ONE
I find her deep in the Old Forest, facedown in the dirt.
Sharp pain needles my palms where I’ve balled my fists so tight, the nails have carved half-moon marks into the skin. Snaking across the twig-strewn ground, gnarled roots press against my boots like a warning as I roll the young woman onto her back. Best to be sure.
No, she is certainly dead. Cold, stiff, and hungry like the rest; even with forest debris masking much of her shirt, the threadbare cotton dips in unmistakable rivulets across her bony frame. I swallow my disappointment and push her eyelids shut, wanting to spare her kin the sight of those empty, pointless eyes.
“Sorry,” I murmur, sitting back on my heels. “I’m guessing you didn’t deserve this.”
Around us, the trees lean inward and down with ominous uniformity, leaves and branches straining against their holds, drawn to the dead woman as if tethered by ropes. The sway, the humans call it. I ignore the prickling in my belly. They’ll straighten out soon enough when the magic leaves her body.
With a final nod, I push to my feet and wend my way back to the forest’s edge. It’s a close wood, with broad oaks in summer bloom crowding the grassy floor, their leafy canopy admitting shafts of sunlight that glitter like crystal chandeliers. All in all, too peaceful a setting for someone driven to madness to die alone. I breathe it in deep to savor the scent while I can, grateful that, for whatever reason, these trees never seem drawn to the magic in my own blood. I’ve had enough of vengeful wilderness to last a lifetime.
“Well?” Seraline asks, her knuckles nearly white where they clutch the hem of her shirt.
I shake my head. “Dead.”
Her shoulders sink. Though Seraline is sturdy as iron when she’s in her aunt’s tannery shaping leather into draft horses’ yokes, standing a determined two paces behind the tree line now, she seems shakeable as snow.
“Come on,” I say, looking to the stony town just across the open fields. “You’re going to be late.” I don’t ask if she plans to examine the body for herself. Seraline may have insisted on coming as a show of support, but our friendship has many limits, her discomfort with the dead and dying the least of them.
After a brief hesitation, Seraline falls into step at my side, sweeping her seeing stick across the ground in broad strokes. “Poor thing.”
I mumble my assent, my jaw clenched tight.
This time of year, the late summer air hangs heavy even in the early morning, enough that the back of my neck is already slick with sweat. The barley fields remain mercifully empty as we pick our way through the dusty rows, but still I plow forward with my head down and shoulders bent, half from habit and half spurred by the hour. Seraline isn’t the only one who’s running behind.
“Will you not come with us?” she asks, her head tipping to the side as we near the town. “Aren’t you due back in Roanin, anyway?”
“I can’t,” I reply, making it sound like an apology. I’m not really sure why we still play this game when we both know it’s futile. “I have a few things to take care of first.”
“Today of all days,” she snorts.
“You know how it is.” In truth, I’d give my right arm to stay away from the capital today. But there’s no help for it.
“Her husband deserves to know,” Seraline adds after a while. “The two of them were inseparable.”
“He will know. The trail wasn’t hard to follow.”
Seraline is always trying to persuade me to talk to the deceased’s families. She believes I have a softer manner than many in uniform, and once she even called me heartless for refusing. That time hurt the most. But it isn’t my job to report any deaths I uncover to next of kin. Only to the king. And it’s not like she’s stepping up to volunteer, anyway.
Briarwend is a humble farming town that stretches all of three streets, a collection of squared-off stone shops that deal in necessity rather than charm. Its weather-worn residents are the same. When I began seeking intel here four years ago, long days tending the surrounding fields made the people lazy and open over a couple of pints. Lately, they’re just hungry, poor soil and rising taxes leaving gaping holes that only tempers seem to fill.
Each night under dwindling oil lamplight and over stained, sticky tables, the pub dwellers deal out anger and judgment like tossing seeds across the earth. The battered forest walker I helped home last night is not the only magical person I’ve found bleeding on cobbled streets. The humans’ ire is growing fists.
Seraline’s family is fixing their horse’s harness to an old wooden cart when we reach their cottage home. Most locals have long since departed.
“Where have you been?” her mother demands, tightening the leather straps. The roan mare stamps a hoof, ears flicking nervously in my presence. “We should have left hours ago!”
“Lela needed my help. And you’re not ready, anyway.” Seraline shrugs.
“Nor are you. Breakfast is gone, so you’ll just have to wait. Go get changed.” She studiously avoids my eye, as if I’m not even there.
Seraline bids me farewell with a light touch on the shoulder, which causes her little sister to quickly interlace two pairs of twisted fingers and pull them apart. The sign to ward off bad fortune.
“You shouldn’t indulge my sister,” the dreadful Arden says once she’s gone, sauntering over and swiping a greasy hand across his forehead. By far the weakest sibling in this family of four. “Seraline is delicate. She can’t be tramping about the kingdom with the likes of you.”
Which is ironic, really, since he was eager enough to sidle close last year, when he thought empty flattery might earn him a kiss. That was before a too-often empty belly soured his tongue, before he learned who and what I am. And though I truly could not care less what this boy thinks, I’m dismayed to find my stomach still burns with anger and something close to shame. My gaze drops to his pant leg, which bears splotches of dried blood from the night before.
“Problem?” Arden sneers, white skin burned red from long days in the sun.
A slow tingling feeling bubbles up from my core, threads of numbness that tiptoe across my arms and legs. I force myself to breathe deeply, to beat the threads back. “I know it was you,” I mutter.
He traces his chapped lips with two fingers, beady eyes darting to his mother before he leans forward, his smile stiffening. “You know nothing,” he hisses.
“You forget I have certain resources at my disposal.” I raise a hand in front of his flaking face, where my nails have sharpened into claws. “And that I know where you live.”
I stare until a satisfying trace of fear tinges Arden’s expression before heading toward the town’s single inn, which is little more than a guesthouse with four creaking rooms. If my brother, Helos, were here, he would tell me to not take the bait, that I’m better than that. What he never seems to understand is that I’m not better than anything at all.
Annoyingly, the innkeeper is absent as I climb the stairs and unlock my room, shifting as soon as I’ve closed the door behind me. Coolness rushes through my tingling limbs like liquid as I release my hold on the borrowed matter, shedding my Briarwend disguise.
In place of Lela’s face and features, my own natural ones take shape—taller height and stronger calves, olive skin a shade darker than Lela’s pale white complexion, narrow eyes and dense, nut-brown hair in waves that fall just below perpetually tense shoulders. A face Seraline’s family would never know as my own. Then I open the single window, considering.
I prefer to pay the innkeeper directly for his discretion, and I’m not keen on the thought that someone below might see me fly away from here. But I suppose most homes are empty by now, and anyway, I really can’t afford to wait. Placing a silver coin on the corner table, I strip off my clothes and focus on a place deep within my core, using it to pull from the air around me. Intuitive as breathing, my body numbs as the bones shrink and settle into those of a goshawk, my gray and creamy white feathers ruffling with pleasure. The knot between my ribs loosens slightly as my wings carry me through the window and out into the morning light.
It’s about an hour’s flight from Briarwend to Telyan’s capital city, Roanin. In this form, my tail is straight as an arrow shaft, my hooked beak sharp as Telyan steel. Tendrils of cool breeze skim my feathers, and my heart sings at the freedom of it all. But only briefly.
Far below, a single wide road cuts north across the farm plots and deciduous woods. Already it’s packed with travelers on foot and horseback. Many, particularly those from farther south, will have set out during the night. It’s the one day each year the Danofers open Castle Roanin’s gates to the public, and many people derive huge pride from actually making it through and securing a place within the grounds.
Even the relief flight brings is not enough to offset my hatred of this day.
Ahead, at last, my destination comes into view: an open expanse of granite buildings gleaming gray in the rising sun, the occasional gabled roofs and spires fracturing the skyline. Encased within the shadow of the Purple Mountains to the north and bordered by dense woods stretching east and west, Roanin is an insular city, its residents increasingly wary of outsiders. With natural barriers on three sides, there is only one way to enter, and even then, strangers would find it difficult to navigate. The layout is a dizzying array of twisting, narrow streets and stone buildings, wild and winding as the Old Forest surrounding it. Lofty and angular, Castle Roanin stands sentinel at the back.
Upon entering King Gerar’s service four years ago, I had been foolish enough to trust in that castle. To hope that, after years of struggling to survive in the wilderness with only my brother beside me, I might have found a home at last. Turns out, solitude is lonely, but being surrounded by people who want nothing to do with you hurts even worse.
I sweep over the castle complex and alight on the roof of my house, a small, single room situated behind the smelly stables and close to the outer wall; the work I do for King Gerar permits me to live on the royal estate, but barely. A city clock tower taunts me with the hour as I throw on a soft blue dress and flats, frown at the dark circles ringing my eyes, and hasten toward the castle’s eastern entrance. Though the oak-lined lawn separating the castle from the complex’s front gates must stretch four hundred paces deep at least, even this far back, the gathering crowd’s gentle roar hums loud as the distant shore.
Through the wooden door, the east kitchens are a flurry of motion. Apprentices chopping, pots boiling, cooks scurrying, all preparing already for midday. Poorer girls like Seraline may have to skip meals now and again, but here in the castle there are always three, served on tablecloths and gold-rimmed platters polished to a shine. I cut through the tempting scents of rosemary and thyme, around the young men pouring carrots and turnips over thinly sliced venison, with my head held high as if the workers’ sidelong glances mean nothing to me. Rude gestures and hardened faces no more than raindrops pattering glass.
By the time I reach the exit, my chest feels tight as a pinprick.
Beyond the empty corridor, the castle’s central atrium is equally chaotic. Tension drags at my shoulder blades as I weave through the men and women rushing about, each step echoing painfully off the polished marble floor. Spanning three stories and lined with lead-paned windows twice my height, this foyer seems designed to make occupants feel small. Wrought-iron banisters guard a covered gallery two floors up, a walkway which traces the room’s perimeter and culminates at a set of glass double doors gleaming in the castle’s southern façade. Within the hour, the Danofers will pass through those doors and out onto the narrow balcony beyond to read the Prediction everyone is gathering to see.
I take the steps on the atrium’s grand staircase two at a time.
It somehow feels easier to breathe on the second floor, where thick green carpets wrap the paneled corridor in a protective cloak of quiet. My heart sinks when I round the corner and see who’s on duty outside the parlor’s double doors.
“You’re late,” observes Dom, one of King Gerar’s most senior guards, in a tone of quiet delight. At his side, Carolette sniffs and looks down her nose.
“Just open the door,” I say.
Carolette clicks her tongue, pushing her long brown plait over her shoulder. “Manners, shifter. You’re in the company of royals now.”
At my side, my fingernails stretch into claws. “Open the door, or I’ll open you.”
The members of the esteemed Royal Guard look far from impressed by this threat, but Dom turns the knob and steps inside nevertheless.
“You reek of death,” Carolette hisses as I pass, her breath hot in my ear. And though I clutch my anger close like a second skin, I can’t stop the old fear from sweeping its clammy hand down my spine.
“The shifter to see you, Your Majesty,” Dom announces, his purple-accented gray uniform appearing washed out amidst the upholstered furniture.
At the far end of the gauzy pearl parlor, three members of the royal family are milling about by the curtained windows. King Gerar with his emerald-encrusted crown, the one reserved for formal ceremonies only, along with the crown princess, Violet, and Weslyn, the elder and far less endearing of the two princes. All three wear the customary funereal black.
The day of the Prediction. The anniversary of Queen Raenen’s death. By a perverse turn of events, this black-hearted day marks them both.
“Rora, good,” King Gerar greets. His tired smile falls flat against the grief shadowing his face. Behind him, Violet spears me with a glance before continuing to pace in her floor-length gown, her dark hair cropped short above bare, rigid shoulders. Back and forth, she taps a long, red-and-gold feather quill lightly against her palm. The one her father gifted to her to cement her place as his successor.
I’d yank that quill from her grasp and snap it in two, if I didn’t think that would crack the kingdom as well.
“Your Majesty. Forgive me, I was following a lead.” I dip into a hasty bow once the door clicks shut behind me.
“Go on.”
“Five more cases in Briarwend,” I tell him. “One of them dead. Two that have reached the sway and the silence.” Five added to nearly two hundred other cases scattered throughout the kingdom. Eighty-seven afflicted already dead, and those only the ones I’ve found. This magic-induced illness with no set duration—it could kill its victims in days or months, adults and children alike. No name beyond the Fallow Throes. No cure that healers have yet discovered. It’s spreading.
“Any links between the afflicted?” King Gerar asks, folding a hand into his suit pocket. His features are a collage of his children’s—the crown princess’s stern brow, the younger prince’s crystal eyes, the elder prince’s trim beard and thick, dark curls, though the flecks of gray peppering his own have become more prevalent in recent months. While he has the tanned white skin of his two eldest children, to my eyes, in this moment, the emotion in his expression is all his youngest son, Finley.
“None that I could tell, sir. Except the usual.”
The usual. That no shifters, whisperers, or forest walkers are falling ill and dying. Only humans. I twist my hands behind my back, watching King Gerar process this information in silence. “There’s something else,” I add, more hesitant now.
Violet’s head swings in my direction, but King Gerar’s brow only furrows. “Speak freely.”
“I found a forest walker who had been beaten badly, not far from the town center.” Safely hidden from sight, my hands constrict into fists. “I think I know one of the persons responsible.”
“Do you have proof of guilt?”
My mouth thins. “Not exactly.”
King Gerar runs a hand along his beard, looking troubled. “Without proof, I can do nothing. But I will send word to the magistrate. Such behavior is unacceptable.”
Violet begins to pace again, her head now bent in thought.
My focus strays to Weslyn a few paces behind, who hasn’t looked away from the window since I arrived. He keeps his back to me now, apparently indifferent to the news that another magical person was mugged in the streets. But then, he’s never shown a shred of concern for anything I have to say. Not since the day we met, four years ago today.
The annual Prediction and Queen Raenen’s death day. Also the anniversary of Helos’s and my arrival at Castle Roanin. A coincidence his flint-edged apathy never lets me forget.
“Thank you, Rora,” says King Gerar, and the threads of numbness dissipate just as quickly as they surfaced. “You may go.” He diverts his gaze to a painting of his late wife mounted above the unlit hearth.
“Sir, shall I do another sweep?” I ask hopefully. “I can leave right away.”
“No.” He waves an idle hand in my direction, and my shoulders droop. “No, I may have something new for you. In the meantime, take the rest of the day off.”
I open my mouth to ask what he means when Dom reenters the parlor.
“Your Majesty, it’s nearly eleven. They’re ready to open the gates unless you say otherwise.”
“Fine, fine.” King Gerar gives another wave of his hand. Then he asks, seemingly to no one in particular, “Where is Finley?”
Copyright © 2021 by Elayne Audrey Becker
