Page 1 of How to Claim A Shadow King

1

AVELINE

Knowing something to be true doesn’t mean you have to like it.

For instance, I know that the guard sitting across from me isn’t happy about any of this. Scowling, he stares out the window at the endless rain and expanse of forest like they personally offended his honor.

He’s been assigned to keep me complacent in the back of the carriage, and though he doesn’t particularly like that I’m being sent to the Wild Oak Woods, away from my home of Stormspire, where I’ve lived my entire twenty-seven years as the last royal duchess, he isn’t acting on it.

Knowing he is distraught about where we’re going doesn’t mean I’m pleased with him.

Furthermore, I have always known my spouse would be chosen for me.

It was drilled into me as a small child, then as a willing to please girl of thirteen, but as balls came and went and suitors were rejected by my stepfather en masse… it became clear that whoever I was to wed was not among the usual landed gentry.

I trace my fingernail across the window of the carriage, following the path of the raindrops beading outside as I traipse down the well-trodden path of my thoughts yet again.

All my thoughts lead to one lingering question, one that’s been at the back of my mind nearly my whole life, but now consumes nearly all of my worries.

Who is it that I’m being married off to?

“There are no landed nobles in the Wild Oak Woods?” I ask out loud.

“No, my Lady,” the guard says.

He’s not very good company.

I decide I don’t have to be good company either and slouch in my seat, tugging at the creamy white fabric of my dress.

“We could turn around,” I tell him. “Make a run for it, somewhere my stepfather won’t know⁠—”

“No.” The guard’s reply is curt, and I raise an eyebrow at him, sick to death of the little social-nicety-scripts I’ve been forced to rehearse aloud nearly my whole life.

“Why not?”

“Because my wife is with child and I need the payment from your stepfather.”

“Oh,” I say, because that does, in fact, make perfect sense, then I narrow my eyes at him. “And if I could double it?”

“You can’t.” He shifts in his seat, finally making eye contact with me instead of the endless expanse of wet greenery outside. “Your stepfather has taken my wife to be your mother’s lady’s maid. You cannot offer my family a position, I fear.”

I smile, wishing, not for the first time, that I had something sharper than my teeth to bare. “How thoughtful of him.”

“He’s a right bastard,” the guard grumbles.

A laugh bursts out of me in spite of myself, but I haven’t heard anyone curse in front of me knowingly in years.

“Apologies, my Lady,” the guard says, looking stricken as he realizes he’s called the man who’s been in charge of my life for most of it a bastard.

“Don’t apologize for telling the truth,” I say. It comes out grim, though, because this truth is grim.

“Tell me.” I lean forward on my seat, and the guard fidgets, looking away. “Who is it that I am supposed to marry in the Wild Oak Woods?”

“I don’t know,” the man says, and he looks so upset that I take pity on him and sit back against the bouncing carriage seat.

Which is stupid, because I am the one sent like cattle to a union I know nothing about, in some backwater I know barely more about.

Outside, the forest continues to roll on, and on, and on, the rain a ceaseless patter on the roof and windows.