Blood and Briar

The mountain of Crimsonpeak had no sunrises. Not really. The peaks were too jagged, too hungry, swallowing the light before it could dare touch the stone corridors of Castle Veltharion. Mist clung to the crags like a second skin, and the air tasted of iron and old magic. It was a place that did not welcome warmth and warmth, in return, had long stopped trying. Vesper had lived here for one hundred and fifty years. She did not look it. She stood at the edge of her chamber balcony, her pale fingers curled around the obsidian railing, her dark eyes scanning the horizon where the mountains finally surrendered to distant valleys. She was breathtaking in the way that dangerous things often are, tall and slender with an otherworldly grace that made mortals instinctively step backward without knowing why. Her skin was the colour of moonlight on still water, smooth and unblemished, untouched by time or sun. Her hair fell in long waves of deep black past her waist, catching no light because there was none to catch. Her lips were the dark shade of a bruised rose, naturally, without effort, and her eyes, when they caught yours, were the deep amber of old blood held against candlelight. She looked no older than thirty. She was one hundred and fifty two. She wore a fitted gown of deep burgundy that swept the stone floor behind her, but even dressed in finery she looked restless. She always looked restless. Her fingers tapped the railing in a slow, deliberate rhythm, one, two, three, pause, a habit her father had long since given up trying to correct. Her father. Lord Draconius the Eternal. He ruled Veltharion from the throne room three floors below, a vampire so ancient that even other vampires lowered their gaze in his presence. He was enormous in the way that centuries makes a man, broad shouldered and imperious, draped always in black armour etched with the crest of Crimsonpeak, a ravens skull pierced by a single fang. His hair was silver white, his face sharp as carved marble, his voice a low thunder that rattled the chandeliers when he was displeased. He loved Vesper in the cold, particular way that powerful men love their daughters, fiercely, possessively, and with very little understanding of who she actually was. He did not know she left. He would not have allowed it. The war had changed everything. Lord Belphegor had seen to that. He was not of Veltharion. He was something older, something that had crawled out of a darker corner of the vampire world with an appetite that had no bottom. His minions spread across the human kingdoms like plague, faceless, merciless creatures that tore through villages at nightfall, leaving nothing behind but silence and ash. They did not feed with discretion the way Draconius had always demanded. They devoured. Souls, flesh, entire bloodlines, gone before morning. The humans had retaliated. Of course they had. Now the roads between the mountain and the valleys ran red, and the name vampire had become a curse word whispered with shaking hands. Every creature of the night was blamed. Every shadow suspected. Draconius had fortified Crimsonpeak, sealed the lower gates, and forbidden any of his kin from descending into the human world until the war was settled. Vesper had nodded obediently. And then, as she always did, she had found a way out. She waited until the third hour after midnight, slipping through the servants passage behind the east wine cellar, her boots silent on the stone. She carried nothing except the small knife at her thigh and the ring on her right hand, a slim band of silver set with a single amber stone that pulsed faintly with warmth. A daylight ring. Rare. Expensive. A gift from a wandering witch two decades ago whom Vesper had once shown a quiet kindness and who had never forgotten it. The ring meant she could walk in sunlight without burning. Her father did not know she had it. She emerged into the cold mountain air just as the first grey light of dawn began bleeding into the sky and she breathed it in, that smell of earth and pine and distant smoke that the castle never had. She tilted her face upward and let the early sun fall across her cheeks. It was warm. Wonderfully, scandalously warm. She smiled and began to walk. By midday she had descended the mountain entirely and crossed into the outer reaches of Thyrandor. She had heard of it. Every vampire had. It was a human kingdom that sat at the base of the eastern range like something the mountains had coughed up and forgotten, grey and sprawling and deeply unhappy. Its current ruler was a man named Governor Aldric, a squat and paranoid lord who taxed his people into starvation and spent the collected coin on his own walls and wine. Famine had hollowed the faces of the people in the streets. Children sat in doorways with wide, empty eyes. Merchants shouted over rotting produce. Soldiers in dented armour shoved through crowds with the casual cruelty of men who had never been told no. Vesper pulled her dark travelling cloak tighter and moved through the market streets slowly, watching everything. This was what she came for. Not danger. Not mischief. Just this. The noise and the smell and the terrible, magnificent chaos of human life. She had never been able to explain it to anyone in Veltharion, this hunger she had, not for blood, but for aliveness. Vampires were eternal and therefore in some ways already dead. But humans burned. Briefly, brilliantly, desperately, they burned. She was so absorbed in watching a street performer juggle fire that she almost walked directly into the girl. She heard her first. A bright laugh, too bright for Thyrandor, too unguarded, like someone had accidentally dropped something precious into a dirty street. Vesper turned. The girl was leaning against the outer wall of a tavern called The Salted Hook, arms folded loosely, one boot propped back against the stone. She was young, perhaps twenty, perhaps less, with a face that was almost aggressively lovely, the kind of face that people wrote bad poetry about and meant every word. Her hair was the warm brown of autumn leaves, loose and slightly windswept, falling around a face scattered with faint freckles. Her eyes were green, a deep, mossy, complicated green, and they were currently fixed on a group of sailors across the road with an expression of politely concealed boredom. She wore a dress of faded blue linen, practical and unlaced at the collar, and a leather cord around her neck from which hung a small coin, worn smooth from handling. Her figure was soft and full and she carried herself with the particular confidence of someone who had learned very young that the world looked at her and had decided to make that fact useful. This was Briar. Widely known. Widely sought. She moved between the sailors and the travellers and the merchants of Thyrandor like water finding its level, always where the coin was, always composed, always with that faint smile that gave away nothing and promised everything. She was not unhappy exactly. She was surviving. In Thyrandor, for a girl alone, those two things were often the same. She noticed Vesper staring. Most people looked away when Vesper stared. Something in the amber eyes made them uncomfortable without knowing why. Briar did not look away. She tilted her head slightly, the way a cat does when it sees something it cannot immediately categorise, and then she smiled, slower this time, more genuine. "You are not from here," Briar said. It was not a question. Vesper blinked. People did not usually speak first. "Is it that obvious?" she replied, her voice low and smooth with the faint accent of the old mountain tongue. Briar glanced down at Vesper's cloak, the quality of it, the fabric, the silver clasp at the throat, then back up at her face. "Your cloak alone costs more than this entire street earns in a month," she said pleasantly. "And you are looking at everything like you have never seen it before." "I have not," Vesper said simply. "Not like this." Briar studied her for a moment longer, that green gaze unhurried and surprisingly sharp. "Are you lost?" "No." "Hungry?" Vesper paused at that. A slow smile pulled at her dark lips, private, amused, at a joke Briar could not possibly understand. "Always," she said. "But not for anything your tavern sells." Briar laughed again, that same bright, unguarded sound, and pushed off the wall, extending one hand casually as though she offered it to strangers every day. "I am Briar." Vesper looked at the hand for just a moment. Then she took it. The warmth of it, the pulse beneath the skin, steady and alive, moved through her fingers like a current. "Vesper," she said quietly. Briar smiled. "Just Vesper?" "For now." The afternoon sun fell warm across the dirty street of Thyrandor and somewhere in the distance a bell was ringing and the world, for one brief shining moment, felt very large and very full of possibility. Vesper did not let go of her hand quite yet.