Worldbuilding Supplement | Seven Bloods, Seven Houses: The Gift You Think You Have Is a Rope in Someone Else's Hand

(This is a worldbuilding supplement, compiled from what is commonly said on the street; it represents no house's official position.)

In this kingdom magic goes by a more honest name. It is called cursed blood.

The official line is a pleasant one: cursed blood is a gift handed down from the ancestors, a blessing in the veins, and the rite-officials have been reciting that at ceremonies for centuries. The lower city puts it less kindly. One end of the rope is in your blood and the other end is in somebody else's hand; it will not loosen, and it cannot be exchanged.

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; at the gate a guard taps a small metal rod lightly against the newcomer's chest and listens for whether anything sounds within.

Set out the seven houses and the seven bloods first. Every one of them comes with an account written on the body:

House Hourshift · Time. Can hold time still for a moment, run a wound backwards, read out the next few seconds of an opponent's movement. The price: one's own lifespan is cut away a length at a time, and the things one remembers fall out of order in time.

House Whitescript · Memory. Can erase, implant, seal away, even inherit another person's memory. The price: the boundary of the self blurs, ancestral personalities crowd in easily, and which stretch of memory is one's own can no longer be told apart.

House Duskcandle · Death. Can see the death-line on a person, delay a death, call back the afterimage of the dead. The price: the body draws a year nearer to the dead with every year, and the feelings of the living go out, a little at a time.

House Starcrown · Astrology. Can read the stars, interfere with a fate-track, give early warning of disasters. The price: the more one prophesies, the harder it becomes to choose for oneself — a future spoken aloud turns back and binds the one who spoke it.

House Mirrorcourt · Mirror Image. Can split off a double, disguise, let a stand-in take the wound. The price: true body and mirror body slowly change places, until in the end not even the person himself can tell which one he is.

House Vowkey · Oath. Can compel by contract, bind by word-spirit, punish whoever breaks an oath. The price: one is bound in reverse by every promise spoken aloud; the more that is promised, the narrower the road left to walk.

House Bloodflame · Blood and Fire. Can burn fire with blood and double its own strength on the battlefield; it is the royal house's military core. The price: violent, short-lived, and once a fight has begun it cannot be stopped. Over the same 400 years, the ancestral-hall book of House Bloodflame carries 2 more generations of names than the others.

Cursed blood cannot be released 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 demonstration class for the new students of Blacktower Academy, what each house brought out was small enough to keep hidden in a sleeve — House Hourshift's bronze crest with the hourglass pattern, House Whitescript's silver-sand wrist cloth, House Vowkey's small block of red-copper wax, House Mirrorcourt's quicksilver wax seal-chip, House Bloodflame's vermilion wax film, House Duskcandle's grey-black lead wax, House Starcrown's little silver dish the size of a palm. Beyond the medium there is a passage of ancient speech to recite, and the one reciting it does not necessarily understand it word for word.

Cursed blood comes by birth, not by study. It is inherited, it can be thickened by marriage, and in some generation it may thin away until it can hardly be seen. Matchmakers in the capital do not ask for a birth date; they ask first which branch within the last three generations produced someone who lost control.

On the matter of the price, the two sides call it by different names. The houses call it the weight of ancestral blood and speak of it like an inherited duty. On the far side of the Northern Riftwall they only call it paying off the debt. The exile register does not write the word price; that column holds four characters and nothing else: bloodline unstable.

Two stubborn misconceptions, cleared up here. Anyone who believes cursed blood can be learned may give it up: the recommended commoners who get into Blacktower read the same books and copy the same scrolls, and on the day of the demonstration class they still sit in the outermost ring. Anyone who believes the purer the blood the better has it half backwards — the older the bloodline the stronger it is, and the more easily it is governed, slowly, by the will of the ancestors; among the main lines of the seven houses, those who reach a great age still lucid can be counted on one hand.

The question most often asked on the street, and least often answered, is this: since each of the seven holds one kind and none of them will yield to another, why has no house in all this time truly swallowed another and made itself king?

Some say the Crown holds them down. The Crown is the symbol of royal authority, and only the one who wears it counts as legitimate; however hard the seven houses fight, they must acknowledge that crown. But the lower city has a colder version — nobody who has worn the Crown has lived long.

Why? No one can answer that. Remember one thing and that is enough: in this kingdom, the stronger the blood, the less free it is. Behind every name in an ancestral-hall book runs a line of small script, recording how many times he used it and how many years it cost him.