“Know this, little princesss,” Mistress Umbra hissed. “We saw your fate unwinding within your veins. You will become powerful and see your grandest hope to fruition. Your role will be essential in returning the heavens to their glorious splendor. But no accomplishment will countervail the love you betrayed.” The creature’s jagged fingers held out a strand of Glistenda’s hair, and it became as black as the shroud’s themselves, tinting all the other strands to match. “We have marked you as ours, for you will come again seeking company with us in this forest, seeking a place where you can hide your sins that twist and twine like the branches of a tree. And we will show you the same mercy you practiced throughout your life. No more . . . no lesss.”
Seeing the change in her hair, Glistenda worried what her insides must look like. She almost called the birds back—to reclaim that part of her she’d given away. But she didn’t want to appear weak.
She waited too long and the formless shrouds—hidden behind the trees—swooped in to capture the starlings in cages of spindly, vaporous hands and fingers. They sank into the ground, becoming one with the ash.
Glistenda took a last look at the man, the unearthly being, who’d saved her, then lost consciousness.
When she awoke in her bedchamber, she thought she’d dreamed it all, if not for her ebony hair, lashes, and eyebrows. Even her family couldn’t refute those changes. A week later when she was strong enough to go out into the palace garden alone, she saw the winged man again, waiting in a copse of honeysuckle. This time he became flesh, extending his hand to help her sit beside him. A breeze blew his hair around, uncovering the tip of an ear. It was furred and pointed like a fox’s.
She learned he was a sylph named Elusion. He had carried her body to the ravine’s opening and convinced the briars to open from the inside then hid so Tristan could find her.
She told him that Tristan was the boy she had been trying to win.
“You did all of this to capture someone’s heart?” her sylphin companion asked, his orange eyes lit to wildfires as he handed her a flower. “Was it worth it?”
Sniffing the honeysuckle petals, Glistenda shook her head. For although Tristan had wrapped her limp, bruised body in his cape and carried her to the castle on his horse, although he stood vigil with her family as the physician and royal mages cleansed her blood with leeches, then roused her with a magic elixir—he still couldn’t offer his love. To him, she was nothing but a prize to be protected and placed upon a shelf.
“I will cut him down one day,” Glistenda vowed, shocked and pleased to feel no remorse for the violent thought. “Does he expect me to be nothing but a silent, customary princess forever?”
Elusion smiled—a turn of lips so tempting and beautiful it took her breath. “You are more than customary, and far too remarkable to waste time seeking affections from a man-child.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Glistenda answered, twirling a strand of dark hair around her finger. “I can no longer be loved.” She felt a twinge when admitting this, but it was tempered with freedom. Confidence that she would never have to suffer heartbreak or be weak again.
“You didn’t crave love to begin with,” Elusion answered. “It was power you sought. And as a woman, yours is already immeasurable.” He leaned in and cupped her temples to kiss her. His warm, soft mouth tasted of wind, rain, and sunlight, elements that had structured the world since the beginning of time. “Hearts are cursory things. The flame of love fades with age.” He whispered this against her neck, nuzzling her. “If you want lasting fire—an ascendancy you can pass down to your offspring—aim for the jugular.” He nipped at her throat, a pinch of sharp teeth that titillated. It would leave a bruise. “Choose your men wisely. Wealthy, with marked positions in parliament. Those who will give you leverage in politics and law. Be subtle and decisive. Convince them you’re the piece of meat they wish to gorge themselves upon. Then be the gristle that chokes them instead.”
She followed Elusion’s advice to the letter, changing her name to reflect her insides as opposed to her outsides. She dyed several strands of her black hair to bloodred, in honor of her sylph coconspirator. At first her royal parents refused to acknowledge her new identity, but she would only answer to Griselda. Soon they could do nothing but accommodate, attributing her bizarre behavior as a means to cope with whatever horrors she’d encountered in those deep wilds—an experience they had caused with their own negligence. Their penance and guilt were absolute, and they watched helplessly as her heart became as grisly, hostile, and briar-filled as the Ashen Ravine itself, and her mind as cunning as a fox.
Or a sylph . . .
She invited Elusion to her bedchamber where he spent every cessation course for two years, sating his lusts and hers. It was he who led her into the dungeons where he’d found a hidden doorway. Upon sharing the secret to opening it, he coaxed her into a tunnel harboring a small dirt room.
“Some grand enchantress once occupied this place,” Elusion told her, motioning to shelves filled with strange and mystical ingredients. He picked up a book entitled Plebeian’s Grimoire. “There are recipes for potions, spell-chants and poisons which combine mystical and natural ingredients that can be used even if one has no inborn magical abilities.”
Griselda took the book from his hands, her dark mind concocting all the advantages such a tool could give her.
“I knew you’d be pleased.” He smiled. “I have one request. Don’t use these things unless I’m here to aid you. There will be hidden curses on the pages, and I wouldn’t wish to see you entrap yourself.”
Griselda didn’t like being told she needed anyone. She used a love potion to capture the Chief Justice of Common Pleas—fifteen years her senior—to increase her standing in the court and secure heirs for the throne, for her brother and his young bride appeared unable to produce one of their own. Elusion left her to her married life until the day her husband died, just after the birth of their youngest daughter.
When Elusion returned, having missed Griselda’s bed, she boasted of how she’d used the grimoire without his help.
Those were her golden days. The kingdom fawned over her princesses—only the youngest suffered her easily bruising affliction, and all three were aptly named to be fearsome and formidable, not precious and predictable. Her brother relied upon her, seeking counsel for governing domestic and private affairs.
However, a few months into this blissful new life, Lyra was conceived, shocking and delighting everyone in the kingdom but Griselda. The child’s birth would cost her everything she’d murdered, lied, and strategized to gain. Elusion offered to help, but later disappeared when the sylph elm’s leaves bled to a brilliant crimson in the garden.
Over the last twelve years, Griselda had wondered upon the synchronicity of the two events. And today, the witch had given confirmation. He was tied to the ground now, paying the price for luring innocent Queen Arael to prick her finger upon the tainted roses . . . for being the seductive voice whispering on the wind in her ear.
Ironic that Arael lived long enough thereafter to give birth to the king’s heir: a proper little princess, seen but never speaking, who would soon sit the throne without any effort on her part other than being born—despite that she was a girl. All the rules had changed when Kiran spawned a daughter.
That thought shook Griselda from her reverie. She rose from the dungeon cot, refusing to be nostalgic. Elusion chose his path. She didn’t force his hand any more than he forced her to commit mariticide. Now she had his wings upon the sylph elm in the garden. She could play that card if necessary, but for the time being, there was work to be done.
She felt her way out of the cell—hands skimming across sticky walls. A powdery grit caked between her fingers and under her nails, and her hem tore from snagging upon the chains in the floor. She gagged to think she would be filthier than Lyra by the time she managed to find the stairs.
After taking the first step, she ascended in a dizzying spiral, her grimy hands leading the way along stones bulging from the retaining wall. Her malicious little niece had snuffed the torches. Every unidentifiable sound reverberated in her pitch-black trek and crept up her spine like icy fingertips plucking an out-of-tune harp.
She’d had the perfect strategy to win the crown for her daughters: dig up Nerezeth’s stairway, kill King Orion; then a few days later, stage a counterstrike by supposed “Night Ravagers” on Eldoria’s castle in which Lyra would be assassinated. But the witch’s confession rendered it impossible.
A peace treaty, signed in blood by both Kiran and Queen Nova, would be undeniable proof that Nerezeth did not order her brother’s death. As much as the gloom-dwellers needed sunlight, they wouldn’t dare endanger such a beneficial alliance.
Griselda narrowed her eyes, nails scraping the stones until her manicure was in shreds and blood seeped from beneath the broken white tips. She’d managed at last to punish Tristan Nicolet for not loving her. But once again, her brother had fouled her chance for the crown.