I Sold My Blood to Pay My Sister's Debt, and the Vampire King Who Bought Me Swore I'd Be His Queen or His Ruin novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Seal

I took the stairs to the tower two at a time with the order crushed in my fist.

Corin couldn't keep up, and for once he didn't complain.

I didn't knock.

Kaelen was at his desk with a candle and a book.

I threw the paper at him.

It hit his chest and fell open on the desk, seal up.

"My mother," I said. "Above the tailor's on Needle Row. You burned her."

He looked down at the seal.

Then at the date.

He didn't pick it up.

"She was thirty-eight," I said. "She sang off-key. She made my sister and me matching dresses out of one bolt of yellow cotton and we hated them. And you put your seal on a paper and they dragged her out of our house in the night and burned her on your steps."

My voice broke on the last word.

I didn't care.

"Say something!"

"Twelve years ago," Kaelen said quietly, "I was asleep."

"Don't."

"Thane."

Corin had come in behind me, out of breath.

He looked at me, then at his king, and then he looked at the floor.

"It's true," he said. "I stood the vault door for thirty years. He went down forty years ago this autumn and came up ten years ago this spring."

"And his seal?"

Corin's mouth went flat.

"Lady Montcalm was his consort then," he said. "She ruled the court while he slept. She kept the seal."

I stared at Kaelen.

"Show me," I said.

He took me down.

Under the archive, under the cellars, there was a stair cut out of the rock.

At the bottom was a round stone room with no windows and no door but the one we came through.

In the middle was a slab of black stone like an altar, long enough for a tall man to lie on.

The dust on the floor around it had been swept, but the dust on the walls hadn't.

There were scratches in the rock by the slab. Rows of them. Little marks in groups of five.

"Thane counted the years for me," Kaelen said. "So I'd know how long I'd lost."

I touched the marks.

Thirty rows.

"Why do you sleep?"

"Because after enough centuries of grey, a man would rather feel nothing in the dark than nothing in the light." He stood at the bottom of the stair with his hands at his sides. "When I woke, I put Isadora aside. I didn't know what she'd done with my seal. I didn't look."

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