“Speak the vow,” Graves commands, handing me the book Hunter read from earlier. “Let every Baron and every Shadow hear it from your own mouth.”
My voice should shake.
Instead, it comes out steady, raw, and stripped of everything but truth.
“I, Arianette, once broken, now made whole by water and by blood,
do swear by the House of Night and by the Cross that waits beneath it:
I accept my atonement.
I accept my place.
From this night until the night that claims me,
I belong, body, breath, womb, and soul
To my King,
To my Barons,
To my Shadows who guard the gate between life and death.
Memento mori.
I will remember that I must die,
so that in dying every day to my old self
I may live wholly theirs.
This I vow on the blood he has painted on me,
and on the blood I will yet spill for them.”
The King’s eyes burn into mine, looking more green than hazel in the firelight.
He presses his bleeding thumb to my lips, sealing the words inside me.
Then he rises.
Graves lifts his hands high.
“Memento mori,” he intones, and the circle answers as one, voices rolling like distant thunder.
“Memento mori.”
“Noctis Crucemis complete,” he says, voice flat, ceremonial. “You are cleansed.”
The last torch gutters out.
In the sudden darkness, I feel the weight of every gaze, every claim, every future night already written in the blood drying on my skin. I remain on my knees, the mud cold beneath me and the river quiet at my back.
8
Damon
The river had been merciless–blackice water clawing up my legs, my waist, my ribs, until it closed over her breasts and stole every last trace of blood and ash from her skin. When we pulled her out, she was shining like something newly born and twice as fragile: moon-pale, lips trembling, eyes too wide.
