The evening found them in different clothes and a different carriage. Laila wore shimmering gold and black. Isabella had chosen dark green, practical enough to move in, elegant enough to belong. Lambert’s suit fit him technically and unconvincingly. Wylan’s waistcoat, deep blue and silver, had been Laila’s suggestion. He had not argued. Arguing with Laila about clothing was like arguing with gravity about falling.
The Amber Ballroom did not announce itself from the street. Its fa?ade was restrained stone and wrought iron, the entrance marked only by a pair of amber lanterns that cast the doorway in warm, resinous gold. One had to know it was there. Most of Pharelle’s polite society did not. Saffron’s doing, almost certainly.
Inside, the restraint ended.
The main hall opened upward into a vaulted ceiling hung with chandeliers that dripped crystal and candlelight in extravagant cascades. Phlogiston-enhanced. Too warm and too steady for conventional flame. The floor was black marble veined with gold, polished to a depth that made it feel less like stone than dark water.
Along the walls, booths were curtained in deep amber velvet, and from behind them came the low hum of conversations that did not wish to be overheard. Acoustically dampened. He could tell from the way sound died at the fabric. There was no menu. If you had to ask what it cost, you could not afford to be here.
? Establishments of this calibre did not employ bouncers. They employed ambiance. The wrong sort of person simply found themselves unable to locate the door, or their confidence, or both.
The air carried cardamom, old cedar, the faint sweetness of pipe resin, and beneath it all, the warm golden note of Amber, the liquor that gave the Ballroom its name. Distilled from the crystallised sap of Palladium itself. Palladium sap had alchemical properties that most commercial preparations failed to preserve. He would need to examine the distillation process. If the poets were to be believed, it tasted like drinking sunlight that had been aged in oak. The poets were, for once, not exaggerating by much.
Laila led. She moved through the Amber Ballroom the way she moved through most rooms: as if she owned it and was merely allowing everyone else to borrow it.
Isabella fell into step beside her. Her eyes moved the way they always did in new spaces, quick and systematic. Wylan had seen it enough times to recognise the pattern: exits, sight lines, threats.
Lambert followed, and was immediately, visibly, out of his depth.
He had spent his adult life in cassocks, cloisters, and ecclesiastical offices. The Amber Ballroom was the precise opposite of all three. The candlelight caught the velvet and the crystal and the bare shoulders of patrons who had dressed to be admired, and Lambert’s cheeks flushed. He kept his eyes forward. He said nothing. He looked like a man trying to cross a river by pretending it wasn’t wet.
? Lambert’s training had prepared him for temptation in the abstract. The Amber Ballroom presented it in the specific, the low-cut, and the extensively perfumed.
Wylan was doing very well at clinical observation right up until a curtain parted and he saw Augustine.
Augustine was leaning against the bar in a dark, well-cut coat, a glass of Amber in his hand, his blond hair catching the candlelight. He was talking to someone Wylan did not recognise, and laughing, and the laugh transformed his face from the stillness Wylan remembered into something open.
Wylan’s systematic cataloguing stopped.
He’s a vampire. You’re staring at a vampire. In a bar. Stop it.
He did not stop it.
Augustine’s gaze drifted across the room, casual and disaffected, and stopped as it passed over him. Augustine raised his glass in salute.
Rather than acknowledging the salute, Wylan’s hand moved to his satchel. He rummaged past the vial he had prepared that afternoon until he found an ague still sharp. He hesitated, and then, realising he had Augustine’s full attention, made a decision.
He pricked his finger on the spike inside his kit and let a single drop fall into the empty vial.
Augustine’s glass stopped halfway to his lips. His eyes gave up all pretence at indifference, replaced by hunger.
Well, that’s one hypothesis confirmed. Only now he didn’t know what to do with this attention.
Laila’s hand closed on his elbow. “Stop dawdling,” she said.
Wylan allowed himself to be steered. Though his thoughts were sidetracked.
The private room was designed to impress, and it did. Decanters of Amber glowed softly on a sideboard. A hookah stood on a low table, its brass fittings polished to a warm shine.
Four people were already seated.
Guillaume and Saffron occupied one side of the table. Opposite them sat a woman with weathered bronze skin, dark hair pulled back from a face that had been sharpened by sun and salt wind. Her hands were rough, her posture straight, and she held her glass of Amber with the grip of someone who’d learned to drink in weather.
Beside her sat a man, older, grey at the temples, with dark eyes and the same strong jaw as the portraits of Alexios that hung in the estate’s upper corridors. But thinner. Leaner. As though the same face had been carved from less generous wood.
“Laila, sweetie, you remember Nikolaos, of course,” Saffron said, as though this were the most natural thing in the world. “And this is Captain Elara Voltari. His wife.”
For a moment, Laila said nothing. The resemblance was not exact. It was worse than exact. It was close enough to hurt and different enough to remind her why.
“Of course,” Laila said. Her composure found its footing. “It’s been far too long, Nikolaos.”
Nikolaos inclined his head. “Lady de Vaillant.” His voice was careful, and his eyes moved across Lambert, Wylan, and Isabella. Something in his face shifted, and his gaze lingered on Wylan.
“I’m so glad you could all arrive for our little family reunion. You’ll have to accept my apologies that I didn’t forewarn you, just my idea of a surprise,” Saffron said, the words falling out of her mouth with far too much ease.
And then, without waiting for a response: “There is so much to catch up on, and so much of it private, if you would allow me...”
Saffron took a long drag from her cigar, held it, and exhaled. The smoke had a way of permeating the room, seemed to cling to the walls.
The room dimmed. Not dramatically, but a settling, as if the shadows along the walls had been waiting for permission to deepen. They stretched and thickened until the doorway and windows were sealed in shade. The sounds of the Ballroom died as though a door had been closed on them.
Saffron opened her eyes. They were gold.
“Unless someone possesses sufficiently strong magic or theurgy,” Guillaume said, “I think we have enough privacy to speak candidly.”
The performance dropped. Nikolaos let out a breath he seemed to have been holding since they walked in, and the careful pleasantness left his face. What replaced it was older and more tired.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he said to Laila.
“I wasn’t sure you existed,” she said. “Nobody talks about you.”
“That was by design.” He glanced at Saffron. “Safer that way. For everyone.”
A silence settled. Not hostile. Measuring.
“You look like him,” Laila said quietly. She hadn’t meant to say it.
Nikolaos’s expression didn’t change, but something behind it did. “He was the better-looking one.”
Elara snorted. It was the first sound she’d made that wasn’t polite, and it broke something in the room that needed breaking.
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“I have to say,” Laila said, “this is such an odd experience. Not two weeks ago we were mourning the anniversary of Alexios’s death. Then a few days ago we learn of your existence, and now you’re sitting in front of me.” She looked at Saffron, then Nikolaos. “And perhaps it’s just me, but isn’t it odd that his own siblings didn’t attend?”
Saffron’s cigar paused. “Don’t mistake our distance for lack of grief. We both remember Alexios in our own way.”
“I did my grieving a long time ago,” Nikolaos said. His voice was flat. “Hard to grieve with a family that isn’t yours.”
“No,” Laila said. “That’s quite enough.” The words came out sharper than she’d intended, and she didn’t soften them. “You are family, and I don’t care if you’re de Vaillant or Voltari. You will come next year, and you will be with us.”
Nikolaos regarded her for a long moment. “That remains to be seen. Given the state of affairs, there might not be a de Vaillant family come this time next year.”
The room absorbed that. Nobody argued with it. That was the worst part.
“Look,” Wylan said. “We have glasses. We have wine.” He glanced at the decanters. “Well, we have this peculiar amber liquid. And we have us. We can do this now and just celebrate Alexios’s memory. However we wish to do so.” He looked at Laila. “Isn’t that right?”
Laila composed herself. “Yes.” She reached for one of the decanters. “I am sure somewhere in that man’s long and occasionally infuriating life, he did something worth toasting.”
“Several things,” Saffron said. “Most of them inadvisable.”
Guillaume poured. The Amber caught the low light and held it, glowing softly in each glass. Laila raised hers.
“To Alexios,” she said. “Who would have hated all of this secrecy, and loved every minute of it.”
“To Alexios,” Nikolaos said. His voice caught, just slightly, on the second syllable. Elara’s hand found his arm.
They drank. The Amber was warm and golden and tasted, as the poets maintained, like sunlight aged in oak. For a moment, nobody spoke, and the silence was neither awkward nor hostile.
Lambert set his glass down first. Laila noted he hadn’t actually drunk. “Pleasantries aside, we do have important matters to discuss.”
“Yes, yes. Captain Navarro,” Guillaume said, waving his hand. “Why do you think I invited Captain Voltari?”
Elara straightened in her chair. “You want to know where he went. I can tell you, because I’m the one who got him there.”
She stretched back in her chaise, satisfaction playing on her face. “Who better to smuggle something beyond the Gallian port authorities? Guillaume might be a rogue, but he’s no pirate.”
? The distinction between ‘merchant captain’ and ‘pirate’ was largely one of paperwork. Pirates had less of it, which was considered one of the profession’s primary benefits.
“Pirate queen,” Nikolaos corrected.
“That’s your title, not mine.”
“I wouldn’t even be the first person to use it.”
It was hard for Laila to observe such playful banter between husband and wife, especially this particular husband. They look like they are more than fond of each other.
“If I may,” Lambert said, clearing his throat. “I’m going to set aside for the moment the revelation of a new part of this conspiracy to smuggle the egg out of Pharelle. Notwithstanding the question I have for you, Guillaume, on how you even got it to the coast in the first place. But in the interests of candid efficiency: where is the egg now?”
Elara laughed and took a long swing of Amber.
“You are as diplomatic as your father when you want to be, I see. But I can tell you this. I helped guide Navarro and the Salvation’s Promise to Fairhaven.”
“Fairhaven,” Lambert repeated. “You’re certain.”
“I dropped him at the harbour myself. After that, he was no longer my concern.”
Laila watched Lambert work his prayer beads, turning things over in his mind.
“So you don’t know where he went after that?” Isabella said. “You, a pirate, had no curiosity about the delivery of a near priceless artefact?”
“Guillaume paid me not to know,” Elara said, “and paid me more not to care.” She tilted her glass. “Although from context it sounds like it was Esteban who bankrolled things. Can’t say it’s been a pleasure taking Church coin for some high seas skullduggery.”
Lambert couldn’t help but grimace slightly.
“Fairhaven, then,” Lambert said. “That’s where the trail picks up.”
The business was done. But the room did not empty.
Laila sat back and watched her children get to work. Lambert had several more questions for Elara about her involvement and what she knew, which was not much. Isabella and Wylan’s interest in adventures on the high seas was far too keen for Laila’s comfort.
Isabella in particular was entirely enchanted by Elara. Laila could tell by the way she unconsciously echoed the captain’s movements and posture, leaning forward when Elara leaned forward, straightening when she straightened.
“Tell me,” Isabella said, “what’s it like to captain your own vessel out at sea?”
Laila could see where this was heading and decided to cut it off before it began.
“There is one other thing we need to discuss,” she said. “And it involves your mother.”
The wonder and enthusiasm on her children’s faces died.
Saffron exhaled smoke. “Now you dredge up even older memories. What would you have us do, join her memorial dinner?” She tapped ash into the tray. “I didn’t think you cared that much for her.”
“No,” Laila said. “I wouldn’t bother with a memorial, since she’s not actually dead.”
Laila watched with just a little satisfaction as Saffron spat out her drink. She had timed the answer perfectly.
“We recently discovered that not only is she alive,” Laila continued, “but she is in fact undead. A vampire.”
Saffron stared. “Are you sure?”
“Found her in a sarcophagus,” Wylan said, “which had been buried for twelve years. It was fairly convincing.”
There was an awkward exchange of glances between Saffron and Nikolaos. The kind of look that said something had just slotted into place that neither of them wanted to examine.
“I thought she was just ill,” Saffron said slowly. “Never liked daytime hours...”
“She was always rather cold to me,” Nikolaos said. “And, well...”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.
“There’s more,” Laila said. “Alexios, and it would appear his direct descendants, have some trace of vampiric strain in them. It would stand to reason that it exists within you as well, and your heirs.”
Saffron’s hand had stopped halfway to her cigar. “Are we in danger? Will we become vampires?”
“Unlikely. But it also appears to be an explanation for why our family has a higher proclivity of Heroes than most, and perhaps even why Lambert, Maximilian, and Wylan’s awakenings were spontaneous.”
Then, by pieces and degrees, it all came out. The breeding experiments. Seraphina’s role in them. The generations of deliberate pairings. And eventually, the de Vaillant Dungeon.
Upon mentioning it, both Saffron and Nikolaos looked ill.
“I take it from that reaction,” Laila said, “that you know of it.”
“Oh?” Guillaume leaned forward. “A Dungeon in the house? That’s rather daring.”
“It’s dangerous,” Laila said.
“Guilles.” Saffron’s voice had changed. Quieter. Harder. “It’s not like that. It’s a hole in the house.” She set the cigar down. “Father made each of us go in. A rite of passage, he called it. Part of the family’s obligation.” She was quiet for a moment. “I went in first. I was the eldest, so it fell to me. I survived by making a bargain.”
“Your warlock pact,” Lambert said.
“Yes. The Dungeon offered, and I accepted. That was the price of walking out alive.”
“Alexios went in next,” Nikolaos said. His voice had dropped. “He was... before the Dungeon, he was different. Lighter. He laughed more. He was vain, if I’m honest. Spent longer on his hair than Saffron did.”
Saffron almost smiled. “He was insufferable. And beautiful. And he didn’t care about duty or legacy or any of the things Father wanted him to care about.”
“And after?” Wylan asked.
“After, he was your father.” Saffron picked up her cigar, turned it between her fingers without lighting it. “All at once, duty. Honour. Obligation to the household. As if something in the Dungeon had burned the lightness out of him and replaced it with purpose.”
Laila saw Lambert’s jaw tighten. Wylan had gone very still.
“And you?” Isabella asked Nikolaos.
“I refused.” He said it flat, the way you say something you’ve rehearsed so many times the edges have worn smooth. “I was terrified. I’d seen what it did to both of them, and I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t.”
“Father considered it an unforgivable failing,” Saffron said. “Not that Nikolaos tried and couldn’t manage it. That he wouldn’t even try.”
“Mother was worse,” Nikolaos said. “She didn’t rage. She just... stopped seeing me. After that I was furniture in my own house. Present but not addressed.” He turned his glass slowly. “I left because staying was worse than going. And none of you knew I existed, which rather confirms the impression.”
“Cedric didn’t forget,” Laila said quietly.
Nikolaos looked at her. Something moved behind his eyes. “Old Cedric. He would write, once or twice a year. Never much. Just enough to let me know the house was still standing.”
“He’s still there,” Laila said. “Still writing letters, I expect.”
A silence settled that was not entirely comfortable but was, at least, honest.
“What was he like?” Isabella said. “Our father. Before all of this. When he was young.”
Saffron and Nikolaos exchanged a glance. Laila realised she was leaning forward. In twenty years of marriage, she had never heard anyone describe the young Alexios. The man she had married had already been the man the Dungeon made.
“He was curious,” Nikolaos said. “About everything. He’d take apart clocks just to see how they worked. He once tried to teach himself Old Gallic from a book he found in the attic. Got about three pages in before declaring it a dead language that deserved to stay dead.”
“Wylan gets that from him,” Laila said, before she could stop herself.
“He was charming when he wanted to be,” Saffron said. “And absolutely impossible when he didn’t. He had this way of making you feel like you were the only person in the room, and then forgetting you existed the moment something more interesting walked past.”
“That I remember,” Laila said.
“After the Dungeon,” Saffron said, “the curiosity went somewhere else. Turned inward. He stopped taking things apart and started building things. Alliances, plans, the household. He became Father’s project, and eventually Father’s successor, and I don’t think he ever forgave any of us for letting it happen.”
The room was very quiet.
Then Saffron raised a hand.
“Everyone, quiet.” Her eyes had gone gold again. She tilted her head, listening to something none of them could hear. The shadows along the walls stirred, restless.
“Is it Theodora?” Nikolaos said.
“No.” Saffron’s brow furrowed. “Something older.” She held still for a long moment, the gold burning steady in her eyes. Then her shoulders dropped, just slightly. “It’s gone.”
Nobody spoke.
“Look, Laila,” Saffron said. The gold faded from her eyes, but her expression did not soften. “You’ve given us a great deal to digest tonight, and perhaps we should take this opportunity to conclude our discussions. I don’t know that I can guarantee our privacy any longer.”
Laila nodded. She rose, and the room rose with her.
Saffron embraced Laila, and there was real warmth in it, the kind that comes from shared revelations rather than shared history. Nikolaos shook Lambert’s hand and held it a moment too long. His eyes moved to Isabella and Wylan, cataloguing faces he had only just met and was not ready to leave.
“When you’re ready,” Nikolaos said to Laila, quietly, “I’d like to hear about my brother. Properly.”
“Come to the estate,” Laila said. “Both of you.”
Elara drained her glass and set it down with finality. “If you need passage to strange, uncharted lands, you know where to find us.” She paused and winked. “Family rate.”
“Which is?” Wylan asked.
“If Guillaume can afford me, I’m sure the de Vaillants can too.”