Chapter 22: The Candle of Making
The flame did not move. Blair watched it burn in the candle's cup, a blade of light standing upright as though carved there, and its stillness frightened her more than the needle had. Everything in the room breathed. The velvet breathed. The mirrors breathed. The flame did nothing at all.
"Come to the bed," Vespera said.
It was not a command in the shape Blair had known for two months. It was quieter than that, and heavier. The Queen held out her hand, palm up, and the cut on Blair's thumb gave one slow throb in answer, as if the blood already understood the order before she did.
Lucien was unbuttoning his cuff. He did it the way he did everything, with a kind of leisure that was really speed worn smooth, and when the sleeve fell back he drew a dagger from the case the footman had carried, a short ceremonial blade with a black hilt, old as the candle. Dante took up his station at the foot of the bed, dressed and formal in his court clothes, and Dove settled beside him on the carved chest, emerald silk pooling, her lavender eyes never leaving Blair's face.
"The old rites," Dante said, and his voice had none of its usual dryness. It had gone deep and level, a voice used to saying things that became law. "Three days. The first is the drinking, and the drinking is the death. I will say that plainly, Lady Blair, because no one else will. What the candle starts tonight, your body will call dying. It is not dying. But it does not know that."
"Thank you," Blair said. "For saying it plainly."
"I have watched two makings in three hundred years," Dante said. "Both of them wept. There is no shame in it. The blood weeps on the way out of the human and on the way into the Made."
"I remember it," Dove said softly. "I remember every hour of it, and I would do it again tomorrow. Both things are true, my love. Hold them both."
Blair looked at the bed. The great four-poster rose up under the mirrors, ivory and silk, the bed where she had been fed and filled and taught to beg, and it looked different to her now, lit by the bone-white flame. It looked like an altar. She thought that was probably the correct reading.
She crossed the black and white tiles and let Vespera's hand draw her up onto the silk.
Lucien knelt on one side of her. Vespera on the other. Between them she sat in her ivory slip and felt smaller and more seen than she had ever felt in her life, and the candlelight stood unmoving in both their eyes.
"Give me your wrist," Lucien said.
She offered her opened thumb first, confused, and he shook his head once, gently.
"The left. The pulse side. Both makers drink in the first hour, a token each, so the house may taste what it is taking in. Then, in the old words, the makers open for the Made, and she drinks from both at once. That is the making itself. Everything else is ceremony."
"The token first," Vespera said, and took Blair's right wrist, and turned it, and put her mouth to the small cut on Blair's thumb.
The sensation went through Blair like a struck bell. It was not pain. It was the opposite of pain, a pulling sweetness that ran from the pad of her thumb up the inside of her arm and settled low in her belly with a heat that made her gasp. Vespera's burgundy eyes came up over her knuckles, watching her face while she drank, and Blair realized the Queen was not merely taking a token. She was learning what Blair's blood tasted like on the last night it would be human.
"Oh," Blair said, uselessly.
Vespera released her with the unhurried care of a woman setting down something precious. Her lips were faintly stained. She did not wipe them.
"She tastes like cream and honey and stubbornness," the Queen said to the room.
"She does," Lucien agreed, and took his token from the same wrist, the same cut, and the second pull was worse, or better, because now Blair knew what it would do to her, and her body leaned into it without her permission, hips shifting on the silk, breath coming shorter. He drank for three heartbeats only and let her go, and his dark golden eyes were burning the way they burned in the solar, and she wanted him, and there was no time, and that was its own exquisite cruelty.
"Now the words," Dante said. "Hold the forms."
Lucien stood. He laid the dagger across his open palm and spoke, and the language was not Valdorian as she had read it, it was older, vowels like river stones, and she understood perhaps one word in five. But the shape of it she understood entirely. He named the house. He named the throne. He named her, Blair Veil, and then he named her again, Ravenwood, and when he said the second name the candle flame bent, just once, toward the bed, and stood straight again.
Vespera answered him in the same tongue, her frost-script voice made ancient and strange, and then she took up the dagger.
"Left wrist," she said to Lucien. "Right wrist. She drinks from both at once. It is the hardest part of the first night and it is why the old rites demand two makers. One blood alone would drown her. Two bloods, drunk together, braid. Hear me, Blair. You must drink from both, evenly, until we take your mouth away. If you favor one, the braid fails, and the making fails, and what is left is not survivable. Do you understand me?"
"Yes," Blair said. Her voice came out small. "Evenly."
"Evenly," Vespera said again. "I will count your swallows for you. I have done this before. Four hundred years, and I have done this twice, and I remember both."
"Who?" Blair asked, because she was Blair, because she could not stop being Blair even here.
"Later," the Queen said, and there was a whole continent of grief in the word, folded small. "Not tonight. Tonight is yours."
She drew the edge of the dagger down the inside of her own left wrist. There was no flinch, no hesitation, and no blood at first, and then the pale line went red and the red began to run, dark and slow and impossibly rich, the scent filling the chamber so suddenly and so completely that Blair's mouth flooded and her stomach clenched and every rational thought she owned went out like a candle in wind.
Jasmine. Crimson velvet. And under it, blood, and her whole body turned toward it like a flower.
"Look at me," Vespera said. "Not at the blood. At me. The eyes, little rose. Keep the eyes."
Blair dragged her gaze up. The Queen's face was perfect and still and shaking, both at once, the tremor back in her fingers, and her wrist was extended over Blair's mouth and Blair could see the pulse in the wound, the slow immortal beat pushing the blood out in fat dark beads.
Lucien's dagger opened his own wrist on the other side, black blood welling in the candlelight, and he said one word in the old tongue that she did know, because it had been on the first page of the first forbidden book she had ever stolen.
"Drink."
She opened her mouth under Vespera's wrist and closed her lips around the cut, and the first swallow went down like fire swallowing fire.
It was agony. It was the crystal plug and the needle and the first night in the Queen's chambers, all braided into one column of heat that poured down her throat and detonated in her chest. Her heart slammed once, twice, and on the third beat it stuttered, missed, caught again with a jolt that arched her spine off the silk. She made a sound against the Queen's skin and the Queen made a sound back, low and wrecked, nothing royal in it at all.
"Again," Vespera whispered. "One. Again."
Blair swallowed again. Then Lucien's hand was in her hair, turning her head, and she opened for his wrist without releasing the Queen's, and the geometry of it held her between them, two wrists, two wounds, and she drank from each in turn, evenly, evenly, counting with the Queen, and each swallow was worse and each swallow was better and the line between them dissolved somewhere around the tenth.
Her body began to burn from the inside. Not fever. Deeper than fever. It started behind her sternum and spread along her bones like light poured into channels, and she could feel it finding her blood and entering it, old blood braiding with new, and every place it touched woke up. Her nipples hardened against the ivory silk. Her cunt clenched around nothing and gushed, sudden and shameless, soaking the slip beneath her, and she would have been mortified if she had been capable of mortification, but the blood had burned that faculty out of her in the first dozen swallows.
"She's taking it," Dove said, from the foot of the bed, her voice thick. "Look at the candle."
The flame had begun to lean. Not flicker. Lean, steadily, toward the bed, drawn like a compass needle, its white burning taller now and somehow quieter, and where its light touched the mirrors the three Blairs in the glass were becoming four.
"It never leans," Dante said quietly. "In three hundred years I have never seen it lean."
"Then the court will have one more thing to choke on," Lucien said, and pressed his wrist deeper to her mouth.
Blair drank. The pleasure came in waves now, synced to her swallows, each mouthful of royal blood landing in her belly and radiating out and up and in, her thighs shaking, her hips working against empty air, and Vespera's free hand came down and gathered the hem of the slip and pushed it up past her hips without breaking the count.
"Two hundred and six," the Queen said. "You're soaked, little rose. Good. The body that takes the making should want the making. It fights worse when it's cold."
"Vespera," Blair tried to say against her skin, and it came out as a moan with a name barely attached.
"I know. I know exactly. I remember." The Queen's thumb traced the arch of Blair's cheekbone, gathering a tear Blair had not felt fall. "You will spend tonight's death on the edge of coming and you will not come. That is the rite, not cruelty. The blood takes you hardest where you are most alive, and you, my love, were never more alive than when you were being kept."
"Kept," Blair breathed, and drank again, and the word detonated with the blood, her cunt pulsing around nothing, her clit a hard starved point, her whole body a bow drawn to the limit and held there, and Lucien's hand slid down her sweat-slick body and cupped her through the bunched silk without entering her, just holding her, heat against heat, and her heart tripped and recovered and tripped again.
"You may scream," Lucien said in her ear. "The old houses are three towers away and I want them to hear nothing and know everything anyway."
She screamed. It tore out of her with a swallow, wordless, and the two wounds in her mouth kept feeding her through her own cry, and the blood drank her scream as she drank the blood, and somewhere in the room the candle leaned further and the mirrors held four of her, the fourth slightly ahead, slightly paler, slightly smiling.
"Three hundred and forty," Vespera counted. Her voice was coming apart. There was blood on her teeth when she smiled, and she had never been more beautiful. "Do you feel it gathering? The old blood braiding with yours? It will feel like being learned. Like a language you didn't know you spoke."
"It does," Dove said, and her voice cracked on it. "Oh, sweetheart, it does."
The burning reached Blair's heart properly then. Not the stuttering, not the trip and catch. A slow, deliberate restructuring, the muscle being taught a new tempo, and each beat came slower than the last and each beat was heavier, worth ten of the old ones, and she could feel her human heart being paid out like rope and something else being paid in, patient, vast, keeping a time she had no word for yet.
Her eyes closed. She could not keep them open. Behind the lids there were colors that had not existed an hour ago.
"Eyes," Vespera said, sharp. "Stay with me. You do not get to drift. You walked in, Blair. Walk."
Blair forced her eyes open. Both wrists came closer, the wounds welling fresh, and she understood that the makers were feeding the flow, pressing their pulses into her mouth, spending their own blood like dowries.
"Evenly," she reminded herself out loud, slurred, and the room laughed, all of them, Lucien low and Dante surprised into it and Dove wet and bright and Vespera's laugh breaking in the middle like a girl's.
"There she is," Lucien said. "There's our clause. Dying, and still managing the rite better than we do."
"She negotiated the writ," Dante said to no one. "Of course she manages the rite."
Six hundred. Seven hundred. The swallows blurred and the counting blurred and Blair existed as a point of heat between four pressures: mouth, mouth, hand, silk, and the candle's light pressing against her closed and open eyes like a hand on a door. Her heart gave a long slowing roll, ten beats where there had been ninety, and in the space between two of those vast slow beats she felt the old blood finish braiding and pull the knot tight, and something in her closed and something in her opened, and both were forever.
"One more hour of drinking," Vespera said, soft as a secret. "Then the candle will gutter once, and gutter once only. Then the fever, three days of it, and us beside you for all three. Can you drink for one more hour, my wife of the blood?"
My wife. The words went in with the blood and settled somewhere permanent.
"Yes," Blair said, against the Queen's wrist, and her voice had already changed, lower by a quarter tone, resonant in her own skull in a new way. "Evenly. Count me."
Vespera counted her. Lucien fed her his wrist and pressed two fingers against her clit, circling, never letting her crest, keeping her on the exact edge through swallow after swallow while the blood remade her from the marrow out. Her skin began to change under their eyes, the tan deepening toward something luminous, the soft new curves going firm and spare without losing their shape. Her curls darkened to a black that drank the light. She felt each change arrive and catalogued none of them, because she was busy, so busy, drinking forever out of two open wounds.
The candle guttered once, near the end of the hour. One gutter only, as the Queen had promised, and every head in the room turned to watch it stand back up straighter than before.
Dante rose from the chest. He came to the bedside, formal, and knelt, and that, from the Arch-Duke, made even Lucien's eyebrows rise.
"I kneel to the throne," Dante said. "And the throne is in the bed, being made. Forgive the presumption, Lady Ravenwood. I will only say it once, and then never again." He bowed his silver head. "The house of Estara is glad. The court will be furious. Between those two things, choose the first whenever it is offered. I waited seventy years to be able to tell anyone that."
"Get up, Dante," Lucien said, rough. "You'll make her cry and she needs the fluid."
Blair laughed against Vespera's wrist, and the laugh shook the wounds, and both monarchs shuddered.
The hour ended. Vespera drew her wrist from Blair's mouth and Lucien drew his, and both sealed their own cuts with a pass of tongue and a murmur in the old tongue, and Blair lay between them on the ruined ivory silk, soaked, burning, emptied of her human pulse and not yet filled with the next one, her chest moving in slow vast beats that were not hers and were entirely hers.
Her eyes opened all the way for the first time since the drinking began. The room was different. She could see the dust turning in the candlelight, could see the grain of the vellum across the room, could hear, faintly, three towers away, an old house's dogs beginning to howl at something they could not name.
"Look at me, little rose," Vespera said, and turned Blair's face to hers.
Blair looked. In the three mirrors, and the fourth, her eyes were no longer amber. They were taking the color of the blood she had drunk, a deep burning red at the center, ringed still with a stubborn ember of amber that would not, apparently, be managed by anyone.
"They're mine," Blair said. Her voice was low and sure. "The eyes. I'll keep the amber. All of it. I walked in."
"You'll keep the amber," Vespera agreed, and kissed her, blood and blood, and it tasted like a promise with a signature on it.
The flame stood straight, taller now, and would burn that way for three days and three nights, and it had already decided, though the room did not know it yet, never to flicker again.