Author's Note: Yes, I am working on the sequel for The Consort of Crown and Blood. Here is a sneak peek (from Chapter 2). A little more worldbuilding and vampire politics. I don't know when I will post the first few chapters. They're still in rough shape and need a lot of editing and revising. But I liked this section and thought it would be a fun look inside Ilya's vampire court.
The thing about the bond, the thing no text had adequately prepared him for, was that it didn't announce itself. It didn't arrive with the weight he'd expected, some seismic interior shift, some new gravity that announced this is different now, you are different now. It arrived the way dawn arrived: gradually, and then all at once, until he couldn't remember what the dark had been like in Shane's light.
Ilya was aware of it, always. A warm current at the edge of his perception, steady and low, the way a river is present even when you're not looking at it. He could feel Shane's general shape, not his thoughts, not the specifics of emotion, but the broad quality of his interior weather. Contentment was read as warmth. Concentration was read as a kind of focused stillness. And whatever Shane was feeling right now, on the other side of the city, in that rink with twelve children and a stretch of well-maintained ice, read as delight.
Bright, uncomplicated, radiant delight.
It was, objectively, the worst possible time for it.
"-- and if I may direct the Council's attention to the precedent established in the Accords," Lord Ellion Davorian was saying, in the tone of a man who had been alive long enough to weaponize patience. "You will see that the language regarding Consort eligibility has never been formally amended, merely interpreted. The question of fitness –"
Ilya set his fountain pen down on the table with the precise care of a man who was not going to stab anyone with it, because that would be a diplomatic incident, and because it would almost certainly not be worth the paperwork.
He was sitting at the long table in the Council Chamber, which had been hosting Vampire Kingdom governance in one form or another for over eight hundred years, and which smelled of old wood and older authority and the particular dry quality that came from having very few living things inside it. The chamber held twelve seats and currently eleven of them were occupied. The twelfth was the honorary seat of the Consort, and Shane, who had been offered a standing invitation to council sessions – and had politely attended two and had expressed, also politely, that he found the proceedings extremely boring and would he be able to attend when something important happened – Shane was, right now, not in the Council Chamber.
He kept his face neutral. It required a degree of active effort that would have alarmed him if he'd had the attention to spare for it.
"Lord Davorian." Ilya let the two words land without inflection, which was how he delivered most corrections. Volume was for people who hadn't learned that silence was more threatening. "You are citing the Third Consolidation Accords."
Davorian looked pleased, which was the expression of a vampire elder who had been doing this long enough to mistake procedure for power. He was old, genuinely old, the kind of age that preceded most kingdoms, that had seen so much historical change that it had calcified into a species of conservatism so complete it had become its own ideology. His hair was white. His face held the stillness of great age, his features slightly too still, slightly too composed, like a portrait of a man rather than the man himself.
"I am," he said, smugly. "Specifically, Article Twelve, Section Three, which stipulates that a Consort of the Crown may be subject to a Fitness Review within the first year of formal bonding, upon petition from no fewer than four members of the Elders' Council."
Around the table, attention sharpened, when something with real edges was placed in the center of a room.
"A provision," Ilya said, calmly. "That has not been invoked in two centuries."
"Two hundred and seventeen years," Davorian agreed pleasantly, as though this were context rather than concession. "The custom fell out of use not because it became invalid, but because the circumstances that would justify its use became rare. The bonding of a Crown Prince to a human might reasonably be considered an exceptional circumstance."
Ilya looked at him.
It was a specific kind of look, not anger, which Davorian would have found manageable, but the flat, assessing regard of a predator deciding whether a thing warranted action or merely observation. Ilya had perfected it over centuries, had deployed it in negotiations and in battlefield disputes, the intimate cruelties of court politics, and it had the advantage of being completely honest: it meant exactly what it appeared to mean.
I am deciding what to do with you, and you should be paying close attention to what I decide.
Davorian held it with the composure of someone who had survived six centuries and several genuine power struggles and had, therefore, a reasonably functional immunity to intimidation. He did not, however, look entirely comfortable.
"Let me understand your position," Ilya said, his eyes focused on Davorian. He kept his voice even. "You are proposing a formal Fitness Review of my Consort."
"I'm proposing that the Council exercise its legal right –"
"Of my Consort." He repeated it without emphasis, because the emphasis was already there, structural, in the possessive pronoun and what it meant in this court, what it had meant for centuries. "Which is, and I want to be precise about this, a formal challenge to my judgment."
The chamber was very quiet.
"Your Highness, that is not the intent –"
"I am not interested in your intent." He said it as simply as he might say the weather today is cold. Observation, not threat. The threat was implicit in the saying. "I am interested in the substance. You are proposing to subject my bonded Consort to a process of formal review, on the grounds that a two century old provision has been technically maintained on the books, because you find my judgment in choosing him suspect." A brief pause. "I want to make sure I have that right before we continue."
Davorian opened his mouth.
"Lord Verchek," Ilya said, turning to the vampire two seats to Davorian's left with the smooth deliberateness of a man who has decided that one conversation was complete. "What was the outcome of the last formal Fitness Review?"
Verchek, who was three hundred years younger than Davorian and had the look of a man who had been dreading this council meeting all morning, answered with careful precision.
"The Consort of Lord Harren, House Cavendish, was subject to review in the year 1812. The review concluded without any findings. Lord Harren dissolved the bonding six months later."
"And what happened to Lord Harren?"
"He died," Verchek said, plainly. "The following year."
Ilya let that settle like snow.
Then he looked back at Davorian.
"I have been advised," Ilya said, raising his eyebrow. "That there are three other members of this Council who have been approached regarding a petition. I want to say this once, clearly, so that it does not need to be repeated. Any petition against Shane Hollander's fitness is a formal assertion that the Crown Prince lacks the judgment to make binding decisions about his own household. The Council has the technical right to bring that petition. I have the authority to table it indefinitely. What I am telling you now, as a courtesy, is that if this petition is formally raised, I will consider it a declaration that requires a formal response." He picked up his pen. "From me. Personally."
The room was the silence that follows something precise. Several of the vampires shifted in their chairs, unsettled.
Good, they should be fucking squirming.
“Vasily, if such a petition was declared, I have every right to respond in any manner of my choosing. Is that correct?”
“Yes, Your Highness,” Vasily said with a coy smirk, flicking his eyes to Davorian. “It is the Crown Prince’s preference to respond to declarations of his fitness with a blood duel. Claws and fangs, if memory serves, Your Highness.”
“Yes,” Ilya said, sneering at Davorian. “I do enjoy a blood duel. It has been over a century since I participated in such a thing. We should televise it. I believe it is called Pay-Per-View.”
Vasily chuckled, nodding his head to Ilya. “We could donate all proceeds to the Irina Foundation.”
“Ahhh, that is such a wonderful idea.”
"The matter," Davorian said, after a moment, with the measured quality of a very old being performing a tactical retreat. "Can be tabled pending further consultation."
"Very well," Ilya said, smiling widely and showing his fangs to the council members. He made a note on his papers with the air of a man returning to more interesting work. "Vasily, what is the next item?"
