by Bree Barton
“Come illness, suffering, e’en death,
Until my final breath I will be yours.”
His upper lip bowed in the middle; his lower lip was plump and full. She felt the integrity of her patellae turn to paste. So this was how it felt to go weak at the knees. Their vows reverberated through the Chapel, a hum of consonants, an aria of vowels.
“Till the ice melts on the southern cliffs,
Till the glass cities sink into the western sands.”
She had the distinct feeling there were two heartbeats woven together in her chest, two lovers interlacing hands.
“Till the eastern isles burn to ash,
Till the northern peaks crumble.”
This was madness. Mia felt as if she were being torn apart. She had no idea what was happening—and she couldn’t trust what she couldn’t know. The prince leaned forward and encircled her wrist with his fingers.
“Promise me, O promise me.
You will be mine.”
“I will,” Quin said.
I will, she said, but the words stopped somewhere in her throat.
She had to run. It wasn’t logical, but to hell with logic. The urge was primal, tearing through her like a snarling beast. She had to get out of there.
She shook his hand off her arm and lunged backward. She started to turn, but Quin was faster. His hands were on her waist, soft yet firm, spinning her around to face him, stepping into the space where she’d stood, incinerating her momentum, cradling her face in his hands—and then falling, falling, falling into her arms.
His face was too close, too heavy. His body had gone limp.
Pandemonium erupted in the Chapel. What was happening? She tried to hold Quin up, struggling to support his weight, and that’s when she felt it. The shaft of an arrow plunged deep into his back.
Mia’s hand was slick with blood as the prince slumped to the Chapel floor.
Chapter 11
Gwyrach
CHAOS. SHOUTING. MURDEROUS HEAT from every direction, liquid and thick, like the churning vortex of a volqano.
Mia crouched over Quin’s crumpled body. She thought she heard Queen Rowena scream, followed by a clash of steel, but it was impossible to sort one sound from the next. A panicked man rushed the altar and swiftly found himself on the wrong end of a guard’s blade.
She couldn’t see her family—the balcony was bedlam. Her eyes blurred as she stared down at Quin, blood pooling in a dark circle beneath him. So much blood she could see her own face in the stain.
The prince convulsed, flecks of spittle on his lips. He was alive.
But not for long once he was trampled, his skull crushed. Why hadn’t the king’s guards swooped in to protect him?
As the Chapel roiled around her, she realized two things. First: if no one else was going to help, it was up to her to get the prince to safety.
Second: the archer who’d tried to kill him was almost certainly still there.
She wrapped her arms around Quin’s chest and, staying low to the ground, dragged him into the Sacristy. Her head was raging, but her hands were steady. She silently thanked her father: she had inherited, among other things, his cool head in times of crisis.
The Sacristy was exactly as she remembered it: a small table in the corner, skirted with purple velvet folds. She snatched a candle off its surface, shoved the cloth aside, and crawled under, pulling Quin in behind her.
He moaned. She couldn’t lay him on his back—the archer had made sure of that—so she propped him on his side.
“You’re going to be all right,” she said, though she had not the faintest inkling how. The arrow had gone in deep, and the wound was gushing.
The wedding guests had gone feral, the turmoil from the Chapel threatening to spill into the Sacristy at any moment. A new thought struck with horror. What if it was one of the guards who had tried to kill the prince? She had to act quickly.
Mia dug at the edges of the trapdoor, wood splintering beneath her fingernails. The thin chain snapped easily as she pried open the door and pitched herself through. Standing in the corridor below, she looped her arms around Quin and half dragged, half fell with him into the tunnel. The train of her dress collapsed on top of them like an overcooked soufflé.
Quin cried out. He’d fallen on his back, propelling the arrow more deeply into his chest. She cursed herself for her carelessness. She grabbed the candle from the floor above and pulled the door shut over their heads.
“Quin, look at me. I need you to look at me.” His eyes wouldn’t focus.
She had to get the arrow out. She didn’t have the right equipment—most brides didn’t bring surgical knives and dwayle to the altar—but she had to try.
She held the candle close, the flame dancing wildly, battered by her uneven breath. The arrow had gone in above his left scapula and sliced all the way through his chest; she could see the sinister red tip cresting the skin above his clavicle. The arrow had missed his lungs and heart by a hair’s breadth. He was lucky to be alive.
She flipped him over onto his stomach and applied pressure to the bony ridge of his shoulder blade, holding him steady. It was a common misconception that an arrow, once lodged in the body, should be pushed all the way through. This was bad science. If forced through the chest, the vanes in the back of the shaft could cause more tearing and internal bleeding. If the arrow had made a clean incision, then the means of egress was ready-made: the arrow could be pulled out the way it came in—as long as you proceeded very, very carefully.
She closed her eyes and conjured up the image of Wound Man: a tall, lean figure pierced by all manner of arrows, daggers, spears, darts, and swords. Macabre, yes, but there was a reason it was her favorite anatomical plate. Next to every wound site was a neat caption with a description of the injury, recommended treatment, and the likelihood of recovery. It had brought Mia tremendous relief that even wounds could be categorized and solved. She had memorized every word.
From what she’d seen of the arrowhead, it appeared to be a clean stone blade, not barbed or jutted. Barbed heads were problematic—they could tear vital organs upon extraction—so all things being equal, she was in an objectively good position. What better time to rip an entire arrow out of a man’s chest?
“Take a deep breath,” she said. “This will only hurt a moment.”
She was quick. With one hand pressed firmly into his scapula, she gripped the wooden shaft in her other hand, took a breath, and wrenched the arrow out in one solid piece.
She tossed it aside, pleased. She’d gotten all of it, including the arrowhead: a perfect extraction. But her satisfaction was short-lived. Quin rolled onto his back as fresh blood spurted from the wound. He howled in pain, then lost consciousness. She’d done something wrong. She must have nicked the carotid artery—there was too much blood.
Mia tried not to panic. Why had her father never let her study wound theory in practicum? A surgeon was only ever as good as his cadavers. But although the other Hunters often practiced extracting arrows from the corpses of Gwyrach, her father had forbidden her from attending these gruesome training sessions.
The prince groaned, his pallid lips moving soundlessly. He was trying to speak. She felt his forehead: simmering hot.
“Under the plums,” he whispered. “If it’s meant to be. You’ll come to me, under the snow plum tree.”
With a pang she thought of Angelyne and felt a searing sense of shame. In the Chapel, Mia had tried to run away. She had promised to protect her sister, but in the end, her baser instincts had won, proving that instincts were never to be trusted.
Where was Angie now? Was she safe? It was an insipid question, considering someone had just shot an arrow into the prince’s back. Were the Gwyrach to blame? That theory didn’t hold up—the Gwyrach had no need for bows and arrows when they could stop a man’s heart. Was the Kaer under siege? Had one of the other kingdoms decided to attack?
Suddenly Quin sat ramrod straight, startling her. “We only wanted . . . she was lying ther
A chill swept down Mia’s spine. “Who was lying there?”
“We didn’t mean for him to find us. I never meant to . . .”
“Who? Who found you?”
He sank into her arms, mumbling nonsense. Was this febrile delirium or a last confession? When he coughed his lips were streaked with blood. Mia knew enough about anatomy to know this wasn’t a good thing.
She ripped open his bridegroom jacket and then his shirt, popping off several gold buttons in the process. His chest was smooth and hairless, a clean slate for the blood leaching from the gash. She’d never seen so much blood. It was everywhere. The white oyster silk of her dress was soaked a deep, pulsing red.
What bitter irony. Here she was, in the tunnels beneath Kaer Killian, holding a bloodied wedding gown. She was living out a grotesque parody of the very escape she’d plotted for herself and her sister. How naive she’d been, hatching schemes of boar’s blood and faked murder. Real murder was a different thing entirely.
She stared down at the prince’s ashen face, his shirt torn asunder, golden curls mashed to his forehead with sweat. He’d never looked so young or innocent. Hard to be an incorrigible ass when you were dying, even for someone as gifted at assery as the prince.
“Stay with me, Quin.”
In seventeen years she’d only seen one dead body, and it was eerily neat and sterile, her mother’s flesh unmarred by any visible wound. Until now, Mia hadn’t known a person could hold so much blood. Reading about the ten pints in a human body was one thing; marinating in them was another.
She was accustomed to having the right answer, but she didn’t have it now. This was a test she was going to fail. Barring a miracle, he would die in her arms.
The candle flame winked and twirled, then sputtered out, shrouding them in black.
Mia was bone tired. She couldn’t give up. Not now. Not like this. In her mind she paged through every book she had ever read: all the anatomical sketches she’d drawn as a Huntress, the physiology lessons from her father, her mother’s medical skills. Maybe she could stanch the flow of blood. Maybe it wasn’t too late.
Instinctively she tore off her gloves and flung them aside, pressing her hands to Quin’s chest. For once she felt no cold rolling off the prince; only sickly heat. The trick was to apply pressure. The trick was to let him know he was not alone. The trick was to do everything in her power to make sure he didn’t die here in this dark tunnel, without his family, without his dogs.
“Stay with me. Please.”
To her surprise, her voice was cracking. She’d never felt more alone.
Her body was a wrung-out cloth. In her mind she watched all her hope and strength swirl down a giant porcelain drain. A crush of feet and metal sounded from above. Either the guards would find her with the prince dead in her arms, or the assassin would drop down into the tunnel and kill them both.
Was there wind in the tunnels? It suctioned her skin, siphoning the air from the corridor. She wanted desperately to sleep. She started to drift off, then jolted back awake. How could her body mutiny at a time like this? She fought to maintain control. But her fingertips were numb and heavy on the prince’s chest. Her eyes stung, her eyelids were leaden.
Mia’s head drooped, her limp curls brushing Quin’s face.
She pressed her ear to Quin’s chest, listening frantically for a heartbeat. Nothing.
She’d lost him. It was over.
“Tickles.”
Mia’s eyes flew open. Had he just spoken?
“Your hair.” His voice was a fuzzy murmur, as if he were lying at the bottom of a long chute. In the dark she felt him lift a shaky hand and part the curtain of ringlets splicing the air between them. “It’s everywhere.”
She sat upright. Heart racing, she squinted into the fathomless black. But it wasn’t fathomless: hazy light seeped in from some unseen cleft in the rock. Quin’s cheeks were tinged with color. His iridescent eyes were clear and open—and also baffled.
Mia was baffled herself. How was the color flooding back into his face?
He sat up, then sank back onto his elbows, woozy. “What happened? We were in the Chapel, saying our vows. The last thing I remember . . .”
Quin stared at the arrow on the ground. Then he looked at his wound.
“You shouldn’t—” she started to say, but it was too late: he touched the hole in his chest. Mia winced, waiting for him to cry out. But he didn’t even flinch. He simply stared at his fingertips, dazed.
There was no hole.
In the weak light, she saw the impossible: the flesh had stitched itself back together, stanching the flow of blood. The gash was no longer oozing; it was white with notched pink ridges, already a fish-bone scar.
“Four gods,” he said.
Mia’s mind was reeling. He should have died. She stared at her hands, still wet with his blood.
“You healed me,” the prince said quietly.
No. It wasn’t possible. She had spent three years studying the human body. A wound of that depth and severity did not vanish from a simple touch.
Unless.
Unless.
“You’re a Gwyrach,” Quin said.
Chapter 12
Times of Unimaginable Duress
MIA HEARD THE WORDS Quin was saying, but she couldn’t comprehend them.
“I—I’m not a Gwyrach,” she stammered. “I can’t be a Gwyrach.”
“You healed me with your touch.” He poked gingerly at his wound. “It doesn’t even hurt. Like it never happened.” His eyes narrowed. “In the Chapel, during the ceremony . . . you were enthralling me, weren’t you?”
Mia’s stomach pitched. Molten lava popped and boiled inside her chest; she swallowed hard to stop the rising bile. Everything she had ever known, every hard-won truth: gone.
“I wouldn’t—I can’t—I would never do that.”
The words came out mangled. Even as she said it, she knew it was a lie. Now she saw the wedding ceremony in a new light: the honeyed heat, the fiery sparks boring into her skin. She had enthralled him. She must have enthralled him in the library, too. What she had naively mistaken for budding attraction was her own dark magic.
How could she be so obtuse? She had studied it in a hundred books, knew the signs, the symptoms. She had touched his hand in the library and again in the Chapel. Both times Quin had been sweating and breathing heavily, his heart beating so loudly she’d felt it thrum beneath her own skin. She had, unwittingly, spiked his blood with desire. She had made him want her.
But hadn’t she been wearing gloves?
To enthrall someone is to enslave them, little rose. You’ve stripped them of consent, robbed them of their choice. And without choice, what are we?
The king’s guards slammed through the Sacristy overhead. Joined by the Hunters, no doubt. A grisly truth settled into the pit of her stomach.
She was a Gwyrach. If they found her, they would kill her.
Quin wobbled to his feet. “We have to run.”
She blinked. “I’m not sure I—”
“Someone clearly wants me dead. And once they discover you’re a Gwyrach . . .” His face was grim. “Your Hand will be the latest addition to my father’s Hall.”
Fear thrashed in her chest. “You would reveal me?”
“No, Mia. I’m not as evil as you seem to believe.” He gestured at his wound. “But it’s a little obvious, don’t you think?”
He was right. The regrown flesh was an unnatural perversion; it could only be a product of magic. They were both doomed.
Yelling broke out overhead, then a crash of steel and brass. A wild notion flashed through Mia’s mind. It was completely illogical, wholly unreasonable, something she would never have cooked up in a million years . . . and it just might work.
She summoned all her strength and stood.
“I know a way out,” she said. “Follow me.”
She’d spent days agonizing over her carefully inked map of the tunnels, but in the end it wasn’t the map that saved her. As she led Quin through the corridors, she invoked her father’s swift, sure footfall the night before. His parting gift.
Moments later, they were standing in the castle crypt.
Mia ached to press her cheek into her mother’s tomb. In the dim light she saw the elegant plum tree carved into the cold gray stone, the little bird on its lonely perch, peering up at the moon. Good-bye, Mother. It seemed she would never get the chance to say a proper farewell—not three years ago, and not today.
“Why are we in the crypt?” Quin said, uneasy.
“You’ll see.”
She had never known exhaustion like this. Her body was an empty vessel, subject to the whims of a force greater than her own. The prince was light-headed, too, she could tell. She circled an arm around his waist and together they staggered shakily along the passageway feeding out of the crypt.
“The path is unforgiving,” she said, echoing her father. “Watch your step.”
She was grateful for her strong legs and hips as they lumbered forward on four legs. They stumbled onto the precipice outside the castle, the bitter wind whisking Mia’s hair into a fine cherry mousse, the moon a glowing stone in the sky.
And there it was, a shimmering beacon twenty feet above them on the cliff side.
The laghdú.
The carriage that had once carted princes and princesses across the quarry, now empty, bobbing on a long, taut cable—the very cable that connected Kaer Killian with the village far below.
Run, little rose. Run fast and free.
Had her father known?
She didn’t have time to wonder. She helped the prince up the bluff and packed him into the carriage in his shreds of bloody shirt.
“Mia?” Quin’s voice was uncertain. “What exactly are we about to do?”
“You have to trust me.”
A bold proposition, considering how the wedding gown tangled around her ankles, nearly catapulting her into the abyss. This pretty trifle would be the death of her—she had tripped on it for the last time. She dug her fingers into the train and ripped it out, tossing it onto the rocks in a wad of grimy silk.
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