Part I: Betrayal, Blood Oaths & Forbidden Feelings
A Dark Fantasy Romance
CHAPTER ONE: SNOW IN MIDSUMMER
The arrow came out of the dark before the scream did.
Olivia felt it pass so close to her cheek that the fletching kissed her skin, a whisper of feather and violence, and then the soldier behind her made a sound she would hear again in her sleep for the rest of her life, a short, wet gasp, and fell into the bracken.
She did not stop running. She could not. Her lungs had turned to fire an age ago, somewhere between the second ravine and the fallen oak, and her gown, once white as the winter she had been named for, was now the colour of mud and old blood where the brambles had opened her arms. Behind her, through the black lattice of the trees, torches bobbed like a swarm of hungry eyes.
Someone was calling her name. Not gently.
Your Highness. Come back here, Your Highness, and I promise it will be quick.
It would not be quick. She had learned enough about Ellia's promises to know that much.
Her foot caught on a root. The forest floor rushed up to meet her, and for one terrible, weightless moment, she believed this was how it would end, not on a throne, not even in a dungeon, but face down in the dirt of a wood she did not know the name of, three days after her father's funeral.
Then a hand closed around her wrist and hauled her upright with a strength that did not match the leanness of the arm attached to it.
"Run," said a voice she had never heard before, low and urgent, close to her ear. "Or die pretty in the mud. Your choice, Princess."
That was several hours later. Before any of it, before the arrows and the mud and the stranger's hand on her wrist, there had been snow.
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It fell in the middle of summer, which the old women of the capital said had not happened since the last true king of Rone was crowned, three hundred years before. It came down soft and slow over the funeral procession, settling on black mourning cloaks and the gilded roof of the cathedral, on the eyelashes of weeping courtiers and the cold, still face of the king himself, laid out beneath a canopy of white lilies that had frozen stiff within the hour.
Olivia stood at the head of the coffin in a dress the colour of the snow itself, her spine so straight it ached, and did not cry.
She had promised herself she would not, not here, not in front of the entire court of Rone, not in front of the ambassadors from Valoria who watched her with the polite, hungry attention of men counting a fortune that was not yet theirs. A princess did not weep where her enemies could see the shape of her grief and learn how to use it against her. Her father had taught her that, in the last winter of his life, his hand cool and dry over hers. Grief is a door, Olivia. Never leave it open for a stranger to walk through.
So she stood, and she bled inside where no one could see it, and she watched the white flowers turn brittle and pale in a summer that had forgotten how to be warm.
Behind her, close enough that Olivia could feel the cold radiating from her like frost off a lake, stood her stepmother.
Queen Ellia wept beautifully. It was, Olivia thought distantly, the only thing about her that had ever been entirely honest, the sheer competence of her sorrow, tears sliding down cheeks that the years seemed unable to touch, a black veil trembling becomingly at her throat. The court murmured its sympathy. Poor Queen Ellia. Poor, grieving Ellia, who had loved the king so.
Olivia did not look at her. She did not trust her own face.
❖ ❖ ❖
The moment the cathedral doors closed behind the last mourner, Ellia's tears stopped as though a tap had been turned.
She walked to her private chamber with the unhurried grace of a woman who had nothing left to fear, dismissed her ladies with a flick of two fingers, and locked the door herself. Only then did she cross to the far wall, to the tall mirror draped in black silk that no servant was permitted to touch, and drew the cloth away.
The glass beneath was not glass at all, not truly. It held no reflection of the room, no candlelight, no queen. It held only a slow, coiling darkness, like ink dropped into still water, that watched her the way she had once watched her own ambition, patiently, and without mercy.
"Show me the girl," Ellia said.
The Mirror of the Black Moon obeyed, as it always did, as it had done since the night eleven years ago when Ellia had first found it buried beneath her family's ruined keep and understood, with the swift, cold clarity of the truly desperate, exactly what it could give her. Olivia's face swam up out of the darkness, pale and dry eyed, standing at the head of her father's coffin.
Ellia studied her the way a butcher studies a lamb.
"The council will name her heir within the month," she murmured. It was not a question. The mirror did not answer questions; it answered fear, and it fed on the answers it gave. "If she lives to be crowned, everything I have built collapses in an afternoon."
The darkness in the glass thickened, almost approvingly.
Ellia had spent her whole life being told what she was not permitted to have. Her family, once proud enchanters of minor blood, had been humiliated out of the old court a generation before she was born, their name spat rather than spoken. She had crawled her way from that humiliation into a king's bed through nothing but patience and a talent for becoming exactly what powerful men wanted to see, and she had promised the frightened, furious girl she had once been that she would never again be a thing other people discarded.
She was not about to let a child in a white dress take it all away from her now.
"Garrick," she said to the empty room, and a moment later, the door opened, because the king's own huntsman had been waiting outside it for exactly that word.
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Garrick had killed things for the crown of Rone for thirty years. Deer. Wolves. Once, memorably and unforgivably, a man who had spoken too freely about the queen's family in a tavern near the eastern gate.
He had never been ordered to kill a princess before.
"Take her hunting," Ellia said, not troubling to soften it, because she had long ago learned that men like Garrick did not respect gentleness, only certainty. "She grieves. She will want to walk in the forest, to be away from all these staring eyes. You will offer to accompany her, out of loyalty to her late father, and you will bring back proof that the woods are dangerous this time of year." A pause, precise as a blade. "Proof that she did not survive them."
Garrick did not ask why. He had learned, over thirty years, that asking why was how men ended up as the second kind of proof.
"It will be done, Your Majesty."
He told himself, walking away down the cold stone corridor, that it would be quick, and merciful, and that the girl would never even understand what was happening to her. He told himself a great many things, in the hour that followed, that turned out not to be true.
❖ ❖ ❖
Olivia had wanted only to walk.
The forest at the edge of the royal hunting grounds was the one place in the whole grieving, watching capital where nobody expected her to hold her spine straight or arrange her grief into a shape convenient for other people's comfort. When Garrick offered to accompany her, citing his long years of loyal service to her father, she had almost been glad of the company. He had known her since she was small enough to ride on his shoulders. She trusted him the way she trusted the shape of her own hand.
She trusted him right up until the moment his bow came up, not to protect her from some beast in the underbrush, but levelled, quite deliberately, at her heart.
For one endless second, neither of them moved. Olivia watched something terrible cross Garrick's weathered face, something that looked almost like grief of its own, and understood, with the swift and total clarity of a girl who has just learned that the ground beneath her has never once been solid, exactly what was happening.
"You're going to kill me," she said. Not a question.
"I have no choice, Your Highness." His voice cracked on the title. "I am sorry."
She had no weapon. She had no guard, no crown, nothing that had ever protected her before that had not been given to her by a father who was three days dead and could no longer give her anything at all. What she had was the low branch of a hawthorn tree within reach of her hand, and a lifetime spent being underestimated by men who mistook a straight spine for weakness.
She swung it into the side of his head with everything her grief and her fear together could summon, and then she ran.
❖ ❖ ❖
She ran until the palace grounds became true wilderness, until the manicured paths gave way to bramble and root and the particular, ancient silence of trees that had never once been planted by a gardener's hand. She ran until Garrick's voice, and then other voices, harder and less sorry than his, came crashing through the undergrowth behind her, calling her by a title that felt, in that forest, like the most dangerous word she owned.
Something with too many joints and too much darkness in its shape slid between two trunks to her left, and Olivia understood, distantly, past the animal roar of her own fear, that the queen had not sent only men into these woods to find her.
She ran until her body simply stopped being able to run any further, until her foot caught a root and the ground rushed up, and an arrow came out of the black.
❖ ❖ ❖
Theo had been tracking a wounded stag for the better part of the afternoon when the scent of blood on the wind changed from animal to something far more urgent, and far more human.
He found her half a breath before the soldiers did, a girl in a ruined white dress crashing through his family's forest as though the whole world were behind her, and it very nearly was. He did not know, in the moment his arrow found the first soldier's throat, that she was a princess. He knew only that she was hunted, and that something in the set of her shoulders, exhausted and furious and refusing, even now, even bleeding, to simply lie down and be caught, made the decision for him before he had finished making it.
"Run," he told her, hauling her up out of the mud by the wrist. "Or die pretty in the mud. Your choice, Princess."
He had not meant the title as anything but mockery, a guess thrown out into the dark. He watched it land, watched something flinch behind her eyes, and understood, a half second too late, that he had guessed correctly.
There was no time to think about what that meant.
He pulled her through the trees at a speed she could not have matched on her own, one hand locked around her wrist, the other loosing arrows behind them with a calm, economical grace that seemed entirely at odds with the danger they were in. Olivia stumbled twice, her vision beginning to blur strangely at the edges, and did not understand, until she felt the hot, spreading warmth soaking through her sleeve, that one of the arrows meant for her had found its mark before Theo had.
"You're hurt," he said, though it was less a question than a curse.
"I'm fine," she said, which was the last coherent lie she would manage that night.
The forest tilted. The torches behind them scattered into streaks of gold. Theo's face, when he turned to catch her before she hit the ground a second time, was the last clear thing she saw, sharp cheekbones and eyes the pale green gold of something wild, creased now with an urgency that looked, absurdly, almost like fear on her behalf.
"Stay with me," he said, and gathered her up against his chest as though she weighed nothing at all, and ran.
❖ ❖ ❖
Adam smelled the blood before he saw either of them, and had a knife in each hand before he had fully registered that he was moving.
He had spent the whole of that grey, restless afternoon in a temper he could not name, some low animal unease crawling under his skin that he had blamed, unfairly, on the weather. When his brother came crashing out of the deeper trees with a half conscious girl in his arms and blood soaking both their sleeves, Adam understood, with a sick lurch, exactly what the feeling had been trying to warn him about.
"Human," he said, and it was not a question either.
"Human, dying, and there are soldiers not far behind me," Theo said, already transferring her weight into his brother's arms without slowing his stride. "Take her to the house. I'll go back and clear the trail before it leads anyone to our door."
Adam did not put the knives away. He did, however, take her.
She was lighter than he expected, and far too still. "And leave me to carry a bleeding human into our own house alone?"
"She won't bite you, Adam." Theo was already turning back the way they had come, already swallowed into the dark of the forest behind them, and there was nothing left to do but exactly what he had asked.
Adam carried her the rest of the way in silence, her blood soaking warm through his sleeve, and did not examine too closely why he found himself walking carefully over the roots so as not to jar her.
He laid her down on the narrow bed nearest the fire in the house sunk low and hidden among the oldest trees in the wood, the home the seven of them had shared for longer than this girl's entire kingdom had existed, and looked down at her properly for the first time.
She did not look, at first glance, like the enemy he had spent his whole existence being taught to hate. She looked like a girl. Pale, and cold, and so young it made something old and tired in him ache in a way he resented immediately and completely. Blood had soaked through the sleeve of a gown that had once, he guessed, been very fine, and was now fit for nothing but burning.
He reached for the torn fabric to see how badly she was hurt, and his fingers brushed the fine gold chain at her throat.
He should have left it alone. He told himself, afterward, that he should have left it alone.
He turned the small pendant over instead, some instinct older than his own patience insisting he look, and found himself staring at the royal seal of Rone, three silver stars beneath a crowned wolf, pressed into gold that had never once, in a thousand years of Fae-kin history, been permitted inside these walls.
Adam went very still.
Whatever this girl was, whoever had put an arrow through her arm and set half the royal guard loose in his family's forest to hunt her down, she was not merely human.
She was royal.