Bound to the Vampire King

Chapter 3: The False Mate

Dawn came and went without the training hall.

Rosalie found me at midday with a dress over one arm and a look on her face I was already learning to read. That look meant trouble was being served for dinner.

"Training's off," she said, laying the dress out on the bed. "The King was called away this morning. He wants you at the banquet tonight instead."

"I'd rather be in the training hall."

"You won't, after you meet the Court." She looked at me a moment. "Keep your back to the wall, your hands off the silver, and your mouth shut. You'll live to see another dawn."

"Thrilling."

"Eira." She waited until I met her eyes. "Half the people in that room would drain you dry just to watch the King's face while they did it."

The banquet hall made the throne room look like a pantry.

Candles burned in branches of black iron. The table ran so long I couldn't see the far end of it. And the Court. The Court looked at me like I was a dessert course nobody had ordered.

I was seated at the King's right hand. His chair was empty. Mine was not so much a chair as a throne with better manners, and the blood of a hundred houses had soaked into these stones, and every one of them was watching me breathe.

"Little king's pet," a woman across the table said, loud enough to carry. "Does she eat with her hands?"

"Only when she's hungry," I said, picking up my fork. "You should try it sometime. It's thrilling."

Silence. Then a laugh: low, rich, surprised, like you laugh at a dog that suddenly recites poetry. I couldn't see who made it past the candles.

The food was real. That was the first surprise. Roast meat and dark bread and wine the color of rust, and I ate like I hadn't eaten in days, because I hadn't. Around me the Court drank from goblets that never seemed to empty, and their eyes kept sliding to my throat like it was a conversation they were having in a language I didn't speak.

"Silver remembers," Rosalie murmured, sliding into the seat beside me. "Poisoned or not, don't eat with the King's fork. Bad manners, worse rumors."

Voices floated up the table like smoke. I caught fragments: "...a human, at the King's right hand..." "...the border patrol should be flayed..." "...she won't last the month, mark me..." and, quieter, from somewhere near the head of the table: "...unless she's not human at all."

I didn't turn to see who said that one. I didn't want to know which face went with the voice that had already guessed.

"Who's the pale one at the end? The one who laughed?"

"Cassian." She said it flat, like a door closing. "He's the only man in this Court who's ever made the King raise his voice. Stay away from him."

"Why? He seems nice."

"He's not nice. He's patient." She stood. "There's a difference."

The man came to me between courses.

He didn't approach so much as arrive. There in the chair beside me, elegant as a whisper. Pale hair, pale eyes, rings on every finger. Handsome the way a knife is handsome: sharp, obvious, and probably bad for me.

"You're the one," he said. "Incredible, isn't it? A thousand years I searched, and you simply walked through his border."

"Who are you?"

"Cassian." He said the name like it should mean something to me. It didn't. "I knew your King when he was young enough to bleed. I've known him longer than anyone in this room. And I'm here to tell you he's wrong about you."

"Wrong about what?"

"About you being his fated mate."

The words landed like a stone in still water. I kept my face still. "He said my blood knew him."

"Of course it did." His smile was patient, pitying. "Your blood knew him because your blood is a lantern in the dark, and he's been hungry for far longer than you've been alive. That's not a bond. That's a meal." He leaned in, and his voice dropped. "The fated bond leaves its mark on both. Not a feeling. A mark. Look at your wrist, little queen."

I looked.

There was a mark on my wrist. A thin line, faint as a memory, curling from my pulse point toward my thumb. I'd noticed it in the bath that morning and thought nothing of it: bruising, from the hands that had dragged me across the border. The pack had held me there. I remembered the ache.

But Cassian was looking at me the way a man looks at a fire he's been promised.

"You see," he said softly. "He never told you what the mark means."

"He never tells you anything," Cassian went on, soft as silk. "Did he tell you why he keeps you in the eastern wing, with no windows that face the border? Did he tell you why you woke up dressed in his colors, in a room he had emptied of mirrors?"

My mouth was dry. "You've been watching me."

"I've been watching this house for a thousand years. You're the first interesting thing in it." His eyes caught the pulse in my throat. He knew. He knew the way I knew my own blood.

"Everyone who gets dragged over a border has bruises," I said. "I've got a whole collection."

"Then look at mine."

He turned his wrist over, and the mark was there: darker, older, winding up his arm like a vine. "The bond marks both, Eira. Always has. Always will."

I looked at his wrist. I looked at mine. The room went wrong-quiet, like the pause before a door is opened that should stay shut.

"Cassian."

The King's voice came from the head of the table like a blade being drawn.

Cassian didn't move. "Kael. You're early. We were just getting acquainted."

"Step away from her."

"Or what?" Cassian's smile didn't waver. "You'll introduce me to the Court formally? We're old friends, you and I. I'm only reacquainting myself with your taste."

Kael crossed the room in silence. He moved the way he'd moved in the forest: too fast to follow, too still to be human. He stopped at my chair, and the cold came off him in a wave.

"Eira. Come."

"Come where?"

"Nowhere you need to know." His eyes never left Cassian. "I said step away."

Something was happening to my skin. My pulse beat against the mark, and underneath the cold and the warmth there was a third thing. Like a chord being struck in a room I'd never been in. I couldn't tell if the burning was the mark, or the bruise under it, or the fact that both of them were looking at me like I was the answer to a question they'd been fighting over for a century.

Cassian rose, slow, unhurried. "Your little queen has a question she hasn't asked you yet. I can see it in her wrist." He held up his hand, the mark facing the King. "She wants to know why her skin sings when I'm near. She wants to know why you never let her near the eastern mirror."

The air went wrong: thick, heavy, colder than the throne room.

"He's lying," Kael growled, flat. "The oldest kind of lie, wrapped in the prettiest words."

"Am I?" Cassian was already moving toward the door, but he paused at the threshold, and his voice carried. "Ask him why he crossed the border that night, Eira. Ask him what he's hiding behind the mirror."

The banquet ended without ceremony after that. Servants moved the candles. The Court filed out in pairs, watching me sideways, tasting the rumor.

Kael didn't speak to me. He didn't look at me. He stood at the head of the table, staring at the door Cassian had taken, and then he was gone, and I was alone with my wrist and the mark I couldn't stop touching.

Rosalie walked me back to the eastern wing. At my door she stopped. "Cassian's mark is real. It's been real for a hundred years. But so is the King's." She looked at me, and for once there was nothing sharp in it. "Whatever's between them is older than you, and you're standing in the middle of it."

"I didn't ask to stand in the middle of it."

"No one ever does." She squeezed my shoulder once and left.

I closed the door and stood in the dark.

My room didn't have a mirror. I'd checked twice that morning and told myself it was an eastern-wing thing, a guest-room thing. Nothing.

I crossed to the wall where a mirror should have hung and ran my palm over it.

Smooth. Cold.

But at the edges, where the dust gathered, the stone was lighter. Brighter, like something had hung there for a very long time and been taken down before I arrived.

Someone had gone to the trouble of removing every mirror from the room they gave me.

I stood there with my hand on the wall and my wrist burning, and I thought about asking him.

I didn't ask him.

I waited until the candles burned low and the footsteps stopped passing my door. Then I slipped out, barefoot, into the dark of the eastern wing.

It was a maze. Corridors that ended at blank walls. Doors that opened into closets. I counted the stones like my mother had taught me to count rows on a loom, so I could find my way back.

I found two mirrors that night. Both small. Both in rooms that weren't mine. Both turned to face the walls, like someone had spun them around in a hurry, running out of time.

And then, near dawn, I found the third.

It wasn't behind a mirror. It was where a mirror should have been: a door painted to match the stone, seams so fine I nearly walked past it. I stood in front of it for a long time, my wrist burning, my heart doing the thing it had done in the forest.

The door was locked.

The door was locked, and the keyhole was warm.