Chapter 1
Reagan
Reagan found it odd that he felt worse now than when the curse had been breaking him like a walnut. He should have felt better. He wore his own skin again at all times, instead of that beastly hide—though his familiar kept it still.
Every time he reached for his mana, his mind filled with the bison’s horns and jagged canines straining against its maw. Seven years ago, it had looked like a poised wolf. Just a proud, brown-furred predator. Now, his familiar had become a hideous beast.
Gwinifer found it funny. Of course she did. Hers was a monster too.
He sighed, his gaze trained on the two sisters hovering by their father’s bed in the infirmary. The sight brought him no satisfaction, only a gnawing weight clawing through his ribs.
When Reagan probed at it, he ground his teeth.
Guilt.
He should have only felt guilty if it was her on that bed, or if he hadn’t taken precautions with her volatile sister sleeping justacross from her. Or the kind born of a dozen failures, each time he let himself be ruled by his worst impulses.
But her father? The man who’d dropped to the ground the instant he’d seen what his own daughter could do? That wasn’t on Reagan. He wasn’t to blame for a heart too weak to face its own blood.
And yet, the miserable thing lingered. It crawled beneath his skin until it nearly drove him to do something dramatic. Like apologising.
He exhaled, eyes closing.
If he didn’t apologise, she probably wouldn’t speak to him. And if she wouldn’t speak to him, he might very well lose what remained of his mental clarity.
It had been four days of silence, and he couldn’t afford to squander what little brain power remained. Not while Alaister Quarrel pestered at his door, the magister who had been tracking Mountheim’s recovery for the last days. He demanded figures and forecasts and all manner of guarantees—as though seven years of a curse could be undone in a week.
When the man had demanded a correct estimation for successful crops in the farmlands, warning that anything less would look incompetent, Reagan nearly snapped,Do you know how long it takes for soil to recover after almost a decade of blight?
The words nearly ripped from him. Instead, he dug his beast’s claws into the dirt of his mind and ground out,I’ll confirm a date with my arcanists.
The wretch went on about the measures of taxation that he would need to abide now, arguing that Mountheim had enjoyed far too much leniency in the past years.
Reagan had grown used to listening to demands and fulfilling his duty, used to denying himself wants and desires. Except for the one desire he now stared at—the person who made himcrave more from life, tightened his chest whenever she entered a room, and improved his mood in a way nothing else did.
He still chastised himself for not seeing what she was sooner, but he was not a complete idiot. He had sensed something. Something he could never quite pinpoint. An elusive feeling he kept shoving aside because he was drowning in more imminent concerns. But that instinct about her clouded his thoughts, enough to make him knowingly ignore that she would return to human lands. He chose her anyway.
At the time, he hadn’t known what the instinct meant. He only knew he trusted it.
If Jane glanced his way now, she would only see her own reflection in the glass pane of the infirmary window. But he could see her clearly, the bruised crescents beneath her eyes, the pallor of her skin, the way exhaustion seemed etched into every inch of her face as though the magelights had bleached her in a sterile glow.
Jane was curled up in a stiff vinyl chair that looked far too uncomfortable to sleep in. Her sister lay on the couch on the other side of the bed, half swallowed by a wool-stitched blanket.
Cerridwen had told Reagan, after he returned from meetings with the stewards, that they hadn’t left the room. Not since the day before, when he had snatched a moment from his duties replacing Silas in Eldritch to see them.
The pulse-tracker orb ticked a soft, regular beep, the only sound in that quiet ward. Her eyes flicked to the orb as if it might give up a different sound at any second, then slid back to where her father lay inert.
Reagan moved to the doorframe. The hairs along his forearm lifted when she noticed him. Brown-green eyes were the only thing that stirred in her face. Reagan dipped his chin, and she spared her family a long look before she rose. Jane’s stepswere leaden as she crossed to the corridor, still glancing at Joy through the glass as she stopped in front of him.
A few copper curls had escaped the braid falling along the column of her neck. A flicker of flux twined through his limbs, his power itching to reach out, yet he held himself back. She would not welcome his touch now.
The look in her eyes, the guarded one he had spent months trying to burn out of her, returned like a stubborn weed in spring.
“How long have you been standing here?” Her voice was frayed with weariness.
“A while,” he replied. “How long have you been awake?”
“A while.”
