The Vampire King Forgets Me Every Dawn

What a Memory Costs

Orla cut the ruined collar from Liora's dress with kitchen scissors.

“Hold still. I won't nick you unless you make me.”

The archive's little stove had gone cold. Liora sat beside it while the older woman fitted a borrowed shawl around her shoulders. Guards waited outside, close enough that their boots interrupted every attempt at quiet.

“You should eat,” Orla said.

“You should stop arriving when I'm being humiliated.”

“I'd have to resign.”

Liora laughed once, then covered her face. Orla set the scissors down. She did not say the king meant well. That was why Liora let her stay.

The blood-witness would take place at noon. A private memory, fixed in blood-ink, could show a room what its owner had seen. It could not prove every motive or reveal thoughts that had never been spoken. It could show Sorin asking her permission, and that would save her from the accusation of marking herself.

She had made four such pages in her life. The ink preserved one chosen recollection by burning away another of equal weight. Ordinary copying could not bring the payment back. She knew her sister had sung while washing their mother's hair. She had written the fact down. The sound itself was gone.

Orla took Liora's hands away from her face.

“What would you lose?”

“I don't know until I choose what to preserve. It takes something I would have kept.”

“Then let them look at the mark. Let them question me.”

“They'll say you were in the next room. Iven saw the letter, not the marking. Sabine will call the physician unreliable because he was treating a poisoned king.”

“And every time you pay, they learn what to charge.”

Liora pulled her hands back. She knew. Knowing had never opened a locked door by itself.

Sorin came before the noon bell. Iven entered with him, leaving the door open. The king had dressed in black, his throat fastened with silver. Under daylight his beauty had the unpleasant perfection of something that did not need to be forgiven.

“I examined the bottle,” he said. “The physician confirms there was poison in it before you brought him.”

“How fortunate that I won't have to die for a thing I prevented.”

Iven looked at the shelves. Sorin accepted the hit without changing his expression.

“I frightened you this morning.”

“You threatened me.”

“Yes.”

She had expected an explanation. He gave her none, and for an instant the room became harder to bear.

“The hearing can be delayed,” he said.

“Can it be canceled?”

“The mark changes the succession. The council is entitled to ask how it was given.”

“Then tell them you won't cut a private night out of me to make them comfortable.”

He looked toward Orla, then back. “I can testify to the wound on my wrist. I can't testify to a choice I don't remember.”

It was an honest limitation. She was sick of having to praise him for those.

“You could refuse to benefit from the question,” she said.

He went still.

At noon the council sat in the winter chapel. Sabine had arranged the chairs in a semicircle, with one low stool in the center for Liora. She saw the stool and remained standing. The regent smiled as if granting a courtesy.

“Show us the king's request.”

Liora took out the blank page and the little glass pen. Her sister had given her that pen on the day she left home. The gift was recorded in her journal. She could no longer remember whether they had argued before parting.

Sorin stood from his chair.

“The blood-witness will be voluntary.”

Sabine's hand rested on the table. “The alternative is an unproven claim upon the throne.”

“Then the claim remains unproven.”

Several councillors began speaking at once. Sorin let them. He had made a choice, but he had left Liora to live with the result: a mark called fraudulent, a job dependent on royal access, servants whispering that she had climbed into a sick man's bed.

She uncapped the pen.

“Liora,” he said.

“Don't order me to stop after leaving me this choice.”

She touched the nib to the inside of her wrist.

The memory came with heat. His fingers had been cold at first, then warm where her pulse beat against them. He asked whether she wanted the mark. She asked whether it meant obedience. He said no. She said yes, and he lowered his head to her shoulder before touching the blood to her skin.

She stopped the memory there. The rest of the night stayed hers.

The ink rose from the page in a faint red light. Everyone saw the small, frightened pause before she agreed. Everyone heard him ask.

Then the payment went out of her.

She reached for the table. The room held. Her hand remained her hand. Somewhere inside her a door had closed, and she could not tell which room lay behind it until she tried to remember the person who used to wrap her scarf before the morning ferry.

Her mother.

She knew the shape of the scarf. She could recall the ferry's bad smell. She could not find her mother's face in that cold, bright morning, the last time she had seen it alive.

Liora sat on the stool because her knees would no longer hold.

Sabine viewed the page with professional attention. “The request was made. Whether poison impaired the king's judgment is another question.”

Sorin knocked his chair over standing up.

“Enough.”

The word struck the chapel walls. Every vampire in the room lowered their eyes. Liora did not. She was looking at the red page and trying, uselessly, to remember her mother's crooked tooth.

Sorin righted the chair. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet.

“No one will cut that mark from her. No one will ask for a second page. I will not marry while its status is disputed, nor use it to claim anything from her.”

Sabine looked up sharply. The delay had acquired a cost to the king at last.

Liora folded the page. It was warm. She put it in her satchel without looking at him.

In the corridor, Iven offered to escort her back. She asked for ten minutes alone. He stationed himself at the far door where she could see him and turned his back.

She stood beside the window until Sorin came out.

“What did you lose?” he asked.

“My mother saying goodbye.”

He stopped well beyond reach.

“Can you write it down?”

“Can you write down how it felt when someone wanted you to come home?”

He had no answer. She was glad. She did not want a king's eloquence occupying the empty place.

At the corridor's end, a clerk dropped his bundle of petitions. Papers slid across the stone. Councillor Marek Vey stood over him, telling him to pick them up.

Liora gripped the window ledge.

Vey had died during the night. She had held a cloth against his wound while Sorin called for help. Afterward, she had washed his blood from her wrists.

The living councillor turned, saw her, and put one finger to his lips.

He looked more frightened than she was.