The Blood Mirror Never Lies novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Open Cut
In front of the whole Court Elspeth opens her own hand to the Blood Mirror, and as the Unwriting starts, the red thread of her bond leaps across the room into Cassian and blood runs from his eyes.
The whole Court of Ravenmoor came down to the catacombs to watch me be unwritten.
Unwritten means the Blood Mirror drinks your memories.
It takes every year you spent at Court and leaves you at the gate with only your childhood.
Seven hundred vampires stood between the stone pillars, each holding a candle.
Behind them, the old graves breathed cold air into the room.
At the far end stood the Mirror, taller than two men, in a black iron frame.
Its glass threw a dull red halo across the floor.
I knew that glass better than anyone in the room. I had polished it every Sunday for five years.
"Elspeth Rainsford," said the Elder. He was Odette Crane's father, and he read from a scroll he didn't need.
"You are accused of plotting with the Fallen. You are accused of trying to murder Odette Crane, who will be Lady of this Court."
The Fallen are the vampires we exiled for refusing the Court's blood law.
The Court burns the ones it catches.
Lord Cassian Rooke sat on the black velvet throne above us with one boot on the step.
He was my fated mate.
The thin red ring on my left wrist had said so since I was twenty-two.
A month ago he stopped touching it.
Tonight he looked at me.
Odette sat on the arm of his throne.
She had handed him a silver cup of dark wine before the sitting began, the way she did before every sitting.
He had drunk it without glancing down.
I had smelled it from where I stood in chains.
Bloodroot, green and bitter. In the Mirror room we use it to numb a hand before a cut.
I thought it was odd. Then the Elder started reading again.
My own left palm was wrapped in linen.
I had cut it open on a broken window five nights ago.
"Your blood was found on the vault sill," the Elder said. "Beside my daughter's blood, and the Fallen knife that opened her arm."
Odette leaned against Cassian's chest.
She drew slow circles on his coat with one finger.
Her mouth curved into a small sweet smile, and she kept her eyes on me.
She thought the glass would finish me.
So I stepped forward and held out my hand.
"I claim the Open Cut," I said.
The guards stopped. Nobody had claimed it in forty years.
"Your hand is already open," the Elder said.
"Then it will bleed easily."
I tore the linen off with my teeth.
I pressed my palm flat against the Mirror.
The glass was cold. Then it was warm. Then it began to pull.
"I was at that window," I said, loud enough for the back benches.
"I saw Odette cut her own arm with that knife. I ran. I cut my hand on the sill."
The Court laughed.
It started at the front and rolled back through the pillars, until even the candles seemed to shake.
Cassian didn't laugh.
"You admit you were there," he said.
His voice was flat and low. It was the voice he used for the Council.
"I'm telling you what I saw."
"You are telling me you stood at the window and watched."
"You never asked me one question," I said. "Not in the cell. Not tonight."
"I don't need to." He leaned back. "The Mirror will answer."
The red halo rose off the floor.
The glass filled with my blood and showed the vault window, the sill and a smear of red on the stone. Then it showed the Fallen knife lying beside it.
Every word of it was true.
My blood had been on that sill. It said nothing about why I was there, or who had been holding the knife.
A hiss ran through the Court.
"Unwrite her," the Elder said.
Odette let out a soft breath.
Two guards pulled my hand from the glass and set a cold rod against my ribs.
The pull began at once.
First went the day I climbed the abbey gate at twenty-one with a letter in my teeth.
Then the first Sunday I polished the glass. Tobias's dry little jokes. Every stair of the keeper's tower.
Then the ring on my wrist burned white.
A red thread tore out of it.
It ran across the floor like a lit fuse, through the candles and the boots, and into the center of Cassian's chest.
He gripped the arms of the throne.
Blood ran from both of his eyes.
The glass went black, and Odette's smile slipped for the first time.
The last thing I heard was Cassian saying my name, in the voice I had not heard for a month.
Then I forgot who he was.
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