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CHAPTERONE
Ihad thirteen days to right a great wrong… and I had no idea where to start.For the longest time, I had yearned to return to Arcadia. I had wanted so badly to be given a chance to fix the damage I had caused to this world and its people. Now that I was here, witnessing for the first time the true extent of that damage, I found myself entirely lost.
The forest of the Moon Children was gone, hacked apart and cut down. Windhelm, instead of a beacon of light and hope, was a darkened void that sucked the light out of the very landscape around it. How much time had passed in Arcadia since the last time I was here? Months? Years? It seemed unlikely that it had been years, but who knew how my actions had disrupted the flow of time?
I was sick to my stomach.
I felt Valerian’s hand rest on my shoulder, and my instinct was to sob… but I held my tears. Crying wasn’t going to fix anything. It certainly wasn’t going to make me feel better, either. I turned my eyes up at him, but he wasn’t looking at me; he was scanning the horizon, his eyes narrow, his gaze sharp and true.
Then he said something I wasn’t expecting to hear.
“We are not alone.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Stand up, but keep your voice low, and don’t make any sudden movements.”
We were standing at the top of a hill, overlooking what was left of the forest and Windhelm far off in the distance. The macabre sight had been too much for me, and I had fallen to my knees. I got up now, slowly, using his hand for support.
“What is it?” I dared to ask.
“A Souldirge,” Valerian said, keeping his voice low. “It hasn’t made itself known yet, but it’s out there.”
The word sent a shudder down my spine.
Souldirge.
I remembered that creature from the Royal Selection. It had almost torn up Lord Cyr after it broke free of its restraints. Had I not leapt into the arena to try distract it, the creature may have ripped the lordling limb from limb. The sheen of its white exoskeleton, its bony crown, its long, razor-sharp claws… I didn’t want to have to come across another one.
We had only just gotten back.
“Why would there be one of those out here?” I asked, barely whispering. “They aren’t native to the forests.”
“No,” Valerian’s voice was low, and gruff. “They aren’t.”
Another bit of memory came back. I had only distracted the Souldirge, but I’d had no idea how to deal with the beast. It was Valerian who had subdued it, and he hadn’t done it by brute force. I actually wasn’t sure what he had done to it. To this day, we hadn’t really talked about the Royal Selection or about his affinity with—wait.
Wehadtalked about his past. He had called himself a hunter, of a sort. The kind that dealt with dark magic, curses, and dangerous or misunderstood creatures. I remembered, now. It seemed like so long ago we’d had that brief conversation, a conversation he had tried to deflect and then cut short. I had even accused him of smelling like he was wreathed in dark magic.
Like it curled off him.
Maybe it was because we had spent so much time together, or maybe the fact that we had been on Earth for so long, with so many other scents to distract my nose, I hadn’t smelled it on him since. I still couldn’t, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. It didn’t mean his abilities, and his mystery, was gone; maybe they were just suppressed.
The last time he had dealt with a Souldirge, he had put it to sleep. He could do that again,right?The tension in his muscles, the punctuation in his words, and the way his eyes were darting left and right told me he wasn’t so confident in his abilities as he had been that day, during the Royal Selection.
“We need to move,” he said, “Slowly.”
“Move?” I asked, “Move where?”
“Anywhere. That way.”
“Are you sure one of those things is out there?”
“It’s definitely out there, and it’s hungry.”
That was enough for me to decide not to stick around. I started moving down the hill, away from the general direction Valerian thought the creature was in, and away from the place where the portal remained. It was still there, though it wasn’t shimmering anymore; it was little more than a haze, a distortion of the air around it.
It would remain that way for a while, maybe for a few days, unfurling only if someone got near enough to it to make it open. Going back through it had crossed my mind at least once, especially considering there was a hungry creature out there, somewhere, whose attention we didn’t want. It was only a fleeting thought, though. Valerian and I were exactly where we were supposed to be.
