HarperCollins Publishers
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Her dreams were a tangled mess of blood and shuddering trees. Rachelle struggled awake with a gasp, her heart pounding in her ears. It was still before sunrise; her room was dark and silent—a simple, human darkness that would melt away with the dawn.
Soon she would lose that darkness, as well as the light. Rachelle wondered how long, exactly, she had left. Her forestborn had said, Before the summer sun makes its last valiant gasp. Did that mean before winter? Before autumn? Or before the summer solstice, after which the days would only grow shorter?
The power of the Great Forest was always stronger on the solstices, when the rise and ebb of the sun’s light shifted. And this year’s summer solstice was only three weeks away.
The thought made Rachelle feel cold and hollow and free all at once. If the world was ending in three weeks, then she didn’t have to care about Erec or the King or the unrest in the city anymore. She just had to ready herself to face her forestborn.
Maybe she could make a final effort to find Joyeuse. She’d given up over a year ago, because she couldn’t see any hope and the worry was driving her mad. But now . . . well, she could bear to go mad with searching for a few more weeks or months. She could bear it, and then she could die fighting, and she didn’t have to care about anything else.
In the distance, the palace bells started tolling. Rachelle started counting the peals, the same way she did every morning.
Five . . . six . . . seven.
The bells stopped. And then she remembered the levée.
She didn’t have to care about anything, including the King’s orders, but if she wanted to make another attempt at finding Joyeuse—and she did want to, she had to—then it would be a good idea to avoid mortally offending him. Becoming a wanted fugitive could wait a week or two.
Rachelle sprang out of bed. The King’s levée started at eight, and he was famously intolerant of people who were late for any court ceremony. An hour was more than enough time to get to the royal apartments, but if she wanted breakfast before facing an hour or more of tedious ceremony, she’d have to get to the guard’s mess room, all the way on the opposite side of the palace.
Luckily, she was still in her uniform from the night before. She buckled on her belt, not even bothering to grab her sword, and ran out the door, re-braiding her hair as she clattered down the dark, pre-dawn hallway. She started running down the stairs, then simply vaulted over the railing to the landing below. The impact sent a jolt up her bones, jarring her enough that she stumbled to the side—
Into the young man who had been running up the stairs.
In a heartbeat, she had him slammed against the wall with her knife at his throat. Their faces were barely a hand’s span apart; she could feel his chest heaving for breath under her arm. Then her mind caught up with her body and she realized he was unarmed.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“Well, I was running from assassins,” he said. “Now I’m being threatened with a knife.”
“What?” said Rachelle, and then she heard the men clattering up the stairs after him. She turned, and saw the glint of drawn blades.
There were three of them, all with rapiers, and she had only a dagger. It would have been a wretchedly uneven fight, if she were human.
It was still a wretchedly uneven fight; it was just uneven in her favor. Rachelle took down the first with a simple kick to the head, then whirled and caught the second’s blade in the hilt of her dagger. Twist, wrench, and the rapier flew out of his hand—she forgot how weak humans were, she thought as she slammed her dagger’s hilt into his forehead.
The third one came at her with a rapier and a dagger, and from the way he twirled them, she could tell he was really very good. His technique was probably better than hers. But now her heart was thundering with the joy of the fight, her blood was singing in her ears, and he seemed ridiculously slow, as if he were moving through honey. Stepping inside his guard, seizing his sword arm, and wrenching it out of the socket was almost too easy. A few good kicks, and he was down.
She looked back at the man they had been pursuing. Wiry, with a square, sharp face softened by a snub nose, and tousled, pale brown hair, he couldn’t be much older than her. There was nothing remarkable in his features—not like Erec’s sculpted beauty—yet they felt vaguely familiar. He had sat down on the stairs to watch her fight, elbows on his knees, gloved hands resting loose, and he was watching her with an intense, guarded calm.
“Shouldn’t you have kept running?” she asked.
“Were you planning to lose?” He sounded politely curious.