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The girl cupped the gold talisman, shaped like a thin disk, with care. It was weathered and aged and delicate. A faint hum of strange remnants of magic lived in the gritty edges. If her father ever learned she’d snatched the piece from the lockbox, he’d probably banish her to her room for a week.
The moonlight gleamed over the strange rune in the center of the coin. The boy in the shadows let out a gasp. She didn’t think he’d meant to do it.
For the first time since she’d started reading to him, the boy climbed up the stone wall and curled his hands around the bars. The red in his eyes deepened like blood. His smile was different. Wide enough she could see the slight point to his side tooth, almost like fangs of a wolf, only not as long.
This smile sent a shiver up her arms.
“Will you do something for me, Songbird?”
“What?”
The boy nodded at the disk. “That was a gift from my father. Watch over it for me, will you? I’ll come back to get it one day, and you can tell me more stories. Promise?”
The girl ignored the wave of gooseflesh up her arms and whispered, “Promise.”
When the sound of heavy boots scraped over the dirt nearby, the girl gave one final look at the boy in the darkness. He held up the silver bird charm and grinned that wolfish grin once more before she sprinted into the grass.
The speed of her pulse ached as she hurried back to the longhouse. Her gaze was locked on the disk in her hands; she never saw the root bursting from the soil. The thick arch snagged the tip of her toe and sprawled the girl face down in the soil.
She coughed and scrambled back to her knees. When she looked down, her insides twisted up like knotted ropes.
“Oh, no.”
The disk she’d promised to protect mere moments before had fallen beneath her body. Now, the shimmer of gold lay in three jagged pieces in the soil. Tears blurred her vision as she gathered the pieces, sobbing promises to the night that she’d fix it, she’d repair what was broken.
Perhaps it was the despair that kept her from noticing the strange rune, once marked on the surface of the disk, now branded the smooth skin below the crook of her elbow.
In time, the more she learned of the viciousness of the sea fae who attacked her people, the more the girl looked back on that night like a shameful secret. She made up tales about the scar on her arm, a clumsy stumble down the cobbled steps in the gardens. She’d forget the boy’s promise to come for her.
The girl would start to think of him as everyone else—the enemy.
If only the girl had kept away from those cells that night, perhaps she would not have unraveled her entire world.
CHAPTER1
The Songbird
Blood was in the air. Pale sunlight had barely clawed through ashy sea mists around the shore, but the hot tang of blood filled my lungs with each breath.
I pulled back the thick, woven shades to see if some gory death had taken place at the base of my family’s tower. The dirt roads carving through the wood and stone fortress we called home for two weeks every summer were filled with loud merchants and courtiers preparing for the festival.
No bones. No flesh. No blood.
I let the shade fall back into place, my thumb tracing the roses and ravens embroidered in the threads—symbols for our Night Folk clans in the Northern realms. The Eastern, Southern, and Western realms would have their own unique markings.
I was losing my damn mind. Brutal nightmares of snakes devouring little birds took up my sleep. Now, I was bringing the blood and death from dreams into reality. Maybe it was because the Crimson Festival marked the end of the war. Or maybe it was because this festival was the tenth since our enemies, the sea fae, were locked beneath the tides.
With every fading summer, the haunting dreams grew more vivid, like a waking nightmare. A distant promise from a lanky boy locked in a cell had become a poison in my mind, an endless image of monstrous serpents rising from the sea, night after night.
I was a fool. There hadn’t been a single whisper of sea folk since the great war ended. This summer would be no different.
To soothe the tension in my blood, I opened a drawer in a table beside my bed. Inside were three lumps of what once was the rune talisman. Since the disc shattered, the pieces had grown more brittle, as though returning to nothing but sand on the shore. They were hardly shapes anymore.
I slammed the drawer closed and climbed back into the wide bed, pulling the heavy fur duvet over my head. Alone, I could succumb to the race of my uneasy pulse, the damp sweat on my palms, and the nervous tremble in my veins.
The fortress was designed to house all four royal families of the fae realms. To the sea folk we were all earth fae, but in truth we were made of clans with different magics and talents.
All the clans fought together to win peace during the great war against dark fury—what my clan called magic—and the folk of the Ever Kingdom—the sea fae.Hispeople. The festival was an excuse to celebrate the victory and gave reason to see everyone I loved through days of field games, archery, lively balls, and too much sweet ale. I couldn’t puzzle through why this summer felt so . . . different.
