In the selfsame hour Griselda sent away her niece’s dying body and reveled in her most cruel and profound triumph, Crony and her sylphin companion wandered the Ashen Ravine in search of fresh stock. The witch’s supplies of herbs and memories were dwindling as she hadn’t set foot outside the ravine in months for fear she’d be captured by Eldoria’s royal regent again.
“Ye be sure these rumors are true?” Crony laid it out as more of a threat than a question. If Luce was leading her through these cursed terrains on a wild corpse-chase when she should be peddling her wares in her shop, she would have his pelt.
The fox slipped in and out of the creeping ash ahead of her, stirring up gray clouds. “I coaxed out the details myself.” His power of persuasion was most effective when he preyed upon a desire held secret within the victim. Which meant the informant must be someone who liked to gossip.
Crony frowned. “Yer source not be Dregs, do it? That dullard goblin always be tellin’ tall tales to compensate for his teensy stature. He sweared he saw a fire-breathin’ horse with wings burn two o’ his goblin acquaintances to ash. As if all the Pegasus didn’t be eaten up centuries ago by the drasilisks.”
“We’ve both seen hoofprints of late.”
Crony snorted, wrestling her cloak’s hem from a tangle of irascible vines. The bag of glass at her waist clinked with the effort. “The Nerezethites trek this forest. We always be seeing their mounts’ hoofprints.”
Luce flattened his body to squeeze through a tunnel of dead roots. When he popped up at the other end, the red of his belly and muzzle were coated in ash, taking on a dusty white. “But there’s the peace treaty. They no longer smuggle sunlight. So they’ve not been coming around.”
Crony rolled her eyes. As if she weren’t aware of that fact. The sun-smugglers used to visit her stall on their bimonthly excursions. They would purchase her wares for protection against the forest’s shrouds. The ravenous creatures always kept watch over the liquid sunshine inside the entrance. Memories were the one thing a person could bargain with to keep their flesh intact, since the shrouds couldn’t resist a glimpse of what they once were. Crony had missed the extra funds.
“But ye be overlookin’ the crimp in Dregs’s tale . . .” She resumed her and Luce’s conversation upon catching up with him. “Since when do a horse with wings leave hoofprints?”
“We’re getting off subject, as always.”
“Ah, but I thought yer kind liked chasin’ rabbits.”
He sneezed in derision before resuming his trek. “A boy lies dying in the ravine, his coffin dragged in and snapped open by the serpentine briars. He appears to have been flogged with barbs. His skin is worse off than the shreds of his clothes. More than one eye saw it.”
“Multiple eyes. So, it weren’t the word of a cyclops then. Be good, that. They have tunnel vision ’bout most things.”
“Ha.” Luce leapt over a quag-puddle. The living murk spread in an effort to trap him. He sailed to the other side at the last minute, scrambling to his left on nimble paws. The puddle burbled in frustration, releasing a putrid stench. The fox barked a laugh, his silver-tipped tail high and proud.
Crony chose a longer route to escape the puddle and had to duck to miss low-hanging branches as black and ungiving as onyx. Her left horn hooked around one and jerked her back. Head throbbing, she freed herself before skidding behind her companion along the sharply declining path to the lowlands. Even using her staff for balance, she could barely keep up with Luce’s four legs. “Ye know we not be welcome in this part of the forest. They despise me for not sharin’ me pilfered memories. And ye—”
“And I talked them out of a kill years ago by suggesting they could feed off her conscience. Is it my fault they misplaced it? The shrouds are about to strip the boy of his flesh. What’s left of it. I assumed you’d want to claim his dying thoughts and maybe his bones. You’ve been needing a skull for your new staff, yes? We can strike a bargain with one of his final memories.”
“Hmmm. Judging from the one and only bargain ye ever striked with them, I venture they not be so receptive. Stay in yer doggy form and I do the quibbling.”
“Once again, you underestimate my charm.” Luce’s retort muffled beneath a rush of inhuman whispers and hisses. He rounded a bend, his pointed ears perked.
Dropping to her knees, Crony crouched with him behind a fallen stump. She clutched the gnarled wood, her brown leathery hands blending in. Her staff rested atop the ash that slithered about their feet.
Up ahead, the shrouds drifted in a dusty clearing—an uneven circle devoid of trunks and shrubbery that still managed to be claustrophobic, cloaked in darkness by the thick, low-hanging canopy stretching from the trees around it. A coffin was toppled open, its small occupant slung over the edge with arms splayed across the ground, unmoving. The vaporous collective had yet to notice their two visitors. A shroud’s wit tended to be as thin as its smoky silhouette, making it easy to elude when preoccupied with the promise of a feeding. But this situation was different, and only one look told Crony why.
Each time Mistress Umbra skimmed forward to attack the dying child, a merging of shadows and luminous-blue rime scorpions rose to defend the supine form. The Shroud Collective cowered behind trees surrounding the clearing, eyes glimmering white. They had no means to pass through, either as unsubstantial shapeless creatures or shifted to their humanlike forms. On one hand, their barrier was as vaporous as they, and on the other, venomous stingers waited to attack. It was a standoff between a cursed darkness and an appointed army. A standoff that could go on for hours.
Judging by the putrid scent of infection and toxins in the air, the victim didn’t have that kind of time. And loathe as Crony was to admit it, said victim was no boy. Even with the child shaved bald . . . even in a page boy’s shredded tunic and pants, with her exposed pearlized skin marred by ash, mud, and hundreds of seeping puncture marks . . . Crony would know Eldoria’s sovereign heir anywhere by the fealty of her night creatures.
Turning to her canine companion, Crony whispered, “That be no page boy. That be the royal princess, what that freed me from Eldoria’s dungeon.”
Luce bowed his head and long muzzle. He hadn’t been happy leaving Crony that day to be captured by soldiers; but the two had a code: should one of them ever be captured, the other did their best to escape so they could help from the outside. Luce had been trying to come up with a plan when Crony found her way home to the ravine.
However, it was more than the guilt of that day weighing on him now.
His wet, black nose wriggled. “I know who did this child ill. I can spot that woman’s handiwork anywhere. And I’m guessing she used some poison to aid her crime.”
His orange eyes blazed. He rarely spoke of his past, yet there were a few details he had divulged. He once flew above the world with a bird’s-eye view of the humans, leaving him detached enough to take advantage of Queen Arael’s pure heart under the advisement of his lover. Even before that, he was indirectly responsible for a human death, first, by suggesting Griselda do away with her conscience, weak as it was, and second, by giving her a spell-book, which she used to rid herself of her husband.
Now that he was grounded, making him a part of the order of things, he had to face the consequences of his actions daily, as any human would.
Crony turned again to the ethereal standoff, her slitted nose sniffing the scent of panacea roses. The princess’s limp arms cradled the dark purple bouquet. Crony recounted seeing the child holding a flower pot during her stint in the dungeon. Regent Griselda had degraded and manhandled the princess that day—calling her a stain. She must be cackling her harpy heart out in that plush castle, convinced she’d rid herself of her niece forever.
May-let this could be Luce’s chance to find redemption for his part and win back his wings. May-let Crony could repay her own debt to King Kiran’s bloodline, to the sun and the moon—a debt known only by she and one other. Crony had made a sacred vow not to intervene directly with kingdom goings-on, which is why she hadn’t shared who’d killed King Kiran. She’d only given away the prophecy half of the memory to the constable, information that would’ve come out on its own via missives or talks between kingdoms. Crony had hoped it might keep the girl safe until she reached a marriable age, yet here she was in a worse state than before.
Retrieving her spirit from the dead without interfering would take some doing. There would have to be a compromise. To save the princess’s life, Crony would have to make the girl anonymous, inconsequential—even to herself. Then Lyra would have to rediscover her true identity without Crony ever telling her.
It could put things right in both kingdoms. Allow the shattered pieces of the prophecy to find their own way back to completion—however messy that reconstruction might be.