Rabbits. He’d always liked rabbits, liked their whisper-soft fur and their curious, wiggling noses and their puffball tails. He’d had a pet rabbit when he was small, a brown thing that he’d saved from the hutch when it was just a baby. He’d fed it from his own scraps and hidden it away from his mother and sisters until it had gotten too big and his mother had taken it away and then there had been rabbit stew and he’d cried and cried and . . .
There were tears on his cheeks. He wiped them away and tried to push the thoughts away again, but like all his thoughts, they had a will of their own; they scampered and ran and screamed, and he didn’t know how to quiet them anymore.
Maybe he belonged here, in the dark, where he could do no more damage.
No footsteps in the hall, but he heard the clank of a key in the lock, loud as a church bell, and it made him try to scramble to his feet. The ceiling was low, and the best he could manage was a crouch as he wedged himself into a corner, trying to hide, though hiding was a foolish thing to do. He was strong—he could fight. He should fight. . . .
The glare of a torch burned his eyes, and he cried out and shielded them. The silver chains on his hands clicked, and he smelled fresh burns as they seared new, fragile skin.
“Dear God,” whispered a voice, a new voice, a kind voice. “Lord Myrnin?” She—for it was a she; he could tell that now—put the right lilt into the name. The horror in her tone knifed into him, and for a moment he wondered how bad he looked, to engender such pity. Such undeserved sympathy. “We learned you were being held here, but I never imagined . . .”
His eyes adapted quickly to the new light, and he blinked away the false images . . . but she still shimmered, it seemed. Gold, she wore gold trim on her pale gown, and gold around her neck and on her slim fingers. Her hair was a red glory, braided into a crown.
An angel had come into his hell, and she burned.
He did not know how to speak to an angel. After all, he’d never met one before, and she was so . . . beautiful. She’d said a name, his name, a name he’d all but lost here in the darkness. Myrnin. My name is Myrnin. Yes, that seemed right.
She seemed to understand his hesitation, because she advanced a step, bent, and put something down between them . . . then withdrew to the doorway again with her torch. What she’d put there on the stained stone floor drew his attention not so much for its appearance—a plain, covered clay jar—but for the delicious, unbelievable smell radiating from it like an invisible aura. Warmth. Light. Food.
He scrambled toward it like a spider, opened it, and poured the blood into his mouth, and it was life, life, sunlight and flowers and every good thing he had ever known, life, and he drained the jug to the last sticky drop and wept, clutching it to his chest, because he’d forgotten what it meant to be alive, and the blood reminded him of what he’d lost.
“Hush,” her voice whispered, close to his ear. She touched him, and he flinched away, because he knew how filthy he was, how ragged and beaten by his lot, where she was such a beautiful thing, so fine. “No, sir, hush now. All is well. I’m sent to bring you to safety. My name is Lady Grey.”
Grey did not suit her, not at all: such a nothing color, neither black nor white, no luster or flash to it. She was all fire and beauty, and no gray at all.
Some of his memory stirred, though, gossip overheard beyond his cell by those whose lives were lived beyond this stone. Lady Grey’s become the queen. She’ll not last long.
And then, the same voices. Lady Grey’s dead—what did I tell you? Chopped on the block. That’s what politics gets you, lads.
This was Lady Grey, but Lady Grey’s head had been chopped off, and hers was still attached.
He looked up, and like recognized like. The shine in her eyes, reflecting the torchlight. The hunger. The feral desire to live. She was like him, sugnwr gwaed, an eater of blood. A vampire. Interesting, that. He hadn’t thought a vampire could survive a beheading. Not an experiment he’d ever tried. Experiments—yes, he liked experiments. Tests. Trials. Learning the limits of things.
“Lady Grey,” he said. His voice sounded full of rust, like an old hinge all a-creak. “Forgive.”
“No need for that,” she said. “Let me see your hands.”
He held them out, hesitantly, and she made a sound of distress to see the burns that were on him beneath the silver manacles. She sorted through a thick ring of keys, found a silver one, and turned it in the lock. They fell apart, slipped free, and clanked heavily to the stone floor.
He staggered with the shock of freedom.
“Can you walk, Lord Myrnin?”
He could, he found, though it was a clumsy process indeed, and his bare feet slipped on the mold of the stones. She was ruining her hems on the filth, he thought. She gave no thought to it, though, and when he reached her, she clasped him fast by the arm and gave him support he badly needed. Her other hand still held the torch, but she kept it well away from them both, which helped his eyes focus on her face, oh, her face, so lovely and well formed. A mouth made for smiling, though it seemed serious just now.