Chapter 26: The First Morning
Blair woke without knowing the hour. The crimson velvet canopy hung above her like a held breath, and the first thing she understood about her new body was the quiet. Her heart beat once. Then twelve seconds of stillness. Then again, a slow deep drum far down in her chest, like footsteps in a great empty hall.
The second thing she understood was that she was being watched.
She turned her head on the silk pillow. Lucien sat propped against the rose-carved posts on her left, one knee up, black hair loose around his shoulders, his blood-orange eyes fixed on her with the patience of a man who had not moved in hours. On her right, Vespera lay on her side, raven hair spilled across the pillow, burgundy eyes half-lidded and unreadable.
"How long have you been staring?" Blair's voice came out lower than she remembered, warm as spilled wine.
"All night," Lucien said. "Every beat of it."
"Twelve seconds is not so long," Vespera said. "You learn to spend them well."
Blair flexed her fingers under the sheet. Her nail beds had gone dark as garnet, her skin faintly luminous in the candlelight the servants had left burning. Her senses unspooled one by one. She could hear the jasmine oil drying in Vespera's hair. She could smell Lucien's blood beneath his cuff, sweet and slow, and her own saliva pooled at the thought.
She was thirsty. She was also, she realized, ravenous in a way that had nothing to do with blood.
"I slept eight hours," she said. "My first act as a Made princess. I want it on the record that no one woke me."
"You slept eleven," Lucien said. "We let you have three extra. Call it a coronation gift."
"Eleven hours." Blair stretched, and the sheet slid down her body. She wore nothing but the jasmine oil Vespera had worked into her scalp, and she felt no urge whatsoever to cover herself. That was new. Yesterday the sight of her own nakedness in the gilded mirrors would have made her blush. Today she looked at the girl in the mirror across the room, soft full curves, dark curls, eyes ringed red as a sunset, and thought, she is ours, and I am she, and neither of those facts frightens me.
Vespera's hand found her hip under the sheet. The Queen's fingers were cool, always cool, and they traced the curve of Blair's waist like a jeweler appraising a stone she had cut herself.
"You are different," Vespera murmured. "Even your skin sits differently on you."
"I feel like I was taken apart and put back by better hands." Blair looked from one monarch to the other. "Yours."
Lucien laughed, a low rough sound. "Twelve hours Made and she is already flattering the crown."
"It is not flattery. It is inventory." Blair sat up against the pillows, and both monarchs went very still, the way predators go still. She liked that. All her life she had learned to make herself small, invisible, head bowed. Now these two ancient creatures adjusted their breathing around her movement. "I am hungry. Both ways. I would like breakfast in bed, and I would like it brought by the King and Queen themselves, because it is my second act as princess to be spoiled."
"The first was sleep," Vespera said.
"The first was sleep," Blair agreed. "The second is this."
Lucien rolled his cuff without being asked. The old scar on his wrist, pale where her fangs had drunk before, caught the candlelight. But Vespera caught Blair's chin and turned her face.
"Gently, little rose. No one is counting swallows anymore. Which means you must count them yourself, or you will drink your makers dry and spend your first morning a widow."
"I would be a very rich widow," Blair said. "Ten thousand marks yearly."
"Insolent thing." Vespera's mouth curved. "I have missed your insolence. It aged well in the fever."
Blair took Lucien's wrist in both hands. The first swallow hit her tongue and her whole body shuddered. It was not the thin desperate sips of the fever. It was full, unhurried, the taste of it blooming down her throat and out to the ends of her, warm as brandy, dark as the garden at midnight. She heard herself make a sound, a low helpless purr, and Lucien's breath left him in a rush.
"There it is," he said softly. "There is the sound that undid me the first night, in the solar, when you were still human and smelled of soap and stolen books."
She drank until the sweetness turned rich and heavy, and then she stopped herself, tongue flat against the wound until it closed. Twelve heartbeats. She had counted. She was proud of that.
Vespera offered her left wrist without ceremony, and Blair drank from her the way she had learned in the rites, evenly, from both, because that was the shape of what she had made herself into. Vespera's blood tasted colder, brighter, like frost over wine. Halfway through, the Queen's free hand slid into Blair's curls and held there, not pulling, just holding, and Blair understood that this was the closest Vespera came to admitting anything.
When she finished, food arrived. It arrived because Blair clapped once, like a girl testing a new power, and Lucien actually rose from the bed naked and unashamed and crossed to the bell-pull himself, refusing to let a servant through the door, taking the covered tray with his own hands. Honey, cream, bread still warm, sliced pear, a small crystal cup of warmed blood. He arranged it all on the silver tray across Blair's lap and fed her by hand, morsel by morsel, and Vespera held her wine for her to sip, and Blair sat between her makers eating like a small fat-bellied queen and laughed at the absurdity of it, and neither monarch laughed with her, because to them it was not absurd. It was owed.
"You fed me by hand for two months before you ever touched me," Blair said, mouth full of pear. "Why?"
"Because I wanted to watch you learn greed," Vespera said. "You were so thin and so careful. You took the smallest piece on the plate, always. I wanted to teach you to want things."
"You taught me well." Blair licked honey from Lucien's thumb, slowly, watching his pupils blow wide. "I want things now."
The tray went to the floor.
It went because Blair pushed it herself, deliberately, and turned to face them both on her knees in the wrecked silk, red-ringed amber eyes moving from the King to the Queen and back.
"My third act," she said. "I want to be worshipped. Both of you. Slowly. It is my first morning of forever and I want to know what it tastes like when no one is counting anything."
Vespera moved first. She always moved first. She drew Blair down onto the pillows and straddled her thighs and bent to her throat, and instead of fangs she used her mouth, open and hot, kissing down the pulse that beat its slow twelve-second drum. Her burgundy eyes flicked up.
"Your heart," she whispered against Blair's skin. "I could listen to it for four hundred years and never grow bored. It is the most patient heart in the palace."
"Kiss lower," Blair said, "and I will beat it for you."
Lucien settled behind her, his chest to her back, his stubble rough against her shoulder, and his hands came around to cup her full breasts, heavy and soft in his palms. He weighed them like a man taking inventory of treasure. His thumbs dragged over her nipples until they peaked, and Blair arched into the touch with a sound that startled her, low and shameless.
"Gods, look at her," Lucien said. "The fever finished her and she is still starving."
"I am always starving. You two made me this way on purpose." Blair reached back and fisted her hand in his silver-streaked hair. "So feed me."
Vespera kissed a slow trail down Blair's soft belly, pausing at the crease of her hip, breathing her in. The Queen's lips were cool and her tongue was hot and the contrast made Blair's thighs fall open without her deciding it. "Look at this little cunt," Vespera murmured, and Blair felt the words like a struck match. "Swollen already. Wet already. And we have barely touched you."
"You counted my swallows," Blair gasped as Vespera's tongue found her, one long slow stripe through her folds. "Both of you. All three nights. Now I am counting nothing, so take as long as you want."
Vespera took her at her word. She spread Blair open with two fingers and licked her with the unhurried thoroughness of a creature who had four centuries of practice and all morning to spend. Her tongue circled Blair's clit in maddening small rings, never quite pressing, and Blair's hips lifted off the bed chasing it, and Lucien held her down by the shoulders, laughing low against her ear.
"Patience, little rose. You are Made now. You have forever to come."
"That is exactly why I want to come now." Blair turned her head and bit at his jaw, blunt human teeth that were no longer quite blunt. "The rest of forever can wait."
Lucien caught her mouth and kissed her dirty and deep while Vespera worked below, and then his fingers joined the Queen's, one sliding into her cunt, slow and thick, curling against the front wall of her until Blair broke the kiss to moan at the ceiling. The two of them moved in concert, Vespera's tongue and Lucien's finger, and Blair's slow heart began to hammer off its count, twelve seconds shrinking to ten, to six, to nothing she could track.
"I am close," she panted. "Don't you dare make me beg. I have begged enough for three lifetimes."
"Once more," Vespera said against her clit, lips brushing the words into flesh. "For old times. Say it prettily."
"Please, my Queen. Please, my King. Please let your princess come on your mouth while your husband holds her down." Her voice cracked on the last word. "I will be so good. I am already good. Please."
"Fucking hell," Lucien breathed. "She has learned weaponized politeness."
"Then she is truly one of us." Vespera sealed her mouth over Blair's clit and sucked, and Lucien pressed two fingers deep and curled them hard, and Blair came apart with a cry that echoed off the gilded mirrors, her back bowing, her cunt clenching around his fingers in wave after wave while Vespera licked her through it mercilessly, drawing out every shudder until Blair was pushing weakly at the Queen's raven head.
"Too much," she gasped. "Too much, too good, stop, no, don't stop, I cannot tell which one I mean."
"Don't choose," Lucien said. "You never have to choose again. That is what we bought you with the writ."
Blair lay trembling in the aftermath, and she discovered the second miracle of her new body: the hunger did not fade. It banked, like coals. She rolled over and pushed Lucien flat onto the mattress and he went with a startled grunt, four hundred and fifty years of kingship landing on his back with a mortal thump.
"My turn to eat," she said.
She kissed her way down his body, mapping him with her new senses. His blood ran fast beneath his skin, she could hear it, smell it, feel the pulse of it in his cock as she took him in her hand and stroked him once, twice, feeling him harden fully against her palm. Then she lowered her head and took him into her mouth.
Lucien swore in a language dead for a thousand years.
Blair had read about this in a forbidden manuscript, once, a lifetime of five days ago. The books had not mentioned the way his taste pooled on her tongue, salt and musk and underneath it the faint copper of his blood near the skin. They had not mentioned the sounds a King made when a former scullery maid swallowed around him, the broken hitch in his breath, his hand twisting in her dark coils not guiding her but clinging. She worked him with her mouth and her hand, sloppy and eager, learning him, and Vespera knelt beside his head and let him bury his face in her neck while his Queen watched his concubine, now his wife of the blood, suck him toward the edge.
"Not yet," Vespera said, and her hand closed in Blair's hair and drew her off. Lucien groaned at the loss. "Not yet. There is one more thing this morning requires."
"What?" Blair's lips were slick, her voice wrecked.
Vespera shed the last of her robe and lay back against the pillows opposite Lucien, porcelain and raven, the most beautiful thing Blair had ever seen, and opened her thighs.
"Eternity also tastes of me," the Queen said. "Come here, wife. I have waited eleven hours to be eaten by a fully Made tongue, and I am told the new ones have no shame whatsoever."
"They would be right," Blair said.
She crawled to Vespera and buried her face between the Queen's thighs like a diver going under. Vespera was already wet, glistening, and Blair licked her with the same greedy curiosity she had turned on Lucien, tasting her deep, dragging her tongue up through her folds to circle her clit, then back down to press at her entrance. Vespera's hand found her head and her hips rose to meet her mouth, and above her Blair heard the Queen saying something in the old language, low and reverent, and Lucien translating under his breath with a ruined smile: she says her wife of the blood has a wicked tongue.
Blair added her fingers, two, then three, curling them into the Queen's cunt while she sucked her clit, and Vespera's composure, that legendary four-century composure, came apart in under five minutes. She came with a sharp cry and her thighs clamping Blair's ears, her hand crushing the silk beneath her, and Blair licked her gently through it until the Queen laughed, actually laughed, breathless and disarmed.
"Insufferable," Vespera panted. "Who taught you that?"
"You did. All of it. Every wicked thing I know, you taught or inspired."
"Then we have only ourselves to blame." Vespera pulled her up and kissed her, tasting herself on Blair's lips, and over Blair's shoulder she said, "Husband. She is soaked and empty and very proud of herself. Fuck her before she swallows us both."
Lucien was on her before the sentence ended. He turned Blair onto her hands and knees between them, his palm flat between her shoulder blades pressing her chest to the mattress, and dragged the thick head of his cock through her wetness once, twice, teasing until she snarled at him.
"Lucien Ravenwood, if you do not fill me this instant I will bite the Queen in front of witnesses."
"Do it and I will watch." But he thrust home, one long deep stroke that bottomed out against her cervix and punched the air from her lungs. He was thick and hard and her cunt gripped him greedily, her body remade to want exactly this, and he set a slow heavy rhythm that ground against everyplace that mattered.
Vespera gathered Blair's hands and held them, lacing their fingers, and kissed her knuckles while the King fucked her, and this, Blair thought dazedly, this was the spoiling, not the food or the gold or the title. It was being held by both of them at once, by hands that had signed a writ in blood to keep her.
"Harder," she begged. "Fuck me harder, I am not porcelain, I am Made, I want to feel it tomorrow even though tomorrow I will be healed, I want it anyway."
Lucien laughed breathlessly and obeyed, snapping his hips, the slap of flesh loud in the jasmine-scented air, and Blair pushed back onto him meeting every stroke, moaning filth into the pillow, telling him in graphic detail how his cock stretched her, how her cunt was made for him and for her, how she wanted his spend deep. Vespera slipped a hand beneath Blair's belly and found her clit and rubbed in tight circles, and the orgasm built in Blair like a tide against a door.
"Together," Vespera commanded, voice fraying. "All three. Now."
Blair came first, screaming into Vespera's neck, her cunt milking Lucien's cock, and he followed with a roar, driving deep and spilling inside her in hot pulses while Vespera shuddered through her own release against Blair's shoulder, Blair's fingers still laced through hers.
They collapsed in a tangle. Lucien slid out of her and gathered her against his chest, his seed slick on her thighs, and Vespera pressed in from the other side, and Blair lay in the middle of the great bed listening to two ancient hearts and her own slow one.
She fed once more, sleepily, from each wrist in turn, a swallow here, a swallow there, honey and frost. When she finished she lay still a long moment, and then she said it into the silence, quietly, because she was Made now and Made things did not have to be afraid.
"I love you both. I have since the garden. I simply wanted to survive long enough to say it when it was safe."
The quiet that followed had weight. Lucien's hand stilled in her hair. Vespera, Blair realized with wonder, was shaking again, very slightly, exactly as she had shaken at the signing.
"Say it again," Vespera whispered.
"I love you. My King. My Queen. My wife of the blood, apparently, since you keep calling me that."
"In the old language it also means beloved of the line," Lucien said roughly. "It always did. I never told her that."
"You absolute coward," Vespera said fondly. "Four hundred years of marriage and you save that confession for the morning after our daughter of the blood turns it into a marriage bed."
"We will fight about the translation later," Blair said, and pulled them both closer, and buried her face between them. "I have forever. Spend it wisely."