In Blood

You don't sleep.

You lie awake most of the day with the satchel on the bed beside you, running the reading in your head the way you'd run a closing argument. You've never actually read a treaty aloud to anyone. In the Treaty Office you draft clauses for men who read them to other men in rooms you are not invited into. You know how a sentence should land; you've never had to land one.

At four, Gisella texts: good luck Ethan. don't say anything stupid. say something dad would say.

At five, the castle breathes in.

At seven, you walk into the Hall of Houses with the satchel over your shoulder and Starke one step behind you, and the whole court is there.

More than last night. More than the first night. They're standing two deep along the walls under the six banners, in their velvets and furs and jet, and the candlelight makes them look carved. A lectern of black wood has been set in the middle of the floor. Beside the throne, on a small table, is a shallow gold dish and a knife with a gold blade.

Not silver. Never silver, here.

On the throne, Valeska Malvern sits with her hands folded and her face like a frozen lake. Velimir lounges at the front of the left wall in grey velvet, looking pleasantly bored. Rozalia Kálmán stands opposite with her arms crossed. Hedvika is at the queen's shoulder. A slim young vampire in a page's black livery waits beside the lectern, bouncing very slightly on his toes, plainly thrilled to be there. He catches your eye and grins, then remembers himself and stops.

"Tamás," Starke murmurs. "The page. Stay calm, Ethan. He'll carry it up to her."

You set the satchel on the lectern and take out the document.

Twelve leaves of cream vellum, folded once and sealed with a disc of dark green wax pressed with the eagle of the Ministry of Security. Ambassador Haverill sealed it in front of you three days ago. Her hands were very steady. You remember that she wore gloves to do it, thin grey kid ones, and that you thought it was elegant.

You break the seal.

The crack of the wax is loud in the silence.

"The Treaty of the Selka," you read, in Aldermarkish, and then again in Old Duskish, because you decided at three in the afternoon that you'd read every clause in both. "Between the Commonwealth of Aldermark and the Realm of Duskmere, done at Castle Duskmere in the presence of the six Houses."

You read.

It takes forty minutes. The terms are good. They're more than good. Aldermark offers to withdraw its troops a mile from the west end of Saltbridge. To reopen the river trade. To formally acknowledge the Duskmere account of the Feast of Ashes, which you read twice because you can't believe it the first time, and the court murmurs, low and astonished. To pay reparations to the families of the six. It asks for almost nothing in return: a border commission, a hotline, a promise of no hunting west of the river, which Duskmere already keeps.

By clause nine you have a cold, sinking feeling in your stomach and you don't know why.

It's too generous. You've drafted treaties for six years. You know what a country gives when it wants peace, and you know what it gives when it wants something else, and this reads like an apology from a man who isn't sorry. Wynward has never apologized for anything in his life. He went on the radio last spring and called Duskmere the infection on our border.

You finish. You lower the vellum.

The court is utterly quiet.

On the throne, the queen is looking at you, and you can't read her at all.

"Is that," she says, "everything?"

"That's everything, Majesty."

"It is a remarkable document." She says it slowly. "It is so remarkable I almost do not believe it. Do you believe it, Envoy?"

You should say yes. Starke is breathing very carefully beside you, and you can feel the whole weight of Aldermark leaning on the word.

"I believe I read it to you exactly as it was given to me," you say.

Something flickers in her eyes. Approval, maybe. Or a warning.

"Very well." She lifts her right hand and Hedvika places the gold knife in it. "Tamás. Bring it to me."

The page bounds forward, delighted, and takes the folded vellum from your hands with both of his. His fingers are bare. His skin is very cold where it brushes yours.

He turns and walks toward the throne. One step. Two. Five.

At the sixth step, he makes a small sound.

Not a scream. Not yet. A little surprised oh, the noise you make when you touch a hot pan. He looks down at the vellum. You look too. Where his fingertips are pressed against the cream leaves, his skin is going grey. Then darker grey. Then black, spreading up from the nails in fine dark lines like ink in water, and smoke, a thin curl of it, rising from his hands.

Then he screams.

The vellum falls. It hits the floor and opens like a fan. Tamás drops to his knees with his blackening hands held out in front of him, shrieking, and the court erupts.

You're moving before you've decided to. You're on your knees beside him and you've got his wrists, careful of his hands, and you're saying, "Don't touch it, don't touch it, don't touch anything," and you don't even know what you mean.

"Back!" That's the queen. On her feet. The whole hall goes still against the wall again.

A thin vampire in wire spectacles comes through the crowd at a run. He kneels on Tamás's other side, takes one look at the boy's hands and then at the fallen vellum, and pulls a handkerchief from his coat. With it, carefully, he lifts the corner of one leaf toward his face. He breathes in.

His expression changes completely.

"Ottokar," Valeska says. Her voice is very low.

"Silver salt, Majesty." The apothecary sets the leaf down as if it might bite him. "Lunar caustic. The vellum has been soaked in it. All of it, I think. Dried in. Harmless to the human. To one of us, through bare skin, it burns." He looks up at her, at the gold knife still in her hand. "Through an open wound, it would go straight into the blood. Any of us. Even you."

The court is absolutely silent now. Two hundred vampires. Not one of them breathing.

You look at the vellum on the floor. At the green wax seal. At the gloves Haverill wore.

Sign it in the old way, you think. In blood. The queen would have cut her palm with the gold knife and pressed her hand flat to the page, and the silver would have gone into her the way the wine went into her sister.

And you would have carried it there. Over the bridge, through a fire, out a window above a gorge. You never lose the document.

You weren't the envoy. You were the delivery.

Beside you, Tamás is sobbing. Across the hall, Starke has gone the color of chalk, and he's backing, very slowly, toward the doors.

And from the left wall, in a voice like a bell, clear and beautiful and carrying to every corner of the hall, Velimir Vantry says:

"The human brought death to our queen."

Every head in the Hall of Houses turns to you.