The Vampire King Forgets Me Every Dawn

Ask Me After Breakfast

The physician said Sorin would live before he said whether the king would remember her.

Liora had not asked the second question. She was sitting on the floor beside the infirmary bed, holding a cup she had forgotten to drink from. The cloth around Sorin's wrist had been changed twice. He slept with one hand outside the blanket, its fingers occasionally closing on nothing.

“The poison is responding,” the physician told her. “He'll be weak for some time. The old wound in his shoulder has opened as well.”

“Which old wound?”

“From the northern war. He dislikes admitting it still hurts.”

She looked at the broad shoulder under the sheet. She knew where he was ticklish and how he held his mouth when amused. She had not known a wound had been waiting there for eighty years, assigned to somebody else's strength.

“The forgetting?” she asked at last.

“The keeper's channel is broken. The crown itself remains. Its older workings aren't undone by breaking one connection.”

“So dawn will take me again.”

“I expect so.”

He left her to sit with that. The honesty was painful, but it did not ask her to choose a stranger to suffer in her place.

Nera came after midnight. Her uniform was creased where she had slept briefly in a chair. She held a bowl of broth as though it were an urgent military supply.

“Orla threatened to bring it herself.”

Liora took it. “Tomas?”

“Mam is with him. He keeps apologizing for the things he wrote. She keeps telling him he needs to eat.”

Nera sat on the windowsill. Outside, rain darkened the garden paths. For a while they listened to the water striking the leaves.

“I nearly took the bargain,” Nera said.

“I know.”

“You would have hated me.”

“I would have hated being the reason. That's not the same thing.”

“It would have looked much the same from here.”

Liora set down the bowl. Nera was right. They had been strangers joined by the king's need. Refusing a cruel bargain did not make every feeling around it generous.

“I'm glad you didn't have to find out,” she said.

Nera nodded, accepting no more than that.

She remembered her brother's name and the reason she had joined the guard. Closing the case had stopped the attempted transfer before its loss became permanent. The promotion was gone. Sabine's offer of rooms had been withdrawn with her authority. Nera would need to find somewhere Tomas could sleep without hearing a keeper approach through the wall.

“There are rooms near the parish,” Liora said. “Sanna knows the owner. Don't promise him a bed inside this place because it's paid for.”

“You sound as though you've tried that.”

They shared a brief, tired smile.

Sorin woke near the third watch. His first attempt to sit failed. He swore, quite ordinarily, and Liora put the cup down before he could knock it over.

“Sabine?”

“Under guard in the west apartments. Iven has the keeper's keys. The council meets after noon.”

“Tom?”

“Sleeping. As himself.”

“And you?”

She looked at the coat hanging beside the door. The parish key lay in its pocket.

“I have a room outside the palace.”

Sorin turned his head toward the window. The eastern edge of the sky was still black.

“You intend to keep it.”

“Yes.”

He was silent long enough for her to know the answer had disappointed him.

“I want to ask you to stay,” he said.

“I know.”

“I won't pretend it's for the work.”

She moved her chair closer. “That helps.”

His hand lay beside hers on the sheet. He had no blade within reach. The guards had instructions to keep the room quiet at dawn and let him read before admitting anyone. It was a precaution, not a guarantee that tomorrow's king would make her welcome.

“I don't want another letter about why I ought to love you,” he said.

“Neither do I.”

“I want a letter about what I did when I was afraid. Including this morning.”

Liora looked at the inkstand. She could write it with cruel accuracy. She could spare him enough to make the next introduction easier.

“Write it yourself.”

His wrist was bandaged. The fingers would not close firmly on the pen. He tried anyway, made an ugly line, and stopped.

“Will you hold the page?” he asked.

She held it while he wrote slowly. He included the threat in his bedchamber and the insult at council. He named the offer made to Nera, the choice he had made about the shard, and his wish that the woman present should not be required to comfort him about any of it.

There was no sentence ordering his future self to love her.

Orla, Iven, and Nera came when he asked for witnesses. They read what they could attest to, required one correction where his account overstated what he had seen, and sealed the page. Iven would remain outside with a separate copy. The writing could survive daylight. Its reader would still have to decide how to live with it.

The witnesses left. Liora stayed until the sky began to pale.

“May I hold your hand?” Sorin asked.

“Until I go.”

He took it carefully. His skin was warmer than usual. Without the crown's borrowed strength he looked tired in a way she had never seen, older and less certain of his right to occupy the room.

“Tell me something I haven't asked before,” he said.

Liora thought about it.

“I wanted to be a mapmaker when I was a child.”

“Why didn't you?”

“My straight lines were terrible. I liked the names of places more than their positions.”

He smiled. “Mine are worse.”

She looked at the crooked letter. “I noticed.”

The dawn bell began.

Liora released his hand before his fingers changed. She stood by the door, far enough away to give him the room he had failed to give her yesterday. His eyes closed. When they opened, he looked at her shawl, the chair, the cup, then down at his bandaged wrist.

He did not recognize her.

The pain came cleanly this time. She had stopped expecting a reward for behaving well.

“There's a letter,” she said. “Iven is outside. I am leaving for breakfast.”

Sorin reached for the page. He read slowly. His mouth tightened at one line. He looked toward the empty place where his blade would normally lie and said nothing about its absence.

She opened the door.

“Archivist Vale.”

She turned because she chose to, not because he had used a title.

“May I see you later?” he asked.

There was no recognition in his voice. There was a request he had not yet learned whether she would grant.

“Ask me after breakfast.”

Outside, Iven stepped aside. Orla waited at the stair with bread wrapped in a cloth. Liora took a piece and bit into it before it cooled.

In the courtyard, Nera was helping her brother into a carriage. Tomas saw Liora and caught her sleeve with two ink-stained fingers.

“The orders,” he said. “Some of them came to Sabine already written. She corrected them. She didn't begin them.”

“From where?”

He glanced toward the eastern gate.

“I remember a seal shaped like a bell. There's another keeper outside the palace.”

Liora looked at the city opening for the day, at all the doors she could now enter without a king's permission.

“We'll speak when you've slept,” she said.

Then she went home to the room she had chosen, carrying her own key.