Prologue
The Emperor of Wyrecia was dying.
Dimas Ehmar sat at his father’s bedside with his hands clasped in his lap, his fingers still stained gray from the painting he’d finished earlier that night.
It had been a painting devoid of color, gray trees casting shadows that, at the right angle, looked like monsters.
The image had plagued him for over a week now, shadows creeping into his vision when he least expected it.
He’d thought getting it down on canvas would help.
He’d been wrong.
Those same shadows were with him now, his only companions as his father slept, frail chest rising and falling in an unsteady rhythm.
Dimas’s fingers twitched. For a second, he considered reaching out to take his father’s hand, just as he had the night he’d lost his mother, but the emperor’s eyes slid open before he could make the choice.
“Dimas.” Emperor Vesric’s voice was a rasp against the room’s oppressive silence.
His face, which had always been strong and full of life, now reminded Dimas of the skeletal wraiths in his mother’s paintings.
The ones she used to tell him stories of when no one was listening.
Something cracked in his chest, like ice breaking on the surface of a lake.
The memory of the late empress was not what he needed right now.
“Have some water.” Dimas reached for the copper jug at his father’s bedside.
He’d dismissed the servants hours ago, insisting that he could tend to his father’s needs and trying to convince himself he was doing so because it was his duty and not because he wanted to gain Vesric’s approval.
But now, as Vesric’s hand shot out to wrap around his wrist, his mouth twisting in displeasure, Dimas could not ignore the rush of disappointment that went through him.
“I don’t need water,” his father said, even as a cough racked his body. “I need … to see Lady Sefwyn.”
Dimas should have expected this. After all, the bond between an emperor and his Fateweaver was one stronger than family; a bond that transcended life and death, it had been created by the ancient acolytes of their matron goddess over three centuries ago.
Of course it was Lady Sefwyn, and not his own son, who Vesric wanted at his side.
Still, it stung.
Schooling his expression into the mask he’d become so accustomed to wearing, Dimas said, “She’s resting, Father. Just as you should be. Now let me—”
Vesric’s fingernails dug into Dimas’s skin, and the sharp sting of pain stole the rest of Dimas’s words. Dimas’s chest tightened. Suddenly he was a child again, and his father was dragging him down, down, down. Into the dungeons. Into the dark.
He sucked in a breath. Let it out again. It was strange, how even on the verge of death, his father was the thing he feared most.
“Where is your Fateweaver?” Vesric’s eyes were wild and feverish.
He pulled Dimas so close that the prince could smell the wormwood medicine on his father’s breath.
Could see the spittle on his lips. At Dimas’s silence, the emperor’s lips curled back from his teeth.
“She is not here yet, is she?” his voice rattled.
She should have been. Every heir before Dimas had secured his Fateweaver before the reigning emperor’s death, so that he could be by her side when her powers began to manifest. But in order to find her, Dimas had needed the one thing the Goddess of Fate hadn’t given to him.
A vision of who his Fateweaver was going to be.
It was a gift every Ehmar heir received on their fifteenth namesday, meant to ensure the empire was never without a Fateweaver to protect the destinies of his people. And for centuries, that vision had never been late.
Until Dimas came along.
Two years had passed since that day. Two years in which the Goddess of Fate, Naebya, hadn’t given him a single clue as to who his Fateweaver was meant to be.
He’d spent most of his nights locked in the church, his bones numb from hours of kneeling before the statue of the empire’s goddess, his mind tainted by the whispers of his father’s court.
Dimas Ehmar is heir of nothing.
A son born of madness!
No Fateweaver in sight. He is not the rightful heir.
Dimas had been starting to think they were right, until, a fortnight ago, the divine connection with his Fateweaver finally began to manifest. He had been painting the snowy horizon from his window when he’d been overcome with a vision: a vast, icy forest, and then …
a girl, her eyes the same gray as the sky above, her form shrouded in twisting shadows as she loosed an arrow at something Dimas could not see.
He’d painted her without even meaning to.
The stubborn set of her mouth. The crescent-shaped scar on her left cheekbone.
When he’d come out of the vision, the snowy forests he’d suddenly found himself in had faded to the familiar silver and blue walls of his chambers, and night had already fallen.
His clothes were stuck to his skin, and all he could do was stare and stare at the image he’d painted of her. His Fateweaver.
At last.
Dimas should have been overjoyed, but as he’d stared at his painting, all he’d felt was dread.
Only bōden descendants of the first worshippers of the Sisters of Fate were capable of receiving a Fateweaver’s power.
Bōda were rarer these days, but if any young girls showed signs of having visions—either of the past, present, or future, depending on their affinity—they were to be turned into their nearest temple.
Should they be chosen as the next Fateweaver, they could be easily retrieved once the subsequent heir received his vision.
But the girl in Dimas’s divine vision had not been in a temple. Which either meant she had no idea she was a bōda—or that she’d been hiding from the empire all this time.
It had been two weeks since he’d gathered the courage to reveal to his father what he’d seen. Two weeks since he’d sent a small unit of imperial hunters, known as the Empire’s Fist, to find her.
Dimas hadn’t heard a word from them since.
Now all he said to his father was: “She’ll be here soon.”
So far, his connection to his Fateweaver was …
unpredictable. After that first vision, which had happened over a fortnight ago, he’d seen nothing.
But it was a start. He knew what she looked like, and he knew she lived somewhere in the Wilds, a frozen forest to the far west of Wyrecia. It was enough.
It had to be.
Vesric’s brows narrowed as he pulled away. “Good, because if the Rite of Ascension is not completed—”
“It will be,” Dimas said.
The rite was a way of solidifying the bond between the next emperor and his Fateweaver, a divine rite that both proved the worthiness of Wyrecia’s next ruler and kept the Fateweaver’s power in check.
If Dimas could not complete it, the church would take it as a sign that their matron goddess, Naebya, had forsaken him.
Dimas couldn’t—wouldn’t—let that happen.
“My Fateweaver will be retrieved,” Dimas insisted, clenching his hands into fists to hide the fact they had started to tremble. “Trust me, Father. I’m going to be emperor—”
His father let out a rasping laugh. “In name, perhaps,” he said, his words cutting deeper than any knife. “But never in spirit. You are, after all, your mother’s son.”
A wave of rage and pain crashed into Dimas. He staggered to his feet, the silver and royal blue of his father’s chambers blurring together before his eyes. It didn’t matter what he did, or how hard he tried; in the eyes of Vesric Ehmar, Dimas would always be a failure.
“Why?”
The question was out of his mouth before he could stop it, before he could consider the weight of asking for a truth he’d wished to know his entire life. It’s your last chance, he thought, his heart fluttering inside his rib cage like a bird. It’s now or never.
But his father rasped, “Why what?”
Why have you never believed in me? Why are you so sure I’ll fail?
Why did mother have to die whilst you got to live?
The fury of Dimas’s thoughts took him by surprise. He blinked at his father, who looked so small and fragile beneath the canopy of this bed—a mighty emperor no longer—and wondered why he’d ever feared him.
It hit him then just how much his father’s opinion had shaped everything in his life.
Why he’d hidden himself behind walls with easels and paints, why he’d felt the need to sneak kisses from servant boys rather than assert his own desires and needs.
Why he’d spent so long wondering why his father didn’t believe in him that he’d forgotten to believe in himself.
But all of that was about to change, and Dimas was both exhilarated and completely terrified of what the future would bring.
It was never going to be enough. He was never going to be enough.
No. Whatever the future held, he had to believe that fate was on his side. And so, instead of demanding answers, Dimas simply said, “I’m going to prove you wrong.”
But Vesric had already fallen back into a deep sleep, his son’s words going unheard in the silent chambers. Dimas lingered in the darkness, watching the shadows as they crept along the white stone walls, growing closer, closer—
A single knock echoed through the room. Dimas jumped, his heart in his throat as he ran a hand over his face. Fate dammit, he needed sleep.
Sinking into the chair by his father’s bedside, he didn’t bother to hide the exhaustion in his voice as he called, “Go away.”
There was a pause, and then a familiar voice said, “It’s me.”
Ioseph.
Dimas was up and opening the door within the space of a heartbeat, icy wind gusting into the chamber. “Did they find her?”
Hope flared in his chest, bright and all-consuming as a flame. His Fateweaver was the answer. Once she was by his side—
“I’m sorry.” Ioseph’s soft words extinguished his hope. “We’ve lost contact with them, Your Highness. They were supposed to send word once they reached the northern outpost, but we—”
Ioseph’s words faded, drowned out by the roaring in Dimas’s ears. Without his Fateweaver, he would never be emperor. Time was running out.
She was the key to everything … and he was going to do whatever it took to find her.
“Gather as many hunters as the Fist can spare and meet me at the gates at dawn,” Dimas said.
Ioseph stared at him, brown eyes darkening. “Your Highness—”
“That’s an order.” Dimas let the mask slip and ran his hands through his already disheveled hair.
I sound like my father.
He reached for Ioseph, his fingers trembling as they wrapped around the solid warmth of Ioseph’s wrist. There was no one else around to see, and Dimas was too tired to deny himself this small comfort. “Please, ’Seph. I need to do this.”
Ioseph’s eyes dipped to Dimas’s pale fingers against his wrist, then back up again, flashing with a tenderness that made the prince’s heart flutter with something other than fear.
Ioseph dipped his head in a decisive nod. “Alright, but I’m coming with you. We’ll bring her home, Dimas. Whatever it takes.”
Gone was the tenderness in Ioseph’s expression, replaced instead with a fierce determination that Dimas recognized with heart-aching intimacy.
Like him, Ioseph knew what it felt like to live in the shadow of a parent.
His father was long dead, but the shadow he’d cast as a member of Vesric’s personal guard still haunted Ioseph to this day.
Dimas gave a single nod, a silent promise. They would prove themselves worthy.
Together.
Ioseph stepped back, looking Dimas up and down with pinched lips. And then he was striding down the candlelit hallway, ebony cloak rippling behind him.
Dimas wasn’t sure how long he stood in the shadows outside of his father’s chambers before he finally strode to his own, his only focus the single, unrelenting purpose pulsing through his veins.
Find her.
His Fateweaver was the only way he could prove to his father—no, to the empire—that he was worthy of being their ruler.
He was Dimas Ehmar, future Emperor of Wyrecia.
And he was going to bring his Fateweaver home.