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Chapter One

S ometimes a heart breaks slowly. Sometimes all at once. But it is a rare and terrible thing for a heart to be broken by magic.

Mine was broken long ago. My mother was a meiga, a magic-wielder, and could do beautiful and formidable things with Light magic. She snapped off a piece of my heart and promised it was for my safety, to keep me protected from the wretched world.

“A heart, little Nightingale,” she told me, “is a bloody timekeeper. It marks the beginnings and ends of days. Every beat a tick, every rush of blood a moment closer to the end. The world is full of monsters who will gladly tear your heart to shreds. So it is safer for me to keep it. It is safer for it to be broken. No one can hurt a heartless witch.”

Then she vanished, taking part of me with her.

Her magic keeps me alive in place of my heart. But I’ve always wondered why, if my heart is so broken, do I still feel so much.

My stepsiblings call me heartless. And I suppose I have quite a bite. Keep your distance. Don’t let them see how you care. Try very, very hard not to care at all. Those are my creeds, and I’m shit at living by them.

For example, I should know not to go into the Blood Woods alone. But it’s my best friend’s scream that rends the evening air, and I make a stupid, reckless decision.

At the sound of the scream, my head whips toward Hugo. He’s standing with me in the near-freezing water of the school fountain. We’d dared each other to jump in barefoot. Whoever gets out first loses. “That was Poppy.”

His eyes are wide with terror too. But he sees the decision on my face—he knows me too well. “Vesper, don’t.”

“That was Poppy.”

“Let’s get the rest of the cohort, tell a teacher. We’ll find—”

I lose the dare. Leaving my buckle shoes in a pile by the fountain, I grab my scythe and sprint for the school gates. Hugo shouts after me, but he doesn’t follow.

I pass the tree line. I shouldn’t be out here. “Don’t go into the woods.” That’s what my father taught me. But then he died in the woods. Disobedient daughter that I am, I’ve been following him into them ever since.

It’s twilight—the shadows of the great bloody oaks have grown cold, and the edge of the sun has dipped past the high towers of the academy behind me. There are mere minutes before the portcullis on the front gate of Gossemort will slam shut, when every window will be barred and every door will lock. And for the night, nothing left outside of Gossemort, student or fiendling, will be able to find its way in.

I have to find her. And I have to be fast. I just really wish I hadn’t left my shoes behind. My stockings are sopping wet, and my toes are near frozen as I stampede through the woods. Twigs and sharp rocks scrape my soles as I listen for her voice again through the trees.

She was on patrol tonight. Each night a team of students traces the perimeter of the stone walls that surround the school, ridding it of fiendlings.

Fiendlings are an enigma. Even those of us who train against them do not understand them and hardly know what they look like. They change form at will. Made of pure shadow, they move like water, only revealing themselves for what they are with those red, glowing eyes.

Patrol is dangerous, but Poppy has done it dozens of times. I’ve never heard her scream like that. I’d rather be locked out of the school in the perilous forest with Poppy than warm and safe inside while she was left to the Dark. She’d do the same for me.

I slow my pace and try to get my bearings. And when I realize that I’m not sure which direction I’m going, when I realize that in the dimness and the strangeness of the shadows of the Blood Woods, I cannot even tell where the sun is, I look behind me, and I’ve lost sight of the school.

The forest floor is thickly covered with creeping undergrowth. The shadows here are deep and sinister. All the trees look the same, their massive bloody trunks snaking upward. The townsfolk believe that these oaks draw their color from the blood of soldiers who died here defending the Kingdom of Gault from the Kingdom of Imaelhain. I know far more blood has been spilled by the monsters that live here. I listen for Poppy and realize that I can hear nothing. Not the wind. Not the rustle of life that a forest should have.

But there is the faintest hush in the dark places between trees, slithering in the hollows and underbrush, creeping beneath thorns and thistles. I hear whispers.

Fiendlings.

They like the twilight, when they can jump from shadow to shadow, avoiding any shards of sunlight on the ground. This, the edge of night, is when they play. Older students protect the school during the risky dying hours, and tonight was Poppy’s turn.

I might have abandoned my shoes.

But I would never leave my scythe behind.

I quietly draw the magic to myself, from the air, the earth, the dying sun, the whisper of the wind and the way the leaves tumble through it.

Omnia magica sunt. All is magic. That is always the first lesson at Gossemort.

I summon the Light to my scythe, and it glows lavender. The skull of a raven tops the willow-wood handle, the blade mirroring the curved beak of the raven, long and sharp and deadly. The wood is worn in the places my hands rest, and those grooves ground me as I watch the shadows.

Breathe in. Breathe out. The steadiness and reason of the Light flow through me. And that’s when the fiendling shows itself. I see no body—not yet. Just two scarlet eyes. A set of gleaming fangs. And a smile. My stomach flips.