by Page Morgan
Silently and quickly, a cloaked figure came into the circle of light. My hand was on the knife handle in my boot before my eyes adjusted. It was a woman, her hooded cloak hiding her face in shadow.
“Huntsman, my lady wishes to complain about her dinner.” One of Mara’s handmaids. I frowned at her; this one looked taller than any of the four I’d seen traveling with the princess. She’d spoken loudly, drawing the attention of a few guards. A moment later, they looked away, uninterested.
I set my plate down and took my time wiping the grease from my fingers. “What is her complaint?”
The handmaid entered the lean-to, and crouched before the fire. She peered up at me, the light from the flames now showing her face. I shot to my feet. It was Mara.
“Sit, Huntsman, please,” she said softly, drawing the hood forward some more.
I did as she asked, my eyes jumping to the guards. “My lady, what are you doing here?”
Assured the guards were ignoring us, I looked at her. But like a scolded pupil, I couldn’t meet her eyes.
“I need to speak to you,” she whispered, sounding as desperate as she had the night in her bedchamber. I hadn’t listened to her then. I nodded once to let her know I was now.
Her lower lip trembled. “Do you think any of my guards or ladies are fooled by the pretense of your being here? Do you think I am a fool?”
Her guards? I leaned my elbows onto my knees, my hands tightly clasped together as I searched the road for where they’d set up camp surrounding the carriages. What did her guards know?
“My father doesn’t want an alliance, does he? I begged you to listen.” Mara slumped forward. Crouched before the fire, she looked fragile and terrified. “You’re here to kill Prince Orin, aren’t you?”
I finally looked her in the eye. Her words from the other evening landed like stones in my chest. But Huntsman, we are friends. I hated that I’d led her to believe that. After a few silent moments, she blinked. “It’s true, then.”
“You’re mistaken.”
I swallowed hard and slid forward to stand. If the guards found out Mara had disguised herself as a handmaid in order to speak to me, rumors would spread. And after I did as I’d been ordered to do in two days time, those rumors could make others suspicious of me.
“Please wait,” she said, reaching out to clasp my hand. Her disguise was flawed. She wore silk gloves befitting a princess, not a handmaid. “Is there anything I can say, anything I can do, to dissuade you?”
I grit my teeth, frustration beginning to brim. “I’ve already told you, my lady, I am not here to do what you think.”
It wasn’t a lie. At least I wouldn’t have that on my conscience. Not that lies were anything compared to murder.
“I see.” Mara stood up, the shadows returning to the inside of her hood.
“I don’t think you do.” I said it before I could think, and immediately cursed myself. It was reckless to urge her to take a closer look at the situation. I needed her to go.
“Before, you said you thought we were friends,” I said. “Friends trust each other.”
She hesitated. “You said you didn’t keep friends at the fortress.”
Hating myself, I forced a reply. “Perhaps I kept one.”
Mara clutched the handmaid’s cloak to her throat.
“I’m sorry, Huntsman,” she said. “That night in my chambers I told you I trusted you. And just now, I’ve accused you of something wretched.”
Hellfire licked at my heels, ready to devour my soul. I wanted to tell her to save her apology, to never trust me. But I stayed quiet. The rain picked up, pelting the canvas roof.
Behind Mara, a few Morvansk guards had turned to watch us.
“You should go before someone comes, my lady,” I told her.
Mara stood taller, shoulders pressing down as she grew alert. “Yes. Please, forgive me. Goodnight, Huntsman.”
My blood pumped hard as she walked back to her carriage. A few minutes later, her door opened again, and the handmaid she’d borrowed the cloak from emerged.
I tossed the game hen into the woods, my stomach in knots. I slammed my head into my palms, gripping my hair until my scalp hurt. The feeble candlelight inside Mara’s carriage snuffed out, and the road in front of me darkened. I listened to rain strike the puddles filling up the ruts. She’d believed me. Trusted me. And I had to destroy her.
I closed my eyes and dredged up three images: Mother, Lael, and Kinn. They needed me to focus. They needed me to feel nothing.
And I could not fail them.
6
Ever
The revelry at Volk’s was still hale and hearty well past midnight. The crocks of rabbit stew had been scraped empty for hours, stout ale and lighter, honeyed quass flowing freely from the taps. The mix of hops and rye, sweat and smoke clung to my clothes as I walked through the meadow toward the barn.
My father had chosen to keep the tavern doors open, saying the village would celebrate the prince’s betrothal until every barrel of ale and every bottle of spirits were drained. Thankfully, he’d sent me away, complaining I wasn’t any use to him asleep on my feet.
My room above the tavern had been clogged with the same stench mixing together downstairs, all of it rising up through the wrought iron floor grates. It had been impossible to sleep, and not just because of the reeking air. The boisterous men and women were so loud they sounded as if they could have been right there, sitting on my bed.
Morning dew already coated the grass. It brushed against my trousers and sent my mucking boots squeaking as I walked through the field. The nearly full moon lit my way, bands of thin clouds streaking fast across the sky. In the barn, I found the lamp by the door and lit it. The flame warmed my fingers as Hilda whinnied.
“Go back to sleep,” I whispered to her and then climbed the ladder to the loft.
A bed of hay and a flannel blanket and quilt were all I needed to sleep well, at least for a few hours. I spread the blanket on the mound of hay, tucked the patchwork quilt under my heels, and turned onto my side. A strip of moonlight fell over the canvas-covered mirror under the eaves. I hadn’t come back up since the day Bram had approached the barn.
I’d seen him coming. I’d seen him because I’d simply asked the mirror to show him to me. That was all it took—a simple command. It wasn’t a trick I’d practiced or studied, or even took pride in. It wasn’t something I understood at all. Why did I have this gift?
My mother had given it to me, yes, but why had she had it? Where had it come from? Magic was not something people went about brandishing as fine family inheritances. It was spoken of in hushed voices. Usually only midwives and herbalists were accused of it. And I’d always been told that under no circumstances was I to ever display my magic for anyone. Even Father didn’t want to see it done, hence the absence of any mirror in the tavern or the rooms above.
I sat up, the quilt falling around my waist. The canvas-covered mirror beckoned me, the draw to it strange, yet undeniable. Its surface could show me anything at all. Well, almost anything. Plenty of times, I’d begged it to show me my mother. I’d wanted to find her, rescue her. Bring her back to my father and me, and then perhaps we could have been a normal family. At the very least, I’d just wanted to see her. But the mirror showed only an odd charcoal haze, moving like a malevolent fog hovering over the meadow at sunrise.
I pulled off the canvas cover, uncertain what to ask for. Bram left the tavern hours before, and I didn’t want to spy on him snoring in his bed. People weren’t fun to see anyway. I liked asking for places, like Pendrak. I’d found the perfect street where hordes of children played happily outdoors until their nursemaids stepped outside of neatly kept homes and clapped for them come in and take supper.
I’d also asked to see Morvansk and Frederic himself. I hadn’t liked that at all, especially when the emperor had looked over his shoulder, searching for someone who was not in the room with him. It had been odd, like he’d known he was being watched, a
nd I’d immediately cleared the vision from the mirror.
Frederic had been decently handsome, for an older man. I thought of what the butcher in the market that morning had said, about the princess being a dog. Prince Orin wouldn’t marry a homely woman, would he? He was a prince, after all. He could afford to be choosy. But then again, alliances weren’t based on attraction.
“Show me Princess Mara.” Her name had been said more than a few times that night in the barroom.
The dark surface of the mirror swirled into rings of lighter colors, yellows and greens, and then reds and purples. Churning at a fast clip, my own pulse quickening to match the rhythm of the swirling rings, the colors pushed to the edges and revealed a darkened room. An open doorway to a balcony. Moonlight brightened the figure of a tall woman standing there. The same moonlight was spilling inside my barn loft right then. She leaned against the threshold in a high-necked nightdress, her hair plaited into a long braid.
She wasn’t ugly. She wasn’t quite beautiful, either, but she had something else about her. A graceful confidence. She stared at the moon, her chin lifted to it. Absentmindedly, the princess twirled a strand of delicate pearls around her wrist, her fingers rubbing and twisting them.
“Please,” she said to the moon. I straightened my hunched back. I shouldn’t have been listening. I shouldn’t have asked to spy on the princess. It was wrong to watch her without her knowing it.
“Please let him be telling the truth,” she said.
“Clear,” I ordered, not wanting to hear more. I wouldn’t want anyone spying on me, that much I knew.
The mirror swirled again with rings of colors, then fell to a cold, solid black. I leaned closer, my reflection expanding. Without my cap, without the kerchief I usually wrapped around my neck, I did look girlish. Nowhere near as womanly as Princess Mara, but it was both exciting and frightening to see it. I would be a girl. At last. But until I left Rooks Hollow, I’d also be a very suspicious boy.
7
Tobin
A brook bubbled through the glade behind the fortress at Pendrak. The glade was a circle of sunlight and warmth just before the forest entrance, darkened and cooled by thick canopies and vines.
I hid behind a hedge of scrawny pines on the forest side of the brook. The glade lay empty, except for a small flock of turkeys nesting in the grasses. The peeps of chicks rose above the sound of the water rushing over rocks in the brook. I didn’t want to hear them. The forest was filled with life, and I’d been trying to push it all under the stone in my chest since walking to the glade an hour before.
I always envisioned a stone, round and flat, at the base of my throat. It was heavy enough to keep everything down, out of my mind, whenever I went on assignment for the emperor. Underneath the stone, my heart might be streaming out nervous beats, or my stomach cinching with pangs of guilt. But with the stone set in place there, I couldn’t feel anything. It kept my head clear, my breathing level. Today, the stone wobbled.
I’d delivered the notes as directed, having handed Mara’s to one of her ladies, and Prince Orin’s to one of his attendants. As soon as I entered the path to the glade, however, the calmness I’d spent years perfecting, faltered. I lost my footing twice along the winding path. Hardwood trees with their long-reaching limbs and thick canopy seemed to move, tricking my eyes. Distracted, I’d crouched behind the small pines and waited for the Huntsman to settle into place. It hadn’t worked.
The shriek of a bird drew my eyes to the trees above. When I looked down, Mara stepped into the clearing. The call of the nuisance bird muted, as did everything else in the world. She came through the tall grasses, her lavender colored skirts gathered in her hands to keep the hem from getting soiled against the ground.
I closed my eyes and forced forward the image of my mother. Of Kinn, of Lael. The worst five minutes of my life were about to unfold, and I had to keep those three faces present if I had any hope of following through.
I opened my eyes as Mara searched the glade for Orin, the man she believed had beckoned her there. She lifted her face to the sun, most likely chilled from the walk through the dim forest.
Mother.
Kinn.
Lael.
I looked into the hushed wood. Her ladies would have made plenty of noise had they followed, and her guards’ steel swords and metal fixtures would have been a clattering racket. She’d come alone, just as the note had bid.
She fiddled nervously with the front tucks of her skirt, not seeing me as I stood. I parted the flexible pines and stepped past the young green needles, coming to the edge of the brook’s banking. The princess spotted me then. She let out a small yelp and covered her mouth with her hands.
“Huntsman, you frightened me.” She lowered her hand and sent me a small smile, though it quickly fell. “What are you doing here? You didn’t…did you read the note you delivered this morning?”
Don’t look at her. Don’t listen to her.
“Forgive me, of course you didn’t. Are you hunting?” she asked as I stepped across the three rocks in the brook and into the glade.
The sun hit me, and my legs turned to dead weight. They didn’t want to move any closer. My hands, too, stayed heavy at my sides. The blade with the prince’s crest was inside my trouser waistline, and my own personal blades were where I always kept them.
“I’m meeting the prince,” she said, her voice notched louder. “It’s not very indecent, considering we are to be married,” she added with a half smile.
I strode through the grass toward her, pushing the slab of stone in my chest lower to crush the rapid beating of my heart. Mara’s shrewd eyes narrowed. My presence made her nervous, yet she didn’t back away as I came to within a foot of her.
Mother.
Kinn.
Lael.
“The prince is not coming.”
Mara looked sideways at me. “How do you know this?” Her facial muscles went slack. “You’ve done something to him.”
“I’ve already told you,” I said. Level. Clear. “The emperor did not send me to kill the prince.”
She wanted to believe me. Just like she believed me the other night when I said we were friends. I could see it in the way she shifted her bottom lip side to side, gripping the inside of it with her teeth.
“Then why have you followed me here?” she asked.
There was not supposed to be any conversation. I’d been taught to be brief, to make sure the target knew who had come for him and why, and then to finish before he could beg or offer money in return for leniency.
“I didn’t follow you.” I reached inside my jacket and gripped Orin’s blade, the gold of the crossed hilt cool under my hot, sweaty palm.
She stared at me with a confused grimace, paying no attention to my hand.
“I led you here,” I said. “It is Emperor Frederic’s order, princess. I am only his servant.”
The last sentence spilled out of my mouth unintentionally, and with it, I caught the first whiff of my decaying will. The Huntsman didn’t explain himself. The Huntsman didn’t make excuses.
I pulled the dagger and stepped forward so swiftly Mara didn’t know to resist. She was taller than me, but I was stronger and faster; I wrapped my arm around her neck and her knees buckled, her chin wedging tight inside my crooked elbow. She screamed, but my bicep and forearm squelched it.
Mother.
Kinn.
Lael.
I positioned the blade against her throat, her frantic pulse pushing against my arm. I could feel it, her very life, thumping and pleading and battling. I closed my eyes to the glade, to Mara’s squirming, her nails scratching at my arms, trying to pry the dagger away from her neck. I saw each of my family, the very ones I had to protect.
Mother’s proud smile wilted as she saw me—really saw me—with a blade to the princess’s neck, prepared to spill her blood.
Kinn’s adoration faltered as he watched with confused horror. I was a monster instead of the hero he’d bragg
ed to his friends about.
And Lael. She only stared, eyebrow arched. She’d known the truth all along.
I couldn’t breathe for the hurt I saw on each of their faces. All my lies and sins swarmed me, and now I stood a heartbeat away from killing an innocent woman. As innocent as my mother…as my sister.
I flung the dagger aside and shoved Mara, catapulting her into the grass. Gasping for air, I tugged my fingers through my hair and screamed at the trees.
“Huntsman!” Mara’s heels dug up the dark soil beneath the grass as she heaved herself away from me. Tears streaked her cheeks. “What are you doing?”
I paced a circle, staggering and lightheaded. What had I done?
I quit my pacing and crouched into the grass, coming eye to eye with her. “You cannot go back to Morvansk. You were right; the emperor doesn’t want an alliance. He wants a reason to incite a war with Klaven. He ordered me to kill you with Prince Orin’s dagger to give him that reason.”
“No,” she whispered. Crystal tears rimmed her eyes as she pressed her palms to the ground, her knees bent and shaking beneath the grass-stained lap of her dress. “He wouldn’t have me killed. You’re lying.”
There wasn’t any time left to convince her. Prince Orin would soon arrive. “If I’m lying, why did I just nearly slit your throat?” She stared at me, holding her breath and trembling. “I’m your father’s huntsman. You know the truth about me. You know I only do your father’s bidding.”
Except for this time. I leaned forward, propping myself up with a fist in the damp ground.
“You must stay here, with Prince Orin. Tell him what I’ve told you, and that Pendrak has spies working for Frederic. The prince will keep you safe.”
If only that had been my duty. To be a guard. A soldier, perhaps. Why this? It didn’t inspire respect or honor. It brought only blood and death and pain. And yet I’d fooled myself for so long.