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I spun toward the window.
Ice-cold dread gripped my body.
Shaggy black birds fluttered in through the broken panes, cawing and croaking. Their wings bent and warped, feathers twisting together into shadowy tendrils that turned, tangled, forming the figure of a man.
His body hadn’t fully shaped out of the shifting darkness when his green eyes connected with mine, his intense gaze interrupted only by a lock of black hair. It hung over his face where it must have escaped those long strands held back with a tie, the sides sheared up high on his skull.
“Who do we have here?” His rough voice drove a shudder under my skin as his gaze slipped to the gemstone resting against my thudding sternum. “Looks like I found you.”
Found me…
Dread like none before chilled me to the bone, and I took a step back, bumping into the stool. It pushed against the table that held the basket of hot curlers. They clanked against each other, louder when Risa grabbed the handle and thrust the searing container at the man.
“Out!” Risa gripped me by the bodice and yanked me behind her just as the man burst into his ravens, dodging the scorching spindles. She shoved me out the door to stumble into the corridor. “We have to find protection with the guards, Galantia. Go downstairs. Go!”
With my breath nothing but frantic little gasps, I hurried toward the stairs, gathering and lifting the train of my dress as much as my shaky hands let me. It kept me from getting my shoes caught in the frills and tumbling down the stairs as I descended into a cacophony of grunts and cries.
“No!” Pottery shattered. Wood groaned. “Get your filthy hands off me!”
My vision speckled from the lack of air. I frantically yanked at my bodice, but my lungs refused to expand. My next step never landed on the wood but inside my skirts. Fabric ripped as I skidded, arms flailing until I regained my balance on the bottom landing.
Then I saw it.
A man—a Raven—held a peasant woman with her chest pinned down on a table, his grip tight in her brown hair. His breeches were lowered to his pale thighs, showing every dark, coiled hair on his buttocks. Muscles clenched each time he shoved himself into her with such force, the entire table jumped and shifted, letting the wooden mugs roll around.
“No-ho-hooo…” the woman wailed, cried, and gagged into a platter of meat, grunting in pain with each merciless thrust. “Please…”
The man snarled and pushed her face down onto the platter, where her muffled gags and a spray of vomit mixed with the meat. “Shut up, cunt, while I put a Raven inside your belly.”
Cold terror pulled my throat at my next inhale, but it froze my lungs when I spotted one of our guards sprawled out, dead on the ground, with a black ring mark around his neck. Gods have mercy, if I didn’t move now, I’d end up like the woman. Or the guard. Or both.
Just as I glanced over at the door that led outside, something shifted in my periphery. A woman with long black hair held yet another guard by his throat, pushing his writhing body against the wall. Rivulets of her black magic slithered into the man’s mouth, nose, and eyes until, with a wet smack, his eyes oozed out of their sockets in a gush of blood.
I yelped.
The woman let the twitching guard slump to the ground, turned her blood-streaked face my way, and slowly placed her hand on her leather-corseted waist with a siren’s smile on her lips. “Ah, there’s the titled broodmare.”
“Out!” Risa shoved me around the corner, through a kitchen littered with unmoving bodies, and out a door into the damp chill of the morning. “You need to run, Galantia.”
“Run? Run where?”
“Run into the wheat and hide as well as you can.”Hrrkwent the train of my dress, letting the biting air nip through my underdress as Risa tore the frills to shreds, then yanked at my bodice.
“What are you doing?”
“They can’t know who you are, child,” she said, crooked fingers stripping my finery before she ushered me to stumble over piles of silk and through a stable filled with snorting, dancing horses. “They kill the men and rape the women, yes, but what do you think they’ll do to someone highborn? The daughter of Lord Brisden? The man who slaughtered them by the thousands? Run, child. Run!”
“But what about y—”
“Run! Don’t look back!”
A push against my back sent me stumbling out the stables, eyes searching the seesawing horizon of naked shrubs, crooked grain stores, and empty haystacks. Where was I? Where were the fields?
My heart thrashed loudly in my ears, but not loud enough to drive out the shouts, bellows, and screams shattering through the village. Wheat. Wheat. Where was the damn wheat?!
Ahead of me, one of our house guards lay sprawled out in the mud, dead. A boy cowered, folded like a turtle behind a barrel, a shadowy arrow embedded in his spine, dead. A horse lay on its side where a fog-like blanket of blackness seemed to swallow it whole, dead.
Was everyone dead? Where were our guards? Mother?
