Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 104842 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 524(@200wpm)___ 419(@250wpm)___ 349(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104842 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 524(@200wpm)___ 419(@250wpm)___ 349(@300wpm)
“Yes,” she agreed. “All that should have been considered before I acted so rashly, but all I could think of was that had Cassius lived, as his only child, Chryos would have sat upon the throne before Varic.”
“Had Cassius lived, he would have returned to Nerilla. I know this absolutely because of what he told Varic as he lay dying.”
“He was lost in sentiment,” she railed at me.
“Yes. For his true love. He made certain that she, not you, would receive the ashes of his heart. You have to see that for what it was.”
“No.” She was adamant.
“Yes,” I reiterated. “Chryos would have never sat on the throne. Cassius’s child with Nerilla would have been the true heir.”
“Nerilla might not have borne a child,” she shot back at me.
“That’s madness,” Cirillo scolded her. “He gave you Chryos. Had Cassius returned to Nerilla’s bed, of course there would have been a child.”
Caught in a web of her own making, she stared at me. “You said you will never like me. I feel the same.”
“Good. It’s important to know where we both stand.”
She pressed her hands together tight. “Speak plainly now. Will Chryos always be welcome in Varic’s court?”
“Always,” I promised.
“Even if my punishment is more than banishment?”
“Always,” I repeated. “He’s Varic’s nephew.”
“He’s more than that,” she whispered, and we both knew that to be true. Chryos was the king’s son, not Cassius’s, which made him Varic’s half brother, just as Alrek was.
“May I sit with the rest of you?” Carice asked.
“Of course. You don’t need to ask.”
She squinted at me. “But we’re not friends.”
“Neither are we enemies.”
“But my part in—”
“You jumped at shadows to save your child,” Cirillo told her. “Had I a child, I might do the exact same.”
She glanced at me, and I shrugged. “I don’t blame you. I merely wish you’d done a bit of investigating before you threw your lot in with the devil.”
“Yes,” she agreed, sounding so very sad.
After a moment of silence I said, “Okay, so can any of you explain to me what the hell is going on with the nobles here? Why do they all look like they’re rotting?”
Carice tipped her head like she didn’t understand.
“Do you know?” I asked her.
“Of course I know,” she answered flatly, gesturing at Cirillo and Keres as well. “We all know. It’s the wasting.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“The prince made you his font,” Keres began gently, “and now you, or rather your blood, can sustain him. Your blood can nourish a royal.”
“Yes.”
“Before you, Varic drank blood occasionally, but only from other nobles, from the dene. Men like Cirillo. He can’t drink courtier blood, or iceni blood, or heaven forbid, human blood. There are not enough nutrients in any of that to feed him for any length of time.”
I wasn’t going to mention that he’d drunk my human blood the first time we were in bed together. She didn’t need to know that. “Yeah. He told me that.” Zev had explained this all to me as well.
“But here you have nobles who, for whatever reason, do not drink from one another. Here they subsist completely on the blood of the iceni,” she said slowly, as if nudging me toward the conclusion she wanted me to draw.
“So then…”
“Their bodies are wasting because the nobles are only drinking iceni blood,” Cirillo explained. “And I have no idea why they’re doing that.”
“Have you seen the wasting before?” I asked them all.
Carice nodded. “The nobles in my village who fucked human women, they would drink only their blood, and in a matter of a year, maybe two, the ravages became evident.”
“In wartime,” Cirillo said, “when the soldiers from the noble houses would become so enamored of battle that they didn’t visit home and instead gorged on the blood of the fallen, there was, over time, the same result.”
“So that’s why all the servants look fine? They eat food and perhaps, if they choose, supplement with blood from one another?”
“Yes,” Cirillo replied. “Which is fine for them because they’re not nobles. More importantly, they’re all younger than me. I cannot drink iceni blood. I would look just like Balon and all the rest in a year.”
“I can’t either,” Carice told me. “I drink noble blood as well, even though I am not from a house but, instead, due to my age.”
“Ødger probably looks worse than his brother because he makes the shift too often,” Keres offered. “He puts undue strain on his body.”
“You think that’s why his eyes are cloudy and you can’t see his pupils? Why he looks more like a corpse than his brother?”
She nodded.
“It was very kind of you to put the herbs in his bathwater.”
“It’s the worst case of the wasting I’ve ever seen, and I can’t imagine why they would keep feeding this way.”
“When Ødger killed Sorin, they all rushed to drink his blood.”