out into the vast sea of you. You were the air I breathed and the blood in my nursing cup; I knew nothing except the strength of your arms and the scent of your hair and the lines of your long white fingers. I lost myself so entirely in charting the contours of my love for you that there wasn’t any room for tracking time. There wasn’t any room to examine the past or the future, there was only the eternal now.

Eventually, I emerged. Whole and new, and somebody else entirely. The village girl I had been was well and truly dead. She had died a dozen little deaths in that marriage bed, and I was your Constanta, your dark and unbreakable jewel.

Eventually, you permitted me to wander the halls of my new home. Leaving the house was strictly forbidden—I was still too weak, you said—and you fed me solely from your own veins in those early days. Occasionally you tempted home a boy from a neighboring village with the promise of work, but those feasts were few and far between. You did your best to only hunt for yourself when I was asleep, not wanting to leave me alone for long periods of time, but whenever I woke to an empty house I entertained myself with exploration.

I was so enamored with every painting, every carefully laid stone in the fireplace hearth. It was finery beyond my wild imaginings, and it was all mine to possess and command. Not that there was much to command, without any servants or guests or other living creatures in the house besides you and I. But I took great pleasure in rearranging furniture, dusting off family silver, and imagining what it may be like to throw a grand dinner party in the house someday.

No room was off-limits to me except the banquet hall, which I was to enter only with your express permission and accompaniment. One day, when you were feeling particularly magnanimous and I was giving you my sweetest pleading look, you granted me entry.

“This is a sanctum,” you said sternly at the door. “Being permitted entry is a privilege. Do not touch anything, Constanta.”

I nodded wordlessly, practically vibrating with excitement.

It must have been used for entertaining travelling gentry with lavish meals, once. But you had cleared away the high-backed chairs and most of the tables to make room for all your beloved devices.

I didn’t know what to call any of them then, but now I know I was looking at beakers and abacuses, mechanical compasses and astrolabes. All manner of medical and scientific tools both rudimentary and advanced, from Greece, Italy, Persia, and the vast reaches of the Caliphate’s empire beyond. They were laid out in gleaming heaps atop sheaves of parchment. Some of the devices were well-used and others appeared to not have been touched in a century.

“What is all this?” I breathed, my voice carrying easily in the cavernous space. Everything about that castle made my tiniest word seem huge, disruptive to the ecosystem you had built.

“The best this backwater has to offer,” you said, sweeping aside a chart of the constellations. “Such a coarse time we live in, Constanta. The greatest minds of Europe cannot riddle out the simplest diseases or equations. In Persia, they chart the course of blood through the body, operate on the livers of live men, perform feats of engineering that seem like alchemy to the untrained eye. The Greeks and Romans knew sciences that have been utterly lost to time.”

“But what is it all for?”

“To decypher the mysteries of the body, of course. To catalogue the human animal and uncover its intricacies.”

“I didn’t realize you had such an interest in humans,” I murmured, reminding myself that I could no longer count myself among their number. Human beings were a less evolved creature, you said, wretched short-lived beasts suitable for food and diversion and little else. Certainly not true companionship. I should not attempt to forge any friendships outside our home, you warned me. They would only end in heartbreak.

“I have an interest in my own condition and so I must have an interest in theirs,” you said, running your finger over a page covered in tight handwriting. I couldn’t read in those days, but I could recognize drawings of human feet and hands, a rudimentary sketch of what looked like a heart. “Don’t you wonder what power animates us after our first death? Grants us our long, unaging lives?”

I gave a little shiver in the drafty hall. I tried very hard not to think about that, most days.

“I couldn’t imagine, my lord. There is no creator other than God, so maybe He forged the first vampire from the clay of the Earth. Instead of mixing the clay with water, He mixed it with blood.”

I had always been a faithful person, sometimes bordering on superstitious. Entering my second life hadn’t changed that; it had simply broadened my existential horizons.

You smiled at me. Condescendingly. Almost pityingly.

“Your priest’s bedtime stories cannot account for us. Whether we are nature’s triumph or her great shame, there’s rhyme and reason to our hungers. To our bodies and their processes. It is my intention to unravel it, to comprehend and map our condition.”

“To what end?” I asked. I could not stop the questions from coming, even though I was learning that more than two in a row tended to irritate you. Sure enough, I saw a flash of annoyance in your eyes. But you sighed and answered me, as though I were a pestering child.