The winter sun filtered in through the curtains, covering my face in a lacework of dappled light. The room had turned gray with the morning, the air crisp and still. It chilled my lungs when I breathed it in, leaving the warmth of my bed to look through the glass doors and past the balcony overlooking the storm-swept hills. A thick pall of fog hung low over the moors, grasping at the hills like the hand of an ancient god. I rubbed my eyes and squinted at the blurred shapes peeking through the haze. And my heart quickened in my chest when I could have sworn I saw a malevolence of ghosts in the mists.
I turned away from the balcony and reached for the cerulean robe draped over the bed. “Aeren?” I threaded my arms through the sleeves and tied the sash at my waist, stepping up to the connecting door. “Are you awake?” I called through it.
Nothing.
I knitted my brows together and raised my hand to knock. “Aer—” The door yielded, creaking open at my touch. I pushed into the silence and slipped inside.
The room was empty.
They gave him away—the unmade bed underneath a canopy of polished branches, the desk covered in scraps of scribbled parchment in the corner. They were puzzle pieces, hints of the parts of him I’d yet to meet. I drew forward and let the air warm me from the inside. It smelled like him—cinnamon and autumn leaves and fresh embers from a tended flame. I stepped along the sapphire walls, past the fireplace where fragments of wood and ash still smoldered, and wondered.
Had the hunt begun so early?
I stopped.
There, in the farthest corner of the room, stood a large mahogany tub—raised several inches from the indigo floor and stained a rich maroon. Even from a distance, I could see the runes in the wood.
Rolisen magic.
My father, a Rolisen by blood, had taught me a few when I was little—one for protection. The other, healing. But stepping closer, I didn’t recognize any of these. One, in particular, a crude muddle of slashes and arcs, repeated too often to be ignored. And the longer I stared, the more they looked like antlers. I looked down at the sudden clink of glass against glass and pulled my foot away from a row of bottles on the ground, kneeling to steady one of them when it bobbled on its base. There were five, sealed tight and dyed a different shade of blue.
I lifted the last from its place and turned it over in my hands. Letters, not runes, had been etched into its face, and as I traced the grooves and whorls with my fingers, I read the word aloud. “Pelwyn.”
“Excuse me, milady.”
Someone cleared their throat behind me, and I shot up, leaving the bottle on the floor.
A boy, no older than fourteen or fifteen, stood in the doorway. He looked as if he’d stepped out of the mural leading to the mirrored room—buttoned in a black hunting coat, a crimson cap fit snugly over his head.
“Please,” I interlaced my fingers. “Xeanora.”
“Gaereth…” There was a long, uncomfortable pause. Then he dipped in a bow. “Milady.”
My tongue teased the inside of my cheek, but I let the annoyance pass. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Gaereth. Would you happen to know where Aeren—Lord Aflytaer might be?”
“He took to the woods early this morning.” He started for Aeren’s desk, seizing the wooden hilt of a knife lying among the scatter of papers, and returned to his defensive stance in the door. “But his lordship forgot his hunting blade. He sent me back to retrieve it.”
“I can bring it to him.” The corners of my mouth drew up in a smile.
But he shook his head, pressing his lips together in a tight line. “It’s best for a woman to stay here … To spare your sensitivities.”
I blinked, my face suddenly warm. “My sensitivities and I insist.”
A young woman in brown stumbled into the doorway, gasping in mouthfuls of air. “There you are, Lady Torrowin. Maery, at your service.” She breathed and curtsied low, the auburn hair left out of the plaits around her head tumbling over her shoulders. With cheeks like lilies and willowy limbs, she looked more like a lady of Phaenn than I did. She carried a bundle of fabric in her arms, layers and layers of spun silk and embroidery. She swayed on her feet under the weight, caught herself leaning, and straightened herself out again. She averted her fox-like eyes from the bottles when I noticed her staring and raised her burden with a smile. “I’m meant to dress you for the day.”
“Thank you, Maery. Gaereth.” I sharpened my tongue as he turned to flee. “You can leave that with me.”
The boy hesitated—something my mother, the Viper, would have never allowed—and surrendered the hilt into my open hand. “Yes, milady.”
“We received the first of your things early this morning,” Maery said, taking the last of my hair and weaving it into a net of gilded braids. It was warm with her leaning close and working so intently. The last hour had seen us sitting at the vanity—her fingers winding and plaiting, adding color to my lips and the corners of my eyes. I studied myself in the mirror when she left her chair to retrieve a parcel of folded satin from the wardrobe. My nightgown lay discarded on the bed, exchanged for the layers of an earth witch. The first was barely visible, sheer and gold with gathered sleeves. The second, a loose viridian shift tied at the waist. And the last—I suspected newly made—a long, open tunic of midnight blue, embroidered with vines and branches of golden roses.
“I thought you’d like to wear a piece of home today.” She smiled upon returning, and as she let the fabric fall away, green and silver glinted in my eyes.
An heirloom comb. A work of glimmering vines and gemstone blossoms set with tiny sapphires and emeralds.
Maery sighed when the sun found it and cast pinpricks of iridescent light all over her hands as she placed it just above my ear. “It’s beautiful. I hear all the girls in Rynmoor look like princesses.”
“That’s…not mine.”
Her eyes went wide. And before I could blink, she’d untangled it from my hair and stuffed it in the folds of her dress. “Forgive me.” She bowed her head, her jaw quavering into her chest. “My mistake.”
“It’s all right.” I reached for her wrist from over my shoulder. “Maery, you’d tell me if there was anything wrong, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course, milady.” She pulled free and carried on, gathering hairpins and tins of powder and setting them in their rightful place, but never meeting my eyes.
“Is there?”
She paused. “Pardon?”
I turned to face her this time, steeling my voice as I asked again. “Is there something wrong?”
Her smile faltered. “The hour is quite late, milady. Lord Aflytaer will be needing his knife.”
Maery led me as far as the labyrinth’s end and not a step more, promising to linger until I returned, and watched me cross the meadow to the swathe of trees in the distance. I gathered my skirts to one side as I trampled a path through the high grasses, barbs sticking and pulling threads in the hems. Most of it was dead. The ground was just as choked with bristles as the House, slithering into the forest in a trail of ruin. I followed it to the edge of the wood, drew in a breath, and entered.
Pale sunlight dappled the sylvan floor, shifting with the caress of the wind in the branches overhead. The forest ran thick. There was no break in the trees in any direction. Roots exhumed themselves from the loam and mud. I meandered deeper, opted for leaping from one root to the other rather than being sucked down into the earth with each weighted step. Until I found a small footpath worn into the ground and clung to it, taking care not to stray and lose myself in the wilds. The woods were eerily still. I didn’t realize until now that I hadn’t heard a sound. No creatures chittered their morning greetings, no birds hung their song on the air.
I halted when I felt it.
A predator. Silent and close. Stalking me in the trees.
I raised Aeren’s dagger and whispered into the ground with my magic, reaching deep and sure, and closed my grip around the earth beneath the killer’s feet.
“Xeanora…”
I whirled in surprise, my call to the earth retreating into my fingertips so quickly I lost my footing and staggered backward.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Aeren. He straddled the path in his hunting clothes, his face severe, a longbow strapped across his back.
I wrinkled my forehead. “What do you mea—”
Something lashed at my ankle and seized it tight, and I managed a small cry before I was wrenched to the ground with a slam. Whatever breath I had was knocked clear of my lungs, and I clawed at the mud for purchase, straining to scream, as I was dragged several feet backward.
“Xeanora!” Aeren shouted and bounded after me, fumbling for the dirk at his thigh.
“Aeren!” I sputtered a mouthful of dirt and blood as bristles sliced at my cheeks. Brown leaves fluttered around me, scattering in the air like moths and breaking apart in my hair. I twisted onto my back and kicked at the vine coiled around my leg, my skirts hiking up above my stinging knees. “Let go!” I screeched and hacked at it with Aeren’s dagger, but it only pulled me faster, through the muck and the moss, past faerie rings and roots, and down onto the cool bank of a pond dark with grime and silt. Aeren dashed out of the trees and to the edge of the water, throwing himself into the mud to lunge for my hand. But he grasped nothing but the air between us, and before I could hold my breath, I was in the water. It shocked my senses as it filled my nose and mouth and left me writhing in the darkness. I fought against the pull, sinking deeper and deeper still, farther from the light of the surface and the garbled echoes of Aeren’s screams. The pond’s face broke over and over, rippling around him as he leaped in after me, lost his breath, and dove again.
Something roiled in the pit of my stomach, white hot and raging as I flailed my limbs and shrieked. A storm of bubbles swirled from my lips. And the water changed, rushing and tearing the cold stillness with a torrent of waves that seethed around me. I kicked my legs again, spending the last of my strength, and this time, a current gripped my body and raised me out of the darkness of the deep, spitting me above the surface and into Aeren’s arms. I dry retched into his chest, gasping as I clung to him, and he held me there for a moment, fitting his chin over my head.
“Are you all right?” he asked when we separated, palming my arms, my shoulders, my neck, and pushed my grimy hair back from my forehead streaked with pond scum. “Are you harmed?” His fingers settled on the hollows of my cheeks.
“I’m fine.” I exhaled, gathering myself, and cupped my hands over his. “I’m fine.”
His mouth crushed into mine, recklessly—and so quickly, I almost thought it’d been an accident, or some waterlogged dream. But when he withdrew, his cheeks flushed, his ragged breath warm over my parted lips, I knew that he’d meant it. I pressed into him, stole a kiss of my own. He leaned backward in surprise, the wan light of the morning sparkling in the amber rings of his widening eyes. And he took my face in his hands, streams of water leaking through his fingers as he pulled me into another. I could’ve anchored myself to his lips—forgotten my short-lived terror, the bone-deep chill of pond water cutting at my waist, the trill of morning birds overhead.
His back suddenly went rigid, his fingers stilling on my cheeks. And he raised his mouth to my ear to whisper, “Don’t move.”
“What?” I flinched and flexed the hand that had held his hunting blade. But the weapon was gone, lost to the water.
“Your magic,” he said, near breathless, through swollen lips. “Reach into the earth. Can you feel it?”
I closed my eyes, my chest still rising and falling in erratic gasps, and let my power branch into the mud squelching underfoot. It warmed my fingertips, electrifying every inch of my skin. And I saw the entire forest floor in flashes. Mice in their burrows, birds pecking at a scatter of fallen seeds.
There, where the thick of the woods gave way to the bank. Four hooves.
Aeren slowly nocked an arrow, water lapping quietly at his thighs, as he stepped to the left, inhaled, and released.
A wail in the distance. And the thud of something heavy collapsing in the dirt.
“The Deathwood—it’s dangerous.” He lowered his bow, solemn, and slung it over his shoulder. “I should’ve told you sooner.”
“The Deathwood,” I repeated, keeping close to his side as we sloshed out of the pond and onto the muddy shore. My dress, in all of its layers, clung to my legs like wet parchment. “That’s what you call it?”
“It’s what we all call it.” Aeren trudged on, just as heavy-sodden as I was. “There’s…a lot you should know.” His voice trailed as the sound of guttural bleating grew louder. And suddenly, we came upon it.
A stag, writhing on its side, the fletching of an arrow jutting from its neck. It was heaving, its large ribcage filling and emptying again in quick succession. It blinked its dark eyes as we approached and wheezed out another blood-curdling moan.
“Easy…” Aeren softened and knelt beside it, placing his hand on the creature’s muzzle, and removed the small knife from its sheath on his thigh. “Thank you for your sacrifice.”
I shuddered when he dragged the blade across the animal’s throat, the edge catching flesh and sinking deep. Bright red rivulets leaked down his fingers as the beast slumped over and keened its last. An ugly, garbled cry. The noise was awful—the vilest sound I’d ever heard, and it haunted me long after the thrashing had stopped.
“It’s all right,” Aeren whispered as he looked up, the breath rattling in his chest, and he offered me an outstretched hand. His palm was slick with blood. “It’s over now.”
If it had burned any brighter, I would have sworn it was the sun. It blazed in a tower of fire, its flames like golden strokes, painting the night in amber. I closed my eyes to the scattering embers and leaned into the rippling air, the wind thick with apple-scented smoke. I’d never felt so warm, so free. All of Phaenn had come. The woodsmen had traded their axes for flutes and strings. Their wives laughed and ate and drank with each other on woven mats and pillows. And children crowned in braided cornhusks and dried branches danced and leaped in rings around the fire. Hundreds of silhouettes, spinning and stumbling and singing.
I watched the skinned corpse of an animal turn on a roasting spit nearby, its flame-shriveled eyes peering back at me through the smoke. “I was taught the stag was sacred to the Taenmi.”
“It is.” Aeren sat beside me, a blanket draped over his shoulders. He raised the edges, leaning in to envelop me with it.
I huddled close. “Then why kill it?” I knew no other coven as well as mine, but it seemed strange, nonetheless. Like slitting the throat of a patron god.
“It’s our source of strength. We hunt it once a year—at the turn of winter,” he explained, his honey eyes lingering on the crease of my mouth. “And when the killing’s done, we take its flesh and eat it. The power lives on inside us—keeps us strong until it’s time to hunt again.”
Haenor staked the point of his knife through a shred of roasted meat and fit the morsel between his lips, a trail of grease leaching down his chin and glistening in the firelight. “It’s how we survive.” There was something disconcerting in his smile, as if he planned to carve pieces of me to eat as well.
“Welcome home, my lord.” A silver-haired woman tucked a wicker basket brimming with oversized produce under her arm and bent to offer Aeren her hand, the lines in her rounded face deepening with her smile.
He squeezed her fingers with a grin of his own. “Thank you.”
“You’ve picked such a beautiful bride.” Her eyes, brown irises edged with the gray of old age, lit up at the sight of me. “You’d best start sewing soon. She deserves something just as lovely as that face.” She palmed a swollen fruit from her basket, placed it in his hand, and disappeared into the amber-limned crowd before he could respond.
“Madame Dey.” Aeren murmured, watching her leave. “She’s wonderful, isn’t she?”
But I’d stopped listening. “What did she say?”
“An old custom—from Saian, the kingdom in the trees,” he stuttered and shifted his legs, his face beginning to flush. “The groom makes the wedding gown for his bride.”
I stared at the cinders fluttering to their tiny deaths in the dirt, and my thoughts turned like a watermill in my head. A chill whispered down my spine in spite of the fire. “Oh.”
“Have you tried anything?” He changed the subject, puncturing the rind of the fruit with his nail and tearing the peel away.
“I…”
“Here.” He pulled a section off and held it to my lips. “You must be hungry.”
I closed my mouth over it, my tongue darting over the tip of his thumb, and tart, crimson juice ran down his hand. The piece burst between my teeth, fragrant and sour and cloyingly sweet.
I clung to the taste, sucking at the inside of my cheeks.
He licked his fingers clean with a chuckle. “It’s good, right? Some of us were given an unusual gift. It lets us work in any of the United Cities. Whatever’s asked of us, we can do. And we bring back what we learned when we come home. We learned this from the botanists in Laethys.”
I swallowed the last of its ruby-colored flesh. “Do you have it?”
“Would you like to see?” Aeren wrapped his wedge of the fruit in a handkerchief and set it in his lap. “It might be better if…” He raised his hand to my face and hesitated, his voice catching in his throat. “May I…touch you?”
I nodded without a word. He pressed forward, and my breath hitched when the pad of his thumb brushed my lower lip before settling on my cheek. My head swam at his touch, cast my vision in shadows. And when the ground trembled, I half-believed I’d imagined it.
But it was Aeren, reaching into me—and using my power as his own. I let out a small gasp when he retracted his fingers.
“I should confess something,” he started, then stopped, as if he was searching for the right words. “The test at the ball—it wasn’t what my father said it was.”
I wrinkled my brow. “Then what was it?” It’d convinced me and everyone that night that we were destined. It was all the confirmation my mother needed to send me away.
“A measure of your magic. The house—” he raised his stare toward the silhouettes twirling among the embers “—this city. They’re cursed. They have been for a year now. I wanted to make sure my wife-to-be would be strong enough to survive it—survive her.”
“The Bone Woman.” Haenor answered before I had the chance to ask.
“All of the United Cities have their own stories,” Aeren rushed to explain. “You’ve heard of the Fog Catcher—in Thieri?”
I nodded. Every coven knew of him, shared their whispered warnings—the bogeyman in the mist, stealing children away in the night.
“This is ours.” The apple in Aeren’s throat trembled as he swallowed. “She still comes for us, sometimes, after all these years.”
“As she did for Lyali.” Haenor added. “His first betrothed.”
My heart quickened in my chest.
Aeren took my hands in his, tightening his hold as if I might slip away if he let go. “That’s why you can’t go into the Deathwood.”
He told me then of the plague of thorns she’d laid on the House. How she’d taken the first of her victims.
Of a boy bewitched by a beautiful girl. How he labored for a year to satisfy her vanity, bringing flowers to her doorstep each morning. And how, in the dead of winter, she promised her hand to him—if only he’d bring her one more flower. One twice as lovely as the others, just as she had thought herself to be. The boy pledged to do just that, wandering through the ice-stricken land until he came upon the wood and ventured into its shadows. He found a clearing there, and the most peculiar flowers in bloom. And he plucked one and planned to return home victorious. But a girl lived among those flowers—a girl far more enchanting than his beloved. And she convinced him to stay the night in her cottage in the woods, only to eat him up come sunrise and leave his bones to be found by woodsmen in the spring. His skeleton lodged beneath the bark of a tree, his jaw ossified in a scream.
That night, I visited the mirrored room again. Tiptoed through the darkness and past the mural slithering with vines. But when I opened the door, there was nothing. No dresses. No mannequins. Only the shattered looking glasses and the thorns that strangled them on the wall. I pushed back one of the curtains from the run of lancet windows and gazed out into the moors.
There was more to Phaenn and the House of Earth and Wood than I could’ve ever known—more than I was allowed to know.
A shape emerged from the shadows of the Deathwood. Half-alive—swaying and stumbling. I watched as it dragged its feet through the clearing, towards the groves of moon-drunk roses. I drew back, my blood running cold when the figure lifted its face to stare at the window.
Aeren.
I sprinted from the glass with my candlestick in hand, out of the room and down the thorn-bitten hall to the stairs. And grabbing a fistful of my nightgown, I tore through the dark, past the silver-limned furniture that lurked like phantoms in the night. I threw open the garden door and a winter wind swept over me, whipping at my face and cutting against my shivering legs.
“Aeren?” I called to him from the doorway, holding the flame to the darkness.
He staggered around a corner in the maze of hedges, lurching a few steps and smiling weakly as his legs buckled beneath him.
“Aeren!” I set the lamp on the pavement and broke into a run, catching him before he could crumple to the ground. His body grew slack and heavy in my arms, and he sank to his knees, pulling me down with him. My fingers met something warm and slick on his back, and my heart dropped into my stomach when I brought my hand to my eyes.
Scarlet.
His head lolled against my chest.
I kept it steady, smearing bloody fingerprints on his cheeks. “Aeren, you have to stay awake for me.” I tore my gaze from his pallid face to scream over my shoulder. “Somebody!”
“What is it? What’s happened?” Haenor dashed into the garden like a wild-eyed man, waving a lantern in his nightclothes, a handful of servants trailing behind him. He lowered the light and made the sign of the gods when his stare skimmed over the horror on my face…and something else.
I followed his line of sight to the shadows of the labyrinth.
A clew of brambles barreled down the garden path. Black as bile, hissing through the brittle grass, they snapped at Aeren’s ankles, drawing blood, and snaked around his waist to tug him from my arms. I fought them, even as tendrils seized at my wrists and slit crimson stripes down my fingers.
“No!” I pulled free and shrieked as they swallowed him, dragging his body into the hedge. I drew the moisture from the air and folded it into itself a thousand times until the layers formed the razor’s edge of a blade. And I lashed it forward into the thorns, slicing through the vines like a knife through an artery. They splintered, withering and sloughing off of him like shriveled limbs.
“Son!” Haenor scrambled to the heap of crumbling vines and bleeding flesh and tore at the bristles, and he held Aeren’s limp shape to his chest when he wrenched the young lord free.
I fell to my hands and knees, gasping.
The curse of the forest. It’d come to us.
I struggled to my feet and strained a step. But before I could take another, I was face-down in the mud, my legs locked in a vise. I shredded my throat with a scream as a horde of vines ripped me through the hedges and the yellowed grass of the meadow.
And into the heart of the Deathwood.