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No. Never mind. They weren’t helpful. Their damn prophecies were what got me into this bleeding mess. They were supposed to help my Raven Queen find a way to wake Ari ten turns ago, and somehow I got pulled into a battle where my bleeding world unraveled.
Better to blame Forbi and her sisters than accept this was truly what fate had in mind.
Cuyler gave a few commands to his men, spreading them out across the city like a spilled inkwell. Most corners were always guarded by blood fae watchers.
If the Mad King and whatever eerie defenses he kept behind his overgrown gates had a care that foreign forces had entered his grimy realm, he never said. He never said anything. A few glimpses of candlelight in the windows, an occasional tune from a lyre or fife, were the only signs anyone occupied Hus Rose at all.
Low, iron gates with spikes on top surrounded the burial grounds. Markers with stacked river stones and pebbles from the sea were the last remnants of the souls sent to the Otherworld.
I paused at the entrance, hugging my middle. The rising blood moon added a touch of wicked eeriness to the overgrown land. One of the few places in the Row where gangly trees grew in a pathetic kind of grove.
When I was a tiny girl, I remembered the leaves being lush, the colors of the grass being rich and verdant, not brittle and yellowed. Folk were once more boisterous and brighter, with a touch of hope in their eyes.
Since the battle of the fae isles ten turns ago, it was as though Raven Row began dying a slow death.
“I’ll wait out here.” Cuyler tapped my elbow. He gave me a sympathetic smile before going to stand beside a wooden pillar carved in faded runes. “Take as long as you want.”
I dipped my chin, grateful for the solitude, and made my way to the back of the grounds. Overhead, branches stretched like bony fingers, reaching for me, ready to snatch me away. I swallowed and kept my focus ahead on the most recent altar of gray stones.
In the South, my Golden King erected a totem for my fallen parents, but also for Captain Annon.
On the first visit back to Raven Row, all my royals and thieves joined and helped create this small plot of land where Stefan, the brother of the storyteller, a damn fine player at the game halls, could be remembered as he was when we walked these shores together.
“I’m still a little angry at you,” I whispered, brushing my fingertips over the smooth stones. “But we’ve got work to do, so I’m going to let it go. For now.”
I sat back on my knees and looked over my shoulder before continuing, voice low. “I can’t write a story, Stef. Words dry up, or they don’t come at all. But I . . . I need you to help me find that voice you were so certain I’d find.
“Not for me. It’s for Lump. You owe him, you know, since he looked out for me in those cells. Lost as he was, he fought those Raven bastards more than once when they tried to slap me around.” I blinked through the burn of tears. “He’s looking out for me now that you’re gone.”
I followed a vein of crystals in one of the stones with my finger, gathering my thoughts. “I need your help because dreams . . . dreams like he’s having, they’re not the good kind.” My stomach flipped. “I’d know since I have wicked dreams much the same. Dreams of the past, but not my past. Other fate workers.”
Since the battle in the Southern Isles, my mind would drift through moments of the past, as though I were looking through the eyes of another; I would dream of moments where storytellers helped bring us to this moment.
After discovering my father’s broken court, it was simple to assume seidr spread throughout the shattered kingdoms.
I was grateful to those past storytellers, grateful for their words. They spoke to me, helped me strengthen my own tales.
When I was a captive in the North, I’d even found an old tale, like it had called to me, and twisted the story of a cursed beast to find a kind-hearted royal. Some whisper in the shadows of those grimy Ravenspire cells told me simple alterations to a handful of fated curses would begin a tale of hope and kind worlds.
“A whisper told me I could do it,” I told the stones. “In the cells with Lump, whispers told me I could change some words and write a new tale for my Cursed King and Kind Heart. Now, I’m dreaming of the storyteller who cursed the North. The one the Ice King slit to pieces. It’s so real, Stef.”
More unnerving was finding the written tales of the past storytellers amidst my dead father’s scrolls of heart songs.
Ari told me Valen’s curse, the same words I’d seen and twisted in the North, had been placed with a stack of other tales. Tales that drew the Nightrender toward a smuggler vowed with a lie taster. Tales where a memory thief found a glass ring. A tale of a raven finding the man who warmed her heart.
Why, then, was I dreaming of those tales?
Time runs short. Like the wind heard my thoughts, a new whisper carried over the burial grounds, lifting the hair on the back of my neck.
I whipped around, searching for the voice. Nothing but shadows and ghosts greeted me.
The familiar sensation of the presence of another spurred me to move swifter. From my jacket pocket, I removed a battered goose quill and a small vial of ink. In the other pocket was a tattered bit of parchment.
“I’m ready, Stef. Tell my daj I need his voice one more time. Just once more, to protect Lump and his family.”
To protect all my royals and thieves. Pressure gathered in my chest. I couldn’t lose any of them. I wouldn’t.
“I don’t know what’s coming,” I whispered to the night, “but it feels like it’s only a matter of time before it all falls apart again.”
