Page 11 of Astarion

“He has,” Aurelia confirmed from the doorway.

The tension visibly went out of the room. Cazador never spent less than six hours in his ritual room, and by that time, it would be dawn. Yousen and Astarion both headed for the door. Petras shoved the chess board away and got to his feet.

“Hey!” Violet said. “You can’t stop now.”

“Watch me.”

She folded her arms and pouted. “If you’re forfeiting, I get to stab you.”

“Father’s not watching,” Petras said. “You can stop pretending to be twelve.” He joined the general exodus, and Astarion didn’t bother to hide his snicker.

—

The halls of Szarr Palace were cool and dim in midafternoon. No shaft of sunlight penetrated the thick stone walls, but air currents shifted, ever so slightly, when one of the mortal servants opened or closed a door.

Astarion woke and stretched. As an elf, he needed only four hours of trance a day. Sometimes he stayed tranced longer, seeking relief from his waking life. Other times, it twisted and grew out of his control, his memories becoming a dreamlike horror of dark, wet earth under his fingernails, choking his throat, as he clawed his way through the dirt with only the broken board of his own coffin lid as a tool.

Sometimes, in the trance, he reached the surface and Cazador was waiting. Sometimes he never reached the surface and could only dig and dig and dig for miles, until his arms gave out and he was reduced to teeth, gnawing at the soil like a fanged worm, forever…

And then again, other times, he was in the magistrate’s court without his pants on. Whatever god oversaw dreams had a bizarre sense of humor.

He sat up. His rooms were small and hung with burgundy velvet. Someone who knew Astarion well—and there weren’t any anymore, if there ever had been—might have observed that the room was both opulent and oddly spartan. A wardrobe for clothes, a basin for washing, a bed with linen sheets worn to softness, and a half dozen pillows. No truly personal belongings, no knickknacks, no paintings on the wall, not even any books.

In his living days, Astarion’s home had been crowded with artwork, the doors flanked by ornate statues or vases glazed in all the colors of sunset. But he had learned, as all the spawn had learned, that anything you treasured could be taken from you. He had once watched Aurelia gaze into the fire, stone-faced, as Cazador tore pages from her sketchbooks and tossed them onto the flames.

In fact, it was from Aurelia, oldest of the spawn, that he had learned the secret to keeping something safe. She had not been kind to him, exactly—kindness was not in her nature—but having a second spawn in the palace meant that Cazador’s sadism was divided between two targets. In the first few tendays, when Astarion was still stumbling and weeping and half mad with a hunger that never faded, she would sometimes pause beside him and utter a few words. Never many, but always useful.

Start screaming early. It’s what he wants, and he’ll stop sooner.

Never try to run.

He gets bored easily. Make yourself boring.

It was that last one that had caught his attention. He looked up, aware that his face was streaked with tears, and met the tiefling’s red, red eyes. “Darling,” he said, “I’m never boring.”

One corner of her mouth crooked up. “You’d better learn.”

It was easier between them after that. She taught him the things that Cazador didn’t bother with—how to keep his fangs hidden and where to bite a rat to extract the most blood with the least mess. How to move around lights so that his lack of shadow didn’t show.

Eventually, how to pick out a victim and hunt them through the streets.

Cazador had been in one of his family moods then and described Aurelia as “a perfect older sister.” They had played the part because it was so much easier than the alternative.

One day, he’d woken to find Aurelia outside his door. “Come on,” she said. “I have something secret to show you.”

“But Cazador—”

“Asleep.”

That was how he learned that the old vampire tranced for eight or ten hours a day. For an elf or a tiefling, that meant there were hours during the day when your mind was almost completely your own. If you’d been given leave to hunt, you could even leave the palace, provided you kept to the Undercity, where sunlight rarely penetrated. In those early days, though, you were expected to hunt only once or twice a month.

But Szarr Palace was very large, and not even Cazador knew every single stone within it. Aurelia had taken him to the wine cellars and showed him a dusty stone half hidden behind an ancient barrel. It opened a passage in the floor, so low that she had to twist her head sideways to keep her horns from scraping on the ceiling. A dozen feet along the passage was a bricked-up wall, and against it lay a stack of pages.

He’d picked one up, the edges rough where they had been torn from a sketchbook, and saw an unfamiliar tiefling woman looking back. When he handed it over, Aurelia carefully gathered the rest and took them with her. Astarion knew without being told that she did not trust him not to reveal the hiding place to Cazador.

That was probably wise.

“There are plenty of secret places here,” she told him. “They raised and lowered the ceilings every time it became fashionable. But never go to one when Cazador’s awake. Inside the palace, he can find you with a thought.”