The Shadow Queen (Ravenspire)

by C. J. Redwine

  MAP

  DEDICATION

  For Dad,

  who taught me that I could do anything I set my mind to.

  For Mom,

  who brought me to the library every week so I could check out yet another book of Grimm’s fairy tales and who encouraged my wild imagination.

  And for Heather,

  my real-life sister who is also the sister of my heart. I owe you an orange Spree.

  CONTENTS

  Map

  Dedication

  Once Upon a Time . . .

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Epilogue

  Incantors

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by C. J. Redwine

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONCE UPON A TIME . . .

  NOTHING HAD BEEN right in the castle since her mother’s death. Her father’s smile had disappeared, and a brittle imposter had taken its place. Her younger brother had begun screaming in the dead of night, trapped in nightmares he couldn’t remember upon waking. And the faint tingle of magic in the princess’s palms that her mother had laughingly told her would one day make flowers bloom and birds sing had become a fierce burn of power that stung her veins and shook the ground if the princess wasn’t careful.

  She’d been desperate for a change—for some way to return the castle to the happy place it used to be. So when the king of Morcant began pressuring her father to marry another Morcantian of the king’s choice in order to keep the alliance between Morcant and Ravenspire strong, and her father announced that he was marrying the princess’s aunt Irina, a woman who’d never set foot in Ravenspire until her sister was buried, the princess began to hope.

  At first, it seemed the princess’s wish had been granted. Irina charmed the young prince into calling her Mama, and his nightmares all but disappeared. She coaxed smiles out of the king, and his hollow cheeks grew round again as she tempted his appetite with lavish feasts nearly every night. And she took the princess under her wing, sharing the secrets of the magic that ran through their blood.

  It was almost like having a mother again. Almost like being happy.

  But it was all a lie.

  Understanding dawned slowly, like prickles of pain in a limb gone numb. The princess began noticing things that shouldn’t be. Apples that gleamed beneath the candlelight but spilled rot once the skin was punctured. Apples her father, her brother, and the castle staff ate nightly until every bit of them had disappeared.

  Apples Irina said were for those without magic in their blood.

  As the king and his staff became glassy-eyed puppets, dependent upon Irina for their every thought, the dungeons filled with those who refused to give Irina what she wanted. Ambassadors from other kingdoms left in anger at the king’s refusal to speak to them unless he first asked Irina what to say. And whispers of magic threaded throughout the castle, a web of deceit it seemed only the princess could detect.

  Scared that she was losing her father, the princess decided to find a way to break Irina’s control over the castle and everyone in it.

  The princess chose her moment carefully. The warmth of day still lingered outside, but the air in the castle’s entrance hall was cool and comfortable, and the family often spent their evenings watching through massive windowpanes as the stars came to life. The princess’s father sat beside Irina, dull and vague, while they watched the prince play with the pet snake the queen had given him for his seventh birthday. Members of the royal guard stood watch nearby, their eyes focused on the queen they somehow adored more than life itself.

  The faint aroma of apples filled the air, and the lingering stain of rot smeared the teeth of those who smiled at Irina.

  The princess’s bare hands trembled as she wrapped them around Irina’s arm, and fear left a bitter taste in her mouth. Her magic burned through her veins and pooled in her palms, and she felt the heart of the queen—vicious, determined, and strong—surge against her hands.

  Her pulse pounding, her legs trembling, the princess said the incantor that would change everything.

  “Nakh`rashk. Find the threads of Irina’s magic and scatter them to the four winds.”

  The queen jerked her arm free, but it was too late. Power leaped from the princess’s palms, slammed into the queen, and then shot to the gleaming marble floor where it exploded into a thousand tendrils of brilliant light. The light snaked over the floor, touching the palace guard, the prince, and the king before streaking throughout the castle to tear into pieces the fabric of lies Irina had built her new life upon.

  The king, his eyes clear, his memory of the last six months restored, shouted for Irina to be put to death for treason. The palace guard, released of their bespelled adoration, rushed to do his bidding. And Irina, one hand reaching to punish the princess who had betrayed her and one reaching to bespell the king again, hesitated for a split second between the two.

  In a heartbeat, the guards were upon her. The king pushed the prince and princess behind him. Swords flashed. Screams rose.

  And then Irina began to laugh.

  The princess shivered deep within as the guards closest to the queen fell back, clutching their faces while their skin peeled away from their bones and their blood bubbled like soup left too long on the fire.

  “Take your brother and run!” the king shouted as he put the prince’s hand in hers. “Protect him.”

  The princess snatched her brother’s hand and pulled him toward a small doorway that led to the servants’ hall.

  Irina scooped up the prince’s pet snake and with a whisper turned him into an enormous black viper. The snake slithered across the bloodstained marble and sank his fangs into the king.

  “No!” The princess turned back for her father, but Irina raised her arms above her head and slammed her palms into the wall behind her.

  Instantly, the stone shuddered and twisted. The princess screamed as the floor buckled, heaving upward and throwing her against a pillar that was quickly disintegrating into dust. All around her, the walls were crumbling, the floor was cracking, and the snake was attacking anyone still left alive.

  The princess locked eyes with the queen, a lake of blood and horror between them, and Irina smiled as the wall behind the princess exploded outward to crush the girl into dust.

  Chunks of stone crashed around the princess, leaving her a small circle of space full of acrid dust. She was trapped, the debris above her creaking and sliding as the floor shuddered. She was going to die, and there would be no one left to protect her brother from the monster who’d taken Ravenspire’s throne.

  A large dark hand reached through a space in the debris, wrapped around the pr
incess’s wrist, and pulled her through the narrow opening between the pile of rubble and the servants’ hall. Gabril, the head of her father’s palace guard, crouched before her, his brown eyes steady on hers, his voice calm.

  “Can you run?” he asked as he scooped the prince onto his shoulders.

  The princess didn’t want to run. She wanted to see her father. She wanted to stay in her home.

  She wanted to fight.

  But though the queen had said that the princess was the daughter she’d never had, Irina had kept the knowledge of how to use magic as a weapon for herself alone.

  And so, as the walls caved in behind them, the princess put her hand in Gabril’s, told her brother everything would be all right, and ran.

  NINE YEARS LATER

  ONE

  “WERE YOU SEEN?” Gabril asked, his dark skin gilded with the last rays of the setting sun as he motioned Lorelai and Leo into the barn. The former guardsman had gray sprinkled throughout his short black hair now, and tiny lines were etched around his eyes. He still carried himself like a soldier, but the cost of trying to keep the queen from discovering that the prince and princess were still alive showed in the slight stoop of his shoulders and the worry that filled his eyes when he thought no one was looking.

  “No.” Lorelai Diederich, crown princess of Ravenspire and fugitive at large, hurried into the dim interior. The barn was tucked away at the edges of an abandoned farm just outside the mountain village of Felsigen and was so dilapidated, a good stiff wind might flatten it.

  “You’re sure?” Gabril’s voice was urgent as he stepped past the princess to help her brother, Leo, pull a heavily loaded hay cart into the barn.

  “Please. You’re talking about the Royal Rogues. Nobody sees us unless we want to be seen.” Leo gave the hay cart one last push inside and then pulled the door shut. He glanced down at his filthy trousers and heaved a sigh. “Although we really should rethink these disguises.”

  “I told you, we aren’t calling ourselves the Royal Rogues. And our disguises are fine.” Lorelai’s gloved fingers fumbled with the buttons of her ragged coat.

  “If by fine you mean hideous, then, yes, they are.” Leo rubbed at the dirt he’d smudged on his face earlier in the afternoon—part of his attempt to look like an unkempt farm boy in case anyone caught sight of him waiting beside the road that led from Felsigen to the queen’s northeast garrison. “And I have several other excellent suggestions for names. The Plucky Pair. The Royal Robbers, though personally I think that makes us sound too much like criminals—”

  “We are criminals.” Lorelai folded up her coat and laid it beside her travel pack. “At least in the eyes of the queen.”

  “A minor detail.” Leo ran his hand over the sacks of loot that were neatly stacked on the hay cart.

  “We made good progress tonight,” Lorelai said as Gabril counted the sacks full of the village’s meager food supply—a food supply Irina had demanded as taxes, even though her garrison already had enough food to feed every village in the Falkrain Mountains for several months. Not that the starving villagers would see a bit of it. Irina would use some of it to feed her army, and let the rest of it rot as a message to remind everyone that she owned Ravenspire down to the last stalk of wheat. “That makes six robberies in two months. Six villages of people who are now loyal to us and will support me when I go after the throne. If we keep up this pace, we’ll have gained the loyalty of the entire Falkrains by spring.”

  Leo gave her a charming, lopsided smile. “Think how much easier it would be to earn the peasants’ loyalty if we had a name to go with our reputation. We could be the Daring Duo—”

  “You could be hanging for your crimes if we don’t move on to the next village,” Gabril said quietly. “Now let’s focus on what needs to be done so we can leave at first light, just in case you were seen.”

  “We weren’t,” Lorelai said as her white gyrfalcon soared in through the open loft window and perched on the princess’s shoulder, her talons digging into the leather harness Lorelai had fashioned to be worn on her shoulder. A dead mouse dangled from the bird’s beak.

  “I hid in the treasury wagon before it left Felsigen. Sasha distracted them with a fake attack when they were an hour outside the village.” Lorelai ran a gloved finger down her bird’s back. “And Leo—”

  “Did the most incredible impression of a Morcantian farm boy you’ve ever heard.” He sped up the cadence of his voice, hitting his consonants hard and running all the sounds together. “I was a Morcantian peasant angry that the blight in Ravenspire is seeping across the border and killing my goats.”

  “He yelled at the treasury officers long enough to give me time to hide in the wagon, but they never got a good look at him.” Lorelai shoved the dangling mouse away from her face.

  Gift. For you. Dinner. Sasha’s thoughts flitted through Lorelai’s mind with quick precision.

  Thank you, but I don’t eat mice. Lorelai’s throat closed as the little body brushed against her hair while images of Sasha’s beak enthusiastically shredding the mouse’s skin to get to its internal organs blazed from the bird’s mind into hers. She swallowed hard to avoid insulting Sasha’s gift by gagging out loud. Most of the time she was grateful for the day nine years earlier when she’d found the dying baby gyrfalcon and sent her magic into the bird to heal her. But sometimes the telepathic link that had formed between them as a result gave Lorelai far too much information about the inner workings of her bird’s mind.

  Strange human. Delicious mouse. Sasha spread her wings and glided to the barn floor, where she tore into her prize with relish.

  “My performance was impeccable.” Leo looked smug as he wiped dust from his curly black hair.

  “I don’t know how you do it,” Lorelai said as Gabril finished inspecting the bags and then limped over to a sizable crack in the barn’s wall to peer outside. “You’ve never even been to Morcant. You overheard one conversation three years ago, and you sound like you were born there. I couldn’t do that if you aimed an arrow at my heart.”

  Leo grinned. “That’s because you’re good at magic, and I’m good at everything else.”

  Gabril turned from the door. “Enough talking. Lorelai needs to practice while there’s still light left to see. Leo, take the sacks up to the loft. My contact in the village will collect them and distribute the food to those in need.”

  Leo looked aggrieved. “I’m always the one who has to do the heavy lifting.”

  Lorelai’s smile was smug. “That’s because I’m good at magic, and you’re good at everything else.”

  “That was cruel, Lorelai.” Leo sighed dramatically and hefted the first sack. Gabril fetched a bundled-up blanket from the corner of the barn and laid it on the floor. When he opened it, several items lay beneath the dim light filtering in through the cracks in the walls. There was a length of rope, a tinderbox, and a brilliant green jewel half the size of Lorelai’s palm.

  Lorelai’s stomach clenched, and the air felt too thick to breathe as she slowly crouched beside the blanket and pulled off her gloves. The fabric stuck to her suddenly clammy skin.

  It wasn’t enough to rob treasury wagons and build loyalty among the peasants. It wasn’t enough to escalate the robberies and gradually move farther south—closer and closer to Konigstaadt, the capital of Ravenspire—to widen her base of support while she weakened the queen’s.

  Confronting the most powerful mardushka to come out of Morcant in a century required a careful, step-by-step plan. Nine years ago, Lorelai had challenged the queen, and her father had paid the price because Lorelai hadn’t thought through every possible way her plan could go wrong.

  She wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

  “I bartered for these from an Eldrian refugee. None of them have touched Ravenspire soil,” Gabril said.

  Lorelai nodded and thanked the heavens that her voice didn’t shake as she said, “So there’s no chance the magic Irina is using to drain the land tainted these, a
nd no chance that if I touch them, Irina’s magic will recognize mine and tell her that I’m still alive.”

  “And exactly where to find us,” Leo said in his I’m-being-helpful voice from the loft above. “Don’t forget about that.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” she said. The knowledge that if she touched something that was bespelled by Irina—which could be anything in Ravenspire considering how much magic Irina used to keep herself on the throne—the queen would come for them was the silent fear that crouched in the corner of her mind and kept her thinking, planning, and thinking some more every hour of the day.

  The only way she could become stronger was to practice her magic whenever Gabril found items that couldn’t possibly have been touched by the queen’s magic, which threaded its way deep throughout the kingdom. Magic that was sucking the heart of the land dry, withering crops and destroying livestock as it forced the living heart of everything it touched to submit to the will of Ravenspire’s queen.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Gabril said softly as Lorelai hesitated, her hand hovering over the three objects on the blanket. “You’ve already had a long day. If you want to practice tomorrow night instead—”

  “I’ll practice now.” Her voice shook a little.

  “You know how to do this,” he said. “Use the incantor that works best for what you want to do. Let your power do the work for you. You’re as strong willed as they come. You can subdue the heart of any living thing, or any object made from a living thing. You don’t have to fear what you are, Lorelai. Being a mardushka isn’t a choice. It’s how you use your power that matters.”

  She let him think she was afraid of her magic. Of being a mardushka in Ravenspire, where outside of Irina and the princess, practitioners of magic didn’t exist. Where magic wasn’t passed through bloodlines as it was in Lorelai’s mother’s kingdom of Morcant, but was feared, and the rare mardushka who left her home country and traveled south into Ravenspire was cursed by peasants and nobility alike.

  Letting him believe she feared her own power was better than admitting that she could still remember the warmth of Irina’s arm beneath her hand and the shape of her lips as she spoke the incantor to undo all Irina’s spells. Still hear the screams and smell the blood as the castle itself turned against everyone but the queen.