Dedication
To Caitlin
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Acknowledgments
About the Author
By Emily B. Martin
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
Prologue
Colm Alastaire clutched a stitch in his side, his lungs burning from hours of sucking in the cold mountain air. His beard was thick with hoarfrost where his breath had frozen on it, turning the normally reddish hairs icy white. He was almost to the crest of the Palisades, having started up the towering escarpment just before sunset. Now it was the deep part of the night, the almost-full moon hanging low in a winter-clear sky. It lit the massive freshwater lake at the foot of the cliffs with stark silver, the islands black against the glow. Despite the alien beauty of his home country down below, he didn’t pause to admire the view. He had a mission to accomplish, and if he wasn’t safely back at Blackshell by midmorning, Mona would have questions he couldn’t answer without lying.
He was going to be doing enough lying as it was.
He adjusted his cloak and continued on warily, aware that his wheezing breath and the crunching of his boots on the snow would give him away to any sharp-eared Silvern rangers. He didn’t want to run afoul of a Woodwalker’s scouting party, as that would mean getting dragged even farther up the mountainside to the Silverwood palace, and there was no way he could keep his trip a secret if the Royal Guard had him in custody. No, he had to make his rendezvous, or everything would be ruined. Despite the fatigue in his legs and the numbness in his toes, he picked up his pace, making for the dark line of leafless trees, still as statues in the windless night.
“I could shoot you in a thunderstorm with my eyes closed.”
He skidded to a halt on the icy rock, his heart rate spiking. She was standing so still at the edge of the trees that his gaze had passed over her as part of the landscape. But there she was, her feet spread on the snow, the moonlight glinting off the silver pin on her lapel. Despite her cloak covering the rest of her uniform, that pin and the double band of fringe on her boots communicated her office—a Woodwalker, a steward and protector of the Silverwood Mountains, charged with keeping interlopers like him from harming the forest and its residents. Another glimmer of silver across her brow betrayed her other title, one she took to with significantly less fervor: Queen of the Silverwood.
“Honestly,” she said. “Do you have to try to make that much noise?”
His alarm ebbed into relief, and he bent double with his hands on his knees, his chest heaving.
Despite her chastisement, she unwrapped her cloak from her shoulders and produced two flasks—one with lukewarm water meant to refresh him after the long, painful struggle up the Palisades in the dead of night, the other with corn whiskey to chase away the chill.
He took a grateful draw at both canteens, spluttering against the whiskey. “Where are all your scouts?”
“I sent the party that patrols the ridge down to Hellbender Bottoms to break up ice dams,” she said. “Not their typical assignment, but they’re smart enough not to ask questions. There’s nobody on the Palisades tonight except us.”
“Did anyone see you?” he asked.
“Did anyone see you,” she muttered. “Did anyone see you, you who snuck a rowdy bunch of cutfoot divers through the middle of a populated mountain range.”
“I’m serious, Mae. I don’t want word getting back to the lake.”
“We’ll pretend we’re having an affair,” she replied.
“That’s not funny.”
“Oh, sure it is. Think of the look on Mona’s face.”
“Think of the look on Valien’s,” he admonished. “What would he say?”
“I’d say get on with it, or take it somewhere else,” mumbled a groggy voice from under the trees, making Colm jump again. “Leastwise, let a man get as decent a sleep as he can in below-freezing temperatures.”
“Val never did like sleeping outdoors,” Mae admitted as the king shifted in the darkness behind her, trying to bundle his bedroll around his exposed ears. “It always made him testy.” She raised her voice slightly. “That’s what comes from having a scented pillow under one’s pretty face since infancy.”
“He came with you?” While her voice rose, Colm’s dropped to an urgent whisper, his breath clouding before his face. “Why?”
Mae looked back at him. “I know you have reason to believe otherwise, Colm, but I don’t actually enjoy lying to people—least of all my husband. Besides, we hadn’t camped together in over a year—we missed the good old days.”
There was something that sounded like a soldier’s curse from under the blankets.
Colm shook himself. He couldn’t worry about Valien—the king had far more loyalty to his wife than to the queen of Lumen Lake, and if Mae requested a secret be kept, Valien would take death over giving it away. Dismissing his unease, Colm reached into his quilted tunic and pulled out a thick packet of parchment, weatherproofed with beeswax.
Mae’s gaze fell on it—and now she was the one who hesitated before ultimately taking it. She looked warily at the inscription on the front and cleared her throat.
“Colm . . . are you sure about this?”
“Yes. Positive. You know what it could mean.”
“I don’t like getting wrapped up with Alcoro.” She looked up at him, the moonlight two pinpricks in her sharp brown eyes. “And certainly not behind your sister’s back.”
“Mona wouldn’t understand,” he said, ignoring the massive twinge of guilt in his gut. “I’ll tell her—eventually. But not yet. Trust me.”
“I guess I’ll have to.” She tucked the parchment into her own tunic. “I’ll send it with a rider as soon as we get back to the palace.”
“Thank you.”
“But you know that it could be weeks—maybe months before it gets there?” she added. “We’re not even sure where she is. We’re not even sure if she’s . . .”
Still alive, Colm finished for her in his head even as he fought against the tightness in his chest.
“I know,” he said. It had been eating away at him since his sister and Mae had returned from their disastrous trip to Cyprien. “But it can’t be helped.” He nodded out at the lake, as if offering it as proof of his—probably ruinous—convictions, and he drew in a breath. “Queen Gemma needs to know about the cave.”
Chapter 1
Treason.
The story of my life.
At least, most of my life.
Early on, it was a blissfully unknown concept, a blank space in my childhood. But then, one day, it morphed into a looming, shadowed specter and abruptly devoured everything I’d taken for truth.
It had hung around, that word—treason—for years, slowly decaying, but occasionally popping up at important crossroads, dragged out of the closet like an unwanted gift I couldn’t get rid of. Something to be pored over, poked, prodded. The same questions, asked again and again. I was relieved, then, when the whispers of treason went largely silent in the past few years.
Until five weeks ago, when I betrayed the Seventh King and the country of Alcoro to our enemies.
I knew it had been five weeks because my cycle had come and gone again, and because of the tick marks I was keeping on a sheet of parchment tacked over the cramped writing desk in the equally cramped study of this cramped place the guards all called the Retreat but was really just an elaborate prison.
The Retreat had been built six generations previously to house a prince who had killed a rival over an academic spat. Since then it had become a place to put members of the royal family who had strayed outside the lines of propriety—a senile queen with a penchant for removing her clothes in public, a sickly princess who suffered from narcolepsy, a king who liked to release his anxiety by setting fire to his belongings.
And now me.
It was three miles outside the city, at the end of a lonely track on the canyon rim. It was a single story, made of whitewashed adobe with pudgy corners and consisting of a kitchen and dining area, a little study, a washroom, and a bedroom. There was a courtyard that was almost twice as big as the footprint of the house, and it would have been comparatively pleasant if not for the twelve-foot high wall that encircled the perimeter, blocking any view of the canyon or surrounding sagebrush flats. A straggly cottonwood tree grew in the middle of the yard, along with some sage and a single prickly pear. I’d heard the narcoleptic princess had planted beds of wildflowers during her tenure here, but I couldn’t say for certain myself, as everything was cloaked in snow.
I shivered at the diamond-paned window in the study, my face reflected in the rippled glass. Of the five weeks since the disaster in Dismal Green, I’d spent three of them here. The first week I had spent in a cell in Bellemere while my folk put all their effort into tracing Queen Mona, Queen Ellamae, and Rou Roubideaux, hoping to recapture them before they could leave the country. The second week I’d spent locked in a carriage as it bumped along the Alosia River and over the Stellarange Mountains. From there it was down into the capital city of Callais, where we bypassed the dungeons deep in the bowels of the palace and headed directly here, which told me they either hadn’t made up their minds about hanging me or couldn’t spare the time.
I’d had only one visitor since arriving here—a clerk, who came to take a written statement on everything that had happened since we’d left the dock in Port Juaro in October to sail to Lilou. She was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t recall her name, which surprised me—I thought I knew most of the clerks at Stairs-to-the-Stars. But I suppose I’d never interacted with the one in charge of prisoners. She’d seemed to be freezing the whole time she was here. She’d hunched over her clipboard behind thick spectacles, with the sleeve of her nondominant hand pulled over her fingers and her hair engulfed in a woolen cap. I’d offered to stoke the fire in the little cast-iron stove, but she just shook her head and continued scratching at her parchment. I spent what seemed to be a relatively short time dictating considering all that had happened—the meeting with Queen Mona and Queen Ellamae in Lilou, the attack on the ship, the abduction by the Roubideaux brothers into the swamp, the string of rooms I was locked inside, the confrontation on the banks of Dismal Green. The clerk made only nominal notes at each point of interest before nodding and declaring she needed to inspect the villa to make a security report. One of the guards accompanied her as she tottered around the periphery of the wall, poking at places where the adobe was crumbling and inspecting the cottonwood tree to be sure none of the branches could provide an escape over the wall. She drilled the guard on their schedules and watch posts. She spent a great deal of time studying a little tile fountain at the back of the yard, dry and buried in snow, which might have held lilies or reeds on some distant sunny day. Satisfied, it seemed, she made a few more notes and left without a word or glance in my direction.
That was ten days ago. The only other human presence in this forsaken place were my guards and the cook who came in every other day to prepare stew and cornbread. The leftovers I was merely to place outside, covered, to be reheated and eaten the next day.
It would be no secret to say my spirits were lower than they had been in a very long time. Even with the disastrous events that had occurred in the past year, at least I had had a job to do, a tacit understanding of my role and responsibilities.
And at least I wasn’t utterly alone.
I spent the time writing, documenting the details the prison clerk had glossed over in her report. How Lyle Roubideaux had shown me his notes on incendiary technology that made our chemists and engineers look like children tinkering with sticks and string. How his brother, Rou, had been unfailingly kind to me, almost enough to make me forget I was his country’s prisoner and political leverage. How Queen Mona had sewn impeccably stitched collars onto my shifts to hide my neck. How Celeno had stared at me, stunned, after I’d thrown the flash grenade that let her and Rou escape down the river.
I left out my wondering if he was ever going to bother looking at me again.
When I finished that, I turned to journaling my daily events, but most of that consisted of washed, ate, journaled. I tried to read, but there were only a few books in the villa, all religious texts, full of theorizing and postulating on the Prophecy of the Prism, which itself was stitched into a thick tapestry that was nailed into the wall of the bedroom.
We are creatures oF The Light,
and we know it iS perfect.
the seventh king OF THE CANYONS Will rise to bring
the wealth and prosperity of a thousand years.
Peace shall come from Wealth.
I am a prism, made to scatter light.
Beneath the archaic cyphers were the two pictorial images, one of a human figure, which most assumed was the Prism himself, and one of a six-pointed star, which had been adopted as our national symbol. My fingers itched whenever I looked at this tapestry—whoever had sewn it had made the star slightly lopsided, and if I’d had a needle and thread, I’d have ripped out the stitches to get it right despite my underdeveloped needlework skills. As it was, I tried in large part to simply ignore the tapestry, a reminder that at present, I was still in the ongoing process of failing my hopes and plans in every possible way.
I longed for my inks and sketchbooks. My mind was trapped without them, stuck in a place even journaling couldn’t shake. I tried sketching with the quill and found it maddening, the ink never lasting long enough to get a good stroke. I attempted to fashion a brush out of frayed strings from the tapestry in my bedroom, but it was crude and left sloppy lines. So I settled on charcoal, conserving my few precious nibs for sketching only. The results were smudgy and flat, but it was infinitely better than nothing.
But none of these meager activities were enough to fully distract myself from my predicament, and more often than not, I sat idle in the little study, staring blankly out the window at the frozen courtyard. Time was slipping away, bit by bit, filling me with the same anxious dread I’d carried with me in Cyprien. That country was rebelling, fighting back, but Alcoro’s military presence was more organized and better armed than theirs. If my folk managed to regain their hold, any number of consequences could follow, each one with a potentially higher death toll than the first. My thoughts often landed on the shocking bit of news Queen Mona and Rou had given me in the bayou—that the sudden Cypri uprising was in large part thanks to an impending military draft designed to muster a force to march against Paroa. Control the ports, control the trade. Control the coast, control the arteries of wealth to and from the Eastern World.
The thought made my stomach go sour. I’d fought that draft—I’d stalled and harangued and petitioned our council to abandon the idea. But Celeno had been ill all that time, fragmenting my focus and adding a layer of tension to the council’s proceedings. It didn’t help that there seemed to be constant whispers, nudges toward approving the draft. I knew where they must be coming from, but the Prelate never made her arguments in the open, instead weaving them skillfully into prayer and Devotion and readin
gs from the Book of the Prophecy, adding to the building conviction that this truly was a stepping-stone in Alcoro’s divinely guided path.
Still, I’d managed to convince Celeno to call instead for an attempt at diplomacy in Lilou. At least, I thought I had. It was only after talks with Mona and Ellamae had literally gone up in flames that I realized he had given his approval for the Cypri draft without my knowing.
And now, every day that passed seemed to add to some phantasmal death count—if Alcoro regained control of Cyprien, it would only fuse the need to spread our control up the coast, spilling blood and wasting lives in all three countries. And if Alcoro didn’t regain control of Cyprien, who knew what measures the council and the Prelate would deem appropriate. We would be cut off from the main trade routes, facing our own dwindling resources and the looming threat of an unfulfilled Prophecy—it made for dire possibilities. A ruinous last-ditch military effort at the least, with a distinct probability of civil war.
The thought constantly made my head spin, leaving me dizzy and dismayed at my dwindling options.
Yes, I was very, very short on time.
I was in just such a state on my tenth day, gnawing my lip and watching the clouds gather in what promised to be a full-fledged snowstorm. I was wondering whether I might find some success in penning a letter somehow disguised as an academic query to my old biology tutor—all my other requests to send letters had been ignored by the guards—when I heard the rattle of keys and the creak of the wrought-iron gate out front. I looked back over my shoulder as the door to the villa opened.
Who would be coming in now?
One of the guards from the perimeter wall appeared in the doorway.
“You have a visitor,” he said. He stepped aside, and like a ghost from the shadows, the Prelate stood on the threshold.
Shaula Otzacamos possessed the innate ability to make me feel like I’d misspoken even before I opened my mouth. Her steely gray hair was pulled back in a tight bun under her star band, a plain one set with three flat glass beads, unlike the overlarge faceted one I still wore despite my imprisonment. Her fur-lined cloak was black, with none of the heavy embroidery that was popular in court. In fact, the only embellishment besides her star band was a large, polished prism that hung on her chest.
Creatures of Light, Book 3 Page 1