Chapter 3
Chapter Three
The guards haul me to the throne room.
There’s another supplicant on his knees before the throne and I’m relieved I’m not the center of attention as I’m dragged through a ring of guards.
“Please, my king. Please.” A wraith begs for mercy, clasping his hands together as he scrambles forward to try and touch the king’s boots. “I have been a loyal servant for nearly a century—”
“Show me,” the king says, his voice echoing through the throne room.
Guards pin the wraith and tear his shirt open, hauling his head back by the hair so the king can see his chest. All three of them wear gloves and they move with grim, ruthless efficiency, as if they dare not get too close.
The entire court draws back with a gasp. Horror fills the guards’ faces—hardened wraiths who’ve killed time and time again for their king and yet, they tremble at this.
I know what they’re looking at, even with his back toward me.
I’ve seen it too many times.
A dark, mottling across the skin that sometimes resembles a bruise over the heart at first. Except it keeps spreading, creeping across the ribs and shoulders, little snaking tendrils that wind down arms and abdomens.
It never reaches the legs. By the time it’s gone that far, you can see it in a wraith’s eyes—dark veins bleeding through the whites of their eyes as if in warning.
The Blight.
One last mocking twist of the curse the fae gifted us with long ago,
“It’s not contagious!” the wraith screams. “The lore masters say it’s not contagious!”
But my father’s face is implacable. He pushes to his feet, fury hardening his jaw. “How dare you bring this among our people? How dare you hide it?”
“You promised us a cure!” The wraith cries, and for the first time his anger overtakes his good sense. “You said you would break the curse. You said you would fix this blight upon us!”
“And fix it I shall. Guards.” My father waves at his men. “Remove him from this court before his carelessness afflicts us all.”
“No!”
My heart kicks into my throat, but it’s all over in a matter of seconds. Steel flashing in the torchlight. The meaty thud as a head hits the ground and bounces.
I turn my face away, eyes clenched shut as I swallow the pool of saliva in my mouth. Curse it. I was hoping to find him in a generous mood. A little tremor shivers down my spine as I lift my eyes to my king.
I’m next.
And my eyes can’t help finding the body of the wraith as the guards drag it from the throne room by its heels. A scarlet trail paints the floors behind it, and someone has its head by the hair.
The Forbidden Court is not a kind place to live.
Once we were as glorious as the fae, albeit the darker of the courts. Unblessed by the goddess, they named us, saying that she had turned her face from our kind.
We weren’t always wraiths.
Once we were a court within the Seelie hegemony, until the other courts turned on us during the Dragon Wars. A mighty battle against the dragons was fought—a battle we should have won—but treachery ruled the day.
I don’t know whether our long-ago king stabbed the king of the Dawn Court’s son in the back, or whether the Crown Prince of Dawn—fueled by an age-old resentment—forced a duel upon the field in which he was not prepared to win. Accounts vary, depending upon whom you listen to.
Either way, the Prince of Dawn died and his father swore vengeance. He named us tainted and proclaimed our unruly blood was costing the Blessed courts the war. He called us Unblessed—a blight on the Goddess’s glory.
With the blessing of the other courts, King Anselm forged a weapon that stripped the fae magic from our bodies.
He said that if we were no longer of the light, then the sun would shun us.
It burned our skin, burned our eyes, and forced us into the night.
Our immortality bled from us, leaving us sickly and dying.
My grandfather, Prince Rakulh, was forced to curse us into a new form in order to survive.
Now we are the Forbidden.
No longer fae. Wraiths, instead. The shadow remnants of our fair brethren, with our pale skin, darkened claws and twisted magics.
Thankfully, I resemble my fae mother more than my father—enough to make it possible to walk among the Blessed courts with a little glamor to hide my glowing skin.
It looks as luminescent as moonlight if I don’t tamp my magic down inside me behind chains of glamor.
After years of doing it, it’s almost as natural as breathing.
But in recent years it’s become clear the curse Prince Rakulh used to save us is slowly destroying us.
Rumors of the blight whisper through court. Everyone’s heard of someone who has an uncle, a brother, a grandmother who’s suffered from it by now. The king has spent years crushing such rumors, but no matter how many of the afflicted he kills, more arise.
And no one knows what’s causing it
At first it was one or two suffering from this sickness.
We knew nothing of it, except for its aftermath.
It happened in the north the first time, during a blizzard along our northern walls.
A shattered guard tower broken apart as if by beasts.
Bodies torn apart and drained of their blood.
Not a single survivor left to tell the tale.
I saw the report sent back to the king. One of the guards was missing, and to all appearances the guard tower was locked and warded against outside forces.
They had to assume the guard had gone on a killing spree, but no one knew how.
The puncture marks left on the bodies spoke of sharpened canines and elongated claws, and while wraithenkind are considered abominations by the Blessed fae, we’re not animals.
My father set the report aside. There were wars to plan and fae princes to manipulate. It wasn’t until the second attack came at a town much closer to the court, that he sent someone to investigate.
Six months passed. There were more attacks, vicious and bloody.
The guards dragged one of the afflicted back to court, revealing a creature with maddened eyes and fangs and claws.
It was as though everything the fairer courts spoke of us had sprung to life, as if some strange magic heard tell of their tales and conjured a monster right out of their nightmares.
A Nightstalker.
It was not an illness. Nor a poison. There was no rhyme nor reason to the blight’s occurrences. It simply happened. And kept happening.
I’m one of my father’s favorites. I’ve knelt by his feet as he’s heard the reports, and seen the fury and fear mingling in his eyes when his seneschals retreat.
“The curse,” he’d whispered once. “It must be that the curse is… evolving.”
And ever since that moment he’s been obsessed with breaking it.
“Well?” Father barks, shattering my thoughts. “What now?”
“Your daughter, Your Highness,” one of the guards says stiffly. “You sent for her.”
“She looks half dead.” There’s a hint of menace in those words.
“Half dead is still half alive,” I manage to rasp. My throat feels like someone reached down it and ripped my lungs out, but the warm tingly feeling means my fae heritage is healing me. I barely have the strength to push myself to my hands and knees, every inch of me shaking.
But I swore myself an oath when I was a little girl.
No matter what happens to me, I will not crawl before this creature.
I will never beg.
I will never abase myself.
Slowly, my chin lifts until our eyes meet.
“Father,” I say.
“Stand up,” the Wraith King snaps.
Stand up, they yelled in the training camps when I was forced to endure trial after trial in order to prove my worth to this creature in front of me.
And if you didn’t stand then you earned a slit throat.
I force my muscles to move as I slowly push to my feet.
And then I behold the true horror of the Unblessed king.
Raesh Ghul had any sense of mercy whipped from him as a boy and it shows in his face. An enormous troll’s skull is carved into a crown atop his head, and his long, raven-black hair is bound into a myriad of plaits. If not for his ghostly white skin—maggot pale—he’d almost be handsome.
And maybe that’s the true horror, for a monster lurks within that fair facade.
One who stole my fae mother from her bed one night and bred a child on her to forge as a weapon against her kin.
A child with the gifts of both sides of her heritage—and one who can pass as fae if I’m focusing on my glamor.
A half dozen soul-traps hang from his throat. He likes to leave his fur cloak open, so they’re visible. One of them calls to me, the wisp of pale blue mist caressing the glass it’s trapped within as if it can sense me.
My soul.
It was cut from me the night I was born in order to ensure my loyalty. With it, he owns me. Without it I can never truly escape, for he can snuff my life simply by closing his fist around that small crystal cylinder and crushing it.
I’ve heard stories of my birth. There’s something about the meld of wraith and fae that often makes delivering a half-born child difficult.
Some say it’s the curse cast upon us, fighting to twist the fae mother’s magic.
In defense, my mother’s power sought to protect her, which nearly killed me.
My father cut me from her womb in order to save my life, and she was left to bleed to death in her bed as he beheld all his hopes and dreams.. . and found them utterly lacking.
I was small, sickly, and gleaming like mother-of-pearl.
In the eyes of my father, who had hoped for a strong child born of two powerful bloodlines, I was an abject failure.
He cast me at a wet nurse and told her that if I lived, then I was to be brought before him at the age of five in order to see if anything could be redeemed of my worth.