Six Scorched Roses (Crowns of Nyaxia)

I wrote to Vale every few days, and then every two days, and then every day. Sometimes, even, multiple times a day.

Ravens would appear in my garden, ready to deposit his latest letter or take mine back to him. Sometimes he sent his messages with magic, the parchment appearing in little puffs of white-blue smoke—those letters were always his most frantic, like he’d had an idea he couldn’t wait for a raven to tell me about, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t devour those the quickest of all.

Vale’s enthusiasm was impressive, but even more surprisingly, it was… familiar. Before, I had respected him, the way one needs to respect a great beast by recognizing that it’s something older and stronger and more powerful than you. But with each one of these letters, that respect turned from a respect of nature to the respect of a friend.

His handwriting was sometimes sloppy, his notes scrawled in margins or at an askew angle across the parchment, like he was in such a rush he couldn’t stop long enough to straighten the paper. I could imagine him writing them, leaning over a messy desk, hair falling around his face, surrounded by open books. He had less reverence for the artifacts around him than I did—he had no qualms about tearing out pages of books to send to me, folded up and scribbled on.

When I had first met him, it had been impossible to imagine him embodying that kind of enthusiasm. But now I could so clearly picture him as the general—the general attacking problems with strategic, unrelenting verve. He had never been a man of science, and his inexperience showed, yes—but he also learned fast, and he wasn’t afraid to ask questions or admit his own ignorance, a quality that many men lacked. Much of the information he sent me was genuinely helpful, and when it wasn’t, he wanted to learn why.

It wasn’t just work, either. He wove little fragments of his life into those letters, too, doodled in the corners or at the bottom of the page. A little drawing of a bird he’d seen on his balcony railing. Mundane observations about the weather: The wind is cold today. How can you people call this spring?

But I liked those things, too. I liked that they so easily allowed me to imagine him, shivering a little under the nighttime breeze. I even liked that he wanted those banal details from me, too.

One day, he ended his letter with a drawing of a nightbane flower, and a tiny note beside it: sweet with a bitter bite.

It was an afterthought, like he hadn’t even known that he’d drawn it. The rest of the parchment was filled with information he’d taken from his Obitraen books—useful stuff, actually, far more useful than a little flirtatious drawing.

And yet, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that flower. From his words beside them. Those letters were not scribbled. They were delicate and soft and elegant, like he had been very careful about how his pen had caressed them.

Sweet with a bitter bite. I could still feel the way his breath had skittered over my skin when he said those words to me that night, when he told me he thought it was what I would taste like.

And sometimes, in the rare moments I allowed myself to sleep, I would lie awake staring at the ceiling, eternally conscious of the way my clothing felt against my skin. And I would slide my own fingertips over my inner thighs—higher—and imagine, without meaning to, what his caress would feel like there, too.

Good, I decided.

It would feel good.

The truth was, I was shamefully, secretly grateful for the distraction of my task and Vale’s letters. Because I worked, and Mina withered.

Every morning I swept the dust from the door. Every evening it was covered over again. Church hymns rang through the streets, the air thick with the smoke of another funeral pyre, and another, and another. The smoke was thinner each time, because now, there was often so little left to burn.

I forced myself not to think about what Mina’s pyre would smell like. I told myself I wouldn’t have to find out.

Mina and I did not discuss her decline. What was there to say?

But the blood drained from my face the first time I came home to see Thomassen sitting at our kitchen table, his hand in Mina’s, their heads bowed.

An acolyte of Vitarus in my house—the same house in which I had an entire room dedicated to the blood and belongings of my vampire… friend. Dangerous.

But what frightened me more were the silent tears that rolled down my sister’s cheeks, because I sensed what this was the moment I walked into the room.

I had long ago come to terms with my own cruel mortality. But it isn’t easy to accept that kind of ugly truth. I went through my struggle when I grew old enough to understand what death meant. In the years since, I’d watched so many others go through it, as their eyes grew hollow, their skin dusty. I saw the desperation as they looked up at the sky, where maybe somewhere the god that cursed them lurked, and I knew they would do anything, anything for more time everyone knew they wouldn’t get.

When I came home and saw the priest holding my sister’s hands, I knew that, for the first time, Mina felt that desperation.

That terrified me.

My sister had looked up and given me a weak smile.

“Sit with us,” she said.

In the same tone of voice that she had asked, Stay.

Stay, I wanted to beg her.

But no, I wouldn’t pray to the god that had damned her. I wouldn’t help her come to terms with a death I refused to let her meet.

“I can’t,” I said, and went to my office without another word. I didn’t stop working until dawn, and even then, I fell asleep over my books.

But Thomassen came more and more often, and death crept closer and closer.

If I was less distracted by my work and the grief I tried so hard to stave off, perhaps I would have been more concerned by the acolyte’s constant presence in this house. Perhaps I would have given more thought to the way he watched me, the lingering stares at the doors I left ajar.

But I was used to being judged—too used to it to realize when judgment became dangerous.

I didn’t have time to worry about one old man’s thoughts about me. I had to work.

I was running out of time.

But then, one day, when nearly a month had passed since my last visit to Vale, something shifted. I slept in my study that day, as I so often did now, and I woke up to a pile of Vale’s letters, strewn across my desk. Four of them, in the sparse hours I’d been asleep.

My heart jumped with either anticipation or dread. So many in such a short span could only signal something wonderful or terrible.

It turned out it was the former.

Vale had made a discovery. I flipped through his letters—pages upon pages torn from one of his books. I’d gotten used to his scrawled handwriting, but the translations in the margins were even messier than usual, as if he’d been writing so fast he couldn’t even stop to form real letters. It took me hours to fully decode them.

When I did, I gasped.

He had found a crucial missing piece. The text was old, detailing experiments done on vampire blood in Obitraes. Yet, despite their age, the figures answered so many of the questions I had been grappling with about how to effectively distill vampire blood into something different. Vale and I hadn’t found much in the way of Obitraen science—vampire society, it seemed, was much more inclined to work with magic instead.

But this… it was exactly the sort of information I’d barely allowed myself to dream of.

“Vale,” I breathed under my breath. “Vale, you—you—”

I was grinning so widely my cheeks hurt. I probably looked like a lunatic, half-mad with exhaustion and hope. I hadn’t changed my clothes in days, and I figured another day wouldn’t do any harm, because I launched myself right back into work.

Hours blurred into days. New equations became new formulas became new vials of experimental potions. Vials of experimental potions became tests as I gave them to my ailing rats.

And tests became medicine as those rats grew less and less sick.

The next batch, too. And the next.

And then, one bleary morning, I found myself standing before an entire cage of healthy, active rodents, cradling those vials in my hands like a newborn infant—and medicine became a cure.

A cure.

It was only fitting, of course, that this was when everything fell apart.