Prologue

If Kiki had ever thought about strange visitors coming in the middle of the night to curse him, he would have assumed the night would be stormy and cold, the visitors ugly and mean, and he would have valiantly fought them off. He, the Great Emperor of the North, would never be felled by something as measly as a curse, after all.

He knew better now.

The visitors were two beautiful men, and the rose they carried was such a vibrant, deep red, Kiki demanded they give it to him at once. He hadn’t bothered asking their names or why they had come. Kiki’s eyes focused on that rose, and once he saw something he wanted, he took it. That was his right as emperor, and no one had dared gainsay his claims before now. The two strangers hadn’t denied him either. The taller one with the oddly shaved dark hair had smiled at him and handed over the rose without argument.

Kiki should have seen something in that smile, and looking back he certainly noticed something strange and almost smug in the tilt of those lips. He didn’t at the time, though, and grabbed the rose without any forethought. It was the one with the purple hair who actually spoke.

“You are a beast in the body of a man, and we are here to rectify that discrepancy,” the purple-haired one said, and his voice seemed to resonate even as the rose began to pulse in Kiki’s hands. “Your outside should match your inside.”

The rose exploded, plastering him head to toe in bloodred petals and wrapping him in a thorny stem that pricked and scraped along his skin. Kiki remembered screaming, remembered feeling both squeezed, as the thorns dug in, and stretched, as his body was yanked apart and put back together.

“True love will break the spell.” He somehow heard through the pain, the words imbedding themselves directly into his brain. “If you can learn to love someone other than yourself, and if they can find some way to love you in return, the spell will be broken.”

When Kiki woke, he was alone—only the red rose still clutched in his hands a reminder of what had happened.

Kiki had called for his servants to help him up, to get him cleaned and dressed, but no one came. The manor he had chosen to call home while the troops were heading south into Monrath was empty. The servants were gone, the guards were gone, and even the baron he had commandeered the place from had vanished.

Worse, the empire was suddenly gone too. Everything he had worked so hard for, had spun so much magic into, had completely ended. With the rose’s touch, all of the spells tied to him to control the lands and the people he ruled were broken, and they then left him behind. He wasn’t an emperor or even a king. No, Kiki was nothing now, and the utter silence of his home only served to emphasize how much he had lost.

Except, Kiki hadn’t realized just how much was gone until he staggered to his feet and happened to look into the mirror hanging in the front hall. He didn’t have the voice left to scream, but his knees collapsed. Even from the floor, Kiki could still make out his face in the mirror. His fingers shook as he reached up to touch, running his fingertips across his forehead, over his nose, and down his cheek along the path the scar took.

His skin, once so smooth, thanks to daily applications of aloes and lotions by his parade of servants, was pocked across every inch where the thorns had taken out chunks of skin. Where he wasn’t pocked, he was scarred. His face was twisted to one side. The skin on the fingers he trailed along his cheeks was also scarred, so tight with scar tissue it was difficult to straighten them fully. He didn’t look like the same person any longer.

Kiki was a beast in image, just as the wizard with the rose had said.

He could still make a fist, luckily, and the mirror shattered with one punch. Kiki let the glass fall all around him. It didn’t matter if it cut his skin any longer. He was ruined and alone. Nothing mattered anymore.

When Kiki finally staggered to his feet, bits of mirror dropped off his clothes. He needed to change. Kiki opened his mouth to demand his servants prepare a new outfit for him, as he had done thousands of times throughout his life, but the silence of the manor reminded him. He had to change his own clothes and probably had to wash and repair the ones he was wearing now too.

It was all the fault of those wizards. How dare they do this to him, the emperor. Kiki tried to be angry, but it fizzled as he stared down at his crabbed hands.

That was the point of the spell, though. He could read the spells of fate and feel them wrapped around him. Kiki hadn’t become the emperor by being a weak wizard himself. The rose had blasted through his defenses, but he could still see the spell that had been written so violently on his flesh.

And there was the rose, lying where he had dropped it in the middle of the foyer. Kiki left it there and limped past. First, he had to break the spell, and then he would make those wizards pay.