The weight of borrowed Souls

The moon was three nights from full, and Corvin Vaen could already feel it clawing beneath his skin. He stood at the highest window of Kaelmoor Keep, watching the silver light bleed across the Veythe Mountains, and told himself, as he told himself every month, that this time would be different. This time the ache in his bones wouldn't sharpen into something unbearable. This time his father wouldn't look at him like he was a wound the family kept forgetting to close. He knew better. He had known better for nineteen years. "You're doing the thing again," said a voice behind him, his sister Mira, arms crossed, hip against the doorframe, the picture of a girl who had never once in her life knocked before entering a room. "The staring-at-the-moon-like-it-owes-you-money thing." "It does owe me something," Corvin said. "I just haven't worked out what." Mira crossed the room and stood beside him, close enough that her shoulder brushed his. She was the only person in Kaelmoor who still did that, stood close to him, touched him without flinching, without that half-second hesitation everyone else performed so carefully they thought he didn't notice. He always noticed. "Three days," she said quietly. "Three days," he agreed. Down in the training yard, torches were being lit for the evening drills, and the shifter guard was going through their forms, men and women flowing between human shape and wolf shape and something in between, muscle and fur and moonlight moving together like a single organism. Corvin had trained beside them once, before his sixteenth summer, before the Binding had made itself known and turned him into something the guard captains no longer trusted with a blade in his hand three days out from the full moon. Because on the full moon, Corvin Vaen did not become a wolf. He became someone else entirely. "Father wants to see you," Mira said, and he heard the apology already loaded into her voice. "Before dinner." "Of course he does." "Corvin, " "It's fine, Mira." It wasn't, and they both knew it wasn't, but there was a kindness in letting her pretend otherwise, so he let her. King Aldric Vaen did not rise when his son entered the war room. He rarely did anymore. He sat at the long table with the map of Veyrath spread before him, its western half marked in the pale blue of House Vaen's shifter clans, its eastern half in the deep red of House Ashgrave's vampire courts, and the disputed borderlands between them scored through with so many pins and notations that the parchment had begun to tear. "You wanted to see me," Corvin said. "The Ashgrave envoy crossed the Veythe pass this morning." His father didn't look up. "Under a flag of temporary truce. They want to discuss the borderlands again before autumn." "And you're telling me this because, " "Because in three nights, you are going to be wearing Lucien Ashgrave's face at his father's own table, and I want to know what you intend to do with your mouth while you're there." There it was. The real reason for the summons, laid out as bluntly as his father laid out everything these days, not how are you managing the pain, not are you frightened, but what use can we make of the thing you've become. Corvin kept his voice even. "I don't control where I go, Father. You know that. The Binding takes me where it takes me, into his body, in his keep, among his family. I don't get to choose to be useful to you while I'm there." "You could try." "I could get myself killed, is what I could do, if I said one wrong word at an Ashgrave table wearing an Ashgrave prince's skin. They'd know something was wrong within the hour. Vampires aren't stupid, whatever we tell ourselves in council." His father finally looked up, and for a moment, just a moment, something flickered behind his eyes that might, in a kinder man, have been guilt. It was gone before Corvin could be sure of it. "Nineteen years ago your great-grandfather and Lucien Ashgrave's great-grandmother bound your bloodlines together to end a war that had already killed forty thousand people," Aldric said. "They didn't ask whether it would be comfortable for the boys who'd eventually carry it. They asked whether it would work." "And has it? Worked?" Silence. Outside, a wolf howled somewhere in the training yard, an ordinary howl, an uncomplicated one, and Corvin felt the familiar hot jealousy climb up the back of his throat. "Go," his father said finally. "Rest before the turning. You'll need it." Corvin went. He always went. It was easier than staying to hear the things his father wouldn't quite say, that the Binding had made his own son a stranger three nights out of every month, a locked door in the middle of his own house, a weapon nobody had figured out how to aim. He found Mira in the kitchens, stealing bread before dinner the way she'd done since she was seven, and he didn't tell her what their father had said. He never did. There was no version of that conversation that didn't end with her looking at him with pity, and he had a lifetime's supply of pity already; he didn't need hers on top of it. "Tell me about him," Mira said instead, through a mouthful of bread, because she always asked this in the days before a turning, as if repetition might make it less strange. "Lucien. What's he like? You've been in his skin more times than I've had birthdays." "Colder than me," Corvin said. "Sharper. He doesn't waste words the way I do." He thought of the flashes he sometimes caught, not memories exactly, the Binding didn't work that cleanly, but impressions, textures, the residue of a life lived in a body that wasn't his own. Candlelight on dark stone. The particular silence of a vampire court, where everyone listened for things human ears couldn't catch. A woman's laugh, warm and unexpected in all that cold marble. "There's a sister. Isolde. I've never, I mean, I've seen her, from inside him, the way you see things in a dream. She's the only person in that whole keep who doesn't look at him like he's a knife they're waiting to be cut by." "Sounds like Lucien has his own version of me." "Maybe." Corvin allowed himself the smallest smile. "Small mercies." "And what does he do? While you're, here. Wearing you." This was the part Corvin thought about most, in the dark hours before a turning, the part that kept him from sleeping. He had no memory of what happened to his own body during the swap, no window into the days Lucien Ashgrave spent walking around in Corvin's skin, sleeping in Corvin's bed, standing in front of Corvin's father. He only had the aftermath, the way the guards were sometimes stiffer with him for a week after a turning, the way his father sometimes looked at him with fresh suspicion, the way Mira, once, months ago, had asked him carefully whether he remembered "what he'd said to her" the last time, and then refused to tell him what that was when he said he didn't. "I don't know," Corvin admitted. "I've never known. That's the worst part, if you want the truth. Three days a month I disappear, and someone else wears my face through my own house, in front of my own family, and I don't get a say in any of it." Mira reached over and took his hand, the way she had when they were small enough that the difference in their blood, shifter and human, because their mother had not been born to magic, hadn't mattered yet to anyone. "Whatever happens," she said, "you're still you when you come back. That's what matters." He wanted, badly, to believe her. The turning came on the third night, as it always did, precisely as the moon reached its fullness above the Veythe peaks. Corvin had gone to his chambers alone, as the physicians insisted, had lain down on the bed with its iron-reinforced frame, a precaution from years ago, when the first turnings had come on so violently that he'd cracked his own ribs against the headboard, and had watched the moonlight climb across the floor inch by inch, the way a man watches an executioner sharpen a blade. It always began the same way. A pressure behind his eyes, like the world tilting sideways. A taste of copper at the back of his throat that wasn't his own. And then the unstitching, that was the only word he'd ever found for it, the sensation of his own self being carefully, methodically pulled apart at the seams, thread by thread, while something else was stitched into the space he left behind. I hate this, he thought, with the last coherent fragment of himself. *I hate this, I hate this, I, * The moonlight kept climbing across an empty room. And three hundred miles away, in a keep of black stone and colder ambition, a prince who had gone to sleep as Lucien Ashgrave opened his eyes and found, for the fourth time in his young life, that he was no longer alone inside his own skin. Corvin Vaen surfaced into a body that wasn't his, in a room he'd never physically stood in, gasping like a man pulled up from beneath deep water. The turning had happened. And somewhere in Kaelmoor, wearing his face, walking his halls, sitting at his father's table, Lucien Ashgrave had just woken up too.