Olwen
For days I dozed, finally resting, learning my new body all over again.
And then I woke to the sound of horns.
Not the musical horns I remembered from my father’s trading caravans, those bright brass notes that announced arrivals and departures, celebrations and feast days. These were deeper. Rougher.
They were war horns, or something close to them.
I sat up in the massive bed, furs sliding from my shoulders, and for a moment I didn’t know where I was.
Black silk sheets. Vaulted stone ceiling carved with ravens. A fire burned low in the hearth, casting long shadows across unfamiliar walls.
Cador’s chambers. I was in Cador’s chambers.
The blood feeding. The golden thread. The confession that had spilled out of me in the dark hours before dawn, every secret I’d been hoarding laid bare between us.
My fingers sought the reassuring thud against my ribs.
The warmth at my center hadn’t faded. I wasn’t burning with stolen heat or buzzing with petal-induced mania. I was simply... stable. Present. Anchored in a way I hadn’t been since I’d crawled out of that grave.
The horns sounded again.
I threw back the furs and stood. My legs held. My body obeyed. The gray hadn’t crept back into my skin overnight. When I looked at my hands, they were pale but not ashen. Cold but not frozen.
Cador wasn’t in the room.
His side of the bed was cold, the furs thrown back, a depression in the pillow where his head had rested. How long had he been gone? Minutes? Hours?
The fire had burned low, but someone had added fresh logs recently. The bark was still curling, smoke rising in lazy spirals.
The horns. I needed to know what the horns meant. I dressed quickly and slipped outside the room.
The corridor outside was empty. No servants, no guards. Everyone had gone somewhere else, drawn by whatever crisis the horns announced.
I followed the sound of distant voices, bare feet silent on the cold stone, until I reached a balcony that overlooked the main courtyard.
And stopped.
The gates were open.
Not all the way, just enough to frame the figures standing on the other side. A dozen men in maroon uniforms, their shoulders marked with the insignia of the Lawkeepers.
The peacekeeping force that operated across this section of Alia Terra, enforcing the fragile laws that governed trade and travel and the movement of people between monster lands.
And at their head, dressed in mourning black with a veil over her face, stood my aunt.
Mabyn.
The world went very still.
I gripped the balcony railing, but I couldn’t feel it properly.
Couldn’t feel anything except the sick lurch in my stomach, the way my newly anchored heart stuttered against my ribs.
She was here. She’d found me. Three months of running, of hiding, of pretending to be something I wasn’t, and she’d tracked me across half of Alia Terra to the one place I’d thought she couldn’t follow.
“You must understand our concern.” Mabyn’s voice carried across the courtyard, pitched to sound worried rather than demanding. The voice of a grieving guardian, not a murderer.
“My niece is very ill. She escaped from the sanatorium before her treatment was complete, and I fear the journey has worsened her condition. Did you think the auctioneer wouldn’t sell information?
Gold opens every door, even into monster lands.
I bought your trail from the Bride Market to this castle. ”
Sanatorium.
My stomach clenched. That was the story she’d constructed. Not a murder. Not an unmarked grave in the woods. Just a sick girl who’d had a breakdown and run away from the people trying to help her. She’d been telling this lie for three months, and now she had to sell it or lose everything.
A girl whose testimony couldn’t be trusted because she was clearly, obviously, tragically mad.
Brilliant. It was brilliant. If I tried to accuse her of murder, I’d sound like exactly what she was claiming, a delusional woman who’d invented persecution to explain her own breakdown.
“The Raven Lands do not fall under Lawkeeper jurisdiction.” The speaker was one of the clan elders. I recognized his voice from the banquet, though I couldn’t see his face from this angle. “Your authority ends at the Veil.”
“Of course, of course.” Mabyn’s tone was soothing, conciliatory. “I’m not here to make demands. I’m here as a concerned family member, begging for your help. My niece is dangerous to herself. The healers at the sanatorium warned us that without treatment, she might...”
A delicate pause. A catch in her voice that sounded almost real. “She might harm herself, or others.”
Murmurs from the crowd below. I couldn’t see how many clan members had gathered, but I could hear them, the rustle of fabric, the low hum of voices debating, weighing, considering.
They were actually considering it.
My fingers tightened on the railing. The stone cracked beneath my grip, a small sound, barely audible, but I felt it. Felt the way the cold rock split under pressure that shouldn’t have been strong enough to damage it.
The blood. His blood in my veins, making me stronger than I should be.
“The King’s bride is not available for inspection.” Another elder, this one female, her voice sharp with disapproval. “She is under his protection now. Whatever claims you have are moot.”
“I have no claims.” Mabyn lifted her veil, and even from this distance I could see the performance on her face. The red-rimmed eyes. The tear-streaked cheeks. The trembling lip of a woman driven to desperate measures by love and worry.
“I only want to see her. To know she’s safe. To speak with her for just a moment, and if she tells me herself that she wishes to stay, I’ll leave. I swear it.”
She was good. She’d always been good, the grieving sister at my mother’s funeral, the concerned aunt at my father’s deathbed, the responsible guardian who’d taken in her orphaned niece out of the goodness of her heart.
Everyone had believed her. I’d believed her, for years, until the evening tea and the bitter taste and the darkness that swallowed me whole.
Fingers clamped onto my bicep.
I spun, ready to fight, ready to run.
Cador.
I hadn’t heard him come up behind me.
“How long have you been standing here?” he asked.
“A few minutes. I heard the horns.”
“The elders sent a runner to wake me when she arrived. I’ve been watching from the upper gallery.” His grip on my arm tightened. Firm. Grounding.
“They’re wavering. She’s playing the concerned guardian well, and some of them want to believe her. A sick human in their territory is a liability. Better to hand her back and wash their hands of the problem.”
The coldness in his voice wasn’t directed at me. It was the cold of calculation, of a king assessing threats and weighing options.
“If she takes me back—”
“She won’t.”
“You don’t understand.” I turned to face him, and my voice came out harder than I intended.
“The sanatorium doesn’t exist. There is no treatment, no healers, no concerned physicians waiting to help me recover. There’s a shallow grave somewhere with my name on it, and she’ll put me in it the moment she has me alone.”
His expression didn’t change. He studied my face, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, what he was planning, whether he believed me or not.
Below, the debate continued. I heard the words “jurisdiction” and “treaty” and “diplomatic incident.” The clan elders were arguing among themselves now, their voices rising, and Mabyn stood at the gates with her Lawkeepers and waited.
She was patient and confident.
She knew how this worked. She knew that monsters, for all their power, were bound by the same political realities as everyone else.
Start a conflict with the Lawkeepers, and the fragile peace between human and monster territories would crack.
Other clans would get involved. Trade routes would close.
The Raven Lands would find themselves isolated, cut off, under siege from enemies who’d been waiting for exactly this kind of excuse.
All for one death-touched bride who shouldn’t exist anyway.
The math was simple. The elders would hand me over. Of course they would.
And then…they did.
The female elder raised her hand. A signal. Two guards at the gate moved to the heavy iron bars, preparing to swing them wide.
“Wait.” My voice came out thin. Desperate. No one heard me. No one was listening. “Wait, you can’t listen to her.”
The guards gripped the bars. The hinges groaned.
A sound came from behind me.
Low. Rattling. The scrape of claws on stone.
I turned.
Lowen emerged from the shadows of the corridor.
The skeletal cat moved differently now, not the slow, painful shuffle I’d seen in the West Tower, but something closer to a prowl. His patchy fur had filled in slightly. His ribs were still visible, but less prominent. His eyes burned that same pale green, but brighter. More alert.
The blood feeding. The anchor that bound me to Cador had affected Lowen too.
He crossed the balcony to where I stood and pressed his bony flank against my legs. The purr that rose from his chest was stronger than before, still that rattling, dice-in-a-cup sound, but louder. More insistent.
Then he turned toward the railing.
Toward the courtyard below.
Toward Mabyn.
And he hissed.
Not a cat’s hiss. Not that sharp, startled sound of a frightened animal. A sound that seemed to come from the void itself, from the space between life and death where creatures like Lowen and I existed.
The hiss echoed off the stone walls, impossibly loud, and every head in the courtyard turned toward the balcony.
Toward us.
Toward the death-touched cat pressed against my legs, his green eyes fixed on my aunt with a hatred that transcended species.
Mabyn’s face went white.
She could see what Lowen was. And she could see the way he stood beside me. Protective, possessive, loyal.
Kin recognizing kin.
“A familiar.” It was the female elder, her voice carrying across the sudden silence. “The old Queen’s familiar. It bonded to the human girl.”