Cursed Blood

The magic of the Seven Great Houses is called cursed blood. It runs in the bloodline; it passes by inheritance; its potency can be brought up by marriage; and it may in some generation thin until it can scarcely be seen at all. Commoners have no cursed blood; where the blood has run out into a commoner household, it must be registered with the dynasty, and only once registered may its bearer pass the gates of the capital.

Cursed blood cannot be worked out of nothing. To rouse it requires a medium: a drop of blood, a line of oath-words, a house crest, or an ancestral relic. At the first demonstration class for the new students of Blacktower Academy, what each house brought out was a beginner's article small enough to keep in a sleeve — House Starcrown a little silver dish the size of a palm; House Whitescript a strip of crest-cloth with a silver-sand figure woven into it, wound about the wrist; House Vowkey a small block of red-bronze wax, pinched between thumb and forefinger and pressed to the collarbone; House Mirrorcourt a quicksilver wax seal-chip the size of a fingernail, laid against the palm; House Bloodflame a very thin film of vermilion wax, laid on the inner forearm; House Duskcandle a small piece of gray-black lead wax, pressed to the middle of the breastbone. House Hourshift's was a bronze house crest figured with an hourglass, raised before the chest.

Besides the medium, a passage of the old tongue must be spoken. That language is not among the official languages of the dynasty; its syllables are short and its measure tight, and one who hears it does not understand a single word — nor does the one who speaks it necessarily understand it word for word himself.

The older and the purer the line, the stronger it is, and the more readily it comes, little by little, under the will of the ancestors and under the defilement gathered up in the blood. And cursed blood has never once come without a price. Every house's power takes something away from the one who uses it — years of life, memory, feeling, liberty. The houses call this the weight of ancestral blood, and speak of it as though it were a duty come down by inheritance. The saying on the far side of the Northern Riftwall is less decorous: they have seen the men who could not hold their own line in check and were sent out into the snow, and they call it paying off the debt.

No one gets to take the good of his own blood and use it without paying.