A Dowry of Blood (A Dowry of Blood #1)(25)

I found her letters, my love. And I found so many more.

At first, I was confused. I couldn’t read with your lightning efficiency, but I had taught myself well enough to know that there was correspondence here dating back centuries, since before you and I had even known each other. Some of it was written in strange alphabets, in any of the many languages you spoke and I didn’t, but there were a few I could decipher.

They were love letters. Written to absolute strangers, stretching across time and space. Strangers that you called husband. Lover. Wife.

I recoiled from the box as though I were Pandora herself, pouring woe out into the world. The letters spilled from my hands and hit the table. Impossible. You had never mentioned other spouses. I was your firstborn, your Constanta. I had sacrificed everything for the crown and you had raised me into queenship in return. I was unique in your eyes. Special, even after we brought Magdalena into our world. I was the love that started it all.

Wasn’t I?

It wasn’t that I didn’t expect you to have taken lovers, to have sought out human companionship during the many years you spent wandering the world. But I had thought you had truly been alone, without an equal at your side possessing your same power, your same sweet-edged curse. But you had turned these people, at least a half dozen of them, and the evidence was right there in your own hand. You seduced them from afar and then coached them through first meetings and first seductions, promising whole worlds if only they would allow you to take that fatal bite. You even used some of the same language when you convinced them to take up with you.

A gift.

A life without laws, without limits.

The choice is yours.

You had specifically sought them out; poets and scientists and princesses, all wracked by some recent trauma. There were fire survivors, victims of brutal marriages, starving artists, and wounded soldiers among your ranks. All exceptional in some way, all vulnerable. It made me sick to think of them, to imagine their glassy-eyed faces when you finally appeared and told them you had come to raise them up out of the dirt and into an immortal life of ease. And you had kept meticulous record of all of them, the same way you kept meticulous record of your little experiments.

I hastily gathered up the letters and put them back where I had found them, doing my best to remember their correct order and arrangement. Then I rushed back into the house, letting the door to the barn slam shut behind me.

The awful truth threatened to swell up and engulf me like a wave, and I was almost driven to my knees by the force of it. I was not your first. You had been keeping secrets from me our entire life together.

I swallowed hard and forced these thoughts from my mind.

You were entitled to your privacy. I shouldn’t have impinged on it if I didn’t want to find out something that upset me.

But try as I may, I couldn’t rationalize your lies away.

I couldn’t work up the courage to confront you about them, either. At least not at first.





I tried to run away once. Even now, I’m filled with shame at the thought. I wish I could say I broke away from you over and over again, valiantly flinging myself towards freedom. But that would be a lie. I was only brave enough to flee once, and it was on such a petulant whim it could hardly be called premeditated.

It was a dreary English summer night, with rain trickling down from the moonless sky. We were on our second decade in the country, and the two of you still had that honeymoon glow, that sparkle in your eyes when you looked at each other. Most days, that looked filled me with warmth, but that night, my heart was cold.

I watched you looking at her in the firelit glow of our flat, your hand on her knee as she bent her head close to yours to show you one of her skillful drawings, and my blood burned in my veins. Earlier that evening you had shouted at both of us for making eyes at the messenger boy who brought you letters from the university, and now you were as sweet as a hen tending her brood once again. It made me sick, watching Magdalena preen for you. She had always been better at fawning over you when your whims turned dark, and so you must love her better, no matter what you said. If I had given it a moment’s more thought I would have realized that I loved you and Magdalena both fiercely, so it was perfectly reasonable for you to love the both of us the same, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was sick with misery and jealousy, and the confines of the small London flat suddenly felt oppressive.

I needed air. I needed the starlight and the wild throng of humanity outside our door, I needed to feel like I belonged to myself again.

I dashed through the door while you were kissing her, into the dark and the rain without so much as a bonnet on. I had no idea where I was going, I just wanted to get away from the life we had built together, from the cycle of brutality and tenderness. My legs carried me out of habit to the doors of the great Gothic Southwark cathedral, looming beautifully on the edge of the Thames. I often came there by night to pray, to think, to watch the delectable people come and seek their absolution. Seeking their own scrap of the eternal, which I had in such abundant supply.

Yet, that night, I would have given anything to be a mortal girl once again, flesh dying around me just as quickly as my beauty had come into bloom. An infinitesimal life seemed preferable to an endless one trailing after you like a dog.

I retreated into the darkness of the cathedral, my hair dripping and the hem of my skirt dragging mud across the marble floors. As a girl I had been taught that churches were the dwelling place of God. I used to peer into every tiny shrine and crevice in the cracked walls of our village chapel looking for Him. The priest had told me that God was in everything, in the communion bread and in the cry of newborn babies and even in me. It had made me feel clean as newly fallen snow to hear him say that. But it had been a long time since I had felt clean.