“No.” My teeth have definitely stopped chattering.
“Then”—her pretty brow pleats—“then I don’t understand.”
He tells her of our little bargain in their tongue.
“Atsa, no. Shabbins bathe in their enemies’ blood! Theydrinkit! We cannot let them loose.”
To think I used to believe these rumors myself. “Not only is soaking in blood positively vile, it’s also surely insalubrious.”
“They will sail to our shores and massacre us!”
I hitch up an eyebrow. “Why would they do that?”
“Because they’re savages.” She pants with such fright that even the hairs of her fur coat stand on end. “I’ve sailed past their island. I’ve seen their beaches. They’re so saturated with blood that the sand has turned pink.”
Although neither here nor there, I do begin to wonder what I would’ve been served for supper. A stein of fresh blood?
Lorcan snorts.
I slip my hand over the slow-roiling shadows of my mate, wishing he was in skin. Wishing he was standing at my side. “Have you ever traveled to Shabbe, Vizosh?”
Vladimir seems surprised by my use of the Glacin term. “No. I was born the year the wards were erected.”
“Your parents then?”
“Yes.”
“And do they share your daughter’s conviction?”
“They said the beaches were white back then.” Konstantin stares at the horizon. “That five centuries of confinement turned the matriarchal society raving mad.”
“Their beaches were never white,” my father says gruffly. “And they don’t fucking drink blood. They use it to cast spells.”
The girl gawks at my father as though he’s just confirmed that they do, in fact, feast on their enemies’ veins.
“Do you find me terrifying?” I ask as the sleigh we await skids to a halt a few paces away from us.
She frowns. “Why would I? Because you’re the daughter of a Crow?”
“Because I’m the daughter of a Shabbin.”
Her head rears back, making the diamonds twinkle in her flaxen strands. “That’s impossible. No one with even an ounce of Shabbin blood can live outside those wards.”
So Vladimir and his son know, but not his daughters?
“Actually, Ksenia”—Vladimir eyes the reddened apex of my seashell—“Meriam and her descendants apparently can.”
Ksenia whips her head back in my direction. “But her eyes aren’t pink.”
I tip my head toward my father. “Mixed origins.”
As Bronwen, Justus, and Cian descend from their sleigh, the Glacin Princess scrutinizes me some more. “You truly descend from Meriam?”
“Truly.”
“And you don’t drink blood?”
“I don’t even eat meat or fish.”
