A Curse of Storms and Scorn (Crown of Feyreign #1)

Prologue

On the night her daughter turned six months old, Melea Waters woke in the darkness to a sound from the bassinet under the window.

Monsters.

It was always her first thought when she woke at night.

She opened her eyes and lifted her head and found the shutters blown open by wind and the full moon’s light pouring over her daughter’s face. No monsters, just Eurydice.

She didn’t recall opening the shutters, but the nighttime winds sometimes blew hard between storms. And Melea was a terrible sleeper.

Since the birth, nights had felt long, dangerous. Often now Melea woke at the smallest sound, her eyes wide in the darkness. In the southern district of the Kingdom of Storms, few thought beyond the next day’s rains. But Melea Waters thought only of the long nights.

It had been six months, and from the moment her daughter had emerged from her body, the sun was no longer the brightest spot in her world. She had borne an infant with straw-gold hair and velvet-soft skin. A light amongst the storm clouds.

Her baby wasn’t chubby. She wasn’t large, and she never cried. But Melea loved Eurydice with leonine fierceness.

In the quiet, she remembered a childhood memory; she once saw a horse-pulled wagon roll in through the gates of the southern district late at night. Two guards sat on the bench with lit torches, and a tarp lay over the wagon’s bed.

From the street corner where she stood, twelve-year-old Melea perceived a creature’s hand peeking from under the tarp’s edge. It was an image she had never forgotten: the hand, veined with black blood. That was when she had known the stories her mother had told her were true.

Monsters were real. They always had been.

She rose from the bed and crossed to the bassinet, where Eurydice lay awake. This was uncommon; her daughter had mostly slept for six months, and rarely woke in the night. Melea made to swipe flour from her hands—a bread-baker’s tic—before touching her baby’s cheek.

She gazed down at her infant and she was startled by the blueness of her child’s eyes. In the moonlight, they were the color of well water and wide open.

For the first time, Eurydice seemed to see her mother. The new glint in her eyes was unmistakable. She let out a noise, sudden and lively, and reached for her mother’s hand. Her fingers closed around her mother’s, her grip tight.

Tears blurred Melea’s vision.

Eurydice was a strong baby. She would survive the southern district, the acid rains, this hardscrabble world.

Her chest wrenched with something like happiness, though not quite. She was not a woman who thought long or hard about what her body told her. She lived each day, and she baked bread, and now she was a mother.

The feeling in her chest was like lightning.