The process of freeing him took hours, but eventually, he felt his coffin shift as it was pulled out of the wall. Then, those cursed swords were removed, and his coffin lid was opened. He was still in darkness, though, because Simon was too weak to even open his eyes.
He could hear people talking, and the sputtering of a torch, but what the actual words might an was well beyond him right now. It was enough that he could tell they didn’t all belong to the sa person. There were three people here with him. Well, there were at least three people here speaking. There might have been more standing by silently. His sharpened sense of sll was so overloaded by all the new things around him right now that he couldn’t tell anything apart with it. Only his neglected sense of hearing and his atrophied brain provided any help, and they whispered that there was a woman and two n.
Freya, he thought. She ca at last the second he figured out that it was the woman who was in charge of the two n.
He felt a mont of gratitude toward her then, even though he hated her. He’d gladly rip her heart out if he got the chance, but hearing her again was a vast improvent over the alternative. She sounded like she was giving soone an order, but before he could figure out if that was directed at him or not, sothing was shoved in his slack mouth, and he bit down on reflex.
It’s going to be terrible! His dormant mind tried to warn him. You’ll open your eyes to see a child or soone you care about, and you’ll be the one to have murdered them!
None of those admonishnts stopped him, though. Nothing could have stopped him in that mont. He was a beast, and he needed to feed.
Whatever he was feeding on struggled weekly in his mouth, but not enough to dislodge his fragile fangs, and slowly, one heartbeat at a ti, that vitality entered Simon’s awful body. He was too weak even to suck the blood from his victim, so to add insult to injury, the heart and the blood pressure of the person he was about to murder had to do all the work to feed him.
That only lasted for a few seconds, though. Once he began to revivify, he began to suck lightly, and then, like his life depended on it. The taste and the power of the blood made his heart sing, but more than that, for the first ti in decades, the hunger that had been his constant companion began to fade.
He felt free in that mont, even as he continued to drain his victim. In only a few seconds, they were dead, and even as Simon opened his mouth, they slumped to the floor.
Simon opened his eyes, then, and was assaulted by the brightness of the torch and the lantern that were in the room. He saw at least half a dozen blobs that were probably people, but it was hard to say. Instead of trying, he hissed and shut his eyes again. The only useful piece of information was that the blob being dragged from the room was too large to be a child. It was either a very large woman or a dium-sized man, and judging by the taste, Simon leaned toward the latter.
Even as he shut his eyes, there was talking and yelling. Soone tried to talk to him. It was the woman, but he realized then that she wasn’t Freya. Her hair was too dark, and her voice was too deep.
All of this was too much to take in while his body was buzzing with a life’s worth of energy after years of starvation. So, he tried to roll away to block them out, but instead, another victim was pushed forward toward him. Even as annoyed and out of sorts as he was, that was not a temptation that Simon could resist.
This one slled and tasted similar to the last one but different from the guard’s he’d devoured before he’d been imprisoned. Not from around here? He wondered. After drinking more of the man’s blood, he decided they were definitely foreigners.
That was all the proof he needed that his mind was starting to wake up. He’d feared that what had been done to him had caused irreversible brain damage and reduced him to so kind of wild beast. While he could still feel that angry, raging beast inside of him, it was slowly going back into its cage as his mind returned to sothing resembling sanity.
As he felt his second victim start to weaken, he opened his eyes again, testing the light. This ti, he found it tolerable, but only barely, and even though soone was still trying to speak to him, it was still too echoey and distorted to really understand. Instead, he focused on the man he was draining dry, willing his eyes to focus so the details would resolve.
Murani, he thought, as soon as he could see clearly enough to recognize the facial features. The sa people we fought in Ionar, but they live hundreds of miles to the north. Why would they…
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Fragnts of conversations with Freya, or perhaps with the farr before he’d been captured by her, started to co back to him. She was at war with them, or at least this kingdom was. What was the na of this kingdom? Brin? Ionia?
None of those were right, but he couldn’t be bothered. He was in a vampire castle high in the mountains, and that was as much about the world he needed to understand as he let his second victim fall free and turned to face whoever it was that had freed him.
Her face was almost as hard to decipher as the horselord, but once it snapped into focus, he was in stunned disbelief.
“Arrraaa…” he rasped, still in denial about it. She’d co back for him, so way, sohow.
Does this an that the people of the region have overthrown Freya? He wondered. It was a shocking thing, but it seed the most likely option. He had, after all, taught her how to use magic. Perhaps she’d succeeded where he’d failed.
Still, he doubted that. Sothing was off. He was sure he’d been in there for decades, and given how she didn’t appear to have aged much, if at all, it couldn’t have been nearly that long.
Was my math off? He wondered. Was I only in the box for a year or two? That would be a horrifying realization, yet even as her mouth continued to move, he finally figured out the discrepancy. She hadn’t aged, but she didn’t have a pulse, either.
The mont she tried to sacrifice her life for her sister ca flashing back to him then. It had been decades before, but it was in this very room that she’d begged him to kill her instead of her sister. She’d no doubt made the very sa offer to Freya, which ant he’d suffered for nothing.
More importantly, though, it ant that Freya was alive. That anger was what slowly forced the world to co into focus and for sounds to finally complete their transformations into words.
“Where is she?” he growled.
“That’s just what I was trying to explain to you,” Ara signed in muted exasperation.
She might look the sa, but she acted differently enough that it was clear she was taking her cues from the mistress of the castle, which ant she was a servant, or even an apprentice, and not a slave or worse. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, but before he could decide, she continued. “We don’t know where she is, but we know what’s coming next, and you’re the only one I could think of who might be able to help.”
“To help? Who? Her?” Simon asked. He wanted to laugh then, but he was physically incapable of it, and when he tried, all he succeeded in doing was coughing. “I’d rather die.”
“I’m sure that can be arranged, but that won’t help with the army, which might start coming down from the pass as soon as tomorrow,” Ara explained. “They will sweep through the region in a matter of days, and sooner or later, they will take Gravenstone Castle while I slumber.”
“That’s rough,” Simon nodded, smiling. “Destroying everything that Freya cares about. That would be a sha.”
The vampiress looked like she was about to slap him. Instead, she commanded, “Leave us. I will call when he is ready to consu another prisoner,” in a tone that brooked no argunt.
That was the first ti that Simon noticed the other people in the room beyond their shapes and their heartbeats. There were guards that obviously belonged to the castle and workn, but they had several prisoners, too, bound and gagged. It was only when all of the n had filed out that she spoke again.
“You have every right to hate her. I don’t bla you,” she said finally, deflating now that there was no one around she needed to put on airs in front of. “I hate her, and she’s done so much less to than she has to you, but—”
“But nothing, Ara,” Simon blurted out. “She took your humanity from you.”
“She did,” the vampiress agreed, “But she spared my sister as she promised, so I continue to serve her loyally in all things.”
Simon flinched as his earlier theory panned out. “Well, I can tell you that she’ll be very unhappy with you for waking up.”
“I doubt it,” Ara shrugged. “I think she’s forgotten all about you, to be honest. If you’ll help save her castle, then she will forgive anything, and if you don’t, then I’ll put you back in the box, and she will be none the wiser.”
That last part was said just cold enough that Simon believed it, so, for the mont, he changed topics since that was the very last thing he wanted. “What is it you think I can do for you?” he asked tiredly. “I doubt I can even stand, and you know I can’t use magic anymore.”
“Simon, you are as clever and as fierce a man as I’ve ever t,” she answered, taking one of his bone-slender mangled hands in both of hers. “You saved my father from a vampire and then destroyed Freya’s castle not once but twice, and I have been looking for a justifiable opportunity to free you ever since. All I want is for you to help save the valley and the people in it, and if you die in the process, then I think we both get what we want, don’t we?”
“The people, huh?” he asked. “You an your sister?”
“My sister is long dead,” Ara answered with a shake of her head, but her children are grown and have children of their own. So of those children have children, too, and all of them are spread in a dozen different villages throughout the valley. So, no, I don’t want to save her, or even then, I want to save everyone.”
Simon could respect that. He would have complinted her on it, in fact, if he wasn’t still so blown away by what she said. “Great Grandchildren?” he asked, doing the math. “How long have I been in there, exactly?”
“I-I’m not sure that you want to know,” Ara answered with sadness in her voice.
“Tell ,” Simon said, looking at her with renewed determination. “Tell everything.”
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