Chapter 20: The Reading of the Writ
The sun went down over the Moonlit Palace like a coin sinking into dark water, and Blair stood at the tall window of the Royal Bedroom and watched the last of it bleed out of the sky.
She had not slept well. Her body still carried the ache of the night before, a sweet soreness between her thighs, a bruised tenderness where Lucien's grip had been. She had bathed at dawn in rosewater and dressed at dusk in a slip of pale ivory silk, no undergarments, per the standing order, and all day she had circled the same thought like a moth at glass.
A Blood-writ. Read every clause twice. What we intend to make you.
Behind her, the doors opened without a knock. Amelia entered first, a dhampir maid with her dark hair plaited tight to her skull, carrying a black lacquered tray. On the tray lay a scroll in a casing of bone-white vellum, closed with a seal of black wax and a smear of dried blood the color of rust.
"From His Majesty's solicitor," Amelia said, and her voice was careful, flat, the voice of someone who had been told exactly how much she was allowed to know. "By sundown, as promised."
Blair took the tray with both hands. The scroll was heavier than it looked. She could feel the weight of it through her palms, like holding a sleeping animal.
"Where are they?"
"Their Majesties are coming. They asked that you not open it until they arrive." Amelia paused at the doors, and for a heartbeat her composure slipped, and she looked at Blair the way the kitchen staff used to look at unusual cuts of meat arriving from the hunt. "Lady Blair. Whatever is in it. The whole household has been talking since yesterday."
Then she was gone, and Blair was alone with a contract sealed in blood and her own hammering heart.
She did not sit at the window. She did not pace, though her legs wanted to. She stood at the center of the room, where the black and white tiles met, because she had learned that standing still was sometimes the loudest thing a person could do.
The doors opened again at the far end of the chamber, and the monarchs came in together.
Vespera wore deep burgundy, the color of her eyes, her raven hair loose and unornamented, which she almost never permitted. Lucien was in black with silver at his collar, and he was not smiling. That was the thing that frightened her most, she realized. A king who smiled at everything had finally stopped smiling, and the reason was a scroll in a girl's hands.
Neither of them sat. Vespera drew out a chair at the long table beneath the mirrors, the table where Blair had once been fed cake across a court's worth of gossip, and gestured to it.
"Read," the Queen said.
Blair sat. The vellum was cool under her fingers. She broke the seal with her thumbnail, and the black wax split around the dried blood, and the scroll unrolled across the table like something exhaling.
The script was old Valdorian, formal, precise, each clause numbered in the margin in red ink.
CLAUSE THE FIRST. Of station. Let it be known that Blair Veil, once of the scullery, is named Lady Blair Veil, beloved of the house of the Moonlit Throne, with standing above all concubines of the court, and below no lady born.
She read it twice. Her throat moved. Below no lady born. The ladies of the ballroom, the ones who had looked through her all night as if she were a pleasing piece of furniture, she now outranked them in ink.
"You wrote this," she said. Not a question.
"Our solicitor wrote it," Lucien said. "We dictated. There were arguments. There were many arguments."
"Continue, little rose," Vespera said, and her fingers were laced together on the table, and Blair saw that the Queen's knuckles were white.
CLAUSE THE SECOND. Of maintenance. The house shall feed, clothe, house, and protect the Lady Blair for the whole of her natural life, and in the event of her death before the house's pleasure, she shall be buried with the honors of a daughter of the throne.
Natural life. The words landed like a stone in her stomach. She read the clause twice anyway, as instructed, and the second reading made it worse, not better. Her natural life. Thirty years, maybe forty. She thought of Dove's aching hands in the cold.
CLAUSE THE THIRD. Of protection. No hand of the court may touch the Lady Blair in anger, in thirst, or in politics. Any lord or lady who raises a hand against her raises it against the throne itself, and the throne shall answer.
CLAUSE THE FOURTH. Of her person. The Lady Blair may not be sold, gifted, lent, shared, exchanged, or discarded. She may not be fed upon without her spoken consent in each instance. Her consent, once given, may be withdrawn at any hour. The house shall not punish its beloved for speech, for refusal, or for temper.
Blair stopped. She read the fourth clause again. Then a third time, which was against the rules, but the words would not settle.
"I may say no to you," she said slowly. "In the bed."
"In the bed, in the garden, in the ballroom, at table," Lucien said. "You may say no to us anywhere, and it will be no, and we will bear it."
"You spent two months teaching me to beg."
"We spent two months teaching you that your wanting was safe." Vespera's voice was even, but there was something raw under it, sanded thin. "We taught you to say yes so that when you finally said no, we would hear it properly. Read on."
Blair looked up at them. They were both standing like defendants, two monarchs of four hundred and four hundred and fifty years, watching a scullery maid read their handwriting.
She read on.
CLAUSE THE FIFTH. Of her people. The Lady Blair shall be granted quarterly letters from and to Marta Sawyer of the palace kitchens, unopened by any hand but her own, for the whole of her natural life.
Blair's eyes stung. She pressed her palm flat against the table until it passed. Marta. They had put Marta in the contract. No one put a baker in a Blood-writ. No one put a baker in a Blood-writ unless they wanted the girl reading it to understand that they had listened to her crying over a letter by a window.
CLAUSE THE SIXTH. Of her wealth. There is settled upon the Lady Blair an estate of ten thousand marks per annum, the east wing in perpetuity, and the library of the Moonlit Palace for her use without restriction, including the forbidden shelves.
"Even the forbidden shelves," she whispered.
"You have already read the worst of them," Vespera said. "It seemed foolish to lock the door after the horse."
There were more clauses. Fees to her if the house fell. A dowry clause that made her snort before she could stop herself. A clause guaranteeing her the right to attend or refuse any court function. A clause that named Dove Estara-Major as a friend of the house, welcome at any hour. She read them all twice, as instructed, and the scroll unrolled and unrolled, and the table was nearly covered, and she reached the last numbered clause in the red margin.
CLAUSE THE FINAL. Of making.
The letters seemed to swim. She bent closer.
Let it be known that the house of the Moonlit Throne intends to Make the Lady Blair Veil of royal blood, by the old rites, with the witness of the Arch-Duke Dante Estara and the Lady Dove Estara-Major, and that upon the making she shall cease to be concubine, or beloved, or ward, and shall stand as princess of the house, equal of the King, equal of the Queen, kin of their blood, forever.
The room went very quiet.
Blair read it again. The words did not change. Royal blood. Equal. Forever. She read it a third time, her lips moving, and somewhere in the middle of it she realized her hands were shaking so badly the vellum rattled against the table like a snake in dry grass.
"No scullery maid has ever been Made," she said.
"No," Vespera said.
"Not in the whole history of the court."
"Not in the whole history of the court." The Queen drew a slow breath she did not need. "It will be a scandal. Dante will relish it. Half the old houses will call it a catastrophe and the other half will spend a decade trying to work out how it happened. We do not care."
Blair pushed back from the table. Her chair scraped on the tiles, too loud. She stood, and she could not keep still anymore, and her feet carried her three steps one way and then back, the ivory slip whispering against her thighs.
"Equal," she said. "You wrote equal of the King. Equal of the Queen."
"We did."
"Not thrall. Not fledgling. Not pet."
"Not anything," Lucien said. "Kin."
She turned to face them. In the gilded mirrors behind them she caught herself, three of her, small and wide-eyed and trembling, and for once she did not look away from her own reflection.
"Why?" The word came out cracked. "Two hundred years of marriage and no permanent lover, Dove said. Kings and queens do not Make their concubines princesses. Kings and queens get bored. They trade up, they trade out, they..." She stopped, because Vespera had moved.
The Queen crossed the floor and stood before her, close enough that the jasmine scent of her was all Blair could breathe.
"Ask us plainly," Vespera said. "You have never once lacked the courage to ask plainly. It is why we chose you."
"Why me?" Blair's voice broke on the second word. "I was a scullery maid. I read a book I shouldn't have. That's all I am. That's the whole of it. Why would you burn the court down for me?"
"Because you read the book," Lucien said from the table, "instead of dusting the sconces."
"Because you laughed at a joke in a ballroom when the whole court was listening and you did not care," Vespera said. "Because you begged beautifully and then argued with me about a clause of your own contract with your hair unpinned and your knees still shaking." Her cool hand rose and cupped Blair's jaw. "Because I have been married to my dearest friend for two hundred years and I have been lonely every single day of it, and then a girl with amber eyes looked at me across a library like I was a person, and I have not been lonely since."
Blair's eyes filled. She did not wipe them.
"And because you will die," Lucien said. He had come to stand at her other side, and she was hemmed between them, the way she had been hemmed in the ballroom, marked on both sides. "Forty years. Fifty, if the feeding is kind. And I have watched things I loved die for four and a half centuries, and I swore, when we drew this up, that I would not watch you."
"When did you decide?" she asked. "The ball? The garden? The first night?"
"The solar," Vespera said, and Lucien said, at the same moment, "The library," and then they looked at each other, and something old and fond passed between the married monarchs, a thing Blair had never seen in them before.
"The library was when we chose you," Vespera said. "The solar was when we admitted it to each other."
Blair looked down at the scroll covering the table. Clause the final. Witnessed by the Arch-Duke. Dove would be there. Dove had told her, take it if they offer, and she had thought, on the balcony, that the offer would be a thing to weigh, a coin to spend carefully, and now it lay before her in ink and dried blood and it did not feel like a coin at all. It felt like a door standing open on the edge of a cliff, with forever on the other side.
"I'm frightened," she said.
"Good," said Lucien. "The ones who aren't frightened of it do not deserve it."
"There's pain. Dove said. The rites. I don't know what they are."
"There is pain," Vespera said simply. "There is thirst, for a while, and a hunger that will frighten you, and there are three days afterward when you will be stronger than you have ever been and more lost than you have ever been, and we will be there for all three days. And then there is forever, and the stars will look exactly the same, and you will be glad."
Blair laughed. It came out wet and surprised. "Dove said that. About the stars."
"Dove is right about most things. It is her most irritating quality."
Blair picked up the scroll's end. The vellum had a space at the bottom, three spaces. A line for the King's blood signature. A line for the Queen's. And a third line, blank, waiting, drawn in red ink, with a small instruction beside it in the solicitor's hand: for the Lady Blair's blood, freely given.
"Freely given," she read aloud.
"That is the whole of it, little rose." Vespera's thumb traced her cheekbone, catching a tear. "Read it as many times as you need. Sleep on it, if you need. Refuse it, if you need, and nothing in this house changes, and you are still our beloved for your natural life, protected and fed and never discarded. The writ is an offer. It is not a leash."
"It's a leash," Blair said. "It's just the nicest leash anyone has ever held out to me."
Lucien laughed, low in his chest, the sound she could feel through the floor. "There she is."
She looked at the third blank line. Her heart was going like a bird's, quick and small and human, and she thought about how it would feel to have that heart still forever, fed and filled and wanted. She thought of the hollow-eyed women kneeling in the ballroom corners. She thought of Marta's letter, quarterly, forever. She thought of herself at twenty-two, dusting sconces, invisible, and of a queen who had looked up and seen her.
She did not need to sleep on it. She had known since the balcony, since before the balcony, if she was honest, since the morning Vespera kissed her forehead like something worth keeping.
"I want one thing added," Blair said.
Vespera's brows rose. "You are negotiating with a Blood-writ."
"You told me to read every clause twice. Nobody said I couldn't write one." She found her voice growing steadier with every word, the old fire coming up through the fear like heat through floorboards. "Clause after the final. If I am Made, I want my maker's last name as my own. Not of the house. Yours, both of yours. And I want it in the court record that I was Made freely, that I read every clause, that I chose it with my eyes open. When the old houses call it a scandal, and they will, I want the record to say I was not made into anything. I walked in."
For a long moment neither monarch spoke. Then Lucien turned away, quickly, toward the mirrors, and Blair saw in the glass that he had pressed the heel of his hand briefly against his eyes.
"You will make her stop doing that," Vespera said to him, but her voice had gone thick.
"Not a chance," he said.
Vespera crossed to the writing desk in the corner, took up a pen, and drew a fresh line beneath the final clause in her own immaculate hand, dictating aloud as she wrote: "Clause after the final. Of lineage and liberty." She finished, blew on the ink, and looked back at Blair. "It will need the solicitor to re-copy it before signing. He will be delighted. He complained that the first draft had no drama in it."
Blair came to the desk and read the new clause twice, as instructed.
Lineage and liberty. Her name, her choice, their blood.
"Then re-copy it," she said. "And then find me a needle."
Vespera turned. The Queen's burgundy eyes were bright in a way Blair had never seen, bright like wine held up to fire.
"You are certain? Tonight? There is no need for..."
"You spent two months teaching me that my wanting was safe." Blair lifted her chin, and in the three mirrors behind her, three small women lifted their chins with her. "So hear it properly. I want eternity. I want your blood. I want to be your equal, not your project, and I want it written that I chose. Bring me the pen and bring me the needle, Lucien, because I'm not sleeping on this one more night, and if the Arch-Duke has to be woken up to witness it, then he can be woken up."
The King smiled, and it was the widest thing his face had done in a very long time.
"Little maid," he said, already moving to the door, calling for the solicitor and the Arch-Duke and a candle of making, "you are going to be a nightmare of a princess."