“A curse I lay upon you now, little traitor: that you will live like the wandering squires of old Staria and no mortal hand may give you comfort. Food offered by mortal hands will turn to ash in your mouth and their shelters will crumble. And everywhere you will be hunted—by the wolves in the fields and the bears that stalk the deep woods, by hawk and owl and mortals touched by my realm. You will not be free until you have found and returned the sword Emeric de Valois stole from me. When you do, you will spill your blood over my broken horn and make it whole, and I will release you.”
Eli should have been terrified. He should have been cowering, begging, falling to his knees like Sabre had at the gallows. But it wasn’t just that Eli was a dominant—something had shifted inside him when he was hanged, a vital piece of himself knocked loose. He was filthy and weak and bleeding, butdespite the fear weighing him down, a surge of fury rose through him.
“When I find that sword,” Eli said, staring Tristan in his golden eyes. “I will use it to carve out your fucking heart.”
The wolf laughed. It was a horrible laugh, low and heavy, and the wolf shifted form as the sound rumbled through the air. He took flight as a black owl with golden eyes and talons, and as he circled Eli, his voice rattled in Eli’s mind.
“Start looking, de Valois. If someone sees you here, it will be the king’s hunters who seek you first.”
Eli shivered in a rush of cold wind as Tristan disappeared into the dark sky. As he stood there, he wondered what his father would think of him now—a traitor to the king and his own brother, bound by the king of the same Wild Hunt they used to read about in the nursery. His breath hitched, and not for the first time, Eli wished that whatever magic existed in the hidden corners of Staria could bring his father back out of the woods in which he’d died, smiling and warm. But the magic hadn’t found Arthur de Valois. It had found Eli, and now, Eli turned from the high walls of Duciel and made his slow, painful way through the dark.
Chapter
Two
The Blanchet country house sat a few miles from the gates of Duciel, surrounded by cultivated walking paths and statues Lord Blanchet had commissioned from artists in Kallistos. As Eli crept among the lifelike marble figures, he tried to make sense of the spirit that had dragged him from the grave. He could feel his mind struggling to cover it up with convenient lies—it was a hallucination, exhaustion, maybe an actual wolf—but some things were too strange for reason. The longer he stumbled down country lanes and through empty fields, the more he realized that it had all been true. He’d wept, then, in the dark, for his mother and Sabre—even if Sabre was alive, since he doubted the king would be particularly kind.
If he went back to Duciel, the king’s guards would simply hang him again. He couldn’t go to the Chastains, his mother’s co-conspirators—Lord Oscar Chastain coveted the crown, and had only favored the de Valois’ plan because they had the power to pull it off.
Lord Blanchet, however, was a different matter. He was a co-conspirator, but he had no desire to take the throne. He genuinely seemed to like Eli, and his nephew, Olivier, was one of Sabre’s friends—Olivier had asked Eli more than once if hemight want to be a Blanchet one day. And Lord Blanchet was a famous recluse—he never went to Duciel, and he only hired servants to clean his house once a week, choosing to run his household himself. He was an eccentric, but his estate was the perfect place to lie low and recover.
Despite it being a country house, the Blanchet residence pushed up against the main road cutting through Eastern Staria, which meant Eli had to duck down a few times as carriages passed by. One carriage particularly worried him, a worn wooden cart with the driver sitting on the bench in the open, hat pulled over his head, but after a while of tense staring, Eli suspected the driver was actually asleep.
When he knocked on the back door, a light turned on in one of the upstairs rooms. After a few minutes of silence, the door opened, revealing Lord Blanchet. He was a genteel older man with graying hair at the temples and a worn nightrobe, and he took one look at Eli and tried to shut the door.
“Wait!” Eli shoved his shoulder in the gap. “Lord Blanchet. It’s me. It’s… de Valois.”
“Spirits preserve us,” Lord Blanchet whispered, staring down at Eli. “My nephew said you were hanged.”
“I was,” Eli said. “It’s a long story. Please, I know it’s a risk, but I have nowhere else to go.”
“Come in before anyone sees you.” Lord Blanchet stepped aside, and Eli slipped through the door. The hall was dark, and Eli felt grubby and out of place in his bare feet and shift. “Goodness, child, the state of you. It’s as though you…as though…”
“I crawled out of the grave?” Eli asked. Lord Blanchet went pale.
“What depths the king won’t stoop to. Come upstairs, child, there’s enough hot water for a bath. I don’t have gowns, but I have some of Olivier’s old things.”
“I don’t mind. Thank you.” Eli could have wept. A bath, after everything, sounded too good to be true.
He was hustled up the servant’s stairway to a spare bathroom, where Eli had to run the taps three times to scrub off all the gravedirt and mud. His hair was too matted to save, and he took a pair of scissors to his curls and tried not to think about how ragged he looked. His neck was the worst part. It was bloody and scabbed where the rope had dragged over his throat, and when Eli tried to clean the wounds, the water ran red and he had to get to his knees, too dizzy to stand.
There were strips of rags in the closet he used as bandages, and Olivier’s clothes fit well enough that he wasn’t drowning in them. When he was done, he looked more like the boy he was than the girl his mother wanted, and the sight of his pale, haunted face in the mirror made him pause.
The house groaned alarmingly as Eli left the bathroom. He knew old houses tended to creak—his own house sounded like it was moaning when it grew too cold—but here, the walls seemed to be cracking, as though they were trying to bend inwards to collapse over him.
Their shelters will crumble,Tristan had said. Surely that didn’t mean the Blanchet house was in danger, though. Eli put his weight on the top step of the stair, and the boards sagged beneath him.
He practically stumbled down the stairs.
Lord Blanchet was waiting for him in the drawing room, his robe tied tight around his middle and two cups of tea steaming on the table. He handed one to Eli, who gripped it tight and stared up at the ceiling as pipes clanked and boards moaned.
“Old country houses,” Lord Blanchet said, smiling. “They tend to complain after a century or so. Sit down. Let’s have a drink, then, and you can tell me what happened.” He sat in anenormous armchair, just a little too far away to reach his own cup. “How on earth did you survive?”
“You wouldn’t believe me,” Eli said.
“It’s all quite hard to believe, in any case.” Lord Blanchet leaned back in his chair, watching him carefully, as though he might turn into a ghost any any second. “King Emile, killing a child! I was half inclined to come up to the city myself when his soldiers delivered the news, which I suspect every noble in Staria has heard by now,” he added, with a pointed look. Eli cursed under his breath. That meant his list of possible allies was thin indeed.
“I think he spared Sabre, at least,” Eli said, taking a sip of his tea.
