Chapter 25: The Third Night Closes
The second night of the fever was worse than the first, and better.
Worse because the burning had learned where she lived. It no longer rolled through her in tides; it sat in her marrow and worked there, patient as a jeweler, and every hour it reset another bone, rewired another nerve, and presented the bill. Better because she had stopped being afraid of it. Somewhere in the small hours she had stopped fighting and started watching, lying in Vespera's arms with Lucien's wrist at her mouth, feeling her own body being built like a ship in a bottle, delicate and terrible and deliberate.
"She's purring," Lucien said at some black hour before dawn. "Listen."
Blair realized she was. A low continuous vibration in her chest she had no memory of starting. She considered stopping it, decided against it, and purred louder.
"There's our princess," Vespera said into her hair.
The hunger was the other change. The first night she had wanted; the second night she wanted the way fire wants. They fed her from both wrists on the hour, evenly, and between feedings they fed her from the kitchen, because the lore said a Made could digest human food and Blair intended to test the clause exhaustively. Warm bread torn from the crust. Cold chicken off the bone. A whole dish of clotted cream she ate with two fingers while Lucien watched her with an expression he would deny in court.
"Slow down," Vespera said. "You'll make yourself sick."
"I'm immortal," Blair said, mouth full. "What's the worst that happens?"
"She's got you there," Lucien said.
The second crest came at moonrise, smaller than the first, a wave that broke against a seawall already standing. They spent it together anyway, because the appetite had no floor and none of them were interested in looking for one. Vespera laid her on her back and put her mouth between Blair's thighs while Lucien knelt behind the Queen and fucked her in long slow strokes, and the three of them moved like one instrument, and Blair came with her fists knotted in the crimson silk and her new fangs bared at the canopy, and afterward she pulled Vespera up her body and kissed the taste of herself off the Queen's mouth and said, "Again," and they did it again.
The third day dawned gray through the shutters and the fever began to leave.
She felt it go the way she'd felt it arrive, as a shift in pressure. The burning drew down and banked itself, coals settling, and what remained underneath was not heat but capacity. She lay still for a long time, listening to her own heart. Once every twelve seconds now. Each beat landed like a bell in an empty church, rolling through her chest and out her limbs, and the silence between beats was enormous, and she had never in her life been so comfortable inside her own skin.
"Lucien." Her voice had settled too. Lower than it had been, a smoky register that made him turn from the basin with the cloth dripping in his hand. "Lucien. I think it's almost done."
He crossed the tiles fast, for all his leisure. Put his palm flat on her sternum and counted, lips moving, and Vespera came from the window where she'd been standing in the gray light like a portrait of herself, and put her palm beside his, and the two of them listened to Blair's heart together with their heads bent, and Blair watched them and felt something fold open in her chest that had nothing to do with hunger.
"Nearly closed," Vespera said. "Hours. Maybe fewer."
"Then we do it properly," Lucien said. "The last day is the best day. Everyone remembers the last day."
The last day was, in fact, the best day.
The fever's final hours were generous. The pain had gone out of the rebuilding; what was left was sensation, pure and enormous, her remade body a country she could finally walk through instead of being dragged across. They bathed her in the great copper tub with water scented so faintly with jasmine it was almost a rumor, and Vespera washed her hair while Lucien knelt at the side of the tub and fed her sugared plums off his fingers, and Blair sat in the warm water with her red-ringed amber eyes half closed and thought, with wonder, this is what being spoiled means. This is what I signed for. I'd have signed for less. I'd have signed for nothing.
"Stop glowing," Lucien said. "It's indecent."
"I'm a Made princess of the house of Ravenwood. Indecency is my jurisdiction now."
"God help the court," Vespera said, rinsing the last of the soap down her back.
They dressed her in nothing, at her own insistence. A slip of ivory silk, soft as breath, and her feet bare on the cold mosaic, and she walked the length of the royal bedchamber just to feel the tiles through her soles, every one of them a separate distinct cold, her new skin a document worth reading twice. She stopped at the gilded mirror and looked at herself for a long time.
The woman in the glass was tall in the way of presence, not height. Soft where she had once been angular, firm where she had once been soft, dark curls loose to her waist, and the eyes, the eyes no record had ever shown, red bleeding into amber like wine into honey. She touched the glass. The woman touched it back.
"Hello," Blair said to her. "Took you long enough."
The sun went down at half past five, and the candle had been burning for three days.
They kept vigil around it as the light died. Blair sat on the bed between them, propped on Vespera's shoulder with Lucien's arm across her knees, and they watched the bone-white pillar of wax and did not speak, because there was nothing in any language that beat this silence. The flame stood straight. It had stood straight for three days without a single tremor, and the lore said it would gutter only once, and only at the close, and only when it was finished.
Dante and Dove arrived at full dark. Blair heard them coming up three flights; the whole palace was a map of sound now, water in the pipes, moths at the shutters, the slow patience of the old houses' dogs three towers away, howling on and off for three nights at something the whole city could feel and none of them could name. The door opened and Dante came in with his silver hair catch-lighted and his green eyes moving from the candle to her face, and Dove behind him already damp-eyed.
"It's closing," Dante said. Not a question.
"Within the hour," Vespera said.
They took their places against the far wall, witnesses, and the vigil resumed, and the candles of the room burned down, and the moon climbed, and Blair felt the last of the fever gather itself behind her sternum for the final turn of the wheel. It did not hurt. It felt like a hand smoothing a bedsheet flat, one last pass, corner to corner, and she closed her eyes and let it work, and under her ribs her vast slow heart beat on, once, and once, and once.
The candle guttered.
It leaned, as it had leaned on the first night, toward the bed. The flame bent double, shrank to a blue bead, held there for one long breath while everyone in the room stopped breathing with it, and then it went out, and the smoke rose straight as a plumb line and dissolved, and the room was lit only by ordinary candles and the moon through the shutter slats.
"The making is closed," Dante said. His voice had none of its courtroom in it. "Lady Ravenwood. You are fully Made. There is no half of you left."
Blair opened her eyes.
The world had finished. That was the only way to say it. Every sense she owned had come home to roost, settled, calibrated, and the room was a masterpiece of detail she could have read for a century: the grain of the bone-white wax, the salt of Dove's tears on the air, the pulse in Lucien's throat, the pulse in Vespera's throat, both of them steady as the tide. And underneath everything, herself. Complete. Sealed. Hers.
"Well?" Lucien said, and for a king he sounded remarkably like a man waiting for a verdict.
Blair looked at her makers. Four hundred and four hundred years, two prior makings between them, a political marriage that had just spent three days in a bed holding a scullery maid through her own death, and she loved them. She found the word sitting in her chest where the fever had been, warm and finished as everything else, and she did not say it yet. She was not going to spend it in front of witnesses.
"Is it over?" she asked. "The fever. All of it."
"It's over," Vespera said.
"Then I have a request."
"Name it," Lucien said. "Anything in the world."
Blair took a breath she no longer needed, out of old habit and new pleasure, and said: "Not blood. Not sex. I've had three days of both and I intend to have fifty years of both, but right now, this minute, what I want, what I have wanted since the first hour of this fever, is a warm bath, and then sleep. Real sleep. The kind nobody wakes you from because your body is rebuilding itself. I want to be washed and dried and put to bed like something precious, and I want my first full act as a Made princess of this house to be eight hours of nobody asking me for anything."
There was a silence.
"You heard the princess," Vespera said, and her voice had gone thick.
They dismissed the witnesses with a word. Dove came to the bed first and bent and kissed Blair's forehead, lavender eyes shining. "Welcome to forever, sweetheart. Sleep well. Menace responsibly."
"Always," Blair said.
Dante bowed, low, the bow of a subject to an equal. "The court will convene within the fortnight," he said. "There will be fury, and then there will be fear, and then there will be diplomacy. Rest while you can, Lady Ravenwood. History is going to want a great deal of you."
"History can make an appointment," Blair said.
The door closed behind them, and then the royal bedchamber held three people and a dead candle and the smell of its smoke.
Lucien drew the bath himself. She heard the pipes sing through the wall, heard the water find the copper tub, heard him test the temperature with his wrist like a man testing wine, and Vespera undressed the ivory slip off her body with two fingers at each shoulder strap, slow, unhurried, and Blair stood for it and let herself be looked at, finished, and the looking was its own warmth.
"In," Vespera said.
The water was perfect. It was so perfect that Blair made a sound she'd have died of embarrassment over two months ago, a low helpless groan, and slid down until the water lapped her collarbones and her hair fanned out black and heavy behind her, and the heat went into muscles she hadn't known were braced for three days. Vespera sat on the tub's rim behind her, sleeves rolled, and worked jasmine oil into Blair's scalp with both hands, firm and thorough, and Lucien perched on the opposite rim with a soft cloth and washed her shoulders, her arms, the line of her throat, with the grave attention of a man restoring a painting he intended to look at for five centuries.
"Comfortable, little clause?" Lucien said.
"I'm going to fall asleep in this tub and you'll both be legally liable."
"We're immortal. Liability means nothing to us."
She laughed, low and rolling, and the water shivered around her, and her hand found Lucien's knee on the rim and gripped it, and her other hand found Vespera's ankle behind her and held it, and the three of them stayed like that for a long time, the candle smoke fading from the air, the dogs finally silent three towers away, the palace settling around them like a ship at anchor.
She drifted. Not fever-drift; real drift, the heavy luxurious sinking of a body with nothing left to do. Somewhere in it Vespera's fingers combed through her wet curls, over and over, and somewhere in it Lucien lifted her hand out of the water and pressed his mouth to the inside of her wrist, where the ceremonial needle had opened her three nights ago, the cut long sealed and the skin new.
"She's asleep," Vespera whispered.
"She's not. She's pretending, because it's the first time in her life she's been allowed to."
"I'm pretending," Blair said, eyes closed, "very convincingly."
They lifted her out. Between them, one arm across each set of shoulders, water sheeting off her, and they toweled her dry with warmed linen and did not let her lift a finger for any of it, and she did not, because she was a princess and had only just learned the word's true meaning tonight. Lucien carried her to the bed. Not the ceremonial carry of the rites; an ordinary carry, one arm under her knees and one behind her back, her head on his shoulder, her wet hair dripping down his sleeve, and he carried her the twelve steps to the four-poster like a man carrying something he had waited four hundred and fifty years to hold and would not rush the last twelve steps for anything in the world.
Vespera turned down the crimson silk. Lucien laid her down in the center of it, and then, instead of withdrawing, the two of them climbed in on either side of her and closed around her like a book. Vespera's arm across her collarbone. Lucien's hand spread over her heart, feeling the great slow bell of it land, once, and once.
"Your heart," he said quietly. "It's finished. Listen to it. It'll beat like that for the rest of forever."
"I know," Blair said. "I've been listening for an hour. I like it better than the old one."
She was nearly gone. The dark behind her eyes was kind, and deep, and hers, and she let herself fall into it the way she'd fallen into everything these three days, greedy, greedy, exactly as taught. At the last edge of sleep she felt Vespera's lips against her hair and heard, very low, in the old language, four words she was too far gone to translate and too new to forget.
"Sleep, wife of the blood," which was Vespera, and then Lucien, rough as uncut stone, against the back of her neck: "Sleep, little rose. The court can howl with the dogs. Nothing gets you before morning."
And nothing did. And in the cold grate the bone-white candle of making stood burned down to a thumb's width of wax, out forever, and would never be lit again in either of their lifetimes, because there is only ever one candle for one making, and theirs was spent, and sealed, and three hundred years of court gossip had just been born in a guttering blue flame, and none of the three people in the great bed cared even slightly.
The dogs, three towers away, had gone quiet at last. Even the old houses, it seemed, had run out of things to say.