“The sunlight in your blood.” Selena was the first to say it aloud, though they were both thinking it. “All these centuries, the sun-smugglers came back through, transporting sunlight. Is it possible the stags also need exposure to it, however small?”
“And these past five years, we’ve been depriving them,” Cyprian took over. “We made them weak. We made them susceptible.”
Vesper winced, horrified. The importance of the sun’s touch upon Nerezeth grew more apparent each day. “I will send Alger or Dolyn back through with a supply after we capture the witch. Enough of a supply to last until my union with Lady Lyra heals our worlds.” He turned back to the bleeding corpses. “Such cruel butchery demands vengeance. When I find the criminals responsible, I will slay them where they stand.”
Inside Eldoria’s dungeon cell, tucked within the plush fabrication of her own making, Griselda stood beside the small dining table where she and her daughters had taken meals for the past five years.
There, she unwrapped a fresh delivery: two sets of brumal stag antlers, still oozing brackish, magical blood that sparkled like the starlit sky in portraits of old. Griselda barred herself against that strange stinging—as if something ached under her scalp above her temples. It always accompanied these transactions. Had she a conscience, she’d suspect it was sympathy pains.
She laughed inwardly at the impossibility; once all of this was behind her, she’d have the castle’s physician see to the strange pains. Considering Lustacia had also been complaining of headaches—the one daughter who had inherited Griselda’s tender skin and physicality—most likely it was a nutritive dearth from lack of sunlight and fresh air.
“Is the quota met, Your Grace?” Sir Erwan asked, observing from beside her while Sir Bartley stood guard outside the door.
“Yes.”
Erwan raised a dark eyebrow as something shuffled behind him.
“I trust the exports have gone unnoticed?” Griselda asked the hoarfrost goblin that sidled out from behind the safety of the knight’s red breeches and white surcoat. The top of the creature’s head came to Griselda’s knees. It was fitting he called himself Slush, as he looked every bit as muddy and trampled as Griselda imagined mucky snow to be.
“Thus to date, Magistrate,” he answered, his voice rustling and airy, like the shift of ash from Griselda’s wretched memories of the ravine.
She winced, annoyed with the rhyming, childlike dialect. All of his kind spoke thusly, so she’d had to be tolerant. That would end today. “It’s Majesty. And you will reserve that title for the princess. She will be your queen.”
Slush sneered, his spiked teeth slick and grimy. The hair atop his head was wiry and thick—the color of mud streaked with milk. Crystalized growths caught the light and shimmered from his chin like a beard of icicles. Similar jagged tapers, smaller in number and length, dripped from long, pointed ears that resembled those of a donkey.
His gray, glassy eyes, protruding like oversized marbles in that small, rough face, turned toward said “princess” with an odd mix of idiocy and inquisitiveness. There, at Griselda’s daughters’ feet, hunkered Slush’s crew of four—slobber dribbling from their lips onto apparel made of tree bark. There had been six at one time, but two had been lost to a fiery death in the ravine several years back. All said, this smaller crew had served well enough.
The girls, dressed in lace and velvet, sat upon cushioned stools. Wrathalyne and Avaricette talked around their sister—Lustacia, now so adept at being Lyra, maintained silence around anyone other than family—while stitching the final touches on her wedding trousseau. They attached pearls on the veil, gloves, and headdress, along with creamy lace across the low-cut neckline of the pink organza gown.
Beside them, the birds cooed and tweeted in their cages, adding to the odd serenity of the scene. Even with her wretched niece dead and gone, Griselda had opted to keep the chickadees, mockingbirds, and swallows close at hand. One never knew when an infestation might occur.
She supposed on some level, this was an infestation: a half circle of gruesome goblins with long, pointy noses that sagged almost to cover their mouths, surrounding three lovely girls. However, none of her daughters minded. Being down in the dungeon all these years without social interaction, they had come to think of the goblins rather as servants. A logical evolution, considering the five bandits had been delivering parcels from Nerezeth ever since Griselda first needed scorpions and cadaver brambles to torture her niece.
If anything, her daughters were bored by their guests’ presence. On the other hand, the goblins were fascinated. Everything about humanness and stateliness intrigued them . . . they coveted such characteristics more than Eldoria’s white gold. An insatiable greed that Griselda had latched upon and exploited from the very beginning.
“And we’ll rule at her side, tall as men full of pride. Aye, yer Graciousness of all spaciousness?” Slush’s question grounded Griselda’s thoughts.
She rubbed the infernal niggle along her scalp, frowning when she noticed two small bumps. Those were new. “That’s Your Grace,” she corrected the goblin, preoccupied with his insolence.
“I am the Grace? But I haven’t the face . . .” He smooshed the end of his long nose with a thin, crooked finger, as if he could push it into his skull and make it smaller.
“You are to call me Your Gra—Oh, never mind.” Stupid as he was, he had a keen sense for what got under her skin. But she would have the last laugh. “I promised you’d be the mirror image of men, didn’t I? A lady always keeps her word.”
Having answered—a stark truth he would soon comprehend with horror—Griselda smoothed her hair into place. She’d consider the knots later, when there was time to look in a mirror. For now, she had no desire to see herself in her brown day dress. Working with magical ingredients in unstable conditions had proven messy in the past, and she’d ruined enough fineries to learn that plain could be better, in rare instances.
She stalked across the chamber and hung the antlers from hooks beside the fireplace, situating them so the black glistening blood could drain into a porcelain bowl. It took two pairs to fill one jar. She had two such jars already lining the shelves, hidden behind bottles of peach wine, reserves of paraffin and liquid sunshine, and bags of dried meats and cheeses. Today her blood supply would at last be of use.
Smirking, she dropped another set of antlers from four months earlier—seeped of all life essence—into a granite mortar and pestle the size of a large cooking pot. Grinding the prongs to sparkling powder so the wintering-frost magic could be released always took some labor. But Griselda enjoyed the process. Pulverizing them was therapeutic, knowing the harvest it would reap, though her hands were permanently bruised and stained a shimmery bluish-white.
What were a lady’s finest satin gloves for, if not to hide her ambition?
She made her way to the shelf and pushed aside everyday items, taking down the two jars of blood. The contents sloshed and coated the glass, leaving oily streaks that glittered like liquid obsidian diamonds in the lantern light—rich with the promise of alchemy and ambiguity. This was the last ingredient for the final step in Lustacia’s transformation.
Sir Bartley had brought the news earlier—a missive sent from Queen Nova via jackdaw—announcing her son’s arrival within a few days. She’d also mentioned a spy had seen the harrower witch in the ravine, that she possessed a box marked “princess - revolution.” If the old hag set foot within their gates, Griselda would have her arrested again. The only thing that mattered today was that Prince Vesper was at last coming to claim his bride. Her daughter, not Kiran’s.
A silver-haired songbird girl who commands the shadows.
Griselda’s checklist was all but complete, short of one thing. And once done, not a body anywhere could deny Lustacia was the true princess of the prophecy.
Placing the jars in a small basket, Griselda looked about the room. The table was scuffed from the time the girls had used it in a game of pitching quoits. The metal horseshoe they’d been tossing over a clay spike dented the wood irreparably. The mirrors magnifying the lanterns were blackened in spots from all the times the girls had polished them; the rugs were worn from waltzing during imaginary balls; and the spice-scented tapestries and fresh flowers were more powerful nostalgic triggers than anything else—harkening back to hours the girls spent in front of the fireplace, giggling about snippets of town gossip delivered by Erwan and Bartley.