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Chapter 1

Ard Tiarna Emrys of Breacadh an Lae, The Raven of the Dawn

Agony poured through me in pulsing beats from what I used to call my heart. It grew more and more insistent as I raced through the palace. I ignored the thunderstruck faces of the Fae around me. Theirs were not the face I was looking for. None of them mattered in comparison to the singular pair of ocean eyes I needed. Each bled color in great pools, dripping at their feet as I sped past them.

My guards fell into formation behind me as I passed. None questioned me. None of them stopped to ask why the Captain of the Guard was running through the palace as fast as his thighs could punish the ground beneath him. Their training told them only that something was afoot and that was all they needed to know.

I focused on the place in the garden where I had last felt her and, like a hound let loose after a pheasant, I made for it. I didn’t bother to note the throbbing in my balls nor the way the wind whistled through the holes in my breeches. Not even the sticky, hot stream of blood leaking down the inside of my leg from where she had just pinned me to a chair with my discarded lunch fork mattered. All that mattered to me was outrunning the jaws of whatever had claimed her, taking my heart alongside her.

My boots ripped across the loosely packed gravel as I skidded to a halt before a sentry tree that lined the open pathway into the orchards. The great milúll tree stood as the ancient entrance path that had once been the only gateway into and out of the palace but now stood as a guard for a long-forgotten trail out into dark woods. Millenia long ago, when Mabh still ruled, these gates stood open wide. Daróg had locked them and melted the keys in the first year of his claiming of the throne. And yet, this was where I last felt her beating pulse. I could almost smell her perfume dancing in the wind, drifting away from me into a distant memory.

My eyes frantically darted around as I searched the garden path, the flower beds, the trees planted to ward the humans out of the dangerous grove of milúll trees. The spiders native to Magh Meall liked to make nests in the boughs of the trees and feast on the harvest of woodland creatures that came to feed on the fallen fruit. Smaller than the mourning spider she encountered in the caves, the grove spiders had a more toxic venom that moved swift and hot in the blood of humans and other small prey. Fae had become immune to it ages ago, using it for recreational purposes as a secondary crop from the orchard.

If she had gone in there, she could be dying this very moment. I had felt this exact same way when she died in the caves, the razor-sharp knives dragging through every vein in my body and hollowing it out while my broken, hopeful heart kept pumping, as if every beat could do the work for both of us.

This was different though. This time, the knives merely made way for the aching ichor that crept in to replace the hot blood that had sung for her. Even the small trickle of miraculous magic she had fed me, which I had hoarded in my soul knowing that miracle would never repeat itself, had gone still and quiet as a grave.

The ribbon that linked us had been cut away. I was desperately pawing for it, reeling it in, hoping that when I reached the end I would not find shorn edges, but her glaring up at me with those devastating turquoise eyes instead.

“Spread out. Find the runaways. None of you harms any of them. If they have run afoul of the grove spiders, save them. If they have been hurt, carry them to the Temple,” I barked, drawing a sword from a passing soldier and plunging into the dusk-kissed trees.

None of them argued with me even though we were about to enter the spiders’ den at the most dangerous time of day. Dusk was when the spiders crept down the trunks and spread out to hunt for their evening meals. Harvesting was only ever done at the depths of daylight and with the sun shining full overhead. If a Fae encountered a spider during the day, it might hiss and chitter its disapproval, but it would creep back up further into the branches to shield its sensitive eyes from the light. Night was their domain though.

I swept through the orchard with not a single care for my own safety nor, for the first time in hundreds of years, for the Fae at my side. I would throw every last one of them to the hungry jaws of a grove spider should it save her from this fate.

I couldn’t even feel her heartbeat slowing with venom. I could feel nothing. Every time I tried to touch the morsel of rich amaranthine magic that had once sparked and spit embers across my inner sky, it faded and bled color around me. I was desperate for it, trying to clutch it closer as it drifted off into the void. The more it evaporated, the more desperately I gripped it.

It was all I had left. All I had of her. Unless I found her again. Surely, I could find her again. She could never hide from me for too long.

I needed to find her.

She could never hide from me when I could still feel her. But all I could feel was my naked hand wrapped around the blade of a knife sliding into my ribs.

We searched every inch of the orchard, twice. For hours, until the sky started to dust with the first kiss of dawn. Spiders had attacked so many times that I was but a pile of shambling rags dripping in their guts, venom, and pieces of carapace as I stumbled through the orchard aimlessly.

“She’s gone,” whispered a dull, familiar voice close to my sword arm.

“Keep looking. That's an order.”

“In the hundred years I’ve had the pleasure of serving under you, sir, you’ve never once had to tell me something is an order.” Silvertree’s shoulder found the crook of my armpit and hefted me upright. “In the two hundred years I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you let a sword drag on the ground. You’re exhausted. You’re spent from battle. And we have searched the orchards so thoroughly, Ebon Breaker found a belt buckle he lost when the Ard Banríon was still having her trysts among the webs. Let’s go inside. We can regroup after you rest.”

I wanted to lean into his advice. Every muscle in my body ached, and the only sensation aside from the hollowness was the ragged agony of their exhaustion.

“I can’t. She could still be out there. She could be hurt. I need to find her before . . .” I couldn’t even bring myself to say it. Before she died thinking the worst of me. Thinking I was a beast. Knowing I was a beast. Regret pooled like bile in the back of my throat. “I should have told her. I should have told her everything, Silver.”

“Captain, you did. You told her in action. I didn’t know her well, but she never struck me as a fool. Hotheaded, yes. But she would have to have been to stand beside you.”

He was speaking of her in the past tense. It stuck in my mind and twisted the poisoned barb and sunk it deeper. I pushed away from him, stumbling a few steps as my body collapsed under the starvation of magic and the weight of my sorrow. Silver reached for me, and I swatted him away with all the strength and hissing of a feral kitten. “Don’t speak of her like that!”

Silver crouched next to me as I fell to my knees. Molten glass scorched fire down my cheeks as I stared into the dawn, my tears washing all sight from my eyes.

I thought I had known grief. Grief and I had become such familiar bedmates that I could smell its perfume drifting on the air and pick it from a stable of others. This was unexpected though. It rushed me, ripping chunks from my flesh and ravaged me with its savagery. This was not grief. This was something else, something more vicious, something beyond grief.

It was a ritual suffering that I had thought myself immune to. It sank into the marrow of my bones and rotted the magic that fed my life force.

“Captain. Let me take you inside. Sleep. We will keep looking. She couldn’t have gotten far. There are no tracks nor missing horses from the stables. Even if she somehow broke the enchantments of the grounds, she can’t get far without horses.” He was straining to lift me. I hadn’t the strength to help him.

I hadn’t the strength to do anything but stare at the lying dawn. The sun had risen just like any other day over the ashes of my family, and now it was rising over the ashes of my very soul. I wanted to yank the sun from the sky and bury it in the ground next to the mountain of bodies that the dawn had robbed me of. All I could do though was stare and let the tears, too stubborn to be held back, roll through the muck that covered me.