Chapter 36
ALMOST 100 YEARS AGO
AMELIA PROMISED HER godmothers she and her father would return before midnight so they could celebrate her eighteenth birthday and watch the moonflowers bloom. In truth, she had no idea how long her father’s excursion would take. She followed him through the forest, their shoes crackling dead leaves on damp earth. Autumn proved itself foggy at night. Even with three soldiers trailing after them, she could hardly decipher chain mail from gray clouds.
“How could you abandon Gyldan? Abandon her?” Amelia cried. She could not tolerate any small talk about her father’s trip, even though the flat mouth of his expression indicated his search for an heir was unsuccessful. His journey had been interrupted by news of Lilith’s affair, yet nothing could justify throwing her to the dungeons.
“I do not need insolence from my child for doing the very same thing,” Victor replied. He took a sharp turn down a hidden path, barely discernible amidst undergrowth, where the trees looked like carved faces.
“What are you talking about?”
“Do you expect me to believe a demon abducted you for almost a year? Your godmothers may be easily fooled, but not me.” He shook his head. Weariness made the bags under his eyes sag further. “Where were you, Amelia?”
She swallowed the lump down her throat. “I will tell you if you release Lilith,” she lied. “I know the godmothers told you Lilith seduced the prince, but that’s their version of the story—”
“She’s already been released.”
Amelia pictured Ezran sneaking to the dungeons, only to be met with empty cells. “Where is she?”
Moonlight filtered through a thinning canopy and illuminated the narrow trail. Familiarity prickled her skin as she recognized the area. Her father had taken her down this same path years ago when he tried teaching her how to hunt. She recalled the faint scent of decay and damp earth, the tightening of her throat as she cried, the arrow that missed the deer she could never kill.
“Do you know why I wanted to bring you to the woods long ago?” he said. “It’s because I knew you’d learn more here than any of those idyllic days you spent with Lilith in the library.”
With a steady hand and focused gaze, he reached for the sling that carried his bow and arrows. The pointed weapon looked sharp enough to cut into cloth and pierce skin.
“I was pleased to find, during my visit to Zilar, that their king enjoyed hunting as well. A conqueror in nature is as much as a conqueror in his kingdom. He took his son on trips and made Ezran keep a hunting journal. I was impressed, flipping through the pages, by how he recorded deer movement and behavior. He took great interest in tracking animals near Gyldan. So much so, that I started to wonder if they were truly animals at all.”
The air around Amelia thickened with something sharp and metallic, as if she’d bitten her lip and tasted the blood spilling down her throat. She couldn’t breathe as they reached the end of a narrow path, where thick trees blocked the clearing. No one from afar would have spotted two bodies hanging from their stakes.
“I chain mail to return home and find my answer,” Victor said, gaze fixed on the man bounded by rope. “Who is the hunter, and who will be the hunted?”
Fresh bruises marred Ezran’s cheeks, evidence of his failed venture into the dungeons that led to his altercation. While he made noise through the rag stuffed in his mouth, far from his reach was a limp body that no longer moved. Amelia gasped, vision swimming with tears before her mind could process the sight. Lilith’s eyes were shut, her limbs tied by rope around the stake. Her skin, once golden, was as white as the pearls scattered near her feet. Splotches of red dried in the dead patch of grass where she hung. Ezran had only recently been caught, while it had been hours since they tied Lilith there.
Amelia lunged forward, but the rough arm of a soldier restrained her. A scream tore from her throat, so primal she couldn’t recognize the wail was her own. She clawed at chain mail as if she’d gone mad.
“They are traitors,” her father said. “Our blood and gold are so valued that we cannot trust those beyond borders and at home. I brought you here to understand the consequences of deception. It’s why we hunt: to show who has power and who is merely prey.”
Ezran continued thrashing against the rope, his yells muffled behind the rag stuffed in his mouth. The bruises on his face welled up, shiny and purple. No matter how severe his injuries were, he didn’t tire resisting. A soldier removed the cloth from Lilith’s mouth, then Ezran’s. Lilith remained still while Ezran spat blood in front of their feet.
“I had higher expectations for you to at least commit to a public execution. But I suppose that would start a war with my father, and Gyldan’s not as powerful of a kingdom as you’d like to portray,” Ezran snarled, teeth gleaming red. “The only people who know of tonight are three of your most trusted soldiers, while you let the rest of the kingdom fill in the stories for themselves. So who shall take the blame in this story? A wicked queen, deemed at fault by status of being a common woman, while their king hides in cowardice?”
The muscles in Victor’s jaw tightened, yet he paid Ezran no response. Instead, he drew his bowstring taut. Ezran continued fighting his restraints, pushing his chest forward to put pressure on the bindings. Welts formed over his limbs from the friction of skin against rope. But brute strength wasn’t enough. Victor’s arrow already pointed directly at Ezran’s head.
It happened in a single breath. The exhale from Victor’s lips, the release of his fingers from the bow. Amelia leapt forward and shoved her father with her full body weight. The arrow took flight, direction askew, and hit Ezran’s arm. Rope splintered as his limbs pulled forward to break free. He tore the arrow from his flesh and stabbed the guard beside him in the eyes. The soldier reared backward, screaming in pain, as Ezran took his sword and thrust the blade into the soldier’s abdomen.
Amelia was on top of her father, his back flat on the ground. Her fists pounded against his chest. “I won’t let you kill them,” she cried. “Lilith wanted nothing but a better future for us. For Gyldan—”
Victor seized her by the wrists. “Do not defy me, Amelia. She betrayed Gyldan.”
Her tears blurred the sharpness of his face. He looked nothing more than a shadow to her, a vague entity, a monster.
“No. She betrayed you. But you do not represent Gyldan.”
She ripped herself away from his grip. Her heartbeats pounded like thunder. They ricochet across her veins. She burned hot, like she was on fire. It wasn’t panic that had overtaken her body. It was rage.
“Our bloodline is not why Gyldan prospers. It’s the hard work of people like Lilith who wanted to make it a better place. You never worked for anyone but yourself. There will be no heir to the throne, Father, because that ends with—!”
The force of Victor’s hands shoving her cut the air from Amelia’s lungs. She landed on the ground before a sword sliced her vision, blade sinking into flesh. Her father’s agonized cry pierced the air. Blood spread from his chest and soaked his shirt. Ezran drew his sword back, leaving a gaping wound where the king’s heart stopped beating.
Ezran retreated to unbind Lilith from the stake, while Amelia remained frozen, staring at the bleeding body before her. Her father had pushed her away from death, only to meet it himself.
There was something petrifying about seeing someone in death. She noticed details she hadn’t before. The grays of his hair, how he hadn’t trimmed his beard for so long that they overtook his face. The sagging skin beneath his eyes. The dimming blues of his irises, ready to erode. He was no longer a king. Only a father who protected his daughter.
She placed shaking hands over his wound, as if her palms could stop the soul from leaving his body. Blood soaked into the fabric of her dress and watered the soil beneath them, thick and foul with the smell of iron. She listened to his fading breaths before his eyes turned to glass. Once he was still, she scanned their surroundings and took in three more bodies splayed on the ground. The two guards that had accompanied them were dead. The third one had an arrow stuck to his eye and a deep slash in his abdomen. She vaguely recalled the sounds of fighting in the background, but the world had tilted its axis the moment she’d tackled her father and let rage blind her. Now, it was grief that turned her vision blurry, tears that clogged her throat and kept her from sobbing.
Ezran was on his knees with Lilith in a chokehold of an embrace. Pieces of rope scattered around them, limp as Lilith’s pale arms draped on the ground. Blood had long left her body from hours spent hanging at the stake. Ezran continued shaking her anyway, screaming her name until his voice turned hoarse and broken.
The sound rang hollow in Amelia’s ears like she was an empty shell. She could not believe the woman in front of them was dead. Lilith looked too cold, like the family portrait hung on the castle walls. Not the queen made of sunlight, whose skin smelled like old books and hands were always smeared with ink. Not her Lilith.
But it was Ezran who held her, not Amelia. It was Ezran who pressed a kiss to her lips, and when he pulled away, left her face damp with his tears. He rolled his head back and released a guttural scream to the sky. The sound was like thunder, raising bumps in Amelia’s flesh in its reverberating anguish. Grief mutated into rage, all-consuming, as he slowly turned to her. His eyes changed first, pupils dilating. A transformation from prince to madman.
Her blood ran cold as his grip twisted around the hilt of his sword. She scrambled to her feet before he lunged for her.
Perhaps it was her distance from him already, or perhaps it was quick thinking that helped her escape into the shadows of the woods. Amelia knew neither was true. She had only done what she knew best: running away.