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It’s not a threat, but it might as well have been one by the way his words make me back into the corner beside the basin. I don’t have time to flip my greasy, ash-blonde braid over my shoulder before the door swings open with a creak that makes the nails coil off my toes. My hand grabs for the towel a heartbeat before the doorframe fills with the feathered outline of a huge—and I meanhuge—male.
He’s a few inches taller than the one on the boat, and the feathers on his arms and shoulders glimmer in the glow of soft orange peeking through the small window up high in the bathing room wall. My pulse is a gushing river without beat or rhythm as those all-black eyes lock on mine, taking in my fear as if it is air to breathe, and his eyebrow crooks.
Eyebrows. He has eyebrows, just like he has a mouth underneath a bird’s beak. Feathers flow from his forehead back to his shoulders and neck, but as I still try to wrap my head around what I’m seeing, they change into a spill of night-dark hair, and along his torso, pale skin covers lean muscle, vanishing in a pair of black leather pants. On his chest, a silver pendant catches my eye before he folds his winged arms over it, effectively blocking out the halo of light framing him from the room behind.
“Alive after all.” Were I not scared out of my wits, I might have noticed the amusement in his tone.
I press my back into the hard wall, grabbing for each inch of distance I can bring between the monster and me.
His gaze runs up and down my body with an appraising quality that makes me feel all kinds of sick.
“Well … mostly,” he concludes, nodding at the towel in my hands. “Were you about to wash up, or is this to smother the next person to enter this room?”
“How did you guess?” The words are out before I can bite my tongue.
The Crow spits a laugh, and I realize his voice isn’t the same bone-grating hiss as that from the Crow on the boat. It’s rich and deep. Almost human. And it makes my hair stand on end.
“Spirited. I like that in a female.” He cocks his head, gaze locking with mine as something starts to register in my mind.
Before I can spit a retort, the Crow steps back, light flooding the bathing room, and drops his winged arms to his sides. I catch a glimpse of a bejeweled hand, not a claw, but the Crow walks away so fast I can’t be certain.
He turns to the Crow guard by the door, crossing the room in long, graceful strides. “Make sure she washes and changes before you bring her down for dinner.”
Something in the way the guard snaps to attention at the Crow’s command makes me wonder ifIam dinner.
I wouldn’t be surprised.
The door swings open on a phantom wind as the Crow swishes his hand, and as he disappears from the bedroom, feathers cover his neck and back like on the other Crow Fairies’. I blow out a breath, resting my head against the wall as the door shuts with a click, and wipe the sweat off my brow.
I survived. The prison, the transfer from Fort Perenis to wherever I’m now. I’m still alive. And my heart is beating out of my chest as I understand I must be in the fairy lands. In Crow territory.
My eyes flick to the window, drinking in the view of sunset-gilded trees.
“You heard the king. Get ready for dinner,” the guard hisses, shocking me into motion.
My hands grab the towel so hard my palm stings where I injured it with the nail, and I glance down to find a streak of crimson seeping into the brown fabric.
The king.I need to lean on the shelf next to the basin as I slam the door in the Crow’s face. The fairy with the black hair was the Crow King.
Gooseflesh spreads over my skin as I try to process that the monster who blocked the threshold a moment ago is my husband-to-be. I pivot just in time to retch into the toilet as my empty stomach rejects the news.
I need to get out of here before they can put me into a magical slumber once more—because by now, I’m certain that’s what the Crow on the boat did. It must have been the water or the hardtack. Or both. But if I just met the Crow King, I must be in his palace. And that means I’m in the fairylands of Askarea.
I wish I’d paid attention to the stories my mother told me about the magical creatures in the north of Eherea, but I’ve never believed in things I can’t see or touch. The magic the merchant brought back from the fairy ports, that’s something I understand. Fairy smoke, fairy wine, enchanted bracelets that give their bearer stamina or strength. I’ve seen those things. Touched them—except for the fairy wine. A bottle of that was what had been missing in Ludelle’s collection of rare Eherean wines. Something he dreamed of gathering to fill that empty spot on the shelf in the captain’s cabin back on the Wild Ray.
The Wild Ray is history though, as is its crew. They are all dead. All, including the man I loved. And I’m the only one left to tell the tale.
Paralyzing desperation creeps through my body, making it hard to breathe.
I’m alone in this Guardiansforsaken world, and what little is left of me has been sold to the Crow King to cover Tavras’s duty of providing a new bride.
I don’t know what gives out first, my legs or my arms, but when I hit the stone floor, the impact creates a dull pain compared to the sharp ache in my chest.
Sold. Abandoned. Forgotten. I was shipped to Fort Perenis and kept alive in a prison no one returns from for this sole purpose.
I don’t know how long I lie there, panting through the pain as I try to figure out a way to reach the window high up in the wall. Unlike the one in the bedroom, all I can see through this one are orange and golden clouds towering in the sky like a fortress of its own.
If I could get the shelf close enough to the wall, I might be able to climb up and smash the glass with my hand. The towel will provide protection against cuts, and if I use my bad hand, I don’t risk losing much mobility in case I slice myself open anyway.
