Page 125 of Vow of Eternal Night
‘And I still love you,’ he said.‘But of all the people the prince took from me, you’re the only one who wasn’t a surprise.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered again.
‘Don’t,’ Yann said.‘But if you want to atone, you can start by at least visiting sometimes.’
I threw my arms around him, overwhelmed by my surging relief.‘I will.’
Upstairs was a maelstrom of activity.Men and women wandered the ground floor in a daze.The traumatised villagers from Orlfen who had somehow survived fared best.The injured had gathered in the dining room, and the very few who weren’t were using whatever they could find to bandage the wounds.
The other humans were more shaken.
Raleigh wasn’t the only vampire who had been cured when the Queen fell.Most of the court had been changed by her hand, and as her curse dissolved so too did her hold on them.There were dozens of them, newly human, who no longer knew what it meant to live for themselves.Most had been hypnotised for centuries.They were waking up for the first time, suddenly alert to their atrocities and with no appetite for violence.A few vampires were still in the mix – those changed by the Queen’s spawn – but they too were subdued.Some remained with their once sires, discussing what to do next in hushed tones, but none seemed inclined to attack Raleigh and me as we passed.In fact, all eyed us with a sort of quiet reverence.They knew what we had done.And whether their loyalty to her was real or enchanted, the awe and fear they now held for us was entirely genuine.
Enrique was among them.Many of them knew him from when he was a boy, and in the weeks and months that followed he would be vital in helping them cross the bridge to their new lives.In that moment we hadn’t thought of what would come next or how we would help assimilate an army of cured vampires with the people of Rostenburg.I was only relieved to see him alive.He had a clothpressed to a ragged wound at his throat, from someone’s failed attempt to feed on him before realising he wasn’t entirely human.Like everyone else, he was covered in ash.
The survivors had gathered the fallen in the entrance hall, where the fighting had broken out.There were nineteen in total – a colossal loss for a town so depleted, but so many fewer than I’d expected.I searched each familiar face one by one, whispering their names and attempting to place them in my few happy memories of Orlfen.
The last one was the hardest.
I’d known from the moment that Father was launched from the stairs that he never could have survived the fall.I’d known it, but I’d pushed the knowledge away long enough to survive the fight.Now that I was no longer in danger I made myself look, and see, and know.It was plain to me that he’d died on impact.His skull was shattered.I hoped I was right.I hoped he wasn’t alive when they tore his throat to shreds.
I closed my eyes, blocking out his visage as my tears began to burn.This was the man who’d orchestrated the famine.The man who’d killed half of Orlfen.Deep down I knew that he deserved this, worse than this.But he was my father.And I knew that if there was the slightest flutter of a heartbeat, I would have brought him back.
If he hadn’t shot Lukas, he might have lived.And if he hadn’t weakened Lukas, none of us would have.
‘You fought well,’ I whispered, then covered his face, and left his side for the final time.
Thirty-Four
IN THE EARLY HOURSof morning, when most of the survivors were falling asleep in huddles around the castle, Raleigh gave me my first lesson in vampiric pragmatism.
One by one we carried eighteen bodies down into the lab and he showed me how he drained and preserved the blood from those he fed from to add to his stockpile in the cellar.The taste, I soon discovered, bordered on rancid compared to how Raleigh’s blood had tasted in the brief moments he’d been alive.
‘They’ve been dead for too long,’ he said once I told him.‘Fresh blood is always better, but you’ll have to put up with this for a while.Another life isn’t worth a better meal.’
The only one we didn’t drain was my father.That was a step too far for both of us.As the years bled away and subsequent faces blurred together, I’d never forget those first eighteen.It was the worst thing I’d ever done.And I had an eternity to get used to it.
We burnt the drained bodies the following day.No one spoke of what we had done, but I suspected everyone knew.They all knew what I’d become by then – I wasn’t doing a very good job ofhiding it – but they didn’t seem to care.In the aftermath of battle, no one from Orlfen could deny that we were on their side, and the worst threat they’d ever known lay on the pyre himself.Simply being undead was no longer a crime worthy of execution.
The remaining vampires kept their distance from the humans of Orlfen after the battle, lurking in the crypt during the day, among the fallen ashes of their Queen, while their mortal sires tried to ingratiate themselves with the townsfolk.When Yann finally led the survivors back down the mountain, half the cured humans decided to go with him.There were enough abandoned homes scattered through Orlfen to house them all, and the farms could use the extra hands.Others filtered further afield – to Triz, to Salzburg, wherever they had called home before coming to court.
And some remained with us.
In killing the Queen, Yann, Raleigh and I had secured a reverence we never expected.Many of the new humans had been changed so long ago that their homes had fallen to ruin, the kingdoms they hailed from dissolved into memory.Life before court was a distant dream of another world.For a while Raleigh resisted, but eventually he stopped trying to make them leave.They became his new court.Ournew court.
They divvied up roles among themselves that Raleigh had long since neglected, slotting around Moira and Enrique.An ancient merchant became the treasurer; a former seamstress declared she would take care of exports.Others negotiated salaries for less glamorous roles as castle staff, and Raleigh let them think he didn’t know how much their wages should have been.Gradually the castle became a bustling hub of activity again.And Rostenburg slowly came back to life.
We convinced the remaining vampires to take up residence in the Queen’s now abandoned palace.They didn’t take much convincing.The Queen had always held control through fear.She was untouchable, but I as a human had stood up to her, stolen her prince, fought her, led a coup against her and ultimately killed her.Never mind that I had barely survived, nor that I’d had no input in the coup and had been a child when Raleigh left court.My reputation solidified before I realised what was happening.When Clara von Rostenburg gave an order, no one argued.
But all of that was to come.
On the evening after the Queen’s fall, Raleigh and I woke early to watch from the tower as the humans returned to Orlfen.We had fallen asleep on top of the sheets, too exhausted even to change out of the clothes we’d died in.The enormity of what lay ahead was unbearable, but as long as I took every step with Raleigh, it became somehow manageable.
‘So what’s next?’I asked, watching the last human vanish into the trees.
‘We have eternity,’ Raleigh said.‘We can do whatever we wish.’
‘What should we do first, then?’I asked dryly.
He pretended to think about it.‘First,’ he said, ‘I’d like to kiss you.’
And he did.
