The Vampire King Forgets Me Every Dawn

The Queen He Could Not Keep

They found Tomas behind the winter chapel, close enough to have heard Liora's blood-witness the previous noon.

Tom led Iven to the passage where the keepers brought clean linen. A sentry denied that any room lay beyond the painted wall. Sorin placed his key in the old lock, and the sentry's denial became an attempt to escape.

Iven caught him before he reached the stairs.

Nera went inside first. Liora heard her brother's name, then a noise that might have been laughter if it had not broken halfway through.

Tomas sat at a table covered in unfinished orders. Each began with a conclusion and left a space beneath it for the cause. His fingers were stained black. He looked older than the boy in Sanna's portrait, of course, but Liora had somehow expected captivity to leave him waiting at the age his family lost.

Nera crouched beside him.

“It's me.”

He looked at her uniform. “They said you'd stop coming.”

“I didn't know where you were.”

“They said you knew.”

She put her hands on the table rather than reaching for him. Her brother was alive, and that had not made the years between them disappear.

Sorin backed into the passage. Liora joined him while Iven brought the physician. Neither of them needed to stand over the reunion like patrons admiring a gift.

On the nearest sheet, Liora had seen her own name. A proposed order withdrawing her employment for misconduct. The date was tomorrow. It was neither prophecy nor a message from the future. Someone had prepared a decision the king might accept after another dawn took away its cost.

“She expected you to sign it,” Liora said.

“This morning I almost gave her enough.”

He looked sick. The king who apologized in the parish doorway had not existed when Sabine's writers prepared the page. They were counting on a familiar cowardice, and sometimes they had counted correctly.

Iven brought Sabine into the empty chapel. The doors remained open. She sat where Liora had been made to sit the day before, on the small low stool.

Liora did not enjoy it as much as she had expected.

“Tell us about the other cure,” she said.

Sabine looked at Sorin. “The crown marked her for collection when you began concealing her from the court. Every night, a private attachment. Every dawn, the crown removed what it judged a competing loyalty. I learned to use what it gathered.”

“You encouraged me to keep her attendance private,” Sorin said.

“You didn't need encouragement to want something for yourself.”

He took the accusation without replying. It found something real enough to hurt.

“The mark,” Sabine continued, looking at Liora's collar, “offered the crown a second possibility. A consort can be admitted into the royal memory. She becomes permanent. But she must make room.”

“By losing what?” Liora asked.

“Whatever life does not belong to her king.”

Her own childhood, her sister, the work she did before him. Sanna's dry room, perhaps, and Orla's bad scissors. Everything that let Liora be someone apart from a woman loved by Sorin.

“You call that a cure.”

“He would remember you.”

Sorin stepped between the stool and the table. “No.”

Liora touched his sleeve and moved beside him.

“Let me refuse it.”

His hand opened. He stepped back.

“I won't give you the rest of my life to improve how he recalls a part of it,” she told Sabine.

The regent's mouth tightened. “Then stop asking for an answer that costs nothing.”

“We asked what it costs,” Sorin said. “You kept finding someone else to pay.”

He looked at the shard in her circlet. The physician had followed Iven out of Tomas's room and now stood at the door. Sorin called him over.

“Can the transfer be stopped without destroying what's stored below?”

The physician examined the shard while Sabine held very still. He had seen its counterpart in the old treatment diagrams, he said. The circlet joined the keeper's transfers to the king's reserve. Breaking that connection would close the path used on Nera. It would not empty the cabinets or restore Sorin's private memories.

“And the king?” Liora asked.

The physician hesitated. “The crown has been carrying injuries his body should have healed slowly. The poison among them. If he gives up the reserve, those injuries return to him.”

Sorin looked down at his wrist. The cut from the marking had already closed. He pressed a thumb over the place where it had been.

“Would I survive?”

“I don't know how much has been deferred.”

Sabine watched Liora. “He asked you to keep him alive. Are you ready to watch him undo your work?”

The question hit exactly where she intended. Liora remembered counting his breaths, the long stillness after the fifth. She had lost her mother's goodbye to prove he had chosen her. She could not imagine adding his death to the price.

“We could wait,” she said before she could stop herself.

Sorin turned toward her.

“Until when?”

“Until the physician understands it better.”

“And leave her another dawn to use it?”

Iven stood close enough to remove the circlet, but he could not promise no one else would take its place. The keeper's authority had spread through centuries of service. Tomas's prepared orders were only one visible part.

Liora hated that the king's answer was also a question she could not solve for him.

“I'm afraid,” she said.

He nodded. “So am I.”

No vow followed. He took the small blade from his belt and laid it on the table, hilt toward the physician. Iven removed Sabine's circlet. She made no attempt to struggle, but she turned her face away when the metal left her hair.

The physician opened Sorin's wrist over a silver bowl. The blood needed to cross the shard before the bond could be cut; the king was the living end of the connection. Liora stood beside him while the physician worked. She did not watch the blade. She watched Sorin's face.

When the shard broke, his knees gave.

Liora caught one shoulder. Iven took the other. They lowered him onto the chapel floor before the physician could demand space. Dark veins rose beneath his skin where the poison had marked him two nights earlier.

He tried to speak. Only a rough breath came out.

The physician called for the remaining antidote and warmed blood from the infirmary. Nera ran. Liora pressed a cloth against the wrist that would no longer close instantly.

Sabine watched from the stool. “Now you will have to love a man who needs things.”

Liora looked up at her.

“I already did.”

Then she turned back to Sorin. His eyes were open. He was looking at her with the terrible concentration of someone trying to remain where he was.

“Don't count aloud,” he whispered.

She bent close. “I won't.”

She counted silently until Nera returned, and hated every number.