“I’m afraid so,” Finley replies. “Couldn’t be helped. They’re not to blame,” he adds, when his brother’s gaze falls to Helos and me just behind.
“And I suppose you needed them both for this very pressing matter.”
I dig my fingernails into my palms and focus on releasing the tension in my shoulders. Control is the key to ensuring I never risk an ill-timed shift from emotions getting the better of me. Interactions with Weslyn make it all too tempting to give in to the lynx’s aggression.
Helos opens his mouth—to say what, I don’t know—but Fin quickly speaks up. “As a matter of fact, I did.”
“What exactly were you doing, then?”
Finley pauses, then shrugs a little.
“This is low, even for you, Fin.” Weslyn shakes his head. “Rules don’t exist to be broken.”
Even to my ears, the chastisement sounds rather halfhearted, as if he recognizes the futility of the words even as they leave his lips.
Finley must hear it, too, because he straightens, suddenly encouraged. And just like that, the tension between them slips away.
“Is Father furious?” Finley asks, a smile working his jaw. I just stand there, trying to look unbothered by the guards’ meaningful stares. I have no doubt what message today’s reading must have yielded.
To my astonishment, the corner of Weslyn’s mouth twitches, as if he might actually smile back. “Furious might be an understatement,” he replies. “But only if you mean Violet. Father is more … resigned.”
Finley is the only one who seems to escape his brother’s usual judgment and severity. A courtesy Weslyn no longer extends to me.
“Come on, then. Let’s get this over with.” Weslyn uncrosses his arms. “You should not be here,” he adds pointedly to Helos. Then he turns to me. “And you should know better.”
“Fi—His Royal Highness needed my help!” I say, wanting to rip the condescension right out of his mouth.
“Well, he—”
Weslyn breaks off when Finley starts to sway. Both he and I reach out reflexively, but it’s Helos who gets there first, catching Finley around the shoulders.
“He needs rest,” my brother says, looking thoroughly unimpressed by the entire tense exchange. “And an infusion of willow bark. I gave him tarryleaf already.”
Finley straightens again with obvious effort. “Helos—”
“I’m sorry, Fin, but he needs to know. It’s the Throes,” he tells Weslyn in an undertone, his expression painfully somber.
Hearing it said aloud is like watching Finley collapse in the Forest all over again. Instant and eternal all at once. Without looking back, Weslyn raises a hand to stop the tide of guards who started forward when Helos caught Finley. He doesn’t criticize my brother’s lack of formality. He doesn’t tell him to let go. He just stands there, unmoving, staring at Finley.
“Are you sure?” he asks after an endless silence, addressing Finley directly.
My heart aches as Finley says nothing, just drops his gaze to the ground.
This, at last, seems to spur his brother into motion. Weslyn starts barking out orders abruptly, shifting Finley away from Helos’s support. Fin begins to object, a torn expression coloring his features, then stops and yields to a throng of guards who surround him before we can even say goodbye. Helos’s arms drop. I make to follow, but an elbow hits me between the ribs, hard.
“Back,” snarls Simeon, one of the most respected members of the Royal Guard, like I’m no better than a dog caught underfoot. Like I haven’t just rescued his sovereign’s third-born.
I lurch forward again, my nails blades against my palms.
“Shifter.”
The word roots me to the spot, motionless, fuming. I meet Weslyn’s stony stare, fire licking my veins. Rora, I want to say. My name is Rora. It’s one of the only things I know to be true, a certainty I cling to in a life shaped by unpredictability.
“My brother no longer requires your assistance. Do not leave the grounds. My father will send for you tomorrow, once the emissaries have departed.”
He knows. Somehow, King Gerar knows I let Helos near his son, and soon he’ll know his son is dying. The two of us together, just like the Prediction warned.
Normally I can brush aside that look in Weslyn’s eyes, the one that says I’m a poison he’s determined to draw out. But right now my feet ache, and my thoughts are growing murky from the morning’s exhausting string of events, and I have no idea if the punishment for defying King Gerar’s orders might be dismissal from his service. For once, Weslyn’s expression does what he intends. It wounds me.
He turns to my brother, not a single sign of gratitude or concern for our fate coloring his expression. Unable—or unwilling—to see anything more in Helos or me than our shifter blood. “My father’s orders were clear. Go. Now.”
Helos remains fixed in place. Staring at me, willing me to protest.
Pressure is building in the back of my skull. Exhaustion and memories. Trauma and time. Go, that quiet, lingering word, the cast that molds my bones. I was five and Helos six the night the humans came and burned our village to the ground. The night our mother abandoned us to die. Go! Helos had shouted after she’d fled and saved herself, when the men discovered our hiding spot. But my ankle was twisted and I could not run, so he shifted to elk and carried me on his back, and to safety.
It was the first time he had shifted to an animal. His first of the three animal forms all shifters gain throughout our lifetimes, in addition to the ability to change our human features. The latter, we have all our lives, but our animal forms are born only from a moment of greatest need, recognized as such by instinct.
Helos’s second animal—the fox—came later, when I was half-starved, feverish, and clinging to life. Though his third has not yet come, his two moments of greatest need thus far have been moments spent helping me.
As I meet my brother’s eyes and see the hurt brimming to the surface, I long to set concern for my job aside and defend his right to be here. To assure him that Finley will recover, and that things will return to the way they once were. This period will pass.
But we cannot revive the past any more than we can escape it. And my brother and I are beyond empty promises.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, before turning to head for home.
How I wish I were that selfless.
THREE
It’s difficult not to feel like a prisoner as I trail Captain Torres of the Royal Guard through the windowless corridor the following morning. Mounted oil lamps flicker along the granite walls, the space beneath them swathed in shadow, while the quarry-like chamber flings the sound of our boots about as if in mockery of my nerves. When the low ceilings begin to feel too confining, I run a hand along the walls and refocus my attention on the stone beneath my fingertips. It’s cold.
King Gerar has requested my presence plenty of times, but not after a direct violation of his policy, or after learning his child has fallen ill. Torres’s grim expression—and the fact that the revered captain of the Royal Guard herself has been sent to collect me—suggests I should start begging fortune for good news instead of bad. But right now I’m finding it difficult to focus on much of anything. Last night brought little sleep, and the thoughts in my head are a jumbled, spiraling blur.
We pass through a wide hall of silk drapes and candles mounted on crystal chandeliers, then into the adjoining antechamber, where an attendant is dusting the portraits of old kings and queens hung along the wood-paneled wall. Despite the hour, the curtains are still drawn across the long windows; it’s as if the castle has curled in on itself, gradually growing as quiet as the city beyond its walls. The boy startles when he sees us and actually drops his feather duster, so dramatic it’s almost comical, before abruptly leaving the room.
Captain Torres hesitates before plowing ahead, broad-shouldered beneath her uniform’s silver epaulets, her dark hair pinned above copper skin reminiscent of polished amber. I only roll my eyes. Nerves
among the staff always run especially high in the days following the Prediction. After King Gerar hired me and helped Helos find work in Bren and Tomas’s shop, he ordered castle staffers to keep our identities a secret; no one outside the complex was to know the circumstances of our arrival. While that mandate has enabled us to lead relatively normal lives out in Roanin—any mistrust leveraged toward us born from broader tension rather than pointed hatred—our story spread among the castle staffers like wildfire. I glance at the cracking portraits, the red rug muffling our footsteps, and feel grateful that at least the painted monarchs can’t flee like the attendant.
“Hold on.”
Captain Torres flings an arm out just as she reaches the door, head cocked to listen. The quiet intensity in her bearing always reminds me of a great bird of prey; a horned owl, perhaps, or a golden eagle. Able to detect the slightest disturbances from far greater a distance than seems possible. Sure enough, beyond the antechamber, the sounds of an argument grow louder, and I hesitate to imagine what sort of disagreement would spur such a breach in decorum.
“Is the—”
“Shh,” she waves. “It’s the Eradain emissary. Wait here.”
I swallow the retort on my tongue with some effort. Apparently it’s not enough that the emissary would not recognize me by my appearance; the Danofers refuse to risk an accidental shift in a foreigner’s presence. Not with the Prediction stoking fear of shifters like me. Emissaries from Glenweil and Eradain come to Telyan each year for the public reading, and every time, I’m not even allowed in the same hall.
Ignoring Captain Torres’s protest, I peek around the corner just enough to see a man pound past, his red-and-blue uniform traced with lines of gold. My stomach churns at the sight.
Expulsion. Executions. Families vanishing in the night. Legislation restricting magical people and creatures, and rumors of worse, relayed in hurried whispers amid the wilderness I grew up in. All stories told of the kingdom to the north, a realm founded on the fear that humans might become second-class to those with magic in their blood. It’s the kind of place I worry Telyan might become, should the tension between humans and magical people continue to rise.
Safe from my vantage point, I watch the emissary storm through the far door the moment a flustered valet pulls it open. I guess the talks did not end well.
The thought offers some comfort as an annoyed Captain Torres delivers me to the study two floors up. I’m in no hurry for King Gerar to make peace with a kingdom that would see my kind destroyed.
* * *
The minutes tick by as I stand alone in the dark-stained, wood-paneled study, waiting for King Gerar to arrive. The more time that passes, the shallower my breathing becomes. He’s probably considering which words he’ll use to dismiss me, and the thought nudges me closer to panic.
I massage the sides of my head with my fingers and attempt to cobble together some semblance of a plan. Perhaps I could try another job in Roanin or even elsewhere in Telyan, where no one recognizes our natural forms, and none suspect us to be the two shifters tied to the Prediction. But this job is the closest I’ve come to experiencing a stable home and real friendship. It’s a chance to repay the man who showed mercy and the boy who showed kindness, long enough to show them they didn’t make a mistake, that I’m worth keeping around, that I can be good. It’s atonement for the way I failed Helos that day by the river, and distraction from what my mother did to me.
Each time I adopt a disguise, I can sink into the role and cast aside the sight of those relentless, haunting eyes—my mother’s eyes as they flickered between the attackers, the open woods, and me. The moment when she looked between her children and freedom, and chose freedom. On my best days, I can even pretend there’s not a snag caught deep inside me, nothing to do with cryptic words or the magic in my blood and everything to do with the person I’ve become. This anger and inexplicable sorrow that hang around my neck like a willful child, stubborn and insistent even when I’ve no cause to feel them at all.
I scan the book spines lining the far wall in an attempt to steady my nerves, then switch my attention to the enormous map spanning a table at the room’s center.
It’s a map of this continent, Alemara, the narrow landmass stretching north and south, longer than it is wide. An enormous river bisects the continent vertically, the dreadful water that separates the Vale from the three realms east of it—the two kingdoms, Eradain and Telyan, with the republic of Glenweil between them. The first persecutes our kind, while the last exiled Helos and me from its borders, going so far as to distribute leaflets bearing our faces sketched in ink. Beneath the illustrations ran a warning to report any sightings of us. I blot it out on the map with my palm.
My gaze drifts left, across the Purple Mountains curving upward along Telyan’s northern border, then west of the river, to the land labeled WESTERN VALE. Terrain with a will of its own—moving, trapping, breaking, alive. Where most magical beings now make their home, and perhaps habitable enough if you have a people, protection. But not for a pair of children endeavoring to survive on their own. Even now, the mere memory of it sends my heart into a gallop.
Clutching the edge of the table, I allow myself just one glance at the dot labeled CAELA RIDGE, a circle of land once made stable thanks to a gift from the giants, where my family had made its home. A single tap of ink to remind others that someone was there, that we lived before raiders destroyed our village and every person in it aside from Helos and myself. By now, that part of my life is little more than a collection of shapes and shadows in my mind. The memories taunt me with their nearness, always just out of reach until, on occasion, I manage to snatch one from the fold. The collection of small wooden structures built around and up in the trees. The bridges suspended between age-broadened trunks where Helos and I used to sprint right to the edges, swiveling back only at the last possible moment. Trying to trick our bodies into thinking we would fall and force a bird form to take shape. (My bird would come later, of course—the result of a different kind of running.) The thuds of our feet hitting wooden planks. A fire to shut out the winter wind. Father’s bloodied back.
I push off from the table and pace the length of the room, forcing myself to breathe deeply. I have never been able to figure out who those men were or why they came, and the uncertainty is maddening.
“Good, you’ve come,” says King Gerar as soon as he enters the study. He’s wearing the dark jacket lined with Telyan purple and green that he always wears for the emissaries’ visits. Unease strengthens its grip on my chest when I see the group tailing him: Captain Torres returned, her oval face impassive, along with Weslyn and Violet. No Finley in sight. Though Violet looks immaculate as always, Weslyn’s navy button-down is uncharacteristically rumpled, the collar askew, and I wonder if he, too, spent the night awake.
King Gerar glances at the two guards flanking the doorway, awaiting orders. “Leave us,” he says.
Just before they shut the door, Astra streaks in and plops down by Weslyn’s side. Then I’m left facing King Gerar, the most powerful man in the southern end of the continent.
“Sit. Please,” he offers, gesturing to a straight-backed, beige lounge chair. “You look as though you’ve had a long night.”
I do as he asks, perching on the edge. Violet remains by her father’s side while Weslyn positions himself in a far corner. Torres stands at the door, and it’s then I realize none of them are going to sit as well.
I feel my future here slip further from my grasp.
“I want to thank you for aiding my son,” King Gerar continues. “Finley told me what you did for him in the Forest.”
“Of course, Your Majesty.”
“And Helos. He aided you?” Violet asks.
I will myself not to wilt under the force of her gaze. Unlike Finley, Violet exudes royalty. It’s there in the way she carries herself, posture regal in a plum, silk shirt tucked into wide-legged trousers. It’s there in the calm and calculating expression with which she app
raises me now. It’s even in the way she always towers over most people in the room, the cut of hair above her shoulders as straight and severe as her bearing. A born leader, and I admire her for it.
I’ve overheard the conversations between her and King Gerar, her demands that he send me away.
“Well?”
“His Royal Highness was feverish, ma’am.” I clutch my hands before me. “He needed medicine, and there was no way to get him back into the castle unseen. Helos treated him.”
“All the way to the door, I hear.”
Violet’s eyes could cut through bone, but I keep my expression neutral. “He’s a healer, ma’am. His Royal Highness asked him to come.”
She lets us stand in silence for another few moments. One of her questioning tactics. By now I’m familiar with it, but still it takes all of my concentration to remain motionless under her stare, to ignore my prickling skin. Though Violet will not inherit the throne for many years yet, the influence she maintains in court is growing stronger by the week. Once she turns twenty-five this winter and begins her first solo tour of the kingdom, that influence is sure to extend to the people as well.
She frowns slightly.
“Rora,” King Gerar says at last. “There is a matter we need to discuss.”
My stomach hits the floor. “Please, sir. Don’t dismiss me. It won’t happen again.”
King Gerar gives me a searching look, as if he can read my emotions in spite of the effort I make to dampen them. “Dismiss you? No, child. I have an assignment for you.”
Relief. Breathtaking solace, trickling through my bones like a stream over stones. I have never known him to lie. “I’ll do what you need me to do, sir,” I tell him earnestly.
His smile is no more than a flicker, there and gone in an instant. “Almost every week now, my people are dying from this malady.” He pauses, as if to see if I’ll contradict him. I don’t. “I had hoped our healers would have found an antidote by now. But nothing they have tried has worked, and now you say my son is dying, too.”
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