Page 99 of His Realm

“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.”

“Which is insane,” Carice said. “His blood is iceni blood. It’s not doing anything for them but killing them.”

“That’s why Ødger lost his mind when he smelled your blood,” Cirillo told me. “His body knows, even if his brain doesn’t, that your blood could heal him.”