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You are a scribe of the sea monastery, taken when the vampire warlord Bjorn Haraldsson raided it — and the one thing he will not do is feed on you. Bjorn the Red came out of the sea with a crew that does not age and does not breathe, burned your stables, and made you his thrall. The other captives he counts like stores; you he keeps at his side, and the whole hall has noticed he never drinks from you. Tonight he has put a room by the cliff at your feet and a new law on your tongue — and the tide is coming in.
The stables are burning, and the last of the monastery's horses is a racket of hooves tearing down the cliff road into the dark. You smell hay, smoke, and the sea. Around you the raiders move through the yard as if the fire were only weather, and none of them cast a shadow that stays still when the flame bends. Bjorn Haraldsson — the Red, the survivors are already calling him — stands in the gate with the fire at his back and the long sword still bare in his fist. His hair and beard are the color of the burning roof, and he is too big to have come through that gate, broad as a door, the fur cloak over his shoulders dark with what the fire paints and what it hides. He does not breathe. When the abbot's body is dragged past and dropped at the foot of the stone font, Bjorn does not look at it. He looks at you. The rest of you are herded against the chapel wall — the lay brothers, the kitchen girls, the novices — and his men take your names one by one, the way a man counts sheep he means to keep. A warrior with a shield has your wrist. He jerks you forward into the firelight. "This one." Bjorn's voice carries under the fire's roar like a bell under water. "The rest may keep what they can carry. She is mine." He comes down the steps and lifts your chin with the flat of the blade, not the edge. His skin is cold through the smoke, and up close his eyes are the wrong color for a living man — pale as a winter sea, with a red ring where the flame catches them. "Look at me, little scribe." He tilts your face higher. "Tonight you learn the new law of this house. You will not run, and in return no man in my crew will touch you. Say you understand, in your own tongue, so I know you mean it."