A black glove gestured to the open window. I moved across the room, keeping a suspicious eye on his extended hand. I tore my eyes from the lord and let them fall outside the window, my body still facing the billowing curtain.
After a few moments, specters carried Jurij and my mother from the castle door to the two awaiting black carriages. Jurij, his face wrapped in bandages, shifted slightly, but my mother didn’t stir. For a moment, I wondered if they were well enough to travel, but my instinct was to get them as far from the lord as possible.
Mother and Jurij were laid one after the other into the carriages. Without a sound, the black horses started moving, and the carriages disappeared down the dirt path through the middle of the woods. The specters who didn’t drive the carriages walked in two steady lines after them. More and more specters poured from the castle door and out into the woods until finally, the last of the specters disappeared from view and into the trees. There had to have been a hundred at least, more than enough to keep watch over the entire village.
I faced the black curtain. There had to be a trick, a plan for the specters to strike when out of sight, or to wait perhaps, until they could capture Father and Elfriede, Alvilda, Nissa, and the Tailors, and everyone else within the village before they made their deathly blow.
“Command me to tell you if this is a trick,” spoke the lord, as if reading my thoughts.
I wasn’t willing to play the game just as he wished it. “Don’t ever harm the people I love.”
Something odd stirred in the lord. A black-gloved hand clutched the edges of the lace tablecloth, an unnatural dam causing ripples along its otherwise unblemished surface. “I will not harm the people you love.”
“Don’t ever let your servants harm the people I love.”
“I will not let my retainers harm the people you love.”
I clenched my fists together. “Tell me if you have already ordered harm to come to them.”
“I have not.”
He released his grip on the tablecloth. The ripples he’d made diverted seamlessly back into smooth waters of lace.
There had to be something I was missing, something he had planned to stay two paces ahead of me. Because now there was nothing holding me back.
“Tell me why you aren’t fighting my orders.”
“I never stood a chance against you, in the end.” His voice was barely a whisper. His hands tugged carelessly at the bottom of the curtain.
My heart emboldened. Laughably, I felt that surge of pride that I had once known as a girl, when I was the little elf queen defeating monsters in the shadows of the secret cavern.
And here sat a monster, hidden in the shadows of that black curtain.
I stepped forward. “You will not harm me.”
“I would never harm you.”
“You will not seize me or grip me by the hands or arms.”
The lord tugged at the curtain, and I heard a small rip among the clattering of the curtain’s rings. “I will not hold you.”
I started, my tongue stumbling for a brief moment. It was off, but it would do. “You will keep no servants in this castle, and no one under your control will ever harm me.”
“They are gone. They will not harm you.”
I nodded. “You will do nothing to stop me from leaving.”
“I will not stop you.”
I paused mere paces from his side, only a thin layer of billowing curtain between us.
“Remove the curtain and show me your face.”
The black gloves didn’t hesitate. They took the bottom of the curtain in their grip and pulled. Rings the color of Elfriede’s and Mother’s hair, only brighter and shinier, fell like shattered glass all around us, to the floor and to the table. I’ve seen a ring like that before—a bangle around Lord Elric’s arm in my dream—in the past. I didn’t flinch as the curtain fell, letting the elf queen inside of me revel in her moment of glory. Nothing touched me. The curtain floated briefly before me as it made its leisurely descent.
My chest was an inferno, and I could feel the flame spark on the skin of my breast. My cheeks blazed, and the very blood that ran throughout my veins seemed ready to light my body aflame.
For he was beautiful. And he stabbed me through the heart with his beauty.
His dark hair came down to his shoulders. Like his hat had often done, the hair caught the flicker of the flame in the fireplace and showed me that it wasn’t black like the men in the village’s, but a dark, succulent brown that only masqueraded as black.
Just as I suspected, he did so look like Lord Elric. But he was paler, much paler. Almost like he was halfway to becoming a specter himself. His skin had an odd, creamy, rosy quality overlaying the soft white. His lips were dark red, as if they had been stained by blood. His nose was thin and straight—and familiar somehow. His brows came together in an almost perfectly straight line, and the bones in his cheeks practically burst through the strange, alluring skin.