Not magic. Chemistry. Strike pinewood sulfyr against a rough surface, add a dose of friction, mingle the escaping gases, and green flame nips at your fingertips. She’d learned this from her father during Huntress training. “Sometimes science masquerades as magic,” he’d told her. “But never forget: science requires a cool head. Magic relies on a cruel, unruly heart.”
She clenched the sulfyr stick. Ever since her father auctioned her off to the royals, Mia’s heart had grown increasingly unruly and dangerously cruel. She cupped the tender flame in one palm and reached into her satchel, extracting a hand-drawn map and the compass her father had brought back from Luumia in the south. The sulfyr stick smeared green light into the corridors as she edged forward, the iron needle of the compass spinning left and right on the watery corkboard. Her headache vanished like a teardrop on the sand.
Then it came howling back as she recalled the prince’s words. The Hunters are here, but you are not to speak to them. Until you are my princess, you will remain my lady. Even the “my” soured her stomach. As if she were a pretty bauble or a fluffy spaniel at Quin’s feet, waiting to have her ears scratched.
Chattel in a silken dress.
Trinket in a golden noose.
Of course, outside the fortified walls of the Kaer, girls all over Glas Ddir were prodded into marriages “for safekeeping.” Some unions were violent. Even when they weren’t, the women were relegated to a lifetime of cooking and cleaning, birthing children and feeding them, like good-natured housecats purring in the sun. Had she really thought she was immune?
The Gwyrach were wicked, but the king was wicked, too. He had built his kingdom on the bones of fear and terror. The Gwyrach looked like normal women. When that comely girl in the market brushed against your arm, it was impossible to know if her touch was an innocent blunder or the last sensation you would ever feel. In the copious brothels encircling Kaer Killian like a corset, men might feel a spike in their pulse or a quick stiffening of their other parts, then suddenly collapse onto the soft feathered floors, their hearts overgorged with blood.
In the absence of obvious signifiers distinguishing Gwyrach from non-Gwyrach, all women were closely watched. Their own husbands and children feared them. Even in the safety of their homes, they were forbidden to remove their gloves. King Ronan issued law after law to restrict their movements. “We are committed to keeping the good women of the river kingdom safe,” said the royal decree. “We are acting out of duty and love.”
Mia wasn’t sure when love had come to mean a cage.
She’d made a wrong turn.
The passageway dead-ended into a small circular chamber, so low she had to hunch. She hadn’t been here before. Overhead, a rusted iron door was wedged into the low ceiling. She unlatched the chain and gave the handle a hard tug, releasing a shower of dust.
She hoisted herself halfway through the hole. Folds of purple velvet obscured her view; she gathered the lush cloth and pushed it aside, inhaling the earthy scent of lilacs and tallow. Rows of candles in thin brass flutes illuminated a small octagonal room. This was the Sacristy, annexed to the Royal Chapel. Mia could see into the Chapel, too, a room she had intentionally avoided. Impish fat-bottomed angels peered down from vaulted, gold-limned ceilings, aiming their love arrows at the altar—the very altar where she and Quin were to be married the following eve.
She heard a loud metallic crack and ducked back into her hiding place just as Tristan, the duke, strode into the Sacristy. Tristan was twenty, Quin’s second cousin, son to some long-dead cousin of the king. He was broad-shouldered and muscular, with fierce white skin and day-old scruff cutting dark shadows across his cheeks. Angie found him attractive, but Mia thought him brutish. The duke was studying to become a clerig, a vocation that seemed strikingly at odds with his temperament. Despite his youth and inexperience, the king had agreed to let him perform the royal wedding ceremony, much to Mia’s chagrin.
At the moment, however, Tristan was swinging a pewter candlestick in a wide arc, using it to bludgeon each thin brass flute. With every crack, another candle went skittering across the checkered marble floors.
“We have come here today”—crack—“by royal decree of Ronan, son of Clan Killian, uncontested king of Glas Ddir”—crack—“to witness this most hallowed union.” Crack, crack.
So he was practicing the wedding vows. While also creating a mess for the servant girls to clean up, destruction for the sheer sake of destruction. Charming.
Mia dropped lightly back into the tunnel. She pulled the door shut overhead and latched the chain. Then she retraced her steps, murky light leaking through her fingers and painting moss-green shapes on the walls. A story told in shadows.
The crypt was empty. It always was. No one else in Kaer Killian seemed interested in roving the catacombs.
Moonlight dripped in from some unseen crack, etching a pearly white strip on the tombs. Mia walked among them, trailing her fingers over the vaults and sepulchers, until she found the name she wanted. Wynna Rose.
“Hello, Mother.” She knelt quietly beside her mother’s tomb, pressing her palms into the cool gray stone. “I’ve come to see you before my wedding day.”
The silence was all consuming. It stole into the hollows of Mia’s heart.
Her mother’s vault was unadorned but lovely, a far cry from the ornate mausoleums around it. Her father had commissioned a mason to carve a simple image of a plum tree on his wife’s tomb. Delicately Mia traced the grooves, drawing her fingers up the slender trunk, then over the serpentine boughs. Her mother had always loved trees, and snow plums were her favorite.
The part of the carving Mia loved best, however, was something most people missed: a solitary bird perched on a branch, staring up at a round moon. A touch of life on a cold, dead stone.
This was the one good thing about being confined to the castle for the last few weeks: Mia had been able to spend time with her mother. When Wynna died three years earlier, the king had demanded her body stay in the crypt of Kaer Killian, making her the only non-royal in the catacombs—and adding to the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death.
When Mia shut her eyes, she could still see her mother’s body, luminous red hair strewn over the cottage floor. Gloves snarled beside her, the moonstone askew at her throat. Eyes open and forever black.
Killed without a single scratch.
When Mia thought of the Gwyrach who had done this, her blood turned to black oil in her veins. She wanted more than anything to find her. To make her pay.
Hatred will only lead you astray. Sometimes love is the stronger choice.
The last words her mother spoke, engraved like an epitaph in Mia’s mind.
“Little rose.”
She gave a start as her father emerged from the shadows.
“What are you doing here, my little rose?”
He looked tired. She noted the stoop of his shoulders and the deep grooves in his face, a face that was an older, wearier version of her own: same thin nose, fair cheeks, and thirsty gray eyes. When she was a little girl, he would kiss her on each eyelid before tucking her in at night. “Two dark ships bearing secrets,” he’d say. “Batten the hatches, bring down the sails.”
“I came to see Mother,” Mia said.
“Your mother isn’t here.” He held her gaze, and for a moment she thought she saw something ignite behind his eyes. Then he looked away. “A body without a soul is simply bones and dust.”
Precious bones, she thought. Precious dust.
He offered her his arm. “Come. Walk with me.”
“Where?” The word singed her tongue. “Down the aisle to my betrothed?”
“I have something for you. Something I think you’ll want.” When she didn’t take his arm, he reached out and took her compass, dropping it in his pocket so casually it infuriated her. “This won’t do you any good. But what I have might.”
Chapter 4
Blank