by Bree Barton
“You can call me Mia. I’ve told you a thousand times, no ‘lady’ required.”
“Until you are my princess, you will remain my lady,” he said in his oddly formal way. He stared at her bare arms and flinched.
“My apologies, Your Grace.” The last thing she needed was the prince to report her. “I was performing my ablutions,” she lied.
She seized the velvety gray gloves off her dresser and slid them over her hands. While most girls in the river kingdom wore coarse bullock and deer hide, Mia and Angelyne enjoyed gloves of lamb slinkskin, soft and buttery. There were perks to being the daughters of an assassin. Especially when that assassin led the Circle of the Hunt, the king’s dedicated tribe of Gwyrach Hunters.
Quin cleared his throat. “I’ve come to tell you the final feast has been postponed.”
“Oh? To what do we owe this tragic turn of events?”
“Something about a burnt duck. We will reconvene in one hour.”
Mia wondered why Quin hadn’t sent one of his myriad servants to impart this news. The Kaer was swarming with them, all young, all female. Was there something else he wanted?
They stood angled toward one another in the doorway, studiously avoiding eye contact. He fidgeted with a gold button on the sleeve of his smart green jacket. Quin was wearing the colors of Clan Killian: seasick emerald and scintillating gold.
He cleared his throat again. “I trust you won’t be late?”
“Of course not.”
“Unlike last night.”
“Last night was an anomaly.”
“And the night before.”
So that’s what he wanted: to mock her. She glared at his glittering green eyes, framed by high chiseled cheekbones and a light smattering of freckles across sandy skin. His gold mane of hair curled over his ears in a perpetual state of touslement. Yes, Quin was beautiful. He was also cold and arrogant and completely unknowable. More than anything, Mia wanted to know and be known.
He was right about her being late to dinner; she’d spent the last few evenings mapping the tunnels, preparing for her and Angelyne’s escape. Had she actually fooled herself into thinking she could evade her fate?
She looked at Quin with new and heavy understanding: this would be her husband. Her lifelong mate. Mia had logged very little time with him—too little to know what kind of boy he was—but she knew exactly what kind of man King Ronan was. Clan Killian had ruled Glas Ddir for centuries, glutted on power and the abuses of it. It seemed only natural the prince would take after his father.
Fear sank its teeth into her stomach and she swayed on her feet.
“Are you—” Quin reached out to steady her, then quickly withdrew his hand from her gloved arm. “You’re not going to faint, are you?”
She exhaled. “I’ve never fainted in my life. I’m not that kind of girl.”
What she didn’t say was that his touch had pierced the slinkskin like a dagger. Was it always this unpleasant to be touched by a boy? She didn’t have much personal experience. While other girls were sneaking into empty market stalls to shyly touch their lips to someone else’s, Mia was throwing blades into tree stumps and studying the number of bones it was possible to break in a Gwyrach’s neck.
Quin gestured toward the bed, where Angelyne’s tiny feet peeked out from under the canopy. “Is that your sister?”
“She’s resting.”
“Make sure you wake her within the hour, or she’ll be late, too.”
“Why the sudden interest in punctuality, Your Grace?”
He shifted his weight. “My father demands it.”
A chill snowflaked under Mia’s skin, as if someone were sliding an ice cube along the nape of her neck. The inside of her neck. She did not care for King Ronan. Didn’t care for the way he spoke to his servant girls or looked at her sister. Nor did she care for the pleasure he took in torturing the Gwyrach who’d been captured and brought back to Glas Ddir. She had seen his Hall of Hands.
Mia straightened. “We’ll be in the Gallery in one hour. Worry not.”
Was it her imagination, or did an inch of tension melt from his shoulders?
“Good. My father will be pleased. My mother is already furious at the cooks for ruining the duck—I’d rather not give her one more reason to whine.”
Mia felt the gut punch she always felt when people spoke of their mothers, especially with such obvious disdain. She wanted to grab Quin by the shoulders and shake some sense into his cerebral cortex. Remind him how lucky he was.
“The Hunters are here as well,” he said. “They will join us at the final feast, to ensure we are protected. But you are not to speak to them.”
Anger flared in her chest. She had every right to speak to the Hunters if it pleased her. She had, after all, been training with the Circle for the past three years, poised to take the sacred oath on her eighteenth birthday and pledge her life to tracking and eliminating Gwyrach. The clean logic of the Hunters’ Creed appealed to her: Heart for a heart, life for a life. Though she had never killed a Gwyrach—her father had strictly forbidden it—Mia knew she would not hesitate when it was time.
And then her father had summarily dismissed her from the Circle and announced her wedding plans.
“I will take it under advisement, Your Grace.”
She studied him. When Mia first arrived at the castle, she’d nursed a wild hypothesis that, underneath his ice-cold exterior, Quin might actually have a red beating heart. She searched his green eyes for it—a spark of joy, a terrible secret, a tiny fissure in his veneer. Something. Anything. But if this were a mask, it was permanently frozen to his face, the secrets frozen with it.
The prince lingered in the doorway. What was he still doing there?
“Your buckles,” Quin said.
“My buckles?”
He nodded toward the decorative buckles on her boots.
“They’re very shiny.”
“Thank you?”
The silence was excruciating. They each cast about for something to say.
“Your buckles are shiny, too,” she blurted.
“Thanks much.”
If this were the sort of conversation that would fuel the next fifty years of marriage, she was tempted to take the buckles and stab herself.
“I’ve got to—”
“I should be—”
“Yes,” they said in unison. Without another word, Quin strode down the corridor on his long legs, his reflection flashing off the black onyx walls. He really did look like Wound Man, the lanky male figure on her favorite anatomical plate, minus the various weapons sticking out of his body.
Mia’s fingers thickened, blood crawling through her veins. It was not the first time Quin had left a trail of frostbite in his wake. She couldn’t account for the sluggishness of her hands or the kiss of cold against her cheek. Was this how it felt to be hated? Like sinking into a snowdrift, naked and exposed?
She banished the notion. Hatred wasn’t cold, any more than love was hot. To start assigning meaning to bodily sensations was a dangerous game. The Gwyrach trafficked in sensations, and as long as they roamed free, touch was a battlefield, bodies the instruments of war. For Mia, the casualties had been devastating.
She brushed past her sister, sound asleep. Angelyne could fall asleep faster than anyone she knew. She’d always been that way.
Mia rubbed her hands until the blood was pumping through them once more. She plucked a bundle of sulfyr sticks from her dresser and retrieved the satchel from its hiding place under the bed. Then she stooped over the stone fireplace and brushed aside the mound of ashes. Under the ashes was an iron grate, and beneath it, a trapdoor.
She lifted the grate quietly so as not to wake her sister, then lowered herself into the darkness.
She would pay her mother a visit.
Chapter 3
Bones and Dust
MIA SCRAPED A PINEWOOD sulfyr stick against the coarse rock of the tunnel wall. The sticks, thick as thumbs, were a gift from her father, his latest
spoils from Pembuk, the glass kingdom to the west. They were clearly his attempt to worm his way back into her good graces. It hadn’t worked, but she’d taken them anyway.
Griffin Rose traversed the four kingdoms hunting Gwyrach, and his pockets were always full of exotic gifts. Mia still remembered how, when she was a little girl hungry for adventure, he would unroll crinkling scrolls of parchment paper on the kitchen table, letting her trace her tiny finger over his travels.
“This is the known world,” he’d told her, “carved into four kingdoms.”
“River, Glass, Snow, and Fire!” she’d cried, eager to please.
“Very good, little rose.” Her father had pulled a peppery-spiced chocolate from his pocket, though for Mia the greater reward was always the way he nodded with pleasure when she answered a question correctly. “Now name them in their native tongues.”
Languages came easily to Mia, in the same way mathematics and sciences came easily to her. A language was simply a system of grammar and rules. It was, at least in its early stages, about sticking variables into equations. Mia liked equations. She loved having the right answer.
“Glas Ddir, Pembuk, Luumia, and Fojo Karação,” she’d said proudly.
“Your pronunciation could be better,” her father had said.
The green flame flickered out as dark shapes swam before Mia’s eyes. She struck the stick against the tunnel wall and the fire winked back to life, flooding the corridor with the sour pinch of eggs. Like magic, sulfyr sticks manifested flame.
Not magic. Chemistry. Strike pinewood sulfyr against a rough surface, add a dose of friction, mingle the escaping gases, and green flame nips at your fingertips. She’d learned this from her father during Huntress training. “Sometimes science masquerades as magic,” he’d told her. “But never forget: science requires a cool head. Magic relies on a cruel, unruly heart.”
She clenched the sulfyr stick. Ever since her father auctioned her off to the royals, Mia’s heart had grown increasingly unruly and dangerously cruel. She cupped the tender flame in one palm and reached into her satchel, extracting a hand-drawn map and the compass her father had brought back from Luumia in the south. The sulfyr stick smeared green light into the corridors as she edged forward, the iron needle of the compass spinning left and right on the watery corkboard. Her headache vanished like a teardrop on the sand.
Then it came howling back as she recalled the prince’s words. The Hunters are here, but you are not to speak to them. Until you are my princess, you will remain my lady. Even the “my” soured her stomach. As if she were a pretty bauble or a fluffy spaniel at Quin’s feet, waiting to have her ears scratched.
Chattel in a silken dress.
Trinket in a golden noose.
Of course, outside the fortified walls of the Kaer, girls all over Glas Ddir were prodded into marriages “for safekeeping.” Some unions were violent. Even when they weren’t, the women were relegated to a lifetime of cooking and cleaning, birthing children and feeding them, like good-natured housecats purring in the sun. Had she really thought she was immune?
The Gwyrach were wicked, but the king was wicked, too. He had built his kingdom on the bones of fear and terror. The Gwyrach looked like normal women. When that comely girl in the market brushed against your arm, it was impossible to know if her touch was an innocent blunder or the last sensation you would ever feel. In the copious brothels encircling Kaer Killian like a corset, men might feel a spike in their pulse or a quick stiffening of their other parts, then suddenly collapse onto the soft feathered floors, their hearts overgorged with blood.
In the absence of obvious signifiers distinguishing Gwyrach from non-Gwyrach, all women were closely watched. Their own husbands and children feared them. Even in the safety of their homes, they were forbidden to remove their gloves. King Ronan issued law after law to restrict their movements. “We are committed to keeping the good women of the river kingdom safe,” said the royal decree. “We are acting out of duty and love.”
Mia wasn’t sure when love had come to mean a cage.
She’d made a wrong turn.
The passageway dead-ended into a small circular chamber, so low she had to hunch. She hadn’t been here before. Overhead, a rusted iron door was wedged into the low ceiling. She unlatched the chain and gave the handle a hard tug, releasing a shower of dust.
She hoisted herself halfway through the hole. Folds of purple velvet obscured her view; she gathered the lush cloth and pushed it aside, inhaling the earthy scent of lilacs and tallow. Rows of candles in thin brass flutes illuminated a small octagonal room. This was the Sacristy, annexed to the Royal Chapel. Mia could see into the Chapel, too, a room she had intentionally avoided. Impish fat-bottomed angels peered down from vaulted, gold-limned ceilings, aiming their love arrows at the altar—the very altar where she and Quin were to be married the following eve.
She heard a loud metallic crack and ducked back into her hiding place just as Tristan, the duke, strode into the Sacristy. Tristan was twenty, Quin’s second cousin, son to some long-dead cousin of the king. He was broad-shouldered and muscular, with fierce white skin and day-old scruff cutting dark shadows across his cheeks. Angie found him attractive, but Mia thought him brutish. The duke was studying to become a clerig, a vocation that seemed strikingly at odds with his temperament. Despite his youth and inexperience, the king had agreed to let him perform the royal wedding ceremony, much to Mia’s chagrin.
At the moment, however, Tristan was swinging a pewter candlestick in a wide arc, using it to bludgeon each thin brass flute. With every crack, another candle went skittering across the checkered marble floors.
“We have come here today”—crack—“by royal decree of Ronan, son of Clan Killian, uncontested king of Glas Ddir”—crack—“to witness this most hallowed union.” Crack, crack.
So he was practicing the wedding vows. While also creating a mess for the servant girls to clean up, destruction for the sheer sake of destruction. Charming.
Mia dropped lightly back into the tunnel. She pulled the door shut overhead and latched the chain. Then she retraced her steps, murky light leaking through her fingers and painting moss-green shapes on the walls. A story told in shadows.
The crypt was empty. It always was. No one else in Kaer Killian seemed interested in roving the catacombs.
Moonlight dripped in from some unseen crack, etching a pearly white strip on the tombs. Mia walked among them, trailing her fingers over the vaults and sepulchers, until she found the name she wanted. Wynna Rose.
“Hello, Mother.” She knelt quietly beside her mother’s tomb, pressing her palms into the cool gray stone. “I’ve come to see you before my wedding day.”
The silence was all consuming. It stole into the hollows of Mia’s heart.
Her mother’s vault was unadorned but lovely, a far cry from the ornate mausoleums around it. Her father had commissioned a mason to carve a simple image of a plum tree on his wife’s tomb. Delicately Mia traced the grooves, drawing her fingers up the slender trunk, then over the serpentine boughs. Her mother had always loved trees, and snow plums were her favorite.
The part of the carving Mia loved best, however, was something most people missed: a solitary bird perched on a branch, staring up at a round moon. A touch of life on a cold, dead stone.
This was the one good thing about being confined to the castle for the last few weeks: Mia had been able to spend time with her mother. When Wynna died three years earlier, the king had demanded her body stay in the crypt of Kaer Killian, making her the only non-royal in the catacombs—and adding to the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death.
When Mia shut her eyes, she could still see her mother’s body, luminous red hair strewn over the cottage floor. Gloves snarled beside her, the moonstone askew at her throat. Eyes open and forever black.
Killed without a single scratch.
When Mia thought of the Gwyrach who had done this, her blood turned to black oil in her veins. She wanted mo
re than anything to find her. To make her pay.
Hatred will only lead you astray. Sometimes love is the stronger choice.
The last words her mother spoke, engraved like an epitaph in Mia’s mind.
“Little rose.”
She gave a start as her father emerged from the shadows.
“What are you doing here, my little rose?”
He looked tired. She noted the stoop of his shoulders and the deep grooves in his face, a face that was an older, wearier version of her own: same thin nose, fair cheeks, and thirsty gray eyes. When she was a little girl, he would kiss her on each eyelid before tucking her in at night. “Two dark ships bearing secrets,” he’d say. “Batten the hatches, bring down the sails.”
“I came to see Mother,” Mia said.
“Your mother isn’t here.” He held her gaze, and for a moment she thought she saw something ignite behind his eyes. Then he looked away. “A body without a soul is simply bones and dust.”
Precious bones, she thought. Precious dust.
He offered her his arm. “Come. Walk with me.”
“Where?” The word singed her tongue. “Down the aisle to my betrothed?”
“I have something for you. Something I think you’ll want.” When she didn’t take his arm, he reached out and took her compass, dropping it in his pocket so casually it infuriated her. “This won’t do you any good. But what I have might.”
Chapter 4
Blank
THE CATACOMBS TAPERED INTO a small square room, then a long corridor, and Mia’s father led the way, no map required. His beard was salted white, but he was still light on his feet. No matter how fervently she trained in the practical skills of hunting—tracking, mapping, survival—her father was still the master. Griffin Rose was the greatest Hunter the river kingdom had ever known.
“Lightly, now,” he said. “This path is unforgiving.”
They were walking underneath the grove of snow plum trees. Through a fissure in the stone, Mia saw them bending to the wind. There were one thousand trees, a personal gift to King Ronan from the queen of the snow kingdom. They blossomed only after the first frost, when their silver branches grew thick and heavy with succulent purple snow plums.