“Do you require medical attention?” Arland asked us.
“No,” Maud and I said at the same time.
Arland glanced at Sean. Sean shook his head.
“Lady Dina, if I might have a moment?” Arland asked.
Maud was on my right and I caught a flicker of panic in her eyes. It was very brief but it made my stomach turn. My childhood had few unshakeable truths, but one of them was that my older sister was afraid of nothing. Maud never backed down and never asked for help. When I was a child and someone was mean to me, I went and got Maud, because after she talked to them, they would never be mean to me again.
The vampire with the tablet tried again. “Your injuries…”
“Are minor,” Arland said. “Lady Dina?”
“Of course.”
We walked away a few dozen feet. I glanced at Maud. Helen was standing next to her, hugging her leg. My sister looked ready to pull her sword out at any moment.
“You didn’t tell me that your sister was married to a knight of the Holy Anocracy.”
“I’m sorry. I was focused on rescuing her and my niece.”
“I’m not upset,” Arland said, glancing back at Maud and frowning. “But I do not like to be misled.”
“It wasn’t my intention to mislead you.” Yes, it was. A lie by omission was still a lie. I would’ve told him anything to get Maud and Helen out of there and I didn’t want to risk vampire politics interfering with that. “I wasn’t certain of my sister’s status. I’m sorry if this will cause issues between House Krahr and House Ervan…”
“What?” Arland drew back. “No. I don’t care what House Ervan thinks. If I field a quarter of our fleet, it will still be three times as much as the entirety of what House Ervan can scrape together. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about…” He waved his hand, trying to find the right words.
“Lord Arland, sometimes it helps to speak plainly.”
“Sword,” he said. “She has a blood sword.”
“Yes, she does.” Where was he going with this?
“She killed four vampires and maimed another two.”
I nodded. “Yes, she did.” And he had been counting, apparently.
“She’s wearing syn-armor. It’s been custom fitted and the patch seam on her left side is recent. When one seals a gash in one’s armor while it is still on their body, one moves the sealing tool from the outside in, creating the raised pattern pointing toward the center of the body, as is seen on your sister’s armor. It feels more natural this way and lets one gauge the risk of structural collapse if the nanothreads within the armor are compromised. When one seals the armor after taking it off, the pattern is reversed, because when we face the armor suit, we tend to repair it by moving the tool from center of the body out.”
“Okay?”
“She repaired her own armor. She didn’t feel it was safe to take it off, so she did it while she was wearing it. That requires skill and experience. One wrong move, and you can critically injure yourself.”
Oh, Maud. “I fail to see the significance of this.”
Arland dragged his hand through his hair, exasperated. “From my interactions with my cousin’s wife, I understand the women of Earth to be delicate creatures, powerful in their own right, but not on par with females of the Holy Anocracy when it comes to martial prowess. My cousin’s wife does not wear syn-armor or carry blood weapons.”
I made a mental note to introduce him to a female MMA championship match the next time he stopped at the inn. “Lord Marshal, I have no idea what kind of woman your cousin’s wife is. Human women, like vampire women, come in all varieties. For example, I don’t like violence, but I will kill to protect my family and my guests.”
“Yes, but I believed you to be an exception due to your unique position.”
“I’m not an exception. Most Earth women would do whatever they had to do to protect their loved ones, and while our culture is less martial than yours, human female warriors exist. Maud was always very good with weapons and never hesitated to use them. I’m sure being married into a Holy Anocracy House meant she had to fight for the honor of the House more than once. Being exiled to Karhari, where she had to defend herself and my niece, only sharpened her skills, so if you don’t mind some advice, treat her as you would treat any skilled female vampire fighter. It will be safer for everyone involved.”
Arland looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. Yes, the princess you were expecting put on her armor and left to kill the dragon. So sorry.
“Lord Arland, my niece is covered in blood. If you don’t mind, I would like to get her to my cabin where she can shower.”
“Of course,” he said.
We walked back to Maud, Sean, and Helen. My sister searched my face, waiting. Beneath our feet the floor shuddered slightly as the massive ship accelerated toward the gate that would catapult it countless billions of miles across the galaxy.
“Come on,” I told her. “Lord Arland has most graciously provided me with a very large cabin. Let’s get cleaned up.”
* * *
The cabin Arland assigned me wasn’t just spacious, it was luxurious and decorated in a beautiful teal-gray, blue, and pink color scheme, which I would shamelessly copy the next time a vampire came to stay at the inn. The door behind us slid shut.
I turned around and hugged Maud. She hugged me back.
Helen pulled on my robe. “Hugs.”
“Hugs.” I let go of Maud and picked her up. “How do you even remember me? The last time I saw you, you were this tiny.” I held my thumb and index finger about an inch apart.
Helen giggled, showing her fangs. “Mommy showed me pictures. She said if she died you would take care of me.”
All the fun went out of me.
“I’ll take care of you,” I said. “Always. And we’ll start with a bath.”
“With water?”
I didn’t even want to know why she asked that.
“With all the water,” Maud said. “All the water ever.”
I carried her into the bathroom. A massive tub rested in the middle of the room, sunken low into the floor so it could be sealed when the ship maneuvered. I turned on the water. Helen pulled off her clothes. The dust and blood had combined into a sort of paste that saturated the fabric beyond the point of return.
“Dina,” Maud said.
“I think her clothes are a lost cause,” I said.
Helen jumped into the bath and splashed. Dark swirls spread from her through the water. Maud had the strangest look on her face, half-pain, half-happiness.
“Wash your hair, baby,” my sister said, grabbed my arm, and pulled me out of the bathroom.
“What is it?”
“Dina, I don’t want to make trouble for you. You can drop us off anywhere outside of Holy Anocracy territory.”
“What are you talking about?”
Her voice was quiet and urgent. “Melizard dishonored his House. They didn’t just exile him, they removed all traces of his existence from the family tree. It’s like he never was born, I was never his wife, and Helen was never his daughter or a child of House Ervan. Two thirds of exiles sent to Karhari die within the first three years. Before they sent us, I begged— “, her voice broke, and she swallowed, “—I begged his mother on my knees to take Helen so she wouldn’t have to go into exile with us. That bitch looked me straight in the eye and told her guards to remove the strangers from her house. I can’t go back to the Holy Anocracy.”
“We’re not going back to the Holy Anocracy.”
“I don’t want to make trouble between you and your vampire. I’ve put you into a bad position and I’m so sorry. House Krahr is one of the most powerful Houses.” She raised her hands. “Look at this ship. I don’t want to ruin it for you.”
“It’s not a problem.”
In the bath Helen dived and surfaced, laughing.
“Dina, I saw his face when the two of you were talking.”
“You threw him off h
is stride. His cousin is married to a human and he has an odd fascination with Earth women. He just didn’t realize not all of us are shrinking violets. He was explaining to me how you sealed your armor while wearing it and how it didn’t compute in his head.”
Maud frowned. “The two of you aren’t together?”
“No.”
“Then how?” she raised her arms, encompassing the ship.
“I asked him for a favor. He offered, actually.”
“The Marshal of House Krahr just offered to take his destroyer and come rescue me because you asked him?”
“Yes.”
She stared at me. “Why?”
“He’s a frequent guest at the inn and he felt obligated to help because the inn hosted a peace summit that saved a lot of vampire lives and resulted in his House making a lot of money. Also, he’s a kind man.”
“The inn? You found Mom and Dad?”
Pain stabbed me straight through the heart. “No. My inn. Gertrude Hunt.”
She looked at me, her face blank.
“I’m an innkeeper,” I told her. “We’re not going to the Holy Anocracy. We’re going to Earth, to my inn. We’re going home.”
All the blood drained from Maud’s face. She looked at me as if she didn’t understand, then her lip quivered and my sister cried.
* * *
It’s amazing how much dirt could come off one little girl. When we finally extracted Helen from the bath, the water had turned a muddy brown. We toweled her dry and put her into one of my T-shirts. She yawned, curled up on the soft covers, and held out her hands. “Fangs.”
Maud handed her two daggers in dark sheaths. Helen hugged the daggers and fell asleep. Maud gently covered her with a blanket.
I pulled a T-shirt and a pair of jeans from my backpack. Maud was taller than me by two inches and shaped differently. We both had Mom’s butt and her hips, but Maud’s legs were always more muscular and her shoulders broader. I offered the clothes to her.
“I had to guestimate the size. Go clean up.” I told her. “I’ll watch her.”
Maud touched the place where a crest would’ve sat on her armor and grimaced. “Old habits.”
They had stripped the crest from her when they threw her and her husband out of House Ervan.
She bent her left arm, slid aside a bulky looking chunk of armor at least two shades lighter than the rest of the charcoal-colored armor plates, and typed in the code. If Arland ever saw that, he would have a heart attack from the sheer inefficiency of it. It was like trying to type commands into a computer except instead of the keyboard, you had an old, rickety typewriter with half the letters missing.
A few seconds passed. Maud bared her teeth. “Work, damn you.” She slammed her arm into the bulkhead. With a faint whisper, the syn-armor came apart, separating into individual pieces. Maud shed the breastplate, the wrist guards, the shoulder pads, the sleeves, one by one adding them to a pile against the wall, until she stood in a dark blue jumpsuit. The jumpsuit had seen better days - the elbows were threadbare. The smell of sweat, blood, and human body that hadn’t been washed for far too long spread through the room. I wrinkled my nose.
“Do I stink?” she asked.
“No. You smell like a fresh lily in the middle of a crystal-clear pond.”
She stuck her tongue out at me, took the clothes, and disappeared into the bathroom.
Someone knocked on the door, gently, almost apologetic.
“Open,” I said. The cabin’s door slid upward, revealing a vampire man carrying a black round case about two feet tall and three feet wide.
“With compliments from the Lord Marshal,” he said and departed.
It seemed like forever before Maud finally emerged from the bathroom. The clothes fit her well enough, and if I ignored the look in her eyes that said she’d seen too many ugly things, I could almost pretend that she was the old Maud, before my parents disappeared and Klaus vanished into the starry vastness of the Cosmos. Except for her hair. The last time we met, she’d had a long waterfall of hair all the way down to her waist, like most vampire women. She loved her hair.
Maud saw the container.
“Arland sent you an armor repair kit,” I told her.
“How considerate.” Her voice had a touch of ice to it. She peered at it and smiled.
“What?”
“I just realized I don’t have to wear the armor ever again.” She paused. “I should probably repair it anyhow. You never know.”
She sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the kit and touched its polished surface. The container split into petals curving from the center, lit from within by a soft peach glow. The kit opened like a flower, its center slid upward, turning and opening into a tower of shelves containing small intricate tools and several crystal vials filled with colored liquids: red, black, pearlescent, and peach.
Maud pulled her breastplate close, took a cloth from one of the shelves, sprayed some pearlescent solution on it, and rubbed the armor. Dirt and dust dissolved almost instantly, revealing the black material of the armor underneath. There was a kind of hypnotic rhythm to it. Swipe, wait a moment as the solution evaporated, swipe again.
“What happened to your hair?”
“I chopped it the day they dropped us off on Karhari. It was too hard to keep clean. Water is precious on Karhari. There is almost none on the surface. It rains a decent amount during the rainy season, but the upper crust of the planet is porous rock. All the rain water seeps through and accumulates in underground rivers. They drill for it, the way we drill for oil. As the water passes through the rock, it picks up some nasty salts and must be purified… Long story short, water was expensive.”
That explained it.
“We always made enough money to keep us hydrated,” she said. “And the meat was easy to come by. The bur are violent once riled up, but pretty stupid.”
“How did you live?”
“We hired out.”
She finished wiping the armor down, took a scanner from the shelf, and passed it over the breastplate. It made a soft musical chime. She put it back, selected a thin, needle-like instrument from the shelf, and carefully touched it to the largest dent. Thin filaments glowing with peach color peeled from the needle’s tip and danced across the dent, pulling the substance of the armor apart.
“Exile or no exile, Melizard was still a Marshal’s son. All that training and experience were worth something, and they didn’t take our armor, our weapons, or our skills. So we traveled from House to House, Lodge to Lodge, and picked up whatever work was available. Usually convoy guard jobs or private security force openings. We were with a mercenary company for a while and it was almost okay.” Maud glanced at me. “It was still horrible, but they had a walled-in base, we had our own room, and we could leave for a job knowing Helen would be safe. We were well liked and the money was decent by Karhari’s standards.”
“What happened?” I had a strong suspicion I knew the answer.
“What always happened.” She sounded bitter and tired. “Melizard.”
Maud typed a code into a small terminal within the kit. The filaments turned pale green and knitted the armor back, this time without the dent.
“He waited about six months until he thought he had built up enough support and started rocking the boat. He didn’t like the jobs we were getting, and if he were in charge, he would get us better jobs, and everyone would be swimming in water, and things would be fair. That was his favorite word. Fair. It wasn’t enough to be respected and earn a decent living. He had to run things and he didn’t want to wait for it.”
“They threw you out?” I guessed.
“They threw him out. They told me Helen and I could stay.”
“But you didn’t.”
She glanced at me for a second. “No. I didn’t.”
The Melizard I knew was the perfect younger child: blindingly handsome, witty, charismatic, with a bright smile, the kind that told you right away that you could trust him because he
was a good guy, even if he was up to no good once in a while. He was the son of the Marshal of House Ervan, handsome, rich, a legend on the battlefield by the time he met Maud, and the kind of catch young vampire girls dreamed of. Maud fell for him hard, but she stuck to her guns. I was sixteen when they met. He worked on her for two years. Maud was like a swan. It took a lot to earn her loyalty but once she gave it, she gave it for life.
“Is that what happened with House Ervan?”
She nodded. “Something like that. After we got thrown out of the camp, I told him it was the last time. That he didn’t care about me or Helen and all he had were these idiotic ambitions that landed us in the middle of a damned wasteland again and again. If he pulled that crap one more time, he was on his own. He swore to me that he would put everything right. He did everything he could: he promised, he begged, he smiled that charming smile, except I was over it.”
“Then why did you stay with him?”
She glanced at Helen sleeping under the covers. And instantly I knew. Helen must’ve adored her father with all her little heart. Melizard was so lovable, handsome, and funny. It would take her years to figure out that he was a terrible parent.
Maud inspected the repair. It was like the dent was never there. She chewed on her lower lip, turning the armor under the light this way and that, and moved on to the next dent.
“After that, House Kor hired him,” she said. “To be their sergeant. They were in a land dispute with another House, and it was getting ugly. They didn’t want me, they just wanted him. They needed someone skilled in tactics, with some name recognition, and they needed him fast, because the other House was going on the offensive. Melizard agreed to take the job. He trained their soldiers, he overhauled their entire force, and he did what he always did when you put him on the battlefield: he tore through his enemies. The other House realized that they had to take him out.”
“Did they kill him?”
“No.” Maud paused and looked at me. “They offered him twice as much money. They didn’t want him to fight for them. They just wanted him to not show up.”
“He told them to shove it, right?”
“No. The moron took the money.”