A Seat at the Blood Court

Kian was never supposed to matter. Embraced cheap and hasty at twenty-three, entered in the Tithery's great Roll of Veins with a blank where his sire should be, he is a seventh generation discard of the Rustwater quarter, the bottom of a thousand-year-old vampire city's bottom tier. His lord pays his debts with a death writ: a place in a thirty-man squad sent to the Marrowfield to gather ancestor blood for the Rite of the Empty Seat, a seven-day scavenging war that no one from the slums has ever survived on purpose.

Then, in the first ambush, Kian's cheap blood does something no blood-born's has ever done. It reaches out instead of back. Instead of being traced up his sire's line, he claims: the assassins sent to kill him kneel and call him Blood Father, their lives locked into his by a cost called the Averaging. Every wound he takes, they feel. Every wound they take, he bleeds. And a claim, once made, cannot be taken back.

Seven days. Seven vials of the first blood. Seven princely seats above one murdered prince, and a court that eats its candidates. Kian meant to buy his survival with the seven vials and walk away. Instead he walks into the Blood Court with sixteen killers for a household, a blank line on the official roll, and a talent the seven Seats would burn a city to own or to bury.

He will need it. The Seventh Seat's orphan, Viola, cold as audit and twice as exact, wants the candidate's luck pointed at her father's murder. The Heptad's six surviving princes want the vacancy filled by a hand they can hold. And somewhere above a wall in the underworld deeps, a wall that breathes, something the court has been feeding in secret for thirty-six seasons is tuning itself toward a moonless night called the Long Dark, and the Rite of the Empty Seat, with its seven days and seven vials, is the sieve it was always meant to be.

Kian plays the only game a discard can play. Rules, precedents, fee-books, turned tables: every chapter of the court's own law becomes a knife in his hand, every assassin sent against him a potential kinsman, every favor a hook. Beside him stands Viola, who offers her wrist in the old form of blood alliance because an accident is a weakness and an oath is a weapon, and because his pulse in her wrist is becoming the one number she cannot make herself subtract. Behind him, smiling, pours the wine, and passes the knives, and keeps the portions exact: Duke Panthus, the oldest friend the seven chairs have ever had.

Seven hundred blood-born live in Caristhal. One of them is about to find out why his blood refuses to answer the Veinwrights' needle. One of them is about to learn what the seventh vial is truly for. And when the Long Dark finally falls, the youngest, cheapest, least recorded blood-born in the city will walk down the tithe stair alone, to meet the first thing the world ever drank from, carrying the only claim in a thousand years that runs backward.

Blood calls to blood. This time, something in the dark answers first.