Betrothed (Skullstalker Brides #4)

Chapter 1

One

Fawn watched the last lock of her hair fall into the river and shivered.

It was getting warmer. But the forest was still too cold for a thin dress and an even thinner coat.

Still, she couldn’t wait—she had been sitting around the campfire with her late husband’s family, listening to them talk about how tragic this whole ordeal was, and she couldn’t take it.

She had walked off into the woods with a hunting knife hidden inside her coat sleeve and a weak excuse about relieving herself.

Her mother-in-law and brother-in-law had barely looked at her. They only paid attention to her when she was late with breakfast.

Fawn sat back against the riverbank, watching the discarded locks of her long, brown hair drift downstream.

Then she reached up and felt the puffy remnants she had left behind on her scalp.

Her hair curled when she cut it this short.

She had forgotten. She had only cut her hair once before, when her parents died.

It was an old tradition. One of many that her hometown observed.

Leaves rustled behind her. Fawn leapt up, gripping the knife, her mind whirling with beasts and thieves and, worst of all, the horrid monster that took her husband from her and made her husband’s family come all this way to retrieve her: a Skullstalker.

But no monster came charging out of the woods. Only Errol, her late husband’s younger brother, strolling like he had all the time in the world.

“Careful with that,” Errol said, tapping the blade with one long finger. “Someone could get hurt.”

Fawn ducked her head. “Sorry, Errol. I was just being cautious.”

He watched her tuck the knife back into her coat sleeve, amused. He often looked amused when women did anything that didn’t match his idea of women as small, meek individuals whose only role was to serve the men in their lives.

Errol craned his head to watch the damp locks of her hair float downstream. “Now is the moment, hmm? I suppose you could hardly go home with your hair unshorn. What sort of widow would you be?”

He touched a short curl that fell over her dark brow. “You could have gotten me to do that for you.”

“I wanted to do it myself,” Fawn said hastily. She waited for him to let go of her hair, trying not to let her disapproval show on her face. Errol was nice enough. There was no reason why her skin should crawl when her brother-in-law touched her.

“Right,” Errol said, finally releasing her curl. “You did it yourself after your parents died, too. Renly told me you wouldn’t let him do it for you. I suppose whoever did it, you would still have looked like a boy at the wedding. Awful.”

Fawn couldn’t tell if he meant her parents’ death or her boyish haircut, but she nodded.

It was better to nod with Errol. With men in general, but especially with Errol.

He got confused when women argued, as if their natural state was to agree with everything he said and disagreeing was a flaw in their character.

She looked back at the tree line. “Errol. I found something.”

“Oh?” Errol said, scratching absentmindedly at the blonde hair he shared with all his family. “Something more important than the pots that need cleaning back at camp?”

“I’ll get to it,” Fawn promised. She led him over to the tree line and showed him the sight that she had spent most of the afternoon staring at before they called her back to camp to make them dinner.

A footprint. Huge and clawed. If it were slightly rounder, it might have been a bear. But the elongation of the foot made it clear: no animal had made these tracks. This was a Skullstalker.

Errol sighed. “This again? Fawn, forget about that beast. It’s probably hiding in a void right now, committing whatever atrocities those things get up to in their spare time.”

“But it doesn’t live in a void,” said Fawn excitedly.

“It lives here, in the mortal realm! Those hunters we passed the other day, they told me that the younger ones didn’t get voids.

All they have is the mortal realm. That’s why there have been more sightings in the past few centuries.

He’s probably the Skullstalker who lives over there. ”

She pointed across the river. Far in the distance sat the Anderfel mountains, still capped with snow despite the spring weather.

“Okay,” Errol said lightly, squinting out at the mountain. Then he saw her expression and laughed. “Wait, you—you want to go there? You want to go to the forbidden Anderfel mountains and kill the Skullstalker?”

Fawn fought her instinctive urge to glare at him.

She almost wished that her instincts told her to be easy and demure, as they wanted her to be.

But her first thought was always to argue, to scowl, to point out how stupid someone was being.

It was deeply inconvenient, and it went against everything her people told her to be.

Well… everything her town told her to be.

When her husband dragged her to join the Circle of the Jeweled Fist, she found herself interacting with people from all walks of life.

And many of them had seemed baffled by her behavior.

They frowned at Renly’s dismissive tone when he instructed her to darn a sock or looked confused when Fawn quietly joked that wives weren’t supposed to like their husbands.

One of the members of the Circle—Ivy Silverpetal, the woman who had, for whatever addled reason, aided both Skullstalkers in their escape and led to the downfall of the Circle of the Jeweled Fist and Fawn's husband’s death—had even asked Fawn if her husband was treating her unfairly.

Fawn had told her no, of course. The bruise that Ivy had been concerned about was caused by Fawn walking into a tree branch.

Renly might not have been the perfect husband, but at least he never struck her.

Many women in Fawn’s town had it much worse.

Still, Ivy’s question plagued her. Somewhere deep in Fawn’s soul, she knew her treatment was unfair.

But it was hidden so deep she could hardly recognize it.

If someone asked, she would have genuinely said that the dismissive way Renly had treated her was the natural order of the world. But she would have said it bitterly.

Errol took Fawn’s shoulders, and she repressed the urge to shove him off. Or better yet, sink her teeth into his wrist. She often entertained fantasies about biting the hands of presumptuous men or even clawing their faces. Yet another thing she could never tell her family about.

“Fawn,” Errol said in that condescending, patient way of his. “My dear, sweet Fawn. My old friend.”

Another thing that Fawn didn’t particularly like about Errol: he pretended like they were more than passing acquaintances before she married his brother. She certainly knew him, but she knew everyone in that little town.

“Forget this vengeance,” Errol continued. “It would make no difference. Renly is dead. Nothing will bring him back.”

At that, his gray eyes went dull. His jaw worked, and Fawn thought back to the previous night, when she had caught Renly’s mother rubbing his back while he had his head in his hands.

He hadn’t sobbed—he would never let a woman catch him doing something like that—but he was clearly grieving.

Possibly even more than Fawn. After all, Errol had actually gotten along with his brother.

They laughed more in one hour together than Fawn laughed with him in all her years as Renly’s wife.

Fawn was grieving Renly. But if she was honest with herself, she was grieving having something stolen from her more than she was grieving the man. She used to know her place in the world. She used to be something: a wife. And the Skullstalker had taken that from her.

“I can’t just go back there,” Fawn managed. “I was right there, Errol. I saw it.”

She looked away, knowing Errol would think she was hiding her tears.

But in truth, she was hiding her absolute fury.

She had tried to stab the Skullstalker when the fighting had died down, and she had to get dragged away.

This was when their leader was dead, and the Skullstalkers had stopped attacking.

After Ivy dragged the old Skullstalker away to his void, the Circle had waited for the smaller one—scarred from the malblossom they used to bind it and covered in Renly’s blood—to resume its rampage.

The monster had looked at them like it was considering carnage. Then it walked off into the trees.

Fawn had screamed for the Circle to chase it down. A very unwomanly thing for her to do. Luckily, her fellow Circle members were all too happy to cover her mouth until the Skullstalker vanished into the forest.

It was a good thing they did. She would have been ripped apart if it returned.

But there was a part of her that was still livid at the Circle, who had all abandoned her as their leader’s body cooled on the forest floor.

Leaving her to bury her husband, send word to his family, and wait for them to come and collect her.

They should have chased it. They should have taken their malblossom-tipped blades and plunged them into the creature’s pale blue flesh. It was already injured; they would never have a better chance.

“Forget about that thing,” Errol urged her.

He looked around the forest and the river and the looming forbidden mountains with a disapproving expression.

“There is nothing for you here. You should have never left home. I understand Renly being fooled by that dolt of a mage who recruited him into that nonsense Circle. But he should never have brought you. You’re too precious. ”

He touched her hair again. For something he claimed to hate, he seemed to enjoy touching her short hair.

Fawn waited again for him to let go. When seconds passed and he didn’t release her, she grew wary.

“Errol?”