by Leah Cypess
Lizette took her hand, and together they sank into the floor and reemerged through the ceiling of the banquet room, floating gracefully to the floor. A few people glanced at them, then looked away.
At a table in the corner, Lady Ardun was picking at the fish course, and her husband was watching her with fear in his eyes. Emilie observed them for a moment, wondering what would happen when Lady Bianca figured out the truth. Somehow, she was sure Lady Ardun had plans in place.
Lord Ardun glanced up and saw her. Emilie held his eyes for a moment, then allowed Lizette to pull her the other way. Together they made their way into the center of the glittering room, while around them rose the carefree laughter of the living and the dead.
Excerpt from Nightspell
A warrior princess . . .
a palace filled with ghosts . . .
a thirst for revenge . . . a heartbreaking choice.
Read on for a preview of
Leah Cypess’s full-length novel about two sisters in the terrifying kingdom of Ghostland
Chapter One
Darri didn’t see the ghost until he was upon her, a solid weight that dropped from the branches above and threw her sideways off the saddle. Because he was solid, she didn’t realize at first that he was dead. She hit the ground with a thud and rolled to her feet, pulling her dagger from her boot. By the time she was standing, she had already thrown it.
The dagger plunged into the man’s chest with a thunk, and he laughed at her. He was a large, ruddy man wearing a fine set of riding clothes and a short cape. As he laughed, his body slowly faded, so that even in the torchlight Darri could see the trees through him. Her dagger dropped straight down through his body and disappeared into the dark mass of ferns that covered the forest floor.
Darri’s breath twisted in her throat. Her horse—a battle-trained stallion who could face a mounted charge without flinching—neighed shrilly in terror and reared. The dead man laughed louder. He became solid again, bent to pick up her dagger, and lunged at her.
Darri’s body reacted instinctively, whirling sideways as he rushed past her. She was poised to kick the dagger out of his hand, but her mind betrayed her. Terror burned through her chest, and by the time she swallowed it, the moment had passed. The specter’s side was no longer unguarded. He turned and came at her again, and the scent of rotting flesh filled the air.
Her attacker jerked suddenly, an expression of surprise wiping the laughter from his face. And then he was gone.
When his hand vanished, Darri’s dagger dropped again. With it fell another—the blade that had been hurled into the ghost’s back. That one gleamed with the unmistakable glint of silver before it disappeared into the ferns.
Darri took a deep breath and looked up at her brother, who was leaning back in the saddle to recover from his throw. His face wore its usual unruffled expression.
Darri willed her voice steady. It didn’t quite work. “I thought the terms of our invitation specified that we bring no silver weapons.”
There was a moment of silence, broken only by the wind and the snorting of her horse. Then Varis’s face shifted into its second most common expression: resigned contempt, as if he couldn’t believe how stupid she was. “We had better keep going,” he said. “Retrieve the knives.”
Darri glared up at him. Over the past ten nights of riding, her patience for Varis had grown shorter and shorter. “I didn’t exactly get off the horse to dawdle.”
“Just get back on!”
He sounded nervous now, which Darri counted as a victory. With deliberately sauntering steps, she walked over and handed him the silver blade, then patted his mount’s hindquarters. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to try and delay us.”
He leaned over to slide the dagger into his boot sheath, then straightened. “It wouldn’t surprise me if you did.”
“That,” Darri snapped, “is because you don’t know anything about me anymore.”
“Nor,” Varis said, gathering up the reins, “am I interested.”
She flinched despite herself, and suddenly the whole thing wasn’t worth it. She should have known better than to start with Varis; he always hurt her, and she never even scratched his imperturbable surface. Darri mounted her horse without another word.
It had been years since she had even wanted a reaction from Varis—four years, to be exact. But being alone with him in this dark, deadly forest played tricks on her memory. It made her feel afraid, as if she was once again a small girl relying on her older brother to protect her.
She had better get past that fast.
She closed her eyes, trusting her horse to follow the path, thinking as hard as she could of sunlight and blue sky and empty plains. Until now, the mental image had kept her just at the edge of panic; she tried to let it fill her inner vision, pushing out the fear.
It wasn’t working anymore. Her arm ached where she had hit the ground, and her grip on the reins was so tight that her horse snorted in protest and tossed his head. She unclenched her fingers and tried to breathe, opening her eyes. All around her, the shadows shifted among the tangled trees. She wanted to be home, where the dead were safely hidden beneath the earth, and you could see an enemy coming for miles. Where people rode during the day and slept at night, instead of the other way around.
Despite herself, Darri looked back. Even with the moon nearly full, the forest was so dark it could have hidden a thousand ghosts—or none at all. The brambles leered at them. Hundreds of eyes could be watching them pass, hundreds of twisted, undead things.
Here be ghosts, the maps said, and that was all they had to say about the kingdom known as Ghostland. They were riding toward a castle where, the legends whispered, the dead outnumbered the living. Each of the dead seeking vengeance and nearly impossible to fight. They could kill the living with any weapon they pleased, but only silver or sunlight could harm a ghost.
Varis prodded his horse into a faster walk and scanned the shadows between the thick tree trunks, as if expecting another ghost to leap out from between them. Darri imitated his movement, her shoulder blades tightening. The thought of another attack was enough to tip the balance between pride and fear. She took a deep breath and said, “Do you think it was alone?”
For a moment she was sure Varis wasn’t going to answer. Then he shrugged and said, “Probably. If there were two, they would have attacked together.”
“Why did it attack us at all?”
Varis glanced over his shoulder at her, long enough for her to see that the contempt was back. “Because we will control their country, one way or another. For all the talk of alliances and marriage, some of them must realize it.”
Great. Wonderful.
Callie, she thought, and called up a memory of her sister: Callie with her arms spread to her sides, twirling around and around in the long grass with her small round face tilted back, giggling uncontrollably. The memory was an old one—Callie had been perhaps five years old, Darri eight—but it was the one Darri had fallen asleep to for more nights than she could count.
Except she always woke up to another old memory: Varis sneaking into her tent to tell her the news. She had been eager to see him, thinking he was coming for one of his usual visits, to regale her in whispers with the tale of a daring raid or a successful hunt. Instead he had told her, in calm concise tones, that Callie would be sent to marry the prince of Ghostland. That their little sister was a reasonable price to pay for the one territory on the east coast they couldn’t easily conquer.
He had seemed surprised when she erupted from her bedroll, but not too surprised to grab her by the wrist before she made it to the door flap. “Darri. I know it’s hard. But no sacrifice is too great.”
“This one is,” Darri had raged at him, trying ineffectually to free herself. “This is Callie you’re talking about, Varis, not a herd of horses or a tactical battle advantage. Father can’t do this to her. He can’t. I’ll stop it.”
Her brother had looked at her with his blue eyes narrow
ed, disbelief slowly turning to disgust, and said, “I won’t let you.”
That was the last time he had ever snuck into her tent.
Now Varis shifted in the saddle, and his voice sharpened. “I think it would be best not to mention this incident when we get to the castle.”
“Because in order to explain what happened, we would have to admit you were carrying a silver dagger?”
His response was another look of cool contempt, and Darri had had just about enough of those. She wasn’t stupid, no matter how many stupid things she had done in her rage over Callie’s betrayal. Maybe it was time Varis noticed that. She spurred her horse forward to ride beside him, shouldering his stallion sideways so they could both fit on the forest path, ignoring both his raised eyebrows and the branches that brushed along her left arm. “I know what we’re doing here, Varis.”
“I should hope so. It’s been explained to you in some detail.”
And he had been repeating it twice daily since they left: the alliance with Ghostland was crucial, especially now that their forces were ready to turn west. They didn’t have time to wait for Callie to come of age. Instead it would be Darri who married the prince of Ghostland, and she had better remember her responsibility to her people.
The fact that Darri never argued didn’t seem to reassure him at all. Varis was not stupid either.
She shouldn’t argue now, she knew; there was nothing to gain. But the words came tumbling out anyhow.
“I stopped listening to the explanations after your first attempt,” she said. “They’re not going to start making sense because you keep repeating them. Nobody bothered to ride here with Callie when you traded her away. Why do I get treated better than she did?”
“Someone has to watch you,” Varis snapped, “to make sure you do your duty. You’ve made that perfectly clear.”
An overhead branch snagged her hair, and she reached up with one hand to wrench it away. The pain in her scalp was welcome; it felt deserved. “Because I love my sister more than I love our father’s ambitions. Unforgivable.”
Varis’s fingers tightened on the reins. “There is nothing more important than maintaining our security. Don’t you remember what it was like when we were the weakest of the tribes, when anyone could hurt us at will?”
He knew she did. Neither of them would ever forget the night their mother was kidnapped and killed, the night their two older brothers had died trying to protect her. Callie had been just a baby, wailing for her mother without understanding that she was gone forever. It had been Varis who had wept with Darri, and held her, for night after night as their father prepared for war. And then left her behind to go to war with him.
She didn’t want to remember that, or to think about how much he had changed when he came back. How she had closed her eyes to the changes in him, followed his lead, wanted exactly what he wanted . . . until the night she finally realized how far he would go.
Varis drew in a breath, let it out, and—in the moment it took his horse to step over a fallen log—became cool and remote again. “But now you care about nothing but Callie. So you should be happy that the two of you will be together again.”
Darri lost control of the reins for a moment, and her horse hit his hind leg on the log and stumbled. She regained her balance and turned in the saddle, this time ignoring the branches that caught at her hair. “Callie will go back with you! Once I marry Prince Kestin—”
“She can help you settle in.” Varis spurred his horse forward, leaving her with a view of his rigid back and his horse’s swishing tail. “Her experience will be valuable to you as you learn the ways of the court.”
Darri watched openmouthed as his horse’s tail flicked against her stallion’s face, making her mount snort and shake his head. That was so like Varis—to assume that Callie would still be loyal, would still devote herself to the Raellian conquest, even after her life had been traded away.
Let him assume it, she thought as she let her horse fall back. Let him assume whatever he wanted. It would make her task easier.
Because regardless of her father’s true reasons for sending them to Ghostland, Darri was here for one purpose only: to get Callie out. And not Varis or her father or all the dead men in Ghostland were going to stop her.
Prince Kestin, Callie noted, was brooding. He had been gloomy for several nights now, and it made him look exceptionally handsome—he had the sort of long, intense face that seemed made for deep thought, and always looked a bit incongruous when he laughed. For most of the banquet, Callie had thought that was the reason for the brooding. But now he had taken to drinking, which was a bad sign.
“They’ll be here before daybreak,” Jano said, materializing in the empty chair next to hers. As Callie turned to look at him, Jano went solid. “I just heard from one of the scouts.”
Callie smiled, knowing it wouldn’t fool him, and looked down at her plate. So her siblings were riding at night. Day and night were reversed in Ghostland to accommodate the dead, but she wouldn’t have thought Darri and Varis would follow that custom until they had to. On the other hand, it was smart that they had given themselves a few days to adjust before reaching the castle. Varis’s idea, probably.
Jano followed her gaze. “You’ve barely eaten a bite all night. Aren’t you excited to see your sister?”
She ignored him. He might look like a ten-year-old child, but in truth he was hundreds of years old. Far too old to get away with this type of rudeness.
“The scout said she’s not as ugly as we had feared.” Jano apparently didn’t notice that he was being ignored. He grinned at her, looping one leg over the arm of the chair. “She’s wearing breeches, though. And riding astride, like a man.”
“All the plains women ride astride,” Callie snapped.
“How barbaric. Lucky that you were brought up in a civilized country.”
A traitorous part of her thought he was right, and was ashamed of her sister in her mannish clothes. Callie looked over Jano’s head at Prince Kestin, who was still scowling at his food as if it had offended him.
Darri would be seventeen now, only four years younger than Kestin. Did her father really imagine that would make her a more acceptable bride? True, Callie had been too young, but that was only part of the problem. The real issue was that the Ghostlanders didn’t concern themselves with anyone outside their own kingdom. She had spent the last four years in an uncertain status, more an unwelcome guest than a hostage, and in all that time nobody had ever seemed to care why she was there. Even the royalty here married whomever they pleased within their own country, and had never before bothered seeking out foreigners for the sake of alliances.
Not that it was relevant anymore. Not for Prince Kestin.
A commotion erupted near the front of the banquet hall. The Guardian went striding past them, his two swords crossed at his back, the silver one catching the lamplight. The black iron mask on his face gleamed too, not quite as shiny as his sword. All at once the hall was silent. Prince Kestin looked up from his food, his face bleak and still.
Oh, burial plots. Callie shoved her hands under the folds of her skirt to hide their shaking. “You said before daybreak!”
Jano noticed the motion. His teeth gleamed white as he smiled. “Is it not before daybreak?”
Callie bit her tongue to keep from saying something she would regret later. Annoying as Jano was, she couldn’t lose her only real friend at court. And to be fair, most ghosts liked to act as if they were above the petty concerns of the living. Deadheads, some of the living called them. Usually behind their backs.
But Callie was still too foreign—would always, she knew, be too foreign—to dare say anything negative about the dead. So she just gave Jano a nasty look before turning to watch the spectacle.
Varis strode in first. Her brother hadn’t changed much: tall and powerfully built, with a blunt, roughly hewn face. To her Raellian eyes, he looked underdressed without a sword on his hip. To her Ghostland eyes, he looked underdr
essed period. He had changed from his riding clothes and was wearing a black silk cape and breeches, his hair bound back in a long, tight braid. The silk meant this was finery, but it was ragged and coarse compared to even the simplest garments worn by the Ghostlanders. King Ais, in his velvet-trimmed robe and elaborately embroidered cape, his hair cut neatly at his shoulders, was clearly not sure whether this was the prince or an advance retainer.
Of all the people in the hall, Callie was certain that only she could tell Varis was annoyed. He bowed from the waist. “Your Majesty. On behalf of my royal father, we extend our greetings to you and your court.”
King Ais blinked only once before beginning his formal response—which would certainly be five times as long as Varis’s, though it wouldn’t say anything more. Callie didn’t bother paying attention. She wondered where Darri was.
People were watching her, she knew. Waiting to see how she would react. Wondering if she had truly been civilized—tamed, a voice in her mind whispered—or if she would revert to type once she was back in touch with her own kind. Her skin felt stretched tight over her face, and she had to dig her fingernails into her palms to keep herself still.
“Thank you,” Varis said, jerking her attention back to the throne. “May I present my sister, Princess Darriniaka of Raellia?”
She had forgotten how fast things moved among her people. How quickly you had to respond among horses and the living. A Ghostlander would have spoken about Darri for at least ten minutes before introducing her. For a painful moment, Callie missed that quickness, and hated herself for being a step behind.
Then Darri walked in, and she banished the thought. That was a weakness she couldn’t afford.
Darri, too, was dressed in finery; but unlike Varis, who was simply drab, she looked ridiculous. Her pale pink gown was a cacophony of faded fashions, probably cobbled together from traders’ reports of Ghostland dress, and she walked jerkily in the tight underskirt. Her hair flowed down her back like a horse’s mane, and her skin was a sun-baked brown. Kestin leaned against the back of his throne, looking momentarily taken aback; then he composed his face into stiff politeness. Callie flushed with shame for her sister.