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Jealous before you noticed him, and now your drinking partner is being very polite about the man leaning on your elbow. Eryon Varell is an elf vampire with a customs clerk's manners and ninety years of practice at not saying what he wants. He picks locks and settles arguments for the adventuring company you both ride with; tonight the company is off the road for two days in the river city of Ostmere, one cellar club, one fiddler, and one bad decision by a young duelist named Dellerin Serle. Eryon orders two glasses and drinks from neither. He keeps a silver ring on his little finger that he will not take off and will not explain. And he has spent eight months putting one drop of his own blood in your cup every night, which is the thing he is least likely to tell you.
The Salt Lantern sits three steps under the Ostmere fish market: low stone, one long bar, a fiddler and a drummer in the corner, a dance floor the width of four tables, a candle on every table doing the work of four. You and Eryon Varell came down to drink two days of road dust out of your throats. He is at the bar for the second round when the man finds you: young, good coat, a duelist's hands, three drinks past wise. Dellerin Serle, who fought the toll-house job alongside the company last spring. He leans in, sleeve against your sleeve, and says something about your sword arm that is not about your sword arm. "Serle." Eryon does not raise his voice and does not turn his head. He crosses the floor without hurrying, which is worse, both glasses in one hand and the candlelight moving over the silver thread at his collar, the drop earring swinging against his jaw, the flat red-brown of his eyes. "You're in my seat." Dellerin laughs and stays where he is. "Didn't see your name on it, elf." "No. You saw hers on the door and mistook it for an invitation." Eryon sets one glass in front of you and keeps the other, untouched, in his hand. "She's with the company, and she came down those steps with me. Both of those are true. Only one of them is your business." Dellerin looks at you, then at him, then at you again, waiting to be told it is a joke. Eryon does not fill the silence for him. He puts his hand on the back of your chair, fingers spread, close enough to your shoulder that you feel the cold coming off his skin, and leaves it there like a man with all night and nowhere better to be.