'I'm the princess. Now let go of her before I rip you limb from limb, enjoying the taste of your blood as I do so.' I smile, but my eyes are as cold as the winter night. I notice him swallow and step away. She sighs, and gratefully (as well as gracefully) curtsies.
The man stumbles backward into a stall of dried figs. The merchant curses, and the man does not stop — he turns and dissolves into the crowd of the night market like ink dropped into dark water. Gone. One moment he was a predator with his fist wrapped around a girl's wrist, and the next he is nothing. This is the privilege of my name. Of my blood. Of the thing that lives behind my smile.
I watch him go. My fangs ache, and I press my tongue against them — a private discipline, a way of telling the hunger not yet, not here, not this one. The night market is not the place. Too many witnesses. Too many torches. Too many eyes that would see the princess of the Sangue Antico tearing open a man's throat among the spice stalls and the silk merchants and the roasted chestnuts, and that image, once planted, would grow into something my father could not prune.
Besides. He was not worth the taste.
The girl straightens. She is young — younger than me, perhaps, though age is a slippery measurement when one of the parties involved has been fifteen for longer than the other has been alive. Human. I can smell it on her: the warm copper complexity of mortal blood, the subtle sweetness of youth, the faint sour note of fear still dissipating from her skin like steam from a cooling stone. Her dress is simple cotton, dyed the blue of cornflowers, and it is torn at the sleeve where the man's grip was. Her hair is dark and wild, escaping its braid in curls that frame a face built for stubbornness — strong jaw, sharp nose, eyes the colour of roasted coffee.
"Grazie, Principessa," (Thank you, Princess,) she says, and her voice is steadier than I expected. She is afraid — I can hear her heartbeat, rapid as a sparrow's, hammering against her ribs — but she refuses to let the fear command her tongue. I admire this. It is a quality I recognise.
"Come ti chiami?" (What is your name?)
"Sera, Principessa. Sera di Monteverdi." (Sera, Princess. Sera of Monteverdi.)
"Monteverdi." I repeat the name. I know the district — a tangle of narrow streets on the city's southern edge, where the tanners and the dyers live and the air smells permanently of chemicals and ambition. Not a place that produces girls who curtsy to vampire royalty. Not a place that produces girls who should be at the night market alone.
"Cosa fai qui da sola, Sera di Monteverdi?" (What are you doing here alone, Sera of Monteverdi?)
She hesitates. In that hesitation I read an entire story — the kind of story that fills the lower quarters of every city in Italia, a story of not enough bread and too many mouths and the quiet desperation that sends a girl into the dark to earn what the daylight will not provide. She glances at the torn sleeve of her dress, and I see shame flicker across her face like a cloud passing over the moon.
"Stavo comprando medicine per mia nonna," (I was buying medicine for my grandmother,) she says. "L'uomo... mi ha fermata." (The man... stopped me.)
I look at her hands. They are empty. Whatever she was carrying, the man took it or she dropped it in the struggle. I scan the ground — the cobblestones are littered with the debris of commerce, crushed petals and fish scales and spilled grain — and there, half-hidden beneath the wheel of a cart, a small cloth pouch cinched with twine.
I bend and retrieve it. The contents rattle softly — dried herbs, by the smell. Feverfew and elderflower and something sharper, something medicinal. A healer's remedy. A poor woman's pharmacy.
"Questa?" (This?)
Her eyes widen. She takes the pouch with both hands, cradling it as though it contains gold. "Si, Principessa. Grazie." (Yes, Princess. Thank you.)
I nod. I should leave. The night market is already dangerous for me — not physically, but socially. My father has not forbidden my attendance, but he has made his displeasure known through the subtle architecture of silence that is his preferred method of control. A princess of the blood does not mingle with merchants and mortals. A princess of the blood does not walk through crowds where any hand might brush her skin and any eye might see her for what she truly is: a girl playing at nobility, a wound dressed in silk.
But Sera is looking at me with those coffee-dark eyes, and in them I see something I have not seen directed at me in a long time. Not fear. Not reverence. Not the calculated deference of a courtier measuring the distance between compliment and survival. She is looking at me with curiosity. With gratitude. With the open, uncomplicated warmth of one person recognising that another person has done a kind thing.
It is intoxicating. More intoxicating than blood.
"Ti accompagno a casa," (I'll walk you home,) I say, and the words leave my mouth before the wiser part of my mind can intervene.
The night market of our city is a creature of contradictions. By day, the piazza is a solemn space — grey stone, severe architecture, a fountain depicting Neptune wrestling a sea serpent that has not produced water in decades. But when the sun sets and the torches are lit, the space transforms. Stalls erupt from the cobblestones like mushrooms after rain, draped in coloured cloth and loaded with goods that have no business existing in the same square: Moorish spices beside Germanic furs beside Byzantine silks beside Roman pottery dug from the earth and polished until it gleams. The air is a symphony of scent — roasting meat, cinnamon, tallow, horse, perfume, sweat, the omnipresent undercurrent of the river that runs through the city's heart like a vein of dark silver.
I love it. I should not. It is beneath me, according to the court. It is dangerous, according to my father. It is the one place in this city where I feel less like a princess and more like a person, and for that reason alone it is the most important place in my world.
Sera walks beside me, and I am acutely aware of the strangeness of this pairing — the vampire princess and the tanner's granddaughter, moving through the market like two streams converging. She is shorter than me by several inches, and she moves differently — not with the predatory glide that my kind cannot help, the fluid economy of motion that comes from being designed to hunt, but with a quick, darting energy, her head turning constantly to take in the stalls and the faces and the thousand small dramas unfolding in the firelight.
"Do you speak English?" I ask, switching tongues. Sometimes I need the distance of a different language, the way a painter steps back from the canvas to see the whole composition.
She blinks. "A little. My grandmother taught me. She says it is the language of traders and should be learned by anyone who wishes to eat."
"Your grandmother sounds wise."
"She is dying," Sera says, and the bluntness of it hits me like a stone thrown at close range. She does not say it for sympathy. She says it as fact — the way one might say the river is cold or the night is long. A truth that requires no decoration.
I am silent for a moment. Death is a concept I understand intellectually but have never inhabited. My kind do not die of illness. We do not age. We persist, century after century, accumulating years like dust on a shelf, and the mortals around us bloom and wither and are replaced by their children, who bloom and wither in turn. I have watched three generations of the palace servants grow old and disappear, and each time the new faces arrive I feel the same disorienting vertigo — the sense of standing still while the world rushes past like a river around a stone.
"Mi dispiace," (I'm sorry,) I say, because the Italian feels more honest for this particular sorrow.
Sera shrugs. It is not a cold gesture — it is the shrug of someone who has already done their crying and has moved on to the harder work of simply continuing. "She has lived a long life. She says she is ready. I am the one who is not."
We turn from the main piazza into a narrow street. The torchlight fades, replaced by moonlight that spills down the walls like milk. The buildings here are old — older than the market, older perhaps than the palazzo itself — and they lean toward each other across the street as though sharing secrets. Laundry hangs between them on lines, ghostly white in the dark, flapping gently in the breeze that comes up from the river.
I am conscious of every sound. The drip of water from a broken gutter. The distant argument spilling from an upper window. The scuttle of a cat across the rooftops. And beneath all of it, steady as a drum, the rhythm of Sera's heart.
I have not fed tonight. The thought arrives without invitation, the way hunger always does — not as a decision but as a sensation, a tightening in the throat, a heightening of the senses, a sharpening of the world's edges until everything becomes exquisitely, unbearably vivid. The moonlight on Sera's skin. The pulse visible at her throat. The warmth radiating from her body like heat from a banked fire.
I clench my jaw. Press my tongue against my fangs. Not this one.
"Principessa?" Sera is looking at me. "Stai bene?" (Are you alright?)
"Si." I force a smile. "The street is dark. I am being cautious."
"There is nothing in this street that could hurt you," she says, and there is something in her voice — a knowingness, an understanding — that tells me she is not naive about what I am. She knows. Of course she knows. Everyone in the city knows what the royal family is. The fangs. The blood. The immortality. The hunger. It is not a secret — it is a fact of governance, as unremarkable as the fact that the river floods in spring or the olives ripen in autumn.
But knowing and accepting are different things, and I am struck by the ease with which she walks beside me. No flinching. No sideways glances. No subtle angling of her body to keep her throat turned away. She walks beside me as though I am simply a girl — a girl who helped her in the market, a girl who is walking her home. Nothing more.
"You're not afraid of me," I say.
"Should I be?"
"Most people are."
"Most people have not seen you pick up a dropped medicine pouch and hand it back like it was the most important thing in the world." She pauses. "That is not a thing that frightens me."
Something cracks open in my chest. A small fissure, no wider than a hair, but I feel it — feel the warmth leak through, the dangerous warmth of being seen not as a title or a species or a monster-in-waiting but as a person who did a small kind thing in a dark market. I do not know what to do with this feeling. I have no practice. In the palazzo, warmth is a weapon — it is given and withdrawn strategically, a currency of control, and to accept it freely is to incur a debt that will be collected with interest.
But Sera is not the palazzo. Sera is a girl with a dying grandmother and a torn dress and a pouch of medicine and a heart that beats with the steady, mortal, magnificent rhythm of someone who does not have centuries to waste on fear.
"Siamo quasi arrivate," (We're almost there,) she says, and points to a door at the end of the street. It is small and battered, the wood swollen with damp, and above it hangs a bundle of dried rosemary — a ward against evil, my mind supplies, though the irony is not lost on me.
We stop. The silence between us is comfortable, which surprises me. Silence in the palazzo is always charged — it is the silence before a verdict, before a blow, before a sentence delivered in my father's burnt-amber voice. But this silence is simply two people standing at the end of a walk, reluctant for it to end.
"Grazie, Principessa," she says again. "Per tutto." (For everything.)
"Lilja," I say. "Mi chiamo Lilja. Non e necessario il titolo." (My name is Lilja. The title is not necessary.)
She smiles. It transforms her face — the stubbornness softens, the sharp angles warm, and for a moment she is radiant in the moonlight, luminous with the particular beauty of the living, the beauty that comes from being temporary and therefore precious.
"Buonanotte, Lilja."
"Buonanotte, Sera."
She opens the door and slips inside, and I hear the bolt slide home, and I am alone in the narrow street with the moonlight and the laundry and the distant sound of the river.
I stand there for longer than I should. The hunger is still present — a low hum beneath my skin, an itch behind my eyes — but it is muted now, overruled by something I cannot name. Something warm and dangerous and entirely new.
I turn and walk back toward the palazzo.
The return journey takes me through the lower quarters, past the tanneries that give Monteverdi its sharp chemical perfume, past the dyers' workshops with their vats of indigo and madder glowing dully in the moonlight like bruises on the earth. The streets are emptying — the market is winding down, the merchants packing their wares, the torches being extinguished one by one until the city retreats into the comfortable darkness that is its natural state.
I move quickly. The palazzo is visible on the hill above the city — a silhouette of towers and crenellations against the star-thick sky, beautiful and terrible, a crown of stone set upon the brow of the hill. Home. Prison. The two words are synonyms in my vocabulary, and I have stopped trying to separate them.
The side entrance is unguarded — a small door set into the eastern wall, hidden behind a cascade of jasmine that has been allowed to grow wild because no gardener dares to trim it without direct orders, and direct orders have not been issued in decades. I slip through and into the servants' corridor, narrow and unlit, moving by memory and by the faint scent of beeswax that permeates the walls.
I am almost to the staircase when the voice stops me.
"Dove sei stata?" (Where have you been?)
I freeze. Not my father — the voice is too smooth, too amused, too laden with the particular malice of someone who enjoys catching others in transgression not because they care about the rule being broken but because they enjoy the power of knowing.
My brother. Draven.
He steps from the shadows as though born from them — which, in a sense, he was. He is taller than me, broader, built like my father but softer at the edges, as though the sculptor lost interest halfway through and left the remaining details to chance. His hair is dark, swept back from a face that the court calls handsome and I call dangerous. His eyes are amber, like mine, like our father's, but there is something additional in his — a glitter, a sharpness, the look of a cat that has cornered something small and is deciding whether to play with it before the kill.
"A passeggio," (Walking,) I say. Keep it simple. Give him nothing.
"A passeggio," he repeats, tasting the word. "Al mercato notturno, forse?" (At the night market, perhaps?)
I do not answer. My silence is its own confession, and he reads it with the fluency of someone raised in the same house of silences.
"Padre non sarebbe contento," (Father would not be pleased,) he says, and leans against the wall with studied casualness. He is wearing his hunting clothes — dark leather, high boots, a cloak the colour of dried blood. There is a smear of something at his collar. Fresh blood. He has been feeding.
"Padre non e contento di niente," (Father is not pleased by anything,) I say. "Questa non e una novita." (This is not news.)
Draven laughs. It is a sound without warmth — the sound of ice cracking on a winter pond. "Attenta, sorellina," (Careful, little sister,) he says. "La tua lingua ti portera nel sotterraneo piu velocemente delle tue gambe." (Your tongue will carry you to the dungeon faster than your legs.)
"Ci sono gia stata questa settimana. Una volta e sufficiente." (I've already been there this week. Once is sufficient.)
Something shifts in his expression. For a moment — just a moment — I see something that might be sympathy in those amber eyes. Then it is gone, replaced by the familiar mask of amusement and contempt that he wears like armour. Draven is three years older than me in turning, and those three years have taught him the most important lesson of our household: survive by being useful, and be useful by being cruel, and be cruel by being entertaining, and the king will let you live in the light.
"Ho visto qualcosa di interessante stasera," (I saw something interesting tonight,) he says, and his voice drops to the conspiratorial register that means he has information and intends to weaponise it. "La principessa che cammina con una mortale. Che la accompagna a casa. Come un cavaliere nei romanzi." (The princess walking with a mortal. Walking her home. Like a knight in the romances.)
My blood goes cold. Colder than usual.
"Non so di cosa parli." (I don't know what you're talking about.)
"Monteverdi," he says. "Una ragazza. Capelli scuri. Vestito blu." (A girl. Dark hair. Blue dress.) He straightens from the wall and takes a step closer, and in the narrow corridor I can smell the blood on his breath — rich and iron-bright and fresh. "Stai attenta con i tuoi giocattoli, Lilja. Padre ha idee molto specifiche su come una principessa dovrebbe trascorrere il suo tempo." (Be careful with your toys, Lilja. Father has very specific ideas about how a princess should spend her time.)
"Non e un giocattolo." (She's not a toy.)
The words are out before I can catch them. A mistake. Draven's eyes widen fractionally — the predator registering that the prey has revealed something valuable. A name might be forgotten. A direction might be coincidence. But defence — defence means attachment, and attachment means leverage, and leverage is the only currency that matters in this house.
"Interessante," (Interesting,) he murmurs. Then he smiles — a smile full of teeth — and steps aside, gesturing me past with a mock bow. "Buonanotte, Principessa." (Good night, Princess.)
I walk past him. I do not run. Running would confirm everything his smile already suspects. I walk with the measured stride of someone who has nothing to hide and nothing to fear, and I hold that performance all the way up the staircase and along the corridor and through the silver-inlaid doors of my chambers, and only when the bolt is drawn and the darkness wraps around me do I allow my hands to shake.
Sera. He knows about Sera.
I press my back against the door and slide down until I am sitting on the cold floor with my knees drawn to my chest. The hunger pulses in my veins, neglected and angry, and beneath it the new warm thing — the crack in my chest, the dangerous tenderness — pulses too, equally insistent, equally demanding.
I am the princess. I am the predator. I am the girl who picks up dropped medicine pouches in dark markets and walks mortal strangers home through moonlit streets because the alternative — being what my blood demands, being what my father designed, being the cold and perfect and terrible thing that sits beside him on the lesser throne — is a death more absolute than any stake or sunrise could provide.
I press my forehead to my knees and breathe.
Outside, the city sleeps. Inside the palazzo, the monsters are awake.
And somewhere in Monteverdi, behind a battered door hung with dried rosemary, a girl with coffee-dark eyes and a steady heart is tending to her dying grandmother, and she does not know that a vampire princess is sitting on a cold floor thinking about the sound of her name.
Sera.
The word sits in my mouth like a communion wafer. Sacred. Dissolving. Gone.
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