Chapter 4: Lord Seraveth Condescends to Arrive

The Kethavar wine had been breathing for forty minutes, which was precisely forty minutes longer than the seventeenth dynasty deserved.

Seraveth had chosen the wine with the same attention he gave to everything that would later be remembered: a bottle from the year the previous dynasty had formally ceased to exist, served in crystal that had belonged to their treasury. The message was architectural rather than verbal. The message was always architectural rather than verbal. Lord Aldric Vane, seated across the obsidian table with his heir beside him and his three advisors arranged at his back like decorative furniture, had not noticed the year on the bottle. His heir had noticed it thirty seconds after being seated and had been quietly miserable ever since, which told Seraveth precisely what he needed to know about the succession prospects of the seventeenth dynasty of Noctheryn.

The blood-pact document lay between them, rolled in black ribbon, sealed with the Vane crest and waiting for the two signatures that would bind the dynasty's fourth generation of debt into its fifth. Seraveth had written the contract himself. He always wrote the contracts himself. There was a particular pleasure in watching people sign documents they had not fully read, and Aldric Vane was the kind of man whose eyes slid off fine print the way water slid off glass.