Olwen
We rode for the better part of two hours.
The world changed around us in slow gradations, faded and sickly.
First came the outskirts of the market town: crumbling walls of pitted stone, desperate faces peering from shadowed doorways, children with hollow cheeks watching our passage with eyes too old for their faces.
Then farmland, but not the rich golden fields I remembered from my father’s trade routes.
This land was brown and withered, crops struggling up from exhausted soil, scarecrows hanging limp on their crosses like executed men.
Then the forest.
It swallowed us whole. Trees pressed close on either side. These were not the friendly oaks and maples of my childhood, but something older. Darker.
Their bark was black as char, their branches bare despite the season, reaching toward each other overhead until they formed a tunnel that blocked out the fading sky.
No birds sang. No insects hummed. The only sound was the soft thud of the Shadow-Steed’s hooves on the packed earth, and even that was muffled.
Absorbed.
His arm stayed locked around my waist, iron-steady, and every mile I burned.
Where his chest rested against my spine, sensation crawled. Not pleasure. Not quite pain. A sensation with no name.
The feeling of thawing.
Of frozen tissue being forced back toward life, nerve by nerve, cell by cell.
I didn’t want to thaw. Warmth hurt. Living hurt.
Every degree of heat was a reminder of what I’d lost, what had been stolen from me, what I could never have again.
Cold was safety. Cold was home. Cold was the stone slab in the mausoleum where I’d woken three months ago with dirt in my mouth and no memory of how I’d gotten there.
Cold was truth.
This warmth was a lie, and lies always ended.
“We approach the boundary.”
His voice startled me. It had been so long since either of us spoke that I’d almost forgotten what sound was, drifting into a dull doze.
I opened my eyes and blinked against the light filtering through the branches.
The forest had thinned. Ahead, the road cut through a wall of mist so thick it looked solid, a curtain of white hanging in the air like something ominous.
And beyond it, the colors were wrong.
Muted. Washed out. Gray stone and purple shadow and silver sky, like looking at the world through a veil of gauze.
“The Veil,” I murmured.
“You know it?”
“By reputation.”
Everyone knew the Veil. Every child in this region of Alia Terra grew up hearing stories about the boundary between human lands and monster territories.
Cross it, and you left behind the jurisdiction of human law. Human courts. Human hunters.
Cross it, and you belonged to the monsters.
The Shadow-Steed didn’t slow.
It plunged into the mist like a diver into deep water, and the world dissolved into white.
For a moment I couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear. Couldn’t feel anything except the Raven King’s arm around my waist and the solidity of the steed beneath us.
The mist was frigid, proper cold, deep cold, the kind that settled into bone and stayed there.
I exhaled. The sound wasn’t performance.
Relief.
We emerged on the other side, and his lands spread before us like a monochrome painting.
No more color. The sky hung low, heavy with clouds that pressed down on the peaks of distant mountains.
The sun hid somewhere behind that blanket, its light diffused into a pale glow that cast no shadows.
The ground was stone and dead grass, dull brown and frost-touched. Trees dotted the landscape, but they were skeletal things, branches bare and black, reaching toward the sky like the fingers of drowning men.
In the distance, mountains rose in jagged peaks. Snow capped their summits, white against charcoal, and something about their shapes made my chest ache.
They were beautiful, empty and dead.
A bird called out overhead with a hoarse croak, nothing like the musical songbirds of the human lands, before landing on my shoulder.
The raven was huge. Bigger than any raven had a right to be. Its feathers were black as a moonless sky, glossy and sleek, each one perfect.
Its beak was a curved blade that could take out an eye.
And when it turned its head to look at me, there was an intelligence in its gaze that went far beyond animal.
It knew things. This bird. It had seen things that mortal minds weren’t meant to comprehend.
I held very still.
“Greetings, little bride.”
The voice didn’t come from the bird’s throat. It came from somewhere else, perhaps inside my head or from the air itself.
Rust and gravel, scraping against my thoughts like claws on stone.
My heart, false and petal-fueled, stuttered and skipped.
“Welcome home, sister.”
The raven preened my hair, running its beak through the pale gold strands like a mother grooming a child. Gentle. Proprietary.
“Cold meat. Good meat.” A sound that might have been a laugh. “We have waited for you.”
Cold meat.
Sister.
It knew. The bird knew what I was. Could smell the grave on me, the absence, the void where a living soul should be.
And it wasn’t afraid, wasn’t disgusted, wasn’t backing away with its feathers ruffled in alarm.
It was welcoming me.
Like I was one of them. Like I belonged to the carrion and the cold and the endless sky.
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Could only sit rigid in the Raven King’s arms while his messenger bird preened my hair and whispered secrets into my mind that no living thing should hear.
Behind me, he shifted.
His gloved hand came up slowly. Deliberately. He brushed the raven from my shoulder. The motion was almost gentle.
The bird took flight with an offended croak, black wings beating the chill air, circling overhead.
But it didn’t leave. It stayed close. Watching.
Waiting.
“The birds usually eat the dying.” His voice was mild, curious. There was no anger in it, no accusation. It was just a question wrapped in an observation.
“They do not greet. They do not welcome. They feed.” A pause. “Why do they court you, little bride?”
I needed a lie.
A good one. A believable one. Something that would explain the unexplainable, that would cover the truth with a story he might accept.
“Perhaps they mistake my silence for death.” I forced my voice to stay light. Careless. Bored, even.
“I’ve been told I’m unnervingly quiet. My aunt used to say I moved like a ghost through rooms.”
It wasn’t entirely a lie. Mabyn had said that. Usually with disgust in her voice, right before she reminded me how much of a burden I was, how much my father’s fortune should have been hers.
Right before she slipped poison into my evening tea.
The Raven King didn’t respond.
His hand moved to the nape of my neck, warm and heavy against my skin.
It slid lower. Found the curve where shoulder met throat, that vulnerable hollow where the pulse beat strongest in living women.
His thumb pressed against my carotid artery, firm, deliberate, and held there.
Counting.
The petal gave him something to find. A rhythm. Fast and thready, irregular and wrong, but present.
I didn’t breathe. Couldn’t afford to, couldn’t risk the performance slipping.
One. Two. Three. Four.
He counted. I waited.
“Hmm.” He released me. Straightened behind me, his chest shifting against my back.
“A strange pulse you have. More like a vibration than a heartbeat. More like a hummingbird than a woman.”
“I’ve always been delicate.”
“Have you.”
It wasn’t a question. The words hung in the air between us, heavy with everything he wasn’t saying.