Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
Downstairs, I hurry through the marble corridors, which stretch wide and bare and empty. On any other night, bustling chatter would fill these halls, but tonight, everyone has gone to the throne room. They’ve gathered to watch the Claiming, and I’m…late.
My pace quickens. I can practically see my father’s cool-eyed disappointment, the divot between his graying brows. Not only have I spent half my life failing his expectations, but now I’ve managed to arrive late for an event I’ve had twenty-eight years to prepare for.
Ishanna’s blood, what is wrong with me?
Up ahead, a side door appears. If I duck through to the outside, I can cut across the garden and reenter the castle through the east wing, come at the throne room from that way. The shortcut will save me five minutes, at least.
An easy decision.
I throw open the door, my skirts billowing as I burst into the balmy summer evening. The gardens gleam in the pastel twilight, but I don’t spare the manicured flowerbeds a glance. I rush between the boxwood hedges, my hems whipping against the trimmed leaves.
In the distance, pale pink light clings to the horizon, the last glimmer of sun narrowing and vanishing. A weight settles atop my shoulders. Time for the Claiming to officially—
I stumble as the entire garden—the entire world—shudders around me. By the time I regain my footing, the disturbance has passed, but…Ishanna’s breath, what was that? I glance around for some kind of explanation, but the birds cease their chattering, the garden plunged into stillness.
Anxious energy fizzes inside me. I try to placate it with a lungful of perfumed evening, but the fragrant sweetness offers no relief. My eyes drift as if summoned to where darkness lurks on the horizon. In the dip between two distant mountains, shadows pool, cloaking the lands that lie beyond.
The Wildwood. The ominous, tangled gateway that guards Velindra, the kingdom of the fae.
Even from here, the forest’s shadows teem with menace. With threats. Dark energy crackles from those trees, and I have no doubt that whatever caused that anomaly just now, it had something to do with—
A twig snaps behind me.
My spine stiffens, my thoughts bursting apart like popped soap bubbles. I start to turn, but rough hands grip me from behind—one at my waist, another at my nape. Whoever has snuck up on me is strong, because I’m locked in place, my stare aimed at the horizon.
“Don’t run,” a voice behind me growls. “Whatever you do, don’t ever run from me.”
I try to turn again, but the hand at my neck tightens like a collar, and I can’t catch so much as a glimpse. My entire body revolts, my nerve endings screaming.
“Do you understand?” the voice grates out. “Once you see me, you absolutely can. Not. Run.”
My heartbeat turns ragged. “O-okay. But why would I run?”
My captor leans in, his breath hot against my ear. He drags in an inhale so blatantly greedy that my vital processes abandon me.
I tremble, chained to the earth not only by his grip, but by a paralyzing burst of fear. Is this the fae king? It must be. No one else would dare accost an Aethrolian princess in her own garden.
“I knew your scent was tempting,” he says, his voice dropping into a gravelly register I didn’t know existed until this moment. “But shadows take me, up close like this, you’re irresistible.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, wishing I was somewhere else.
Anywhere else. My assailant inhales again, concluding with a groan so obscene that if my sisters heard, they’d spend a week repenting for it.
As it stands, I’ll need a scalding bath later, just so I can slough that horrible sound from my skin.
“Irresistible?” I manage. “Because of…what, my smell?”
“Yes.”
“But I don’t have a smell.”
He laughs. It’s a dark sound—rough and heavy and inevitable, like the last rattle of autumn before snowfall arrives. “You do. You smell like something I’d chase until the ends of the earth. I wouldn’t be able to help myself, in this form. Which is why you shouldn’t run.”
A thousand urges collide in me at once. I want to scream. I want to flee. And yet this stranger’s warning carries gravity, enough to override the panic bubbling in my veins. I need to stay calm. Extricate myself from his hold, somehow.
“If I did run,” I hear myself say, “what would happen?”
The hand at my hip squeezes. “I’d chase you.”
“And then?”
“I’d catch you.”
I force a swallow. “And…then what?”
An eternity slips past, marked by the uneven rush of my pulse, by the pull of warm breath against the sensitive shell of my ear. My captor edges so close his chest brushes my back. “Something you wouldn’t like,” he rumbles.
Something I wouldn’t like. A violent shiver wracks my frame, because the mere thought of fleeing from the fae king—of being marked for capture by those merciless yellow eyes—sends dread spiraling through me.
I wouldn’t survive that. Survive him. Or, if I did, I’d probably wish I hadn’t.
“I will let go of you,” the voice behind me says, “if you promise not to run.”
I breathe around the leaden weight wedged in my airway. “All right. I-I promise.”
For a moment, his hold actually tightens, the pressure accompanied by the prick of…what are those, claws? But before I can decide, his grip vanishes, leaving me weak-kneed and wobbly, like I’ve been stranded amid empty air.
I breathe. And breathe. And breathe. Then gather my wits and turn around.
And immediately lose track of myself again, because this is not the fae king. At least…not in the form I last saw him in.
No, this is a goblin—indigo-skinned and impossibly tall, his frame so broadly muscled it’s as if someone carved him from a solid block of night.
His long white hair gleams in the twilight, the top half pulled into a knot that bares his pointed ears, the bottom half cascading over elaborate leather armor.
Starlit glimmers play across his bluish-purple skin, but the shimmers seem to be part of him somehow, not reflected from above.
And…Ishanna’s blood, I do want to run. Some primal instinct courses through me, a bone-deep urge to flee—away from him, or toward him, I can’t tell. I can’t even separate up from down right now, not with his presence diving into me like a thousand knives.
“You’re thinking about it,” the goblin says, his moonlight-colored brows pulling together. His eyes bore into me, as cold and bright as yellow planets. “Running. I can tell.”
I blink, needing a reprieve from his stare, from the sharpness of his jaw, but it’s hopeless. He’s too intense. Too overwhelming to possibly shut out with something as flimsy as eyelids.
“It’s kind of hard not to,” I breathe. “You’re… You’re…”
He waits, but no word exists in this language or any other to adequately conclude that sentence. He’s enormous. He’s dizzying. He’s devastating and otherworldly and impossible.
And Ishanna help me, he is definitely not what I pictured when I heard the word “goblin.”
“Frightening?” he guesses, revealing pointed canines.
That flash of teeth sends an electrical impulse barreling down my throat, which flares to a full-blown wildfire the moment it hits my belly.
Yes, he’s frightening. Terrifying, even.
And yet every second spent staring upward pries my mind apart a little wider.
How have I spent twenty-eight years in a world that contains creatures like this, and never even realized?
The silence between us tightens. The goblin lets his focus travels over the high collar of my dress, the buttons beneath my chin, the loose fall of my hair. After half a century, he drags his gaze back to mine. It lands like a blow, the reverberations rattling in my bones.
Run, my brain screams.
I almost do. I want to, so badly my legs quiver. But if I flee, this goblin will catch me, and I don’t trust him not to tear me apart with those wicked teeth.
“You’re…intimidating,” I squeeze out, then widen my feet in an attempt to convince them to stay in contact with the ground. “But you’re not so scary that I’m going to run.”
He crosses his arms, displaying biceps roughly the same diameter as my thighs. “No?”
“No.” I gulp down the nerves boiling in my stomach. “I mean…I’m standing here, aren’t I?”
His low chuckle roughens the air. Those eyes—goddess, are they glowing?
—take another detour downward, consuming every inch of me, from my head to my toes and back again.
He doesn’t move, but something about his stillness crackles with energy, like he could burst into motion at any moment.
Uncage all the strength coiled in those sculpted limbs and use it to force me into submission.
“You are standing here,” he says. “Impressive. Most humans can’t manage it.”
“You did just make me promise not to run.”
“That doesn’t usually stop people.”
I frown. He holds my eyes without blinking, and…goddess, the look on his face is hungry. Greedy enough to steal the pauses between my heartbeats and collapse my insides to a frenetic buzz.
I have to get away from him. Stop him from sizing me up like I’m his next meal. “Look,” I say. “I have somewhere to be, so how about I turn around and walk away now? I can do it slowly, if that helps.”
An avid light flickers in his eyes. “No. You’re not going anywhere yet.”
My breath leaves me in a rush. “But…why not? What could you possibly want with me?”
His violet tongue darts out to swipe across those pointed teeth. “In this form? I don’t think you actually want to know, Princess. You humans are so easily scandalized.”
A spark of annoyance flares in my chest. Scandalized? Why, because we humans have common decency, unlike the fae? Because we have morals that prevent us from accosting people in their own homes?
“Look,” I say. “Either let me go, or tell me what you want and then let me go.”
His smile turns mocking. “Okay. I’ll tell you. But you won’t like it.”
“It doesn’t matter if I like it. I have to get to the throne room. Now. I’m already late.”