Chapter 23: The Fever of Three Days
Fever came with the morning.
Not the human kind, which burns in patches and cools at night. This burned like a held note, a fire that had moved into her bones and taken up residence. Blair lay in the center of the great bed, the ruined ivory silk changed for crimson, and her body glowed. The sweat came off her in sheets, sweet and strange, smelling faintly of jasmine now instead of salt.
Vespera sat behind her, propping her upright against her body, one arm across Blair's collarbone. Lucien knelt at the basin on the tiled floor, wringing a cloth in cold water, and when he brought it to her throat the contrast made her whimper.
"There," Lucien said. "There she is."
"She's been talking," Vespera said. Her voice had gone rough with the whole night of it. "Old Valdorian. Slurred. She recited the writ to a pillow and told the pillow its clause was badly punctuated."
"The pillow took it well."
Blair surfaced from the burning long enough to know where she was. Her eyes would not focus properly. The room was too bright and too detailed, every thread of the velvet counted and catalogued by eyes that had not asked her permission to become new. She was aware of her own heart, distantly, beating maybe once every eight seconds, each beat rolling through her like a tide.
"Lucien," she managed.
"Here, little clause." He came to the bed and sat on her other side, and the mattress dipped, and his nearness was a pressure she leaned toward without meaning to. "Drink first. Then complain."
He opened the seam of his own wrist with a thumbnail, a small fresh cut, and held it to her mouth. The blood was barely warm, held at the temperature of the body that made it, and it went down and the fever leaned back from it like a crowd making room.
"Sip," Vespera said against her hair. "Sips, my love. The gutters and gulps are over. Now it's mending, and mending is slow, and you will hate that."
Blair hated it. She sipped anyway. The blood hit her stomach and spread outward, and she could feel it going to work, feel it laying down new structures along her spine the way mortar lays between brick. Her teeth ached at the roots. Her fingernails had changed in the night; she noticed when her hand flexed against the silk, the beds of them flushed dark.
The day moved in a slow rotation of care. Vespera held her. Lucien wiped her down, cloth and cold water, over the shoulders, between the breasts, along the belly where her softness had firmed into something carved, and each pass of the cloth made her arch, made a sound she didn't choose. Her skin had gone so sensitive that the water was almost too much. Her nipples stayed hard and aching, dragging against the crimson slip with every breath.
"Is it always like this?" she asked, when she could assemble words.
"For Made blood, yes," Vespera said. "For born blood, we're told it's worse. Lucien cried for a day and denies it to this very hour."
"One incident," Lucien said, wringing the cloth. "Four hundred years ago. Let it go."
Dove came at midday with Dante, and Blair knew it before the door opened, heard their footsteps on the tiles from thirty feet, heard Dante's ring click once against his signet. The hearing was the thing that frightened her most so far. The world had come closer. She could hear the candle breathing now, and it did breathe; it had just been too quiet for human ears.
Dante stood at the foot of the bed and studied her the way he studied contracts.
"The eyes have settled," he said. "Red, and the amber holding. That's not written anywhere, Lady Ravenwood. No record of a Made keeping two colors."
"Then write it down," Blair said, feverish and thick. "I'm going to be very annoyed if history loses track of me."
Dove laughed and came around the bed and took Blair's free hand, and her lavender eyes were wet. "You sound like me," she said. "Seventy years ago I promised Dante I'd be a menace forever. He's still collecting on it. Fever's going to crest tonight, sweetheart. When it does, you'll feel like you're coming apart at every seam. You're not. You're being sewn."
"Sewn," Blair repeated, and drifted.
The afternoon burned. Sip by sip, cloth by cloth, the rotation held, and at some point she was aware of Vespera's mouth against the crown of her head, murmuring in the old language, not the rite this time, something else, something with the cadence of a lullaby learned four hundred years ago and never once used.
"She's singing," Lucien said, very quietly, from the basin.
"I am not," Vespera said, and kept doing it.
The fever crested at moonrise.
Blair felt it turn the way one feels a wave pass under a boat. The burning gathered instead of spreading, drew itself in from her limbs toward her center, packed tighter and tighter behind her sternum until she was groaning with it, until her back bowed off Vespera's chest, until every nerve in her body stood pointing at one place, the dense blazing knot of everything the blood had done to her, and the knot had a shape, and the shape was the orgasm the rite had forbidden her, held on the edge for a full hour and never spent, banked like a coal in her core for a day and a night.
"It crests," Vespera was saying, somewhere above her. "Lucien. It's cresting. Lucien, now."
The King's face came into her narrowing view. Dark gold eyes, stubble, the silver streaks catching candlelight, and his expression was the one he wore when a thing he had wanted for a long time arrived.
"Lady Ravenwood," he said. "Ask us."
Blair's whole body shook. The knot turned over. She was soaked, had been for hours, the crimson slip dark and clinging to her hips, her clit so swollen and starved that the air moving across it was nearly enough to end her, and not enough, never enough, a day and a night of not enough.
"Let me come," she said. It came out wrecked, ruined, honest. "Please. Please, I held it, I held it for the rite, I held everything you gave me, please let me spend it. I want it. I want you both. I want, please, Vespera, Lucien, please, I'm begging, I've never begged like this, please."
"God," Lucien said softly. "Four hundred years and that never gets old."
"It gets better," Vespera said. She turned Blair's face up to hers, and the Queen's burgundy eyes had gone wide and dark with something older than politics. "You heard her, husband. Our wife of the blood has crested. The rite is satisfied. Everything the first night withheld belongs to her now."
"Everything," Lucien agreed. He stripped the crimson slip off her body in one motion, and the air hit her soaked skin and she shuddered and nearly went, and caught the edge and hung there, trembling, held by the last scrap of her own will.
"Not yet," Vespera murmured, and the word was silk and cruelty both, and Blair sobbed.
Lucien's mouth closed over her breast.
It was not like before. The making had rebuilt every nerve, and his mouth was a furnace, and the pull of it ran a direct line from her nipple to her clit to the knot behind her sternum, tightening all three. He sucked the nipple to a hard peak and bit, gently, with the very points of new-sharp fangs, and Blair screamed and grabbed his hair and did not come, because some animal part of her had learned the lesson of the rite too well and would not spend without the word.
"Good girl," Vespera breathed in her ear. "Hold it. Even dying, you held it. Hold it a little longer, little rose, and we will make it worth every hour."
Her fingers slid down Blair's body, over the trembling belly, through the soaked thatch of curls, and found her clit, and circled once, featherlight, and Blair's hips came off the bed hard enough that Lucien had to pin them with an arm across her thighs.
"She's a bowstring," Lucien said against her breast, and his voice had gone rough as uncut stone. "She's going to snap and take the room with her."
"Let her take the room." Vespera's fingers parted her, spread her open to the candlelit air and the mirrors, and Blair saw herself in the glass, red-ringed amber eyes wild, body flushed and gleaming, held open between them, and the sight nearly did it alone. "Let her take the palace."
Lucien moved down the bed. He knelt between her thighs, and looked at her cunt the way he had once looked at the writ, like a document worth reading twice. Then he put his mouth on her.
His tongue found her clit and her world went white. He was unhurried and utterly thorough, broad flat strokes and then the pointed tip, circling, flicking, pressing the hood back to work her bare, and his fangs rested against the tender skin of her inner thigh, a promise she could feel with every beat of her vast slow heart. Vespera held her from behind, one arm banded across her chest, her other hand working Blair's nipple in slow rolls, and the two of them had done this before, Blair realized dimly, they had a system, they had spent a day and a night building her toward this and now they were taking her apart with the patience of craftsmen.
"I can't," Blair gasped. "I can't hold it, please, I'm going to, please, I need"
"Ask properly," Vespera whispered. "As I taught you."
"May I come," Blair sobbed, and the words broke apart in her mouth. "Please, my Queen, my King, may I come, I'm yours, I signed, I drank, I'm Ravenwood, please let your princess come."
The word did something to the room. She felt it land, princess, in both of them, felt Vespera's arm tighten and Lucien's mouth still against her for one heartbeat, and then the Queen said, low and wrecked and imperious all at once:
"Come, Blair. Now. Come for your makers."
Lucien sealed his lips over her clit and pressed two fingers into her cunt, deep, curling, and spent she did.
It was not an orgasm. It was a detonation. The banked coal of a day and a night went up all at once and the wave rolled out from her center through her remade body and it did not stop. Her scream was sound and pressure. Her back bowed off the bed. Her cunt clamped down on his fingers and gushed around them, soaked his hand, soaked the silk beneath, and he worked her through it, fingers and tongue relentless, and Vespera held her through it, murmuring her name over and over like the counting of swallows, and the first wave had barely ebbed before Lucien crooked his fingers and dragged the second one out of her, longer, deeper, rolling, until she was babbling, until the words stopped being words.
She came down in pieces. Her heart, her new vast slow heart, hammered faster than it had since the making, and the speed felt like a gift she had given herself.
"Oh," she said, at last, to the canopy. "Oh, that's what the rite was saving."
"That," Vespera said, "and more."
Blair turned her head. The Queen had shed her robe at some point; she knelt on the bed in nothing, porcelain and hourglass and terrible, and Lucien was shedding his clothes with that same leisure that was really speed, and Blair's new eyes went over both of them and her body, spent and hollowed, began to want again immediately, greedy, insatiable, the making having apparently installed an appetite without a floor.
"More," she heard herself say. "I want more. Is that the fever or is that me?"
"Yes," Lucien said, and the whole bed laughed, and Blair laughed with them, red-ringed and amber, burning down to a steady flame at last, her first night's death completed and spent, and the candle at the bedside stood tall and straight and bright, and would for two nights more.