by Page Morgan
The emperor flipped open a tiger oak box set atop the round table, next to his decanter of wine. A silver glimmer from inside cinched that invisible rope tight. Blood pounded against my eardrums as Frederic grasped the hilt of a dagger and lifted it into view. The polished blade reflected my rigid posture in the chair. He held it outward, displaying the golden, double-headed lynx on the crossed hilt—the crest of the Klaven royal family.
“It is of Orin’s private collection. No one has the like of it.” The emperor admired the crest with a gentle rub of his thumb. “You must act quickly. You’ll have but ten minutes to slay the princess before Orin arrives.”
The emperor continued to speak, but I couldn’t hear anything but the three words splitting my chest into halves: slay the princess.
“Kill Princess Mara? That is my mission?”
Frederic sealed his lips, and I realized I’d interrupted. But I couldn’t stop.
“She is your daughter.” My heart fought for its normal rhythm again. “She is a woman.”
The emperor sighed heavily and switched the dagger from his left hand to his right. “I understand you have your rules, Huntsman. No women, no children, no torture.” He ticked them each off as Kinn might recite monotonous vocabulary. “Admirable. And haven’t I accommodated you these last many years?”
I stayed silent. I wasn’t sure my voice would allow a reply anyhow. The princess. The emperor wanted Mara slain—by my hand. The images of her offering a chair to me at her sitting room table, of her delighted laughter when I returned a thick text to her less than a day after she’d leant it to me, of her kind eyes and patient smile, quick-fired in my mind.
Frederic stood and replaced the dagger in the tiger oak box.
“Mara is not a woman. She is a princess. Remember that, Huntsman. And remember that as emperor, I am often forced to make weighty decisions that would cause weaker men to crumble. I love my daughter.” The emperor closed the lid. “But I love Morvansk more. Recently, we suffered a great blow to our internal defense. To rebuild it, I require a reason to invade Klaven. A reason the Morvansk people and soldiers will all support, without question. The time has finally come.”
He held out the box, expecting me to take it. He wanted me to use Orin’s dagger to slay Mara, and then what? Frame Orin? It didn’t matter. I’d always done as ordered, but this…not this. I rose from the chair, my skin hot, my head tipping.
“I won’t.”
It was stupid. Lunatic. No one refused the emperor. Frederic’s onyx eyes contemplated me. My fate, really. Refusing him would warrant my own death.
So be it. I wouldn’t change my mind. I wouldn’t kill a woman. I never had, and I never would. I was no longer an eleven-year-old boy afraid of the noose, but a man. I would rather accept my punishment than kill Mara.
“That would be a most unwise decision.” He put the box on the table. He tapped the lid twice and then paced away, a hand on his chin. “Your skill with these highly confidential matters has surpassed my previous huntsmen by far. The duties you’ve performed have, in fact, done more good for Morvansk than what even a hundred of my finest warriors on the battlefield could accomplish.”
I had taken just under two-dozen lives for Morvansk. All of those lives had been warranted. Murderers, mutinous plotters, spies. Perhaps I truly had done more good than a hundred warriors. But nothing warranted the killing of an innocent princess.
The emperor stopped pacing. “Huntsman, I want you to give me your loyalty freely. But if I must, I will force it from you.”
I held my position, willing the thumping of my heart to slow. “I do not fear my own death.”
It was an honest statement. I’d seen enough to know dying was like all other things in life: inevitable.
The emperor smirked. “No, I didn’t think you would. However, if you do not take up that dagger, deliver those notes, and do the duty you swore to do, it will not be your death you need fear.”
A flame-eaten log crumbled in the hearth, scattering ash and coal as Frederic’s smirk fell away.
“I hear your mother has appreciated life in the heights.” He walked around the throne-like chair, back toward the balcony. “Your younger sister and brother, too. I trust they are all faring well?”
He turned on his heel and held my eyes. Then lowered his gaze to the tiger oak box. His meaning settled. It dripped an icy flush down my spine.
That bastard. Anger and frustration roiled in my stomach as I thought of Mother and Lael, most likely working in the kitchen right then, and Kinn, probably avoiding a bath or his chores. If I didn’t carry out my orders… It will not be your death you need fear.
The emperor opened the balcony doors, and left. He already knew he’d won. I reached out, and with the world coming down all around me, I picked up the dagger.
4
Ever
Freshly skinned rabbits hung from a butcher’s wagon in Rooks Hollow’s center market, their long bellies and ribs split and hollowed. The sun beat down on the carcasses, flies gathering on the whitish pink skin. The meat at the center market wasn’t as fresh or clean, but I’d take the flies any day over entering Nikols Butchery. The last time I’d been there, Bram’s eyes had fixed themselves to my chest, as if he’d known a pair of breasts hid beneath the binding cloth, which I’d drawn as tight as it would go.
“I’ll take four,” I told the vendor who was busy gutting yet another rabbit. He brought them down and wrapped them in paper. Blood quickly leaked through.
“Celebrating the prince’s betrothal?” he asked. I passed him a few half-storgs.
“It’s nothing to me,” I said.
Plenty of villagers were in favor of Prince Orin aligning with Morvansk, and the rejoicing had started earlier that morning when news arrived that the princess was expected in Pendrak within a few days. My father was not one of the revelers. Nothing about Morvansk or Emperor Frederic ever made him want to rejoice.
The vendor laughed. “I heard the princess is dog ugly. Someone ought to give the prince a blindfold for the wedding night, eh?”
The vendor jabbed me with his elbow before picking up the thin blade and skimming it along the rabbit’s hindquarters. The crude comment didn’t make me blush—it was just the way men talked to other men. Until a woman came around, of course.
The rabbit blood turned my fingers sticky as I walked to the tavern. The curtains were drawn in front of the gold-etched windows. Father had been drinking since he closed the tavern last night. Others might have mistaken it as celebrating. I knew better.
“The rabbit,” he grumbled from the kitchen. “You got the rabbit, Ever?”
I gritted my teeth and hurried into the kitchen, dumping the bundle on the table. “Don’t worry, I’ll make the stew right now.”
The crowds would show up earlier than usual, and men drank more with dinner in their bellies, especially when I sprinkled the stew with spicy redroot powder. My father slumped in a chair at the head of the table, his mug drained once again. His fingerprints had smudged the glass to a fog, and errant splashes of ale stained the front of his shirt.
“Don’t worry?” He flung his mug to the side, and it shattered against the windowsill.
I leaped back as a rain of glass caught the sunlight spilling in through the back door. Dragging in a breath, I tried to close my eyes, but they were stuck open. It had been ages since the inexplicable fear of broken glass had gripped me. I’d never understood it, and definitely never shared it with my father. The pool of jagged glass on the floor seemed to expand and reel me in as he continued his rant.
“Frederic will have an open door into Klaven. He could come here, Ever.”
He kneaded his knuckles, his wrists trembling. I looked from them to the shattered glass, then back, trying to tame my spiking pulse.
“The emperor won’t come to Volk’s.”
He closed his eyes, the lids heavy with creases, and ignored me.
“We came here because Klaven was sealed off to Morvansk. We
came here to get as far from Frederic as we could. She knew we’d be safe here.” His anger turned to misty sadness, as it did whenever his drunken thoughts shifted toward my mother.
I didn’t remember living in Morvansk, though I knew we once had. Father had taken me and fled the empire less than a day after Frederic’s warriors stormed our little cabin in Steegen, a paper-making village clear across the empire from Yort. His story of that night hadn’t changed over the handful of times he’d told it. Because the story had stayed the same, I took it for truth. The warriors had broken down the front door, dragged my mother by the hair from her bed where she’d sat nursing me, and bludgeoned my father until he lay unconscious on the floor. They probably thought they had killed him, but he’d woken, plastered in blood, to a wailing infant on the rug beside him, and his wife gone. The muddy footprints from the warriors were still tacky on the floorboards when he’d bundled me up, packed what he could, and set out for Klaven.
The first time he’d told me the story, I’d been furious.
“How could you just leave like that? Why didn’t you go after her?” I’d screamed, thinking the worst of him. That he’d been a coward and weak, that he hadn’t loved my mother enough to at least try to rescue her. But he’d only walked away from me, leaving my questions unanswered. Letting me hate him. Even now, I didn’t know if my mother was dead or alive. I’d asked the mirror to show her to me dozens of times, but the surface only ever showed a smoky black haze. The only image I had of her was a roughly sketched portrait, and it wasn’t even really mine.
My father kept it pinned to the inside roof of a trunk in his bedroom. I’d found it one night a few years ago, when he’d been so drunk I’d had to help him up to bed. I’d been looking for a shirt to replace the one he’d chummed on, and had opened the trunk. There the portrait had been. A piece of paper about the size of my open palm. Her long hair, wavy and dark, her nose short and upturned, her lashes long and thick. When I left Rooks Hollow and my hair grew long, I would look just like her. I hoped.
My father swayed to his feet now.
“I can’t send you to Pendrak. Frederic might not come here, to Rooks Hollow, but he’ll certainly be there.”
He took another mug and teetered into the barroom. I heard the stream of ale as it flowed from the tap and sloshed into the mug.
“Things have changed, Ever, and they’ve changed quickly. People are noticing you. They’re noticing, and then this betrothal…” He drew a long gulp of ale, shaking his head of auburn curls. “I’ll need to find another place to send you.”
We’d planned on Pendrak. We’d planned for so long. Yes, my father shouted. He drank too much. He refused to explain the mirror magic. And he’d never once told me he loved me. Still, I knew everything he said and did, even the hurtful, angry things, was—in his warped way—how he said it. If he didn’t love me, he wouldn’t have worked so hard to hide me.
I leaned against the table, accidentally setting my hand in the puddle of blood seeping from the rabbit.
“There is nowhere else I can go,” I whispered. We were in Klaven because it had been an enemy empire, hidden away from Frederic, the monster. Frederic, the kidnapper.
“There has to be someplace else. Ever, look at you.” I glanced down gullibly, wondering if blood had made it onto my clothes. “You think I don’t notice that Nikols boy sniffing around? It’s only a matter of time before he says something. And are you really naïve enough to believe Frederic won’t search for you? That he won’t want your magic the same way he wanted your mother’s?” He snorted—his way of calling me an idiot. “Frederic’s men made a mistake not taking you the day they took her. Your magic is worth more than all the sacks of gold in the empires, Ever. Frederic knows it.”
I wiped the blood from my palm and whipped the towel onto the table. My face and ears burned. He always made everything out to be my fault. As if I’d wanted to disguise myself as a boy in the first place! As if I wanted everything to come undone.
“And how did Frederic know? About mother and the mirror magic? You’ve never told me. You’ve never told me anything!”
The muscles in Father’s jaw tensed and twitched. He didn’t answer right away, and I knew he was avoiding the question. Like always.
“He just did.” The answer was as vague as I’d expected. But then he surprised me with something more. “The mirror magic isn’t anything new, Ever.”
It wasn’t new? “What does that mean?”
“It’s known,” he said with a long sigh. “It’s ancient, and those with it know others with it, and not everyone is as quiet about it as we are.”
There were more people like me. I’d wondered…hoped…but had never known.
“Then Frederic might have already found someone else with the magic. He might have forgotten all about the baby his warriors overlooked,” I said, more hope rising. “We shouldn’t give up on Pendrak. It’s an enormous city, and when I arrive I’ll have no standing, no status. I’ll be a housemaid or a nanny or something lower. Even if Frederic passed within five inches of me, why would he bother to glance my way?”
My father grasped my shoulders. “How could he not? How could he not recognize the younger face of his best kept secret?” Spittle flew onto his lips and chin. He held on, giving me a small shake. “I will not send you into Pendrak.” He shook me again, harder. “I will not send you anywhere he can find you. Anywhere he would dare look for you.”
He jostled me a final time and thrust me backwards. I stumbled, treading on some of the glass shards. The race of my heartbeat as the glass ground between the soles of my boots and the wood plank annoyed me. The glass was on the floor, already shattered. What was there to be afraid of?
“After this wedding, he’ll be able to look for me in every empire. There is nowhere left!”
“There is one place,” my father replied.
I shook my head. The ale had to have smashed him. My father slowly met my eyes, and I knew what he was going to say.
“Frederic would never follow you into the Silent Ranges. He’d never seek you out.” He suddenly looked sober enough to thread a needle.
The Silent Ranges were a crescent of snowy-peaked mountains that touched all six empires, though not one of the empires claimed them as their own. They were ruled by other…things. The stories of ill-fated expeditions into the ranges were old; I had been raised on them, just like everyone else in the empires. Creatures, unlike anything we knew, roamed the ridges and guarded the summit. What lay on the other side of the mountains remained a mystery. Those who entered the foothills never came out. It was an unspoken, uncontested rule: You don’t go into the Silent Ranges. At least not if you’re sane.
Glass strained under my heels as I shifted away from him, toward the back door. It was too hot in here with the leaping fire in the hearth, the air drenched with humidity. My stomach swirled.
“No,” I said, then louder, “No! I won’t go there. I’d rather stay here and take my chances with Frederic than flee to the ranges.”
His cheeks fumed red and then mottled purple. “You’d rather be caged and treated as a circus pet the way your mother was? You’d rather send all of my sacrifices, everything I’ve done for you, into the gutter?”
This was typical of him. First, he blamed me for everything, and then layered on guilt.
“You don’t even know what’s in those ranges,” I said, retreating even further. “No one does.”
“I do know what will happen to you if you’re discovered. If any Mors or Klaves, or anyone at all discovers what you can do. It is not a gift, Ever. It’s a curse. A goddamn blight.”
As if the floor beneath his heels had tilted, he stumbled, the haze of ale catching back up with him. His hand made a sloppy pass over his forehead, and he staggered to his chair. He wanted to send me into the Silent Ranges? Alone, or would he come, too?
It didn’t matter. I’d never go. I’d face the emperor first.
I’d face him the way my father never
had.
5
Tobin
The sharp hum of insects joined the rumble and clop of wagon wheels and horse hooves along the road between Yort and Pendrak. Humidity hung on each leaf and vine as Princess Mara’s caravan traveled east inside the empire of Klaven. Mud sucked at my boots as I trudged along the path with the foot guards, flanked on each side by dense forest. A dozen foot soldiers wearing the sapphire of Klaven had met us at the border, and were under orders from Emperor Lucian, Orin’s father, to accompany us.
It was early evening when we stopped to make camp, heat lightning and dark thunderheads on the horizon. The rain started past dark. It pattered off the oiled canvas sheet above the fire pit, the skin of the last game hen browning above a pathetic flame. I’d already fed the guards and ladies, but I didn’t feel hungry. The next morning we would arrive in Pendrak. Then the morning after that, I’d deliver the notes.
I had to deliver them. Kinn, Lael, Mother…they depended on me to deliver them, whether they knew it or not. When I announced I’d be joining the princess as one of her guards, Mother had been too proud to do more than give me a giant kiss on each cheek before turning away, misty eyed. Kinn asked me to show him my arm muscles a half dozen times, but of course Lael had only stared at me with distrust and said nothing.
I slid the cooked hen from the spear over the fire pit, onto my tin plate. The Mor foot guards had taken to the tree cover to the right of the road, and the Klaven guards to the left. Torches lit both sides, a few guards from each empire posted on night watch.
Three roofed carriages sat just off the road, the horses still hitched in case we needed to break camp fast. Candlelight brightened the veiled windows of two carriages, one belonging to the princess, the other to her ladies. The third carriage, carrying an emissary and one of the emperor’s advisors, was darkened. I sat alone under the canvas lean-to, picking off the blistered skin of the game hen. I couldn’t eat. I probably wouldn’t sleep either.
