Chapter 79: Price Of A Secret
The Tarlington Fortress looked considerably less dramatic by moonlight.
Jack had to admit that when he first laid eyes on the castle from the bridge, half-mad from a newly forming mana circuit and propped up on a borrowed cane, the place had carried a certain mythic weight. The sandstone walls rising from a mirror-black lake, the single tower standing vigil over the north like some forgotten sentinel — it was the sort of fortress that made a person feel small in the good way.
Now, a week later, with Zero standing at the gate holding a lantern and the distant sound of Thar arguing with a carpenter about load-bearing walls echoing across the water, it mostly looked like a construction site.
’Give it time,’ Jack told himself as he crossed the bridge. The frost on the sandstone caught the moonlight in pale blue flickers. At least the storm had finally passed. The air smelled of wet stone and pine resin from the freshly cut timber being hauled up from Blackthorn’s forest edge.
Behind him, the clip of boots on stone told him Kieran Ravenhall was keeping pace. The baron hadn’t said a word since they left the mayor’s residence. That was either a good sign or a very bad one. With the raven-cloaked men, Jack was learning, silence usually meant they were thinking. And men like Kieran thought the way other men sharpened blades — with deliberate, patient strokes.
Zero bowed as they passed through the gatehouse. Her purple hair hung over her eyes in its usual curtain. The two Aurel drifting behind Kieran regarded her with their amber helmets pulsing faintly, as if attempting to parse what she was and failing.
"She smells like a grave," Kieran murmured beside Jack, his dead eyes fixed on Zero’s retreating back as she led them into the courtyard.
"She is many things," Jack replied pleasantly. "Grave is accurate enough for one of them."
The courtyard still had the skeletal look of a place being rebuilt from the inside out. Scaffolding lined the western wall. A pair of Jack’s new knights — former refugees in mismatched plate — stood guard by the main hall entrance and stiffened with comical rigidity when they spotted him approaching. He chose not to comment on it. Dignity was something you gave people until they either earned more or deserved less.
The main hall was small by noble standards, but it had the bones of something grander. A long table had been dragged in from somewhere, ringed by chairs of varying quality. A fire crackled in the hearth at the far end, and someone had managed to find three decent candelabras, which threw warm gold light across the stone floor. It smelled of tallow and woodsmoke and faintly, beneath it all, of the damp cold that lived in old fortresses and never quite left.
Jack took the seat at the head of the table without ceremony. He did not invite Kieran to sit. He let the silence work for him.
Kieran sat anyway.
The two Aurel remained standing behind their master, still as decorative pillars. In the firelight, the golden thread on their black robes shimmered. Jack studied them with his Perception Field active, keeping the sensation carefully tamped down. He’d learned to open the skill like an eye — a narrow aperture rather than a flood. Even so, what he saw of the Aurel’s mana circuit made him sit slightly straighter.
’Not enslaved by Blood Magic. Not Soul Bound either. That’s something else. Something older.’
He filed it away.
"You said you know my family’s greatest problem," Kieran said. His voice had the quality of dry autumn leaves — thin, slightly brittle, liable to scatter in a sharp breeze. "I have been generous in following you out here in the dark without verification. I consider that a significant act of goodwill on my part."
"I consider it curiosity," Jack replied. "But we can call it goodwill if it makes you feel better."
The baron’s dead eyes didn’t flicker. He was, Jack thought, the sort of person who had long ago decided that pride was a resource better saved than spent. "Say what you know."
Jack leaned back and looked at the ceiling. The stone was old, older than the kingdom that had built the fortress around it. You could see it in the way the mortar had settled differently, the way certain stones carried the ghost of carvings that had been smoothed away.
"The Aurel," Jack said, "are dying."
The fire popped. Kieran did not move.
"Not the ones behind you," Jack continued, "specifically. Those seem stable enough, whatever you’ve done to them. I mean the species as a whole. They haven’t reproduced in — I would estimate — close to three centuries. The few remaining are bound into servitude by families like yours before they waste away, because a dead Aurel is worth nothing and a bound one is worth an army. That’s why your family needed the slaves from Blackthorn. Not for labour. For the ritual."
Silence. The kind with weight.
"You need living vessels," Jack said. "Vitality donors. Human ones, specifically, because human mana circuits are the only ones compatible with Aurel binding without killing the host outright. Your family has been performing the rite for generations, extending the Aurel’s existence by transferring life force through a third party. Very elegant. Very illegal. Very expensive."
Kieran’s thin smile returned. It looked like a scar. "Where did you learn this?"
"That’s not the question you should be asking."
"Then what is?"
Jack met the baron’s eyes across the table. "You should be asking why I haven’t reported it to either kingdom, considering what it would mean for House Ravenhall if I did."
This time, something moved behind Kieran’s dead eyes. Something old and calculating and, underneath it all, afraid. Good. Fear was the beginning of honest conversation.
"Why haven’t you?"
Jack turned his palm upward on the table — a gesture that managed to suggest both openness and inevitability at once. "Because I don’t want your ruin. I want your birds."
Kieran blinked. It was perhaps the first genuinely unguarded expression Jack had seen from him. "My birds."
"The giant blackbirds your convoy travels with. Carrier birds, I assume, given their size. Trained for long distances, capable of crossing the Aldric Mountains?"
A pause. "Capable, yes. We have used them for courier routes between Staedbergh and the central continent."
"That," Jack said, "is exactly what I need." He stood and walked toward the fire, placing his hands behind his back in the manner of someone who had already decided how this conversation ended. "Your family’s problem is supply. You need living donors, and the northern villages are running dry as the population flees south. I have a solution to that, but we’ll come to it. My problem is isolation. Blackthorn is cut off from the central continent, which is where my future lies. Your birds give me a line of communication across the mountains before I am personally strong enough to cross them."
He turned to face Kieran.
"I will not report your family’s activities to either kingdom. I will provide your ritual with willing donors — specifically, criminals and individuals condemned under Blackthorn’s new legal framework. In return, House Ravenhall provides me with six trained birds, access to your courier network, and one additional thing."
Kieran’s sunken cheekbones shifted as his jaw tightened. "What additional thing?"
Jack smiled, and it was not a warm smile. "Information about what’s waiting for me on the other side of those mountains."
The fire settled into a low, steady burn. Outside, the lake lapped quietly against the fortress foundations. Somewhere above them, in the room Jack had designated as a study, the faint scratch of Automatic Writing continued its endless work — cataloguing, organising, preparing.
Kieran stared at the table for a long moment. Then, with the careful movement of a man who had negotiated his family’s survival through three generations of political upheaval, he reached into his robe and withdrew a black feather. He placed it on the table between them.
"A Ravenhall compact," he said. "You have terms. I have one of my own."
"Speak it."
"If your information is ever used against my family — if a single syllable of what you know reaches another noble, another king, another institution — the compact is void, and you will learn what happens when House Ravenhall decides someone is a liability rather than an asset." His dead eyes held Jack’s without flinching. "We have been making problems disappear for a very long time, Your Highness."
Jack picked up the black feather and twirled it once between his fingers.
"I have been making problems disappear since before your grandfather was born," he said pleasantly. "But I accept your term."
He set the feather back on the table and extended his hand. Kieran looked at it for a moment with the expression of a man shaking hands with something he couldn’t fully classify. Then he reached across and took it.
The compact was sealed.
Jack walked Kieran back to the gate himself. The Aurel drifted behind them like dark clouds following a storm front. At the bridge’s edge, Kieran paused and looked out at the lake — the moonlight cutting a pale line across its surface toward the distant treeline.
"You are a strange creature," Kieran said, not unkindly. "I have dealt with noble vampires before. They are either feral or arrogant. You are neither."
"I am both," Jack replied. "Just on a schedule."
Kieran made a sound that might, in a different life, have been a laugh. Then he stepped off the bridge into the cold air, the cushion of wind catching him as always, and drifted back toward his camp without another word.
Jack watched him go. When the raven-cloaked figure had dissolved into the dark, he turned and looked up at the Tarlington Fortress tower. A single candle burned in the uppermost window. Somewhere up there, he knew, Melinda was awake — she slept less and less now, another quiet marker of her transformation.
Six birds across the mountains. Eyes on the central continent. A courier line that answered to no kingdom.
’Not bad for one night’s work.’
He turned up his collar against the January cold and walked back inside.