Chapter
Four
Galantia Present day, the village Larpen
stared down at the roasted bird on the platter where a girl from the kitchen had left it on the table in my room only a moment ago, the way she’d arranged the peppered and salted thing on a bed ofI red beets nothing short of nauseating. “You cannot be serious.”
Risa frowned at the meal, assessing the tiny bird for a second before she simply shrugged. “It’s much too small for a raven, so it’s probably quail.”
Probably… My stomach clenched. “It could be the size of a sparrow, and I still wouldn’t touch it.”
I turned away, leaned against the frame of the window, and stared through the thick pane of glass over at the mountain range where the sun had gone up a few hours ago. “How can they eat something that looked human only moments before?”
“Reckon because it looked plenty like chicken once plucked and roasted.” Risa walked away from the wooden tub in which I’d bathed earlier and rounded my bed. “The people are starving, Galantia.”
“I know.” I turned away from the window, pressing a hand against that sudden cramp in my stomach. “Gods confound it. Eating aside, I shouldn’t feel so ill over this. She was a Raven.”
Evil. Wicked.
The reason for devastated fields, starving subjects, and nearly twenty-five years of bloodshed and hostility. All in the name of a Raven who had kidnapped and raped King Barat’s betrothed, breaking faith with us humans in the most corrupted way.
I stroked a hand over my hair, sleek again since the curls had been washed out, thinking back on how Father had patted my head after I’d killed that Raven boy. The prince. Who’d apparently been kept in our dungeons after all, for reasons I’d never dared to ask.
Not that it mattered.
Had I been born a boy, I would hunt down those Ravens myself, doing Father proud once more.
The bells had tolled for me that day, and I wouldn’t let this unpleasantness drive out the memory of those chimes.
“Ravens are an evil pest that need to be burned away like the ones they spread over our fields,” I said, my spine straightening with new resolve. “One more Raven dead is one less Raven our soldiers
will have to face on the battlefield.”
A moment of silence and then… “I told you not to look.” Risa’s berating remark drew my attention to where she frowned at the sweat-dampened, crumpled sheets on my bed, which she flattened with even strokes of her hand. “But you wouldn’t listen, and now you tossed and turned all night.”
“Because you snored. Truly, it’s become rather excessive over the years.” I stepped over to the fire in the hearth where my clay curlers heated in an iron basket that sat in the embers, already wearing my shoes, my gemstone necklace, and a green silk gown with too many frills, laces, and grommets. “I’m fine, and you’re fussing too much.”
When her gaze settled on a white down feather that must have escaped the pillow during said tossing and turning, her hand stalled for a moment, only to brush it off the bed with a disapproving shake of her head. “Yes, you’ve gone from a child to a woman grown. The old nursemaid stays behind with nobody left to fuss over. At least let me fuss while I still have you.”
While I still have you… Pressure built behind my eyes, strange and unwelcome. Two more weeks on the road, and I would finally escape Tidestone. I would run, and cry, and walk in the rain, and touch all the damn knives I
could!
And also leave Risa behind.
Father had meant to dismiss her when I’d turned twelve, saying that she had long outstayed our need of her, but Mother insisted on keeping her. Likely so she wouldn’t have to deal with me.
My nose suddenly turned stuffy as though I was about to cry. Unlikely. I hadn’t shed a tear in…
gods, I couldn’t even say how long.
I blinked. Blinked again.
No tears came.
Just as well. How I would manage Ammarett without Risa, I didn’t know, but I could hardly bring my nursemaid to the marriage bed… “Very well, the pipe clay should be plenty hot now.” I walked over to the upholstered stool and sat. “The gods know it takes quite some fussing to get my hair to coil without it breaking. Will that do?”
A smile hiked the wrinkled corners of Risa’s mouth as she hurried over, grabbed the long handle
of the iron basket from the fire, and carefully set it on a small table beside me that had already gone black from old burn marks. “There will be no finer bride in all of Dranada the day you wed the prince.”
Clad in the tightest corset yet, I sat compliantly still as Risa ran a soft bristle brush over my scalp.
“Why I’m forced to survive on little gasps of air still many days away from Ammarett is beyond—”
Thud.
Dust rilled from the crossbeams, making me look up into the gables before I glanced over my shoulder back at Risa. “What was that?”
She squinted up, fingers slipping off my hair, but it was the barks of soldiers that had her spin toward the door. Heavy footsteps, metal clanking against metal, the sound of wooden furniture shifting over the floorboards… it all drifted into my room through the gap at the bottom of the door.
A feverish chill spread across my nape, clashing with the waft of heat from the clay curlers sitting beside me. Was I imagining this for lack of sleep? Making a fuss of it for something as simple as the guards readying themselves for our departure?
The moment I rose toward the window, trying to see if they’d finally finished preparing the carriage, Risa grabbed my arm. “No. Don’t let anybody see you in the window. We will stay in this room, Galantia, until Captain Theolif says otherwise.”
Surely she had to be overreacting. “Maybe a brawl—”
Glass shattered.
I spun toward the window.
Ice-cold dread gripped my body.
Shaggy black birds fluttered in through the broken panes, cawing and croaking. Their wings bent and warped, feathers twisting together into shadowy tendrils that turned, tangled, forming the figure of a man.
His body hadn’t fully shaped out of the shifting darkness when his green eyes connected with mine, his intense gaze interrupted only by a lock of black hair. It hung over his face where it must have escaped those long strands held back with a tie, the sides sheared up high on his skull.
“Who do we have here?” His rough voice drove a shudder under my skin as his gaze slipped to the gemstone resting against my thudding sternum. “Looks like I found you.”
Found me… Dread like none before chilled me to the bone, and I took a step back, bumping into the stool. It pushed against the table that held the basket of hot curlers. They clanked against each other, louder when Risa grabbed the handle and thrust the searing container at the man.
“Out!” Risa gripped me by the bodice and yanked me behind her just as the man burst into his ravens, dodging the scorching spindles. She shoved me out the door to stumble into the corridor. “We have to find protection with the guards, Galantia. Go downstairs. Go!”
With my breath nothing but frantic little gasps, I hurried toward the stairs, gathering and lifting the train of my dress as much as my shaky hands let me. It kept me from getting my shoes caught in the frills and tumbling down the stairs as I descended into a cacophony of grunts and cries.
“No!” Pottery shattered. Wood groaned. “Get your filthy hands off me!”
My vision speckled from the lack of air. I frantically yanked at my bodice, but my lungs refused to expand. My next step never landed on the wood but inside my skirts. Fabric ripped as I skidded, arms flailing until I regained my balance on the bottom landing.
Then I saw it.
A man—a Raven—held a peasant woman with her chest pinned down on a table, his grip tight in
her brown hair. His breeches were lowered to his pale thighs, showing every dark, coiled hair on his buttocks. Muscles clenched each time he shoved himself into her with such force, the entire table jumped and shifted, letting the wooden mugs roll around.
“No-ho-hooo…” the woman wailed, cried, and gagged into a platter of meat, grunting in pain with each merciless thrust. “Please…”
The man snarled and pushed her face down onto the platter, where her muffled gags and a spray of vomit mixed with the meat. “Shut up, cunt, while I put a Raven inside your belly.”
Cold terror pulled my throat at my next inhale, but it froze my lungs when I spotted one of our guards sprawled out, dead on the ground, with a black ring mark around his neck. Gods have mercy, if I didn’t move now, I’d end up like the woman. Or the guard. Or both.
Just as I glanced over at the door that led outside, something shifted in my periphery. A woman with long black hair held yet another guard by his throat, pushing his writhing body against the wall.
Rivulets of her black magic slithered into the man’s mouth, nose, and eyes until, with a wet smack, his eyes oozed out of their sockets in a gush of blood.
I yelped.
The woman let the twitching guard slump to the ground, turned her blood-streaked face my way, and slowly placed her hand on her leather-corseted waist with a siren’s smile on her lips. “Ah, there’s the titled broodmare.”
“Out!” Risa shoved me around the corner, through a kitchen littered with unmoving bodies, and out a door into the damp chill of the morning. “You need to run, Galantia.”
“Run? Run where?”
“Run into the wheat and hide as well as you can.” Hrrk went the train of my dress, letting the biting air nip through my underdress as Risa tore the frills to shreds, then yanked at my bodice.
“What are you doing?”
“They can’t know who you are, child,” she said, crooked fingers stripping my finery before she ushered me to stumble over piles of silk and through a stable filled with snorting, dancing horses.
“They kill the men and rape the women, yes, but what do you think they’ll do to someone highborn?
The daughter of Lord Brisden? The man who slaughtered them by the thousands? Run, child. Run!”
“But what about y—”
“Run! Don’t look back!”
A push against my back sent me stumbling out the stables, eyes searching the seesawing horizon of naked shrubs, crooked grain stores, and empty haystacks. Where was I? Where were the fields?
My heart thrashed loudly in my ears, but not loud enough to drive out the shouts, bellows, and screams shattering through the village. Wheat. Wheat. Where was the damn wheat?!
Ahead of me, one of our house guards lay sprawled out in the mud, dead. A boy cowered, folded like a turtle behind a barrel, a shadowy arrow embedded in his spine, dead. A horse lay on its side where a fog-like blanket of blackness seemed to swallow it whole, dead.
Was everyone dead? Where were our guards? Mother?
My head turned back toward Risa, but the echo of her words stopped me. Run! Don’t look back!
Against the numbness freezing my muscles, I lifted my arm as if in a trance, pushing myself away from the wooden beam beside me. One foot inched forward, and then the other followed, carrying me out from underneath the stable’s overhang.
“Where are you going?” An arm grabbed around my waist, pulling me back against the biting stench of garlic and sweat. “Did we have you already?”
“Let go!” No wiggling or writhing changed how the man easily lifted me, carrying me several
steps toward a barrel beside an empty stall. “Unhand me at once!”
“Won’t do no harm to have you again.” He pushed against my shoulder blade until my upper body slammed against the wood, an iron ring digging into my lower belly as he kicked my feet apart.
“You’re a young one. All soft, tight skin.”
I bucked against the barrel, trapped between ungiving oak and the weight of this man hunched over my back. “Gods fetch you!”
“Keep fighting, shouting, and I might have to share this little pink cunt.” Rough fingers scratched over my knee and up along my thigh as he shoved my skirts up, exposing parts of me no man had ever seen. “But not until I thoroughly fuck this hole.”
My pulse raged at the way he groaned against the side of my neck, making himself smaller until his groin pressed into my bared backside. His hard penis stabbed against my inner thighs, thrusting and shifting in search of my entrance, spreading something wet and sticky across my skin.
Digging my nails into the wood of the barrel, I fought down the nausea and sealed it behind my clamped lips. If I stayed quiet and endured, I might survive. But survive for what? Without my virtue, I had no chance at a life worth living.
“Get off her!” A violent shout echoed through the now eerily silent village. “She’s the one the fate wants, you fucking idiot.”
The man’s weight lifted off me before he staggered sideways, cursing and pulling his breeches up.
“How would I know? Doesn’t look highborn to me.”
“Right. Because peasant women wear gemstones around their clean necks where you come from, don’t they?” A yank on my necklace cut off my air, pulling me up and turning me, bringing me face to face with the green-eyed Raven from my room. He held me in place, chain tight in his grip, mouth curling up on one end as his gaze strolled over my underdress. “Though, the way you got rid of the silk looks rather inviting. Molted your pretty feathers right down to the cotton, huh? Who are you?”
My lips parted.
Nothing came out.
Nothing but a gag as my stomach convulsed, sending a burn up into my chest. Would they take me hostage? Perhaps they thought they could get cartloads of coins and silver out of any highborn woman in exchange for her safe return? Yes, that had to be it.
Human or Raven, wars cost gold all the same.
Except… if they’d come for me, shouldn’t he know who I was? And if he didn’t, was it wise to tell him? If I revealed myself, these savages might rape me, torture me, kill me. Or worse, rape me and keep me alive.
“Swallowed your tongue, sweetheart?” He smirked down at me, his dark brown leather outfit sitting as snug against his broad chest as the bowstring that spun across his tooled cuirass, and eased his grip on my necklace. “Your name.”
Fear throbbed through me, clouding my head. What was I supposed to say? None of this made any sense.
“Aww, look how shy she is, sweet little girl.”
My gaze snapped to the Raven woman from earlier, who walked up beside us, her fingers wrapped around Risa’s neck. Black veins spread from where she dug her long nails into my nursemaid’s mottled skin, wrapping around her throat like a tangle of ropes.
A lump of bitterness clogged my throat. No. Oh, please, not Risa!
“Lorn…” The Raven beside me let go of my necklace, but I sensed him shift closer against my side. “What do you want with the old hag?”
“This one tried to save the girl. Ah, watching it got me all warm on the inside. Maybe it’s her mother? No. Too old. Maid? Lady’s maid? What’s the difference, Sebian?”
Sebian shrugged. “As if I care.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Lorn gave a yank on Risa’s neck, ripping a miserable cry from her that soon turned into a wheeze under the strangle of shadows. “Let’s make this easier. Little girl, who is this woman?”
I looked at Risa, watching her gag and hearing her struggle for air. “My nursemaid.”
“Nursemaid.” Lorn gave an amused scoff. “And who… are… you?”
Risa made a strangled sound. “Naaah!”
I swallowed a gush of saliva, nearly vomiting it back up. Holding back my identity would only buy me time, not change the inevitable. What if revealing it saved Risa? I couldn’t lose her.
Not now, not like this.
“If I give you my name, will you let her go?” When Lorn nodded, I straightened as much as the fear gnawing in my spine let me. “I am Lady Galantia of the House Brisden, daughter of Lord Brisden.”
Sebian sucked a long breath of air through his teeth, but it was Lorn’s malicious grin that turned my stomach before she said, “Brisden’s daughter. Take her to Malyr while I try to track those soldiers who escaped with the golden bitch.”
Dread thrashed through me, but I breathed it down, desperate to salvage the little I could. “You’ll want to take my nursemaid as well. Y-you’ll need her. To chaperone me! If it’s my value you want, let me assure you, it lies in my virtue.”
“My value lies in my virtue,” Lorn mocked in a high-pitched voice as she rolled her eyes, then let out a laugh and pulled a black knife from her belt strap. “Love, you’re too old for a nursemaid. Time
to grow up.”
She winked at me.
Then she stabbed Risa in the neck.
