Larkin slipped into a defensive stance. “You can see me.” No one had seen her in the forest. Not when she screamed at the townspeople that the lord hadn’t killed his mistress, even as the poor man wept over the girl’s grave. Not as Larkin watched his legs twitch as he dangled from a tree. Not when Larkin whispered the horrible things she would do in that monster’s ear.
Her attention snapped back to the man. He’d come closer. Too close. Magic surged, and she flicked her blade into place between them. “How do you know my name? Who are you?” Who am I?
The red-haired man paused, studying her with infinite sadness instead of fear. “You know who I am.”
She didn’t. His accent was strange and rolling in a way she was certain she’d heard before. But for all her thinking, she couldn’t place it. “Where is that woman? The lady?”
“Larkin, there isn’t much time.”
She lunged, her sword tip at his throat. “Where is she?” I have to kill her.
He backed slowly away. “Whoever she is, she’s long dead. As is anyone who ever knew her.”
This man thought to trick her. She advanced on him, sword at the ready. “Where is she?”
“Look at your chest, Larkin.”
She felt it then. The pain. The stickiness. He was at a safe distance. She risked glancing down. Her front was saturated with . . . ink? It couldn’t be blood. Blood wasn’t black. She checked to make sure he was still a safe distance away, pulled out her collar, and gasped in horror.
The wound was black and deep. Deep enough that she could see ashen organs beneath bone. Even as she watched, the blood slowed. Stopped. Bone and flesh knit together, leaving an angry dark line that faded to white before disappearing as if it had never been.
And then she remembered.
Denan—her beloved, her husband—had stabbed her. “But that was days ago.” Long before the monster who called herself a lady. And besides, Denan would never hurt her. Except he had. It was like he hadn’t recognized her.
“It was last night,” the man said.
“That’s not possible.”
Shadows. So many shadows. Tearing and cold and empty.
Wraith.
She couldn’t breathe.
Denan had killed her because he thought her a wraith.
She hauled up her sleeves, staring at her pale, freckled skin. The sigils were still beautiful, opalescent. She was not a wraith. She looked up to find the man had moved closer. Close enough to touch her.
She danced out of range, keeping her sword between them. “Stay back!”
“Larkin, it’s nearly sunset. The shadows are coming. You have to listen to me.”
Sunset? But it was morning.
Jangled visions.
Shadows and blood and snot and piss.
She didn’t know what was real anymore. Her magic slipped from her grasp, sword flickering out. She rocked back and forth. Hit the heel of her palm against her head. “What’s happening to me?”
The man gripped her arms. “You became a wraith last night. Denan killed you. The Black Tree brought you through the shadows, showed you a memory. Something horrible. Forgive the people in those memories. Find the good in them, and you will find yourself. Only then can you fight back.”
Forgive? She searched the man’s face.
“Ramass,” she gasped. Her enemy. “But this can’t be. You’re a man.”
“I am always a man. But at night, the shadows take me.”
He was a monster. A monster like the lady. She shoved him hard. “You killed Venna and Talox and my father.” So many others. Thousands and thousands. “You did this to me!”
Stumbling, he closed his eyes, his jaw hard. “Not willingly.”
He deserved death and worse. She’d forgotten her purpose, but now she remembered. She’d come here to kill the wraiths. To kill him. Maisy had been right. The wraiths were weak during the day. Because they were human. Which meant Larkin could finally kill him.
Her sword and shield flared to life. They were wreathed in shadows. She hadn’t noticed before. But she was certain they would still cut. She took an offensive stance.
Ramass sighed. “If you must.” Instead of moving to defend himself, he pulled off his long shirt—he wasn’t wearing pants—and stood before her completely naked. He was covered in red-gold hair and even more freckles. And black blood, though she saw no wounds.
He tossed his shirt to the side and tapped just to the left of his sternum, where his heart was. “Here.” He gripped his wrists behind his back and gritted his teeth, waiting for her.
Traps. Always traps. She circled him. “You want to die?”
“Rather than become a mindless monster each night . . .” He closed his eyes and breathed out, “Yes.”
Lies and traps and poison. Watching for tricks, she adjusted her grip and eased forward.
Shadows and blood and snot and piss.
Monsters must die.
She struck, burying the blade in so deep that a hand’s breadth stuck out his back. Ramass hunched over her sword. His face darkened; the veins in his neck stood out. Black blood seeped down his chest. He coughed, blood spraying onto her armor, and dropped to his knees.
She felt a thrill of excitement. A bone-deep satisfaction. The monster she’d originally hungered for wasn’t here. Now. But this one was. And she’d killed him.
She let her magic fade and stepped back. Without her blade to stanch it, blood gushed. Ramass collapsed onto his side. But then the bleeding slowed. The gaping wound seamed together. The black line faded to white and then disappeared like it had never been.
Just like it had for her.
Monsters
Ramass wiped blood from his lips and grimaced at his black-soaked torso. Watching her warily, he rose to his feet, his hands held out at his sides.
Larkin gaped at him, her chest rising and falling hard and fast. She had given up everything—her husband, her family, her life—to kill this monster. She’d put her sword through his chest, straight into his heart.
Yet he hadn’t died.
Her ears rang, her vision going fuzzy around the edges.
“Slow your breathing,” Ramass said reasonably.
“Don’t tell me what to do! You’re a monster. You made me a monster! You tricked me!” She cut into his side.
Grimacing, he danced back and hunched around the bloody slash. “I didn’t make you a wraith, Larkin.”
Shadows and blood and snot and piss.
“Liar!” She stabbed him again.
He fell to his knees, his face pale. But even as she watched, the slash was healing. “Ancestors, Larkin, do you think I would still be alive if someone could kill me?”
He must be like the mulgars. A sword to the chest wouldn’t kill him, but beheading would. She took a running step and drew her sword over her right shoulder. He closed his eyes and turned away. Her sword cut through flesh and bone and sinew. His body collapsed. Blood geysered from what was left of his neck and part of his jaw, where muscles were torn like shredded rope and chunks of white bone poked through.
His head rolled a few paces away and came to a stop.
She felt a burst of satisfaction. Until she noticed Ramass’s gaze fixed on her.
Like he was still alive.
Horrified, she watched as sinew wormed forward, latched onto the severed ends of the neck, and twisted the head into place. The gaping wound sealed. In moments, only the blood and urine pooling around Ramass’s body remained as a testament to what she’d done.
She leaned over and retched, spitting bitter bile.
Ramass pushed himself onto his back, his eyes screwed shut with pain. “Do you believe me now?” His voice was raspy with damage.
She didn’t bother answering. “You’re a monster.”
“The monster I was made to be.”
Too many emotions swirled inside Larkin for any of them to take a firm hold—like she was empty and yet overfilled. “I don’t understand.”
Ram
ass took a deep breath and said as if by rote, “The sacred trees have no ears with which to hear nor eyes with which to see. So they borrowed them. No. Not borrowed. Traded. The trees grew thorns, which mankind slipped into their skin. Bits of living, thinking magic that took root and grew, giving men and women access to the trees’ enchantment. In exchange, the trees took the memories of the dead and the companionship of the living.
“It had always seemed to the sacred trees a fair trade. More than fair. For though their minds could not understand the strange thoughts and ways of mankind, for the first time, they experienced color and light, patterns and music, and the glory of purpose and movement.”
Larkin had never considered what life must be like for a sacred tree. “It sounds like they were lonely.”
“Lonely?” He considered her words. “They didn’t used to be.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Have you never thought about what lies beyond the three kingdoms of Valynthia, the Alamant, and the Idelmarch?”
What a strange question. “There isn’t anything beyond the forests. The world ends where the sun sinks beneath the ground.”
He huffed. “No, Larkin. The world is far larger than that. And it was covered in sacred trees, kings and queens of their forests. Their roots intermingled, memories and music and emotions flowing from one to another in a steady stream.”
“What happened to them?” she asked in a small voice.
He frowned and said heavily, “We did.” At her confused look, he motioned to the font. “Look into the font. See for yourself.”
The font crouched at the top of the dais, its wicked black thorns glittering in the dying light.
Fear took root inside her, its roots digging deep. Breathless and dizzy, she let her sword fill her hand. It probably wouldn’t do any good, but its presence made her feel a bit more in control.
She eased up the steps. Careful of the sharp thorns, she peered into the font. Beneath the amber sap, there was a blackness, deep and consuming. A blackness that sucked her in, pulled her down, ripped her in two. She couldn’t escape. She would never escape. She deserved to die. She and every other human. To rot in a grave. Even now, she could smell it. Her own grave as her body rotted around her.
A hand latched around her arm and pulled her back, breaking her gaze. She stumbled back. Ramass stood by her. She didn’t shy away. As much as she loathed him, he had pulled her from that emptiness. And the touch of another human grounded her in a way she couldn’t pull back from.
“I know that black, sucking feeling.” It was what evil felt like. Like looking into the wraiths’ eyes. But Ramass’s eyes weren’t black and sucking but full of pity and sorrow. So different from the feeling beating down on her like a freezing sun. Hatred. Hatred for all mankind.
Hatred that emanated from the Black Tree.
Beneath Larkin, shadows scrabbled at her again.
Shadows.
She let out a short gasp. “The wraiths aren’t the source of the curse.”
“The Black Tree is,” Ramass said softly. “The Silver Tree realized people were using its powers for evil. It first despaired. Then grew angry. Then vengeful. It decided all men needed to die.”
People using its powers for evil—like the lady murdering the girl and her child. Light. All these centuries, everyone had believed the wraiths had created the curse. Had twisted the once glorious Silver Tree into something wicked and dark. But it had been the other way around.
“The Silver Tree created the curse,” she echoed, trying to make her mind believe.
“And became the Black.”
She knew it was true. Knew it as surely as she knew that the Black Tree would take her soul and warp it as surely as it had warped its own. She finally understood. The wraiths had never been monsters. It was the sacred tree—the Black Tree. And she was now its slave.
She looked up at him. “But if you didn’t bring me here, what did?” Even a sacred tree didn’t have such powers.
He gestured to the formless shadows beneath her. They’d given up clawing at her and now shifted back and forth like a hunter trapped in a cage.
“What are they?” she whispered.
Ramass watched the sun cut in half by the horizon, a look of dread on his face. “Shadows, the souls of the dead, twisted by the Black Tree just like the rest of us. Eiryss’s countercurse bound them to the night and the Mulgar Forest, though they can travel beneath the trees of the Forbidden Forest.”
That explained why no spies ever came back from the Mulgar Forest. “So the vision I saw of the lady and the girl and the lord, it was a memory from one of the shadows?”
He nodded.
She closed her eyes against the horror of it. “And when night comes?”
Ramass glanced to the west, at the sun slipping beneath the horizon. “You let him in; you can force him out.”
What? She felt it then—a cold slithering around her feet, a cold that sank its teeth into her over and over again. Frozen with fear, she looked down at the shadows seeping from the tree in the shape of thorned vines that snaked around her ankles, each thorn drawing black blood. They stung like a thousand poisoned barbs.
Those same vines wrapped around Ramass. He closed his eyes as if he couldn’t bear to see what came next. “Don’t fight the shadows. It will only make the Black Tree angry.”
“Please.” This couldn’t happen. Not to her.
His eyes were ancient and filled with grief. “If I could spare you this, I would.”
What would the Black Tree make her do? But she already knew the answer. She’d seen it often enough. She would turn her people into a mindless army and kill anyone who tried to stop her.
Including Denan.
Where the emptiness inside her had been, now there was only venom from the vines that crept up her calves, poisoning her blood with seething madness and hatred and murder.
Memories of monsters.
Already, she was losing herself.
She flared her knife and cut at the vines. They dissipated like smoke. More vines lashed out, wrapping her up. She kicked free and staggered back.
Ramass didn’t try to stop her, only watched her with an infinite pity. “Remember what I told you.”
Light, I’m going to become one of them. A monster.
Shadows and blood and snot and piss.
She ran. The shadow vines clung to her, tearing her flesh. Her thighs. She was half in the here and now, and half in the memory of the beautiful girl. The way she’d clutched her dead baby tight, though she herself was dying. Later, the lord had been so racked with grief he hadn’t even fought the mob. His legs had kicked and his bladder had loosed as he hung from a graveyard tree.
No.
She couldn’t face this again.
She’d go mad.
A hundred yards across the platform was an ornate, rusted carriage. If she could reach it, she could make her way down to the lake. Wraiths couldn’t cross water. So maybe the shadows wouldn’t reach her. She sprinted.
She was nearly there when a vine caught her leg and wrenched hard. She heard a snap, felt a pop. She pushed up on her elbows. Through the shadows, she made out her foot turned the wrong way. Her leg was broken.
The thorns pinned her shoulders, clawed up her face. She struggled free, clothes tearing, blood soaking her. In her mind was the beautiful girl’s eyes and the lord sobbing. Begging.
She crawled to the carriage and hauled herself up on the metal curled in the shapes of flowers and vines cankered with rot. Maneuvered to the side. Hanging over the long drop, she had an impression of wildness—untamed hometrees rife with birds and crawling creatures.
But instead of a beautiful turquoise water gleaming with fish, there was a fen filled with patches of deep water, swamp, and swatches of land. Huge glowing mushrooms and flowers grew among short grasses. A dracknel with wide, sharp antlers looked up at her and bared its pointed teeth.
The thorns lashed up her neck, her cheeks, blood d
ripping. Pulling her down. She looked down the long drop, wondering what the fall would do to her.
Can’t be worse than becoming a wraith, she thought. She tensed to throw herself headfirst into the water.
“Don’t,” said a voice with the same strange, rolling accent as Ramass.
The vines stark against her pale skin and freckles, a woman panted behind her. The thorns clawed over her skull and wrenched her head viciously to the side. Beneath their cruel grip, her curly red hair flared, the breeze tugging it to and fro. She looked so much like Ramass that this could only be his sister.
Hagath, the only female wraith.
Inexplicably, the woman was stark naked. “The water repels wraiths, and the fall will break every bone in your body.”
Larkin shuddered. “I’d rather endure anything than become a monster.”
“Nothing will stop you from becoming a monster,” Hagath said. “It’ll just hurt so much you might lose your mind for the next decade or so.”
Ancestors.
Shadows grew over Hagath’s eyes. “The Black Tree controls us, but it doesn’t understand us. Use that to your advantage. Like Maisy used the rhymes. Trick him.”
Maisy was dead! “What are you talking about?”
Even as she said it, the sun went out. Larkin didn’t have to see it. She could feel its lack inside her. Feel its absence like someone had snatched away her soul.
Why had the Black Tree hunted her for so long? “Why give up his army to get me?” Larkin cried.
“Because you’re far more dangerous than all his mulgars combined,” Hagath whispered.
The vines surged, pinning Larkin painfully against the bark. She gasped, and the shadows dove into her mouth, tore down her throat, rooted into her lungs, her guts.
Pain.
Pain and screaming.
Roots grew from the shadows and pierced her brain, their thorns biting deep. The Black Tree invaded her soul. She witnessed a young bride thrown into a dark cellar because she’d burned the bread. An infant, filthy and starving but not bothering to cry because it knew no one would come. A grandmother being beaten by her grandson—a boy who was barely more than a child.
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