The House of Flame Lilies Ch. 06

Chapter Six: Humanity

I'm alive! You wouldn't think it, given how long it's been. Life has been very... life... this 2021, and I really wanted to give this part of the story time. For all of you still here, my undying appreciation, it honestly means so much! A belated special thank you to Victor, who so kindly put together a wonderful wealth of information for me on Romanian culture and history to inform this work. It is still underused in the current posts, (and I'm sure I'm making some mistakes!), but as I develop and expand this world, his help was invaluable. I wish you all Yuletide blessings and hope this double update does something to help you enjoy the darkness. See you in the new year!

For my cub.

Full work summary: Cast out of his village and freezing to death in the snow, Sparrow finds himself rescued by a mysterious and beautiful woman, living in a grand house in the mountains. As he falls under the spell of his strange host, he finds himself brought into a dark world that presents a destiny he never could have imagined. Submission to a vampire is only the beginning.

Previously: Sparrow stumbled across Vestalia, his rescuer and lover, in bed with two chained prisoners, one of whom she then drained of blood and left dead on the floor. Terrified, he fled her manor. But Vestalia pursued him on wings, flew him to the rooftop, and reclaimed his body, drinking from his throat.

Chapter summary: Sparrow contemplates what has happened, under the care of Cyrus, Vestalia's groundskeeper. He visits the surviving prisoner and finds himself strangely drawn. Vestalia and Cyrus undergo an old practice and we learn more of their dynamic.

The quotations from Japanese poetry at the end are from One Hundred poets, One Poem Each, (Penguin Classics, 2018, tr. Peter MacMillan), no. 25 Fujiwara no Sadakata, no. 44 Fujiwara no Asatada, no. 50 Fujiwara no Yoshitaka. N.B. for art reasons, this story refers to flame lilies as being safe to touch, but they can cause skin irritation, so if you come across them, use gloves!

"Ah, at last, there you are, Little Bird."

"No, go away."

"I've been looking for you everywhere, we must go to the church."

"I don't want to."

"Why not?"

"Because if I go, then..."

"Ah, then you will have to accept that Marius is dead. You will have to say goodbye."

"I don't want to."

"I know, Little Bird, none of us do. But Marius has left us, the mountain has taken him. We cannot have him back, so we must say goodbye."

"I don't want to say goodbye. It feels so heartless. He didn't want to die, so it feels heartless to say goodbye as if he was a leaving guest."

"Perhaps. But funerals are not for the dead, you know."

"Then who are they for?"

"For us. If we don't bid Marius farewell, then he will not rest and the mountain will be haunted for us. We will lose our home to ghosts and we will never smile again. But if we take the time with him to say goodbye, if we part well, he will be able to leave us for his new existence and the mountain will be for the living once more. All our lives we will feel loss - loss of people, loss of hope, loss of strength, loss of faith. We need our mourning rites, they clean our souls out, let us face a new day. Without rites, we'd be trapped in purgatory even before our own deaths. We'd become ghosts, barely even human anymore, adrift in the spaces between lives."

"But if we make ourselves feel better, isn't that like saying he wasn't important?"

"Oh, Little Bird, not at all, not at all. Mourning rites are how we show how important we are to each other. Humans mourn because we love. We can't help but love each other. And you are very good at love."

"I am?"

"You are. Now, come perform the rites and stay human with the rest of us."

*

Rain drummed idle fingers on the towering window, silver and shadow braiding on the glass and wandering slowly down the pane, drooping and drifting like willow branches. The sound of thudding water rumbled in the dense, stone walls and the deep earth below. It played the gutters like a glockenspiel. It tapped on the teeth of gargoyles and pattered on the broad leaves of ivy clinging to the mortar. Mist veiled the drop down the mountain and caught like cobwebs on the knotwork hedges. The grass flushed emerald. Everything else fell into muted grey.

Sparrow curled in the window seat of his bedroom, hugging his knees, his head rested lightly on the cool glass. He gazed unseeing out into the landscape. It all seemed so small. The stewing, drab cloud obscured the soaring vastness of the sky and hazed the foaming mountain tops. The world was fading from him.

He wrapped the fine blanket closer about him, the slippery softness draping over his arms and legs and hanging loose over his narrow torso. He'd woken past noon to find a new set of neatly folded garments and a locked door. He'd eyed both with an uncomfortable surge of resentment, wrapped his sore, naked body in the blanket and nestled as close to a way out as he could get. But there was no real way out. He knew it in what was left of his blood. He could go and it wouldn't be over. He would always be here inside himself. He'd come alive here.

He'd died here.

Died so beautifully.

Death wasn't supposed to be beautiful.

He combed his fingers into his tangled hair and massaged his scalp. His brain felt like a lump of wet moss. He dropped his head forward and his neck smarted. He hadn't been able to bring himself to look in the mirror, but he could feel the wound she'd left on his throat like two pins were holding his tendons together. It ached to his spine. The ache was sweet. He hated that it was sweet. His whole body was tender, muscles strained from that nightmarish hurtle through the night, bruises on his back from the hard, slate tiles of the roof. His chest kept squeezing and his eyes were hot underneath. He felt skinned, even the lap of the blanket like a cat's tongue. He took a deep, slow breath. He filled with the smell of wood smoke and the herbal tea left with his clothes.

He closed his eyes and listened to the rain. It deadened his thoughts.

Drum. Drum. Drum.

Then another drum, out of time.

The door.

Sparrow's heart pounded, the apathy shooting from him in a spike of panic. He sat up straight, fists clutching the blanket, and stared like a rabbit across the room.

The knock came again. His pulse tripped over it.

A gruff voice came muffled through the oak. "Sparrow? It's Cyrus."

Sparrow's throat closed, his wound twinging. The memory of the burly man hauling bloody bodies washed his vision.

Cyrus murmured dully through the door. "I'm here to tend your wound, may I come in?"

Sparrow couldn't speak. He glanced about for a hiding spot, but everywhere just put his back against a different wall. He grit his teeth and curled his toes to spring.

The scraping of a key. A harsh click. A whisper of wood. The creak of a heavy boot. Cyrus stepped weightily into the room, carrying a wooden box and a bland, unreadable expression. He closed and relocked the door behind him. Sparrow watched the little, silver key vanish into the cavernous pocket of his coat. Cyrus turned to face him, staying at the opposite side of the room, a bear crossing the path of a fox. His thick eyebrows lowered a fraction. "You're not dressed, are you sick?"

Sparrow's pulse thumped weakly in his veins. The feel of his blood moving spiralled last night's events through his mind and made his stomach lurch, then flutter in excitement. He swallowed the unpleasantly pleasing sensation down and kept his gaze warily on Cyrus, the fox watching the bear for danger.

Cyrus didn't move. His stance was easy, his broad shoulders low.

Sparrow rolled his jaw and spoke hoarsely through his tender throat. "You said the clothes she gave me were from visitors."

Cyrus nodded.

"Visitors or victims?"

Cyrus' face tightened infinitesimally.

Sparrow jerked his head at the folded pile of clothes on the bed. "Whose shirt was that?"

Cyrus' peat eyes darkened another shade. "I don't remember."

"Is he dead?"

Cyrus' chest rose and fell in the odd mimicry of taking a breath that did nothing to enliven his eyes or speech. "He died happy."

Sparrow looked sullen back to the rain. "That's worse."

Cyrus said nothing. The clouds loomed low and more mercury shadows streaked down the glass and painted Sparrow's bare, warm-toned skin in the colours of grim winter. He regarded the boy calmly, cataloguing the creases in his brow and at the corners of his mouth, the new well-depth to his brown eyes, the pink smudging over his fine neck. He let out something like a sigh. He walked softly to the window seat, picking up a chair on route. He dropped the chair beside Sparrow and lowered himself into it. He shrugged off his coat and let it fall with a thud to the floor out of Sparrow's reach, so he couldn't pickpocket the key. But the idea didn't seem to have occurred to the lad. He kept gazing dimly out of the window, his body folding tighter and crumpling away from Cyrus. Cyrus rolled up his grey sleeves and unlatched the box. "Show me your neck."

Sparrow could smell turned, musty earth and something sticky under it, like rotting vegetables. His pulse had slowed again, but he could still feel it too harshly under his skin. He thought vaguely about being afraid of what was in the box and what Cyrus would do to him and how he might escape. He listlessly drew his hair over his shoulder and exposed his wound, letting the blanket wilt down his upper arm. He blurred his eyes in the interlace of raindrops. He felt Cyrus lean closer; no breath fell on him, but the scent darkened.

"Good, almost gone."

A flicker of surprise pulled Sparrow back to a measure of clarity. He turned to Cyrus with a frown. "But it felt so deep."

Cyrus' empty eyes roved scientifically around the edges of the twin punctures, now two round, rhodonite marks set into a marzipan flush and a smear of plum bruising. "The bite ends with the release of a coagulant," he said flatly.

Sparrow blinked at him.

"Something to clot the blood," he explained. "And it aids with healing and against infection."

Sparrow moved his shoulders subtly, testing the soreness in his neck. The ache was like the burn of labour, it wasn't sharp, it didn't tear like he felt it should. He frowned in further surprise. "Why?"

"Can you imagine how it would be for you if your goats died from a single milking?"

Itchy heat shot up Sparrow's back. "I am not a goat."

Cyrus looked unmoved. "You're more like a goat than you are anyone in this house."

Sparrow's lips pursed around grinding teeth. "Because I'm kept and fed on?"

"Because you're alive."

Sparrow pressed his lips together. He stared at the great, grey man, at the sallowness of his skin, the dry dullness of his thicket of curls, the stone stillness of him, the graveness. He looked sharply away.

"May I touch your neck, to apply some salve?" Cyrus asked gently.

Sparrow hesitated, glancing at the limestone chips of Cyrus' fingernails. He nodded. Cyrus pulled a pot out of the wooden box and opened it with a quiet pop. The scent of rich beeswax and tangy marigold and prickling lavender bloomed into the stale air. Sparrow kept his eyes down on the soaking wildflower beds far below and tensed at the first touch of rough fingers, his body flitting into high alert with a flare of pain in his wound. He sucked the tingling, floral scent of the balm and forced himself to relax his muscles, the pain dwindling. Cyrus' touch was firm, grounding, the pressure sinking through Sparrow's flesh and wrapping his soreness in soft fleece. The salve made his rough fingers silken, the waxy substance layering a protective coat onto the wound. The bite.

The bite.

Every press on it sent a small shimmer through Sparrow, half pain, half... something else. His mind fogged with the heat of her body, the blaze of fire in her hair, in her brilliant eyes, the crush of flesh, the beating of wings, the rush of a howling gale, the piercing ecstasy of her teeth breaking his skin and her lips and tongue sweeping flame over his nerves. A thought wormed its way through the fray of images. His gaze stole back to Cyrus. "I don't think I ever told you I was a goatherd."

"No."

"So..." His stomach fluttered with a hope that made him feel foolish. "So she's talked about me?"

Cyrus' fingers paused, then began to circle again. "Yes."

"What does she say?"

The thick fingers curled away, leaving his throat soothed and supple and shining. "That isn't my right to repeat."

Sparrow's voice dropped to the volume of a mouse's footsteps. "Does she laugh at me?"

Cyrus raised his eyes from where he was busying himself with the box. "Why would you ask that?"

A crackling bitterness rose in his muted voice. "The stupid peasant boy who thought he was her lover and that everything was so easy and wonderful and never even realised, even with all the obvious..." His throat corked. He glared at his knees. His eyes swam scalding. He blinked urgently.

Even with the dullness of Cyrus' eyes, he could feel his gaze on him, unsettlingly soft, almost sympathetic. "She doesn't laugh at you." He spoke like velvet and sandpaper rubbing together. "She refers to you as her Little Adonis."

"What's that?"

"Adonis was a young man who was so beautiful and sweet that the goddess of love herself fell for him. Deeply. She raised him. She protected him fiercely. She had all the world sing his worthiness. He was her favourite."

The words fell like blossom over Sparrow's fragile heart. The pricking in his eyes intensified, became unbearable. His chest swelled with water. He blinked again and the room misted into a wash of blue. The tears that had swilled silently in the depths of his body for hours suddenly fountained to the surface. He let out a feeble, choking noise and hastily buried his face in his forearms as the first seismic shudders hit him. And hit him again. Harder. His body rocked with tears. He felt them brewing in his gut and shoving past his organs to flow searing from his eyes. The blanket drenched against his face, the fibres gumming to his cheeks. Convulsions went through his throat and under his wound. He sobbed and shook, his gulps and gasps buffeting the rumble of rain. The fear and shame and grief poured out of him and drowned him in a whirlpool, spiralling down, down, down.

Cyrus tutted as if at a fussing pony. He planted his huge paw between Sparrow's trembling shoulder blades and rubbed in rhythmic circles. The blanket slipped and let him touch the warm, bare skin. Sparrow felt the heavy touch absorb the waves pulsing up his body, a magnet pulling the scratching iron filings out of his system and leaving him raw, but balmed. Cyrus had no heat, no force, no sudden moves. It was like leaning against an ancient oak. Raining onto an ancient oak. Sparrow felt like rain, a cloud ripping open and gushing into soft, sodden earth. He lost definition between himself and the deluge outside. He tumbled into it, let it break him apart and bury him in the ground. She was so wonderful, she was so good, he was so lost and she had found him, and now...

And now...

What now?

His mouth went dry as he hauled a breath in through the fine wool. He focused on the millstone kneading of Cyrus' hand and gradually felt himself reform around the spreading pressure. Almost reform; he wasn't exactly solid, but he had some shape again. The tears heaved out of him until he was ragged and void. The drumming rain echoed in his ears.

Drum. Drum. Drum.

"Get dressed."

Cyrus' hand moved away and the sound of the medical box clacking shut woke Sparrow back to the room. He slowly raised his head, eyes stinging in the low light of the hearth. He glowered at Cyrus' mop of curls. "I won't wear those clothes."

"You need to get out of this room," Cyrus said pragmatically, standing and shaking out his coat from its heap on the floor. "I'm going to take you to the hothouses. But our mistress will be very angry if I let you walk naked in the rain and make you ill."

Mistress. Her voice whispered it under his skin. Venom. He drew his shoulders up defensively. "I won't wear them."

"Do you want to go the hothouses?" There was a note of irritation, the kind used with difficult children.

Sparrow coloured and nodded. "But I won't wear them."

Cyrus huffed, encasing himself in his dusty, leather coat. "Fine. I'll bring you something of mine."

"Thank you."

He nodded. His glance caught on Sparrow, like cotton on thorns. He regarded him another moment. Sparrow met his lightless gaze levelly. He nodded again, picked up the medicine box, and strode from the room.

*

The echo of tears left Sparrow uncannily calm, hollowed out and filled with the cool, spring rain. It tap-danced on the hothouse deafeningly, shielding him with rhythmic sound, drowning out the world. Water streamed over the glass, domed roof, veiling the grey sky, enclosing Sparrow in a delicate chrysalis. Its lacework of shadows was lost in the dense cauldron of leaves. Sparrow could have been deep in a far off jungle, somewhere where none of this even existed.

He knelt in one of the lush beds, his small body draped in one of Cyrus' immense, dark grey shirts. The britches, into which a good three Sparrows could have fit, were tied at his waist with a length of garden twine, all of Cyrus' belts similarly too big. The clothes were a little shabby, but they smelled clean, the earthy sort of clean that reminded Sparrow of the scent of laundry beaten against river rocks. He was barefoot, Cyrus having carried him across the garden when he had refused to wear even the boots. He leaned forward into the spray of vibrant, rich, purple flowers around him and took a long draught of their fresh, candied scent, covering the lingering scent of the healing balm on his throat and the taste of charred petals that pressed his tongue every time he thought of her.

"My name is Vestalia."

"I've never heard that name before."

Last night kept trying to haunt him, but every time it did, another memory intervened. He thought of their meeting, of how she'd melted into the firelight and it had caressed her eerie paleness, licking the cut of her jaw, playing on her fingertips, kissing the end of her proud nose. He crawled deeper into the flower bed, soil sinking under his hands and knees. Squat blooms gathered around his fingers, the colour of raw meat. He remembered her red tongue enveloping slices of beef, the way her opulent mouth moved luxuriously around the bite, the points of her teeth gleaming in the candlelight.

"Do you ever feel longing, Sparrow?"

He breathed deep through his mouth, coating his tingling tongue in a layer of exotic juices in the air. And then his tongue was snaking through her flesh, tasting her, starving for her. He was lapping and sucking and swallowing. His throat smarted and he realised his mouth was moving in the present. He bit his lip.

"Do you feel warmer now?"

He closed his eyes and let the misty air of the hothouse salve his neck and smooth his shoulders. The rain lashed the glass. And he was safe from it. Utterly protected. He was precious. He was cared for and doted on, tutored and treated and teased. There was so much softness here. The softness of the bed, the couches, the cushions, the blanketing warmth of the hearths and the gushing green of the flora and the way she held him and smothered him and giggled prettily in his ear. Nothing here was cold. Nothing here was lonely. Nothing here was tough. Nothing here was angry or brutish or sharp.

Except...

"Are you afraid of me?"

"I don't know."

He took a steadying breath and fixed his eyes on a crumb of earth on an emerald leaf and forced himself to recall last night. What he could of it. The crazed howling of the wind, the rending terror and grief. The piercing. The pain. The flying. The flames. The moon and the stars and being covered in heat and scent and dream.