Prologue
Sir Emeric de Valois stood in a trampled wheat field on the border of Eastern Staria, and waited for the Wild Hunt to come.
They descended with the thunder rolling over the storm clouds, with a baying of spectral hounds and the shriek of hunting birds, a great host of the dead riding down from the sky like the wind that bent the trees. They came laughing, singing, some dancing amid the skeletal horses, their riders like revelers at a spring festival. They came with a drumming of hooves that shook the air and made the ground beneath Emeric tremble.
At their head, beautiful and wicked as he was in life, rode King Tristan.
His hair was gold and braided with wildflowers, and garlands draped the bones of his horse and wound along the reins in his hands. He was dressed in black, with a tattered cloak and a ruby clasp at his throat, and when Emeric drew his sword, he tossed his head and laughed.
“De Valois!” He slipped off his horse and landed heavily in the muddy field. The Hunt surged at his back like the tide, spirits laughing and shrieking. Horses pawed at the air. Emeric shiftedhis feet as ghostly wolves stalked through the remains of the wheat, watching him.
“Tristan.” Emeric slipped one hand into the pouch at his side and gripped his sword in the other.
“Of course you would be the one to betray me,” Tristan said. “Where have you taken my sword? My horn? I can sense the horn. It is close. Very close. You were foolish to take it, de Valois. It is not meant for human hands.”
“It wasn’t meant for yours, either,” Emeric said, and Tristan’s brow furrowed. The wolves howled in the wheat, and a hundred spectral warriors turned their dead gazes his way. “You were human once. It isn’t your place to steal the dead for your Hunt. They deserve their rest.”
“Don’t tell me what the dead deserve,” Tristan snapped. “My sword, Emeric.”
“It’s out of your reach, now,” Emeric said, and pulled out a horn etched with golden script. The bone was warm in his hand.
He tossed the horn up, and Tristan surged forward, unnaturally fast, his footsteps feather-light through the wheat. Emeric brought his sword down, and the horn fell to the ground in pieces.
Above him, the Wild Hunt howled. They shimmered like rain breaking apart in the wind, rippling and undulating. Ghosts scrambled toward Tristan with gaping mouths and bony fingers, and Tristan cried out as the wind ripped them to tatters. Their cries echoed in the air with a distant ringing of bells, and Tristan doubled over as though in pain, hands clutched to his belly.
“It’s over, Tristan,” Emeric said. “There can be no king of the dead.”
Tristan looked up at Emeric through his curls. Flower petals hung limp in his hair, and when he stepped forward, his body moved unnaturally, as though he were a doll being pulled around.
“I don’t need a host to be king,” he said, in a voice that echoed with the fading chorus of the Wild Hunt. Emeric raised his sword. Tristan ducked so swiftly Emeric could barely track his movement, and he dug his nails into the meat of Emeric’s neck.
Emeric had seen the Wild Hunt’s power in battle—Tristan with his host of spirits, dragging the ghosts of the dead from their bodies as they lay on the battlefield. He’d walked among them as they danced in the moonlight, their wild music urging weak-willed mortals to dance until their feet bled, and drank from Tristan’s cup as he eyed the horn hanging from his hip. He thought he knew the danger, then.
But as the magic of the Hunt sank into his body, he knew he’d been a fool to face the king at all.
He shuddered, weak and gasping, as Tristan ripped his soul free of his body piece by piece. He could feel it unstitch itself, a pain so deep he couldn’t even cry out, and as it came loose, Tristan bent his head and spoke in a low voice.
“Listen to me, Emeric de Valois,” he whispered. “You have failed, thoroughly and utterly. Horns can be remade. Swords can be found. But in the end, the dead of Staria are mine.”
He drew back, and as his body dropped from Tristan’s arms and sank to the ground, Emeric’s fingertips brushed the broken horn. The last thing Emeric de Valois saw before he died was a low wind sweeping over the field, rustling the trampled wheat and stirring the folds of Tristan’s ragged cloak.
Chapter
One
Eli de Valois never did like to dance.
When he was young, his mother and father used to hold balls at home in Duciel. They were grand events, full of sparkling silverware and glittering jewels, and Eli was too young to do more than sit on the stairs by the ballroom and watch enormous skirts and buckled shoes glide across the polished floor. They moved so smoothly and mechanically that Eli would fall asleep on the stairs, dreaming of clockwork puppets dancing in unison across an endless ballroom.
Some nights, when there weren’t any balls and Eli’s mother went calling on her friends in town, Eli’s father would join him in the nursery to read from a set of books on the upper shelves of the schoolroom. He always pretended they were too heavy to lift, and he would go staggering around just to make Eli laugh.
“What is it tonight, then?” he’d ask, thumbing dramatically through the pages. “The Wild Hunt, the Wild Hunt, or the Wild Hunt again?”
The Wild Hunt wasn’t Eli’s favorite, even though his father thought it was. It was terrifying, with dark etchings of ghosts and spectral wolves stalking the dead. But Eli approached fear as though it were a feral cat that could be tamed with enoughpatience and affection, so he always picked it when it was his father’s turn to read.
There were hundreds of stories about the Wild Hunt in Staria. Starians didn’t usually believe in gods, but they did believe in people that could become powerful and strange, tall tales striding about the Starian countryside. One spirit was the Green Man, whom they said roamed the woods during the spring solstice. Another was the May Bride, whom they said would wander the fields looking for a maiden she could truly love. Eli’s father’s favorite was Jack of the Bridge, a spirit who took other people’s bad luck and went stumbling around Starian villages with his head in a bucket. There was the Fox, a trickster that could change forms between a mortal and a fox to vex Starian farmers, and a dozen more carefully illustrated in the heavy book. But the one Eli knew best was King Tristan of the Wild Hunt.
The Wild Hunt came from old Staria, when they weren’t a proper kingdom but a mess of borders with dozens of warrior kings fighting each other for scraps of farmland. The Hunt was a host of dead warriors that fell on the battlefield or grabbed commoners who’d been caught in the fighting, and they galloped about the countryside on spectral horses, chasing down errant spirits. Sometimes, they’d gather in fields for a riotous dance, and any mortal who saw them would be doomed to dance along until their bodies gave out and their shoes were worn through.
