by Bec McMaster
He flings something at my feet.
A golden amulet shaped like a dragon’s claw. It fetches up by my bare feet. The last time I saw it, it hung around Prince Keir’s muscled throat, but my sister stole it and presented it to my father as the Heart.
Stillness runs through me. This moment is dangerous.
Because I mistook nothing.
The Dragon’s Heart was never a relic. No, it was a story twisted to hide the truth of the matter: Many, many years ago, Keir was one of the powerful dragon kings who ruled this world. Rumors abound that when the fae went to war with the dragon kings, the dragons turned to stone and withdrew from the world.
But Keir merely focused his magic upon himself.
He forged a new body, one that looks fae enough to pass, and he tore his court from the mortal planes, anchoring it in an Other World that sits alongside ours. Now he’s nothing more than a powerful prince in the eyes of the Blessed courts.
If anyone knew the truth of his heritage, there would be war again.
It was never a relic I was searching for. But his heart is another matter. If my father could cut it from Keir’s chest, he wouldn’t merely have the power to break the curse that afflicts wraithenkind and binds us to the icy north, he could tear apart the entire Seelie hegemony.
And I can stop him.
All I need do is keep this one secret from him. I can finally thwart him, even if it costs me.
So I lower my eyes. “My mistake, Father. I’m sorry.”
Ruhle’s smile is the kiss of a knife against my throat. “We’re only ever allowed one,” he whispers. “You seem to be at your quota.”
I swallow down the temptation to retort. “What would you have of me, my king?”
“Your sister is missing,” Raesh tells me.
Not a dream. It wasn’t a dream at all. Which means that Keir truly demanded I find the Horn of Shadows for him.
“What do you mean?” I ask slowly, because I need to sound surprised.
“I sent her to carry out a task for me, and she hasn’t responded to the last three of my communications.” The king clamps a hand around one of the vials around his throat. “She’s not even responding to this.”
“What happened to her?” I can’t stop my gaze from dropping to the tiny vial. The wisp of her soul lies still and dormant at the bottom of the soul-trap. They’re never quiet like that.
For the first time, I feel true worry.
When Keir mentioned her disappearance, I shrugged it off. Soraya is a survivor. No matter what she must face, she puts herself first. Even the sight of her amulet wasn’t enough to know true fear.
But this….
She’s not dead. The little wisp of soul in that glass vial would have evaporated if she was, but something is wrong with her.
The king waves off my concern. “She will either return or she will not. What matters now is that her task remains incomplete. And you will finish it.” His eyes become hard. “The Lord of Mistmark is marrying the Prince of Blood’s cousin. I want you to steal something from Malechus—"
I almost laugh, barely hearing the words. What are the odds? If he dares say it….
“I’ve heard rumor the Lord of Mistmark has managed to get his hands on a certain horn…, one that controls the hounds of the Great Hunt. And those hounds can lead me to the Cauldron of Creation.”
Fuck you, Fate. Fuck you, you capricious bitch.
“The cauldron?”
The Wraith King leans toward me, both pallid hands curling around the ends of his throne. “I warned you once that I would have an end to the curse that binds us to these misbegotten lands and tethers us to this warped flesh.” He holds up his claws. “You failed to bring me the Dragon’s Heart. The only other relic with the power to shatter our chains is the goddess’s cauldron.”
“There has to be another way.” The words blurt out of me. I can’t let him do this. I can’t let him say the words. “If we—"
“Enough. Bring me the horn,” my father declares. “And I will break our curse.”
What am I going to do?
If that was truly not a dream, then Keir just demanded I fulfill my debt to him. I can feel the magic of his glyphs under my skin. The agony as they branded themselves into my skin was indescribable. I can only imagine what would happen if I dared defy him.
But my father….
My lungs still ache. Every inch of me is cold and clammy and echoing with the caress of death.
If I betray my father, then he won’t just kill me.
He will make me suffer endlessly.
And with my lifespan, it might be centuries before I ever see the mercy of light again.
“Yes, my king,” I breathe, bending knee once more before I turn toward the doors in a flurry of sweat-fueled nerves.
“Zemira?”
I pause, glancing back over my shoulder.
“No more failures,” the Wraith King says in a menacing whisper.
Ruhle smirks at me from his side. “Fail again and maybe I’ll ask for a boon. Maybe it will be my hand that ends your wretched life.”
It’s not an idle threat.
I have no choice.
The only one who can save me is me.
My shoulders straighten. “I will find the Horn of Shadows. I will not fail you again, Father.”
I do not dare.
Even if I have to betray Keir in order to do so.
4
Torn between a vicious king and a powerful prince.
I sigh as I stare at the ceiling of my bedchambers at the inn I’m staying at. All I really need right now is to throw my treacherous sister into the mix, but she’s missing.
And the Lord of Mistmark’s name keeps being mentioned in relation to Soraya. My sister was sent to kill him and for the first and only time, she failed.
I know how she played the ruse.
From what little I know of the Lord of Mistmark, he’s powerful, dangerous, and rules his own lands, separate from any court. She tried to seduce him and something went wrong, for she either couldn’t kill him, or she didn’t have the heart to kill him.
Until this moment I wouldn’t have thought her to have a heart, but I taunted her about him once and she nearly put a knife in me. I saw the look that crossed her face. Just one fleeting, unguarded second of pain. It was a look of lost hopes. And dare I say it, broken dreams….
And now he’s marrying another and my sister, who was sent to steal the horn he has in his possession, has vanished into the winds.
The Court of Blood is one of the most dangerous of the Blessed courts. It’s ruled by King Aswan, but his son is hungry and ambitious, and his nieces no less so. They’re gifted in the art of poison, and it’s said that some of them mix torture with sex. Narcissa, one of Aswan’s nieces, was one of the potential brides summoned to the Court of Dreams three months ago, and although she died, I wouldn’t have liked to have crossed her.
Why would the Lord of Mistmark want to marry Belladonna?
Why would he want to marry any of the Court of Blood?
They’ve been passed over for centuries—one of the reasons Narcissa was so desperate to capture the Prince of Dreams’ attention—and if sweet little Belladonna is as poisonous as her sister, then it would be like bedding down with a viper.
If Mistmark caught a glimpse of my sister’s face, then he might be responsible for her disappearance. He’s definitely at the top of my suspect list, though certainly not the only one on there.
I need to get into the court to find answers.
But I don’t have an invitation to the wedding.
The Court of Blood will be locked down tighter than my sister’s heart. With so many of the Blessed courts in attendance, the guards will be thick and alert. Servants will be known and vetted. I could kidnap one and glamor myself to look like them for short periods of time, but that’s a dangerous route to take. One must have time to study one’s prey and their mannerisms.
But several princesses sa
w my face three months ago. They knew me as Merisel of Greenslieves, and while my skills of glamor are good, they’re not good enough to completely change my appearance. It’s a twist of the cheekbones here, a slip of the nose there…. You’re constantly working to hold the glamor in place, because different angles change perspective. Too many people would look at me and wonder why I seem familiar.
Who knows what kind of traps and glamors the Prince of Blood has laid over his court? He didn’t earn that moniker because he’s a kindly soul.
The answer to my dilemma is clear: I can’t get into the Court of Blood in disguise.
The only way to get in is if I’m invited.
Or more to the point, if Merisel is invited. And there’s one fae who isn’t invited, but will be welcomed all the same.
Pushing upright, I scowl.
Sometimes I hate the twists my mind takes.
Fate trails her icy fingertips down my spine.
I cross to the fireplace, pour myself a goblet of wine, and stare into the flames. I’ve never tried to contact Keir but I can feel the link between us, etched into my skin with his magic. Four hundred and thirteen days I owed him—a year and a day—and now roughly three hundred and fifty marks remain. They’re invisible to anyone other than myself and Keir. Each day a little tingle shivers through me as one of the runes vanishes.
“Hello?” I whisper, stroking the mark on the inside of my wrist. “Can you hear me?”
There’s a moment of silence and then a foreign awareness turns toward me. I don’t know how to describe it. One second the room is empty, and the next I can almost feel an enormous body brushing against mine, his breath whispering over the back of my neck.
The prince.
Keir’s not here, of course, but it feels like it.
“Zemira?” His whisper is intimate. “What happened? Where did you go?”
I swallow hard. “You want me to steal the horn? Fine. But I’ll need a little help to do so.”
There’s a long, drawn-out pause. “What do you need?”
“You.”
This is the second time I’ve planned to betray the Prince of Dreams.
I wait by an old castle’s ruins, right on the border of the Court of Blood. Trees sprawl over tumbled rock walls, vines snarling around broken towers. It’s as though the forest is trying to reclaim the castle, eating it inch by inch, year by year.
One day, there will be nothing here but trees and future fae will stub their toes on mossy stones and wonder why they’re rectangular.
The eastern road passes by here. It’s one of the least known entry points to the Court of Blood and lightly guarded. There’s no trade into the mountains, and the threat of the Forbidden are far to the north.
Or so the fae think.
Thousands of years ago, when the dragons lived they ruled the world. When the war forced them to treat with the fae, they returned their magic to the cauldron so that their kind could live, and yet a spark remained within their breasts.
The loss of their magic stripped them of their immortality too.
And when they died, it took years for the fae to understand that that spark of magic slowly bled into the world beneath a dragon’s bleached bones.
We call them barrows.
When their bones melded with the soil, they forced the earth around them to become different. Magic leached into stone, and roots, and trees. Old forests grew—the kind of forests that whisper of an ancient time. It slowly seeps outward, infecting the earth around it. Year by year, the barrows grow. They’re an Other World, a place cleaved from the real world in time and space, even though they look the same as the world around them. You can always tell when you enter a dragon’s barrow. It feels like walking through an invisible shock of lightning. It’s just enough to make your breath catch, and then the world around you is a little brighter, and there’s a faint hum like the far-off buzz of cicadas.
Nothing lives in a barrow beyond the trees and the grass. It’s an eerie, silent place. No wind blows. Nothing moves. And yet, there are eyes on you somehow. Invisible eyes watching and judging you. They even say the dragon’s spirit lives on, lost in dreams, and that if you’re not careful, you can be drawn into such dreams yourself.
Few would ever venture inside willingly, but if you find the heart of the barrow, then you can sidestep into another Other World, another barrow.
And walk out of it a thousand miles from where you entered.
The fae don’t use them, considering them haunted. It’s forbidden to enter one, and without a ward against the barrow’s magic, you can be lost to the Other Worlds.
But my father’s been slowly mapping their paths, sending his wraithen scouts to test the pathways. Many don’t return—the issue with exploring such newfound paths is that nobody knows the dangers of a dragon’s dreams until it’s too late. But the risk is work the reward in my father’s eyes.
He yearns to deliver an army right into the heart of any court in the land if he so wishes.
The Blessed fae would be practically defenseless.
But first we have to shatter our curse so his wraithen armies can walk beneath the sunlight without being struck down.
I saunter through an ancient arch of a broken castle, a shiver running over my skin as I exit the barrow. Sound intrudes again. A chatter of squirrels nearby. None of the fae know just how vulnerable they are. They barely even guard these places.
The jingle of tack echoes through the air.
There. Sunlight sparking off something bright. A carriage, by the look of it. One drawn by a brace of matching fae horses, their coats rippling silver beneath the light. I hide in the shadows, my heart skipping a beat.
Keir.
He’s here.
In the flesh.
Suddenly, I can taste betrayal in my mouth and my heart skips a beat. Keir and I spoke once of trust and I remember the look in his eyes when he realized who and what I truly was.
There’s no coming back from that.
For either of us.
But he doesn’t need the horn. He merely wants it in order to control its power.
And I need it.
I watch the carriage spill into the clearing below us, where it draws to a halt and someone steps down from it. I can barely see him. A tall figure, garbed in a cloak. Tugging his gloves from his fingers, he circles the ruins. Looking for me, I think.
Keir.
I Sift through the shadows, watching him stalk through the broken stone towers. His shoulders are broader than I remember.
To see him in my dreams was dangerous enough, but there’s a potency about him in the flesh that can’t be denied. He towers a good five inches over me, and every inch of him is lean, hard-cut muscle. To see him is to be reminded of what he is all over again. A predator in the body of a handsome fae prince. Hard. Dangerous. Lethal. There’s something sinuous about the way he moves, as if, even after centuries of pretending to be fae, the dragon still exists.
“Zemira?” he calls, the wind caressing his shirt against his body.
I Sift through shadows, following him.
“I know you’re here,” he whispers, and somehow the breeze carries his words right to my ear.
I peer from around the stone arch I’m hiding within.
Gone. He’s gone.
I press my back to the stone wall and swallow. I’m still half in the shadows. He can’t see me. But he’ll have sensed me.
Wind stirs through the ruins.
I can almost hear a roughened laugh.
He’s hunting me, and we both know it.
Sound whispers to the left of me—perhaps a boot on stone.
I turn right and slam directly into a hard chest. It’s almost an exact reenactment of the night I first met him.
Gloved hands capture my forearms and the prince’s shadow falls over me. He tears me back out of the shadows, and the shock of sudden light is near blinding. My fae half protects me from the burn of sunlight, but it still hurts my eyes.
> “Here you are,” he breathes, his voice rough-edged with delight.
He’s real. Real and solid, and I can smell his cologne—something spicy that never fails to twist my insides. Hot, golden eyes lock upon me. He’s not even bothering to hide the dragon within him—or maybe now I know it’s there, I can see it.
The first time I laid eyes upon him, he’d been a target, a means to an end. I’d been focusing so hard on my mission—get into the Court of Dreams, ensure nobody broke my cover as the Lady Merisel, and find the Dragon’s Heart—that I’d relegated the actual prince of the court to merely a male I needed to avoid.
Instead, he was everything I could have dreamed of.
I was wraithenborn. A monster in a fae world.
And if I looked back on the events of this summer, it’s easy to see where I went wrong.
The first time a boy kissed me, I was sixteen and preparing for my final trials. The kiss took me by surprise—he was the son of one of my trainers, brought in to spar with me over the autumn—and until that final night, neither of us had thought the best of the other. He was handsome, cocky, frustratingly arrogant. I didn’t even really care for him.
Five of the trainees make it through the final trials, and our particular year was incredibly competitive. I’d spent half the night polishing my blades and trying to calm my racing heart, when Rian gave me a piece of information about the forthcoming trials that might save my life. Maybe he felt sorry for me. Maybe those hours of earnest sparring had earned me some slight reprieve. After years of barely daring to let another into my life, his kindness made me falter where nothing else could have.
It was the first time I let down my walls.
And when I survived, I fell into his bed with a desperation neither of us could quench. I needed some sort of connection to another living being after Soraya’s betrayal. I wanted to be something else, someone else. I wanted to bury myself in Rian’s arms and pretend I was merely a fae princess somewhere in the Blessed lands, holding onto her beloved.