BVC Announces The Princess and the Slaymate by Sherwood Smith
The Princess and the Slaymate
by Sherwood Smith
The new vampire and the new princess make unlikely allies against an ancient threat.
In this latest addition to the Dobrenica series, Ruli, a new vampire, is trying to adjust to this change in…can you call it a life? She’s lost everything. But that including her old reputation for weakness and lack of direction, as she discovers the lure of badassery.
At the same time, Kim and the crown prince of Dobrenica are on their honeymoon at last, but just as she and Alec are relishing the magic of Venice, they find themselves cornered and nearly grabbed by goons. Whose? More important, why? They have to figure out the roadmap to royal marriage while on the run.
Kim reaches out to Ruli for answers, and so begins a wild adventure as ancient enemies redefine what it means to be human. And inhuman.
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Sherwood Smith writes fantasy and science fiction.
One
Ruli
MY HUSBAND WAS ABOUT TO MARRY AGAIN, because I’d been declared dead.
My death certificate was a finesse, but in the tiny country of Dobrenica, such declarations, made by either church, temple, or royal decree, had all the force of law. What else can they do when someone finds herself numbering among the undead?
My name is Aurelia von Mecklundburg, and I am a vampire.
The sun sinks late in the summers, twilight lingering over the mountains ringing the little country where I was born. Past childhood I’d never thought of it as home. Paris had been my heart’s home until a vindictive, backstabbing family relation changed everything.
Once night had fallen, I walked up to the royal palace on the hill. Strange. Now that I was not imprisoned there by family duty, I could admire the Fischer von Erlach-style: refinement, you could say, with intent. Lit brilliantly by modern electricity.
I slipped past the Vigilzhi guards, made my way inside without unduly disturbing the servants, and sniffed the air for Alec’s scent.
I don’t mean the soap he uses, or the trace of cedarwood from the closet where his clothing is stored. I mean the scent of his blood. To me, now, the blood of a living being is as fresh a scent as that clean, soapy aroma that I used to like on a man.
The sound of his heartbeat reached me next, and I located him in the guest wing. When I opened the door, I discovered him seated in a chair beside the great carved bed that had once belonged to a famous queen, writing a letter with his fountain pen. He used as a lap desk a heavy silver-gilt tray flipped over.
My cousin Cerisette used to coo that he was as hot as he was rich, but I had always found black hair and blue eyes uninteresting. There were many in Dobrenica with that particular coloring, the blue eyes from the Swedish invaders, the silky black hair from long-ago plains-riding raiders. My tastes had been for the classical profile, the warm browns and thick curls of the Mediterranean.
But I was no longer bound to Alec by duty, nor he to me. After a brief glance from him to the still figure stretched out under the lightest of coverlets, I let him hear a single footfall.
He leaped up, eyes wide as he thrust himself between me and the woman on the bed, pen falling to the floor, tray held as a shield. “Ruli.” He exhaled my name on a breath.
“Relax,” I said, keeping my distance; the anti-vampire charm on his signet ring scraped at my nerves and buzzed in my ears. I could cross it, but it would be painful. The charm was simple enough, using captured sunlight, which is deadly to me. “I just came from Kim.”
He cast a startled look at the still profile on the bed so very much like my own. Then he turned to me, brows knit. A vein beat in his temple. I consciously drew breath, partly so I could speak, but also to gain control over the little thrill of desire. Not for sex. More vital than that.
I said, “You told everyone she was sick? I did not expect to meet her in the Nasdrafus.”
“The Nasdrafus,” he repeated, the vein ticking faster as he squinted at me. I had learned since my transformation that that protective charm makes me appear as if I were seen through water.
“Object,” I said, “of many of the stories we were bored by as kids. My brother, of course, always denied it existed, but it is there—think of it as an extra dimension, if you will. Or an alternate Earth. Or even as Purgatory, as some of our ancestors did. My point is, Kim in spirit form is wandering around there. She and…ah. Let us say that the situation appears to be complicated, but I thoroughly expect her to find her way back to her body sooner than later. Time being slippery. And while I don’t owe you anything—”
He raised his fingers in the fencer’s salute that used to irritate me. It was one of those things he shared with my brother Karl-Anton. So superior they had been about their fencing and similar idiocy, as teens.
“—I do owe it to Kim, one of the few people in my family who respected me as a person, rather than regarding me as a piece on the royal chessboard.” That much I had planned to say. It sounded less impressive out loud. I could just imagine my brother’s commentary on how I still whined even past the grave.
“I apologize for my part in that,” Alec said. And then, in a lower voice, “And I’m sorry about Marzio di Peretti.”
Ah, Marzio, my soi-disant beloved.
From this side of death, I could see what everyone else had been so annoying about: that Marzio had lavished on me the flattery and attention that I had never had from my own family. He had given me the smiles, the affection, and the words that I craved so much that I was determined to believe them real.
“Marzio,” I said, “was proof that you can buy love. I know you despised him, but at least you didn’t murder him. Whereas my family? Uncle Jerzy did the deed, but I could have believed it of half of them.”
Alec glanced at Kim’s body, so still on the bed, the quilt barely rising and falling with her slow breaths. He stretched his hand over her forehead, slightly cupped in a brief, tender gesture I would have thought entirely uncharacteristic, then dropped his hand. “Shall we talk elsewhere? It feels wrong to chatter over her like this. When she cannot hear.”
The raggedness had faded from his voice, and he had control of his heartbeat once again. He picked up pen and paper, set the tray aside, and we entered the hallway, at the other end of which were located the rooms where we had last seen one another, sharing what turned out to be a drugged drink.
A quick glance, and I knew he was remembering waking up on the snowy cliff where he had been thrown, the only living victim of an accident staged to make him out to be a murderer, whereas I? When next I opened my eyes, it was to look into the red-glowing eyes of a vampire.
“Tony never believed in magic or the Nasdrafus,” Alec said. “But he always believed in the existence of the inimasang.” He used the old-fashioned, Dobrenican term for vampire. “I thought I knew most secrets hidden by the Five Families, but your family’s pact with them was…” He shook his head.
“Convenient?” I put in.
He gave me an almost-smile. “New. Kim said that your grandmother Rose is one?”
“I would have been drained dry and my body left to rot if she hadn’t been.”
He opened the door to the sitting room directly across from Kim’s bedroom. “Kim told us that there was a conflict between inimasang—what do you call them? Armies? Groups?”
“Families,” I said. “You’ll appreciate the paradox.”
He winced, whereas Anton would have laughed. But Anton had always been careless of others’ feelings, and much as I had lumped my brother and Alec together when we were all teens, Alec never had. He paused in the act of turning on a lamp, and glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough. “Will the light disturb you?”
“Electricity is no threat,” I said. “Sunlight is the problem.”
He flicked on the light and sat down. I chose the armchair opposite him.
“I take it that the, ah, enemy vampires have been routed?”
“You need not worry about them,” I said—though I was far less certain than I sounded.
“Rose von Mecklundburg is your leader?”
Our leader is far, far older than my grandmother, perhaps older than the kingdom. But even if I had wished to talk to Alec about Antonius Augustus, there was a compulsion on me that prevented it. Though I have been learning to master the abilities inherent in my new state, as well as guard against its dangers, I was not yet strong enough to resist such compulsion. “Rose watches over our house,” I said, “in her way.”
Alec’s ironic smile (I had hated that, too) acknowledged how oblique my answer was. But he let it rest. “Thank you for telling me about Kim.” He let his breath out slowly. “Beka found her collapsed in the street off Roskvit Square, and went to get Natalie and her doctor kit. They couldn’t rouse her. At least it was they who found Kim, so no one else knows besides the Vigilzhi patrol who helped get her into a car and up here.”
Beka had found her. I’d never liked Beka Ridotski while we were growing up, though she had done nothing to earn it. I finally figured out that she was a living reproach to my frivolity, and when I reflected on the fact that she didn’t intend that, either, that she actually enjoyed studying and later teaching, I could pity her for crushing on duty-bound Alec—and then, more permanently, falling in love with my brother, wild as he is. Talk about attraction of opposites in every possible way.
Of course Beka would be the one to find Kim, just as she would find a way to get her safe. “And the Vigilzhi are under your command,” I said. “You can thus order the truth hidden in favor of a public lie.”
Alec lifted a shoulder. “Beka insisted that there was some kind of magical glamor over Kim. We didn’t know if she might be the victim of some vile attack aimed at me, so it’s been mostly a waiting game.”
I thought over the long, tangled story Kim had told me. “I think it’s best to leave explanations to her, but I can say this: she is being watched over, and by others with whom I have no influence. Kim’s first thought was getting back to you. But she has something to do first.”
“Thank you.” He looked away from me, and down at his half-finished letter. “But what you have told me doesn’t alter the lie I was in the midst of writing.”
“Lie?” I asked, my tone implying, Another?
He turned his head, gazing at a second-rate eighteenth century painting of pair of Dsaret princesses dressed up as shepherdesses—as if shepherdesses had ever worn their blond hair high-piled with curls in rouleaus, and short skirts polonaised under brocaded bodices and frilly ribboned blouses. I don’t think he noticed those unlikely rosy cheeks or the tiny feet in those pointed, red-heeled shoes; I wondered if his mind had homed back to Kim, lying so still on that bed, last of the once-numerous Dsaret family.
He said, “Kim had agreed to begin her official duties early. I was in the middle of concocting a tale to postpone her visit when you appeared.”
He laid the fountain pen on the letter, his expression shuttered in the way I had hated while we were all growing up. His control had appeared innate—easy—making it easy to assume he had no messy emotions like mine. But I’d seen the cost of that control during our brief state marriage, measured by the amount of fine whisky poured through decorative and discreet decanters kept in every room.
He had gone silent, and although I didn’t hear the surface of his thoughts, as some of the older, more powerful vampires could, I surmised he was remembering how much I had loathed politics, and how I had refused to do any more than the minimum required of a dutiful princess. The only duty events I had attended had been social, involving ancient porcelain, gold tableware, and wardrobe by Hermes and Balenciaga.
“Not a soiree?” I asked.
“A tour,” he said. “Mines.”
“Mines? Kim was really going to tour mines?”
“Problems up there. I think her mysterious illness will become a case of influenza—”
I had to laugh. He looked startled, probably because he saw my teeth. “You suspect my brother as the cause of those problems.”
He did not deny it.
“Oh, well, then,” I said. “You owe me the pleasure of at least telling me what it is.”
“The general problem is the secret mines.” Alec opened his hands. “This is aside from the, ah, ongoing discussion between your family and the government about taxes and how they are allocated. But that’s a centuries-old problem. This wrinkle became current, recently.”
“Go on,” I said, aware of the habitual tug to light a cigarette. I can still smoke, I discovered, but in the physical world it is a laborious chore affording no pleasure, and a danger of fire unless one has recently fed. In the Nasdrafus, the act evokes remembered pleasure.
“There is at least one unregulated mine up there somewhere between Mt. Dsaretsenberg and Mt. Dhiavilyi apparently reopened. The evidence is partly an increase in the crimes subsidiary to smuggling and theft, and partly to a disturbing number of fresh graves, as if from a mine collapse whose victims were dug out too late.”
“And you think my brother’s behind it.” I said, enjoying his muted surprise at the fact that I was listening.
“He does tend to take a laissez-faire attitude toward laws, but there is no excuse for perpetuating safety measures that were questionable in the sixteen hundreds. You know that if I make an official tour, I’ll only see what they want me to see. All will be on their best behavior.”
He was stating the obvious. I waited.
“But Kim was popular on her own account before she and I announced our plans to marry. The people like her. Though an official tour is still likely to shuffle her from one scrupulously clean and polished site to another, I thought it possible that ordinary miners might talk to her. A sympathetic question here or there about mine collapses, anything she could do for the families of the survivors, and—” He shrugged.
“And you sic Dmitros in his Jazd Komandant uniform on the mine owners, and shepherd the rest within the protection of the law. I see. But why go to that trouble? I would be delighted to confront my brother. It is about time he got to know the new me.”