General Van Houten appeared from his tent with an unreadable look on his long face, that ice-cold gaze piercing the green smoke that filled the air with a choking sweetness.
An arrow sailed through the trees and landed an inch from Risa’s foot.
Then another.
They were under attack.
CHAPTER FIVEIn Which the Girl Barely Escapes from a Massacre
Risa screamed.
Yes, she had considered the possibility of an attack several times as the group marched through the Bosque—in the same way she considered theimpossibility of farmers growing crops in the sodden soil of Barrow.
No, she hadn’t formulated a plan.
She flung herself onto the ground, and another arrow sailed past where her face had been moments before. Javi followed suit, flattening himself until he practically fused with the ground.
“We’re under attack! We’re under attack!” the golden soldier shouted as he rushed from the military tent. He pulled a sword from the scabbard that hung at his side. His stance widened, his shoulders rolled back, and for a brief moment he glowed like a storybook hero in the green firelight, ready to save—
He slumped onto his knees. An arrow protruded from his chest where his row of medals might have been if he’d lived long enough to earn them. A few more arrows landed, wounds spurting as his mouth fell open in a silent scream.
Oh no. Absolutely not.
The soldiers around the fire wobbled slowly to their feet, their pints of ale soaking the thirsty ground as they tried to respond. They hurried to pull weapons free, hands fumbling with hilts.
But the arrows continued to rain down despite the thick cloud of green smoke. Soldiers dropped with heavy thumps, their shouts swallowed up by the eerie trees, their blood mingling with the spilled ale.
Risa glanced to her side to find no sign of the prince; instead, there was a trail of disturbed earth and gouges where he had crawled away from the chaos.
Or been dragged.
This was a direct consequence of her curse. She knew it, as surely as she knew her own name. Her bad luck had arrived in a hail of arrows, rearing its ugly head and nasty teeth. There was no escape from its clutches, not in Barrow and certainly not outside of it, and she was the only one to blame.
Blood pounded in her ears while a strange sensation started in her chest. Underneath the thunderous beating, something that felt like a string pulling taut around her heart tugged at her, a little more insistent with each passing moment.
Another arrow landed inches from her fingertips.
With her eyes, Risa followed the trail of disturbed earth that the prince had left in his wake. It disappeared into the dark thicket of trees swaying ominously behind her. Shadows danced across the treeline, cast by the flames that still spit green sparks. Dread churned in her belly, not at all helped by the insistent tugging at her chest.
She was not going that way.
Instead, she set her sights across the clearing, where the trees seemed less eerie. She began crawling, spurred on by instinct and the desire to avoid more bloodshed, as arrows whizzed past from invisible corners. While the arrows missed her completely, many of them struck the soldiers around her. Bodies went down one after another. The air became thick with sweet smoke as the flames in the firepit leaped higher, painting the scene in garish light.
General Van Houten hadn’t moved from the mouth of his tent, where he shouted at his men and brandished his longsword above him. The green firelight exaggerated the angles of his angry face and made him look ghastly ill as he searched the wreckage for his invisible foes, eyes narrowed in focus. But he found no enemies in the encroaching darkness.
Risa managed to pull herself into a cluster of overgrown shrubs. Branches scratched her face, and while most of the clearing was obscured, a clear gap remained where she watched the general, still visible through the smoke, make his last stand.
Something flickered across General Van Houten’s face. Rage or fear or perhaps a terrible combination of both. His mouth pulled back into a sneer. One moment, the proud man held his gleaming weapon above his head, ready to strike. The next, he fell forward. His sword slipped from his grip and sank into the drenched soil. Three arrows protruded from his side. When his head struck the ground, a sickening crack rang through the trees, but the sound was cut short, swallowed up by the Bosque.
Everything stopped.
Risa waited. Counted the seconds from when the last arrow had sailed through the air, as if doing so could serve as a kind of magical ward. When she reached forty-three, several shrouded figures slipped from the trees, footsteps silent, flashing daggers catching in the firelight.
One figure approached the general, head cocked. They were covered head to toe in black fabric, a red crescent moon sewn on their chest. They threw something into the fire, and the green flames turned an ordinary orange.
“Oof, that’s gotta hurt.” Another figure, also dressed in black with a matching crescent moon sewn on their chest, stepped out from the dark like a blooming stain. The figure dug the heel of their boot into the stomach of a fallen soldier and asked, “Where’s the prince?”
They received no response.
