Iskander laughed. “Truly, the men of the Black Wolves are enormous, not to mention devoted to you. I’ve no doubt you’ll have your country back by this time next year. What army could stand against you?”
Impatience flashed through me. The prince traveled all this way, but he still didn’t understand. “It’s not that—”
“Heeellp meeee.”
The sound seemed to come down from the trees almost below my level of hearing. I froze. Ice tiptoed across my skin, but it wasn’t the ice of a cold winter day. It was a deeper cold, the kind that lingers at the edges of all things.
Iskander looked at me with open confusion, but I couldn’t respond. Death magic spilled out of my chest, pooling beneath my skin, and silently, I called out to the void—to the source of the scream that only I could hear.
She appeared at the top of the hill like a pocket of fog the sun couldn’t reach. She was small, but something in the way her ghostly shoulders drooped made me think she wasn’t a child. The spirit flickered, like maintaining even this diaphanous form was an act of will.
“My lady?” Vitaly’s voice was tight, face pinched. His hand was on his sword.
Iskander’s fingers brushed my arm. “What’s wrong?”
Wind gusted down the hill, making dried leaves skitter across the frost-hard ground. A sickly smell, both sweet and meaty, crawled up my nose. It was the iron tang of spilled blood, the rancid scent of spoiled meat.
“Do you smell that?” I asked, my voice low as the horses whickered and stomped a nervous dance.
Vitaly’s sword scraped against its scabbard as he drew the blade. “Go get the general,” he barked at the servants tending the boar. “You should go, too, my lady.”
I nocked an arrow in response and started up the hill, leaving my horse with a white-lipped servant. The ghost waited for me as I trudged up the hard winter earth, Vitaly and Iskander at my sides, Lord Marr at my back. The ghost was younger than I’d thought, late teens perhaps, but her face was aged with horror.
Up ahead the hill dropped away into a deep valley that made the small gully we’d come from look like nothing more than a boot print in a muddy street. At the bottom, nestled between the black pine forests and the ever-rising peaks of the mountain range, was a village.
Was a village.
The freshly fallen snow should have blanketed the roofs of the few dozen homes. Smoke should have been billowing merrily from each little chimney, promising warmth and comfort in the face of a chilly winter day. Children in bright-colored clothes should have been running though the fields rolling up snowballs and making angels in the hillside.
My whole kingdom was filled with what should have been. Bile rose in my throat. I forced it back, willing myself not to scream.
“Lady Night, have mercy,” Iskander breathed. His dark skin had gone gray in the face of what lay before us.
“Roven shows no mercy,” I said quietly.
Houses charred to ash stained the snow. Smoke, like the ghost of the fires that destroyed this place, rose in lazy coils before disappearing in the breeze. Bodies lay scattered in the streets and on the hillside, so small it was almost possible to pretend they weren’t corpses but for the carrion birds pecking away at soft skin.
“We need to get out of here,” Vitaly said, his voice low and urgent. “The Voyniks could still be in the woods.”
My eyes darted to the ghost at the thought of the elite Roven soldiers surrounding us. “Are the soldiers still here?” I asked silently, ice blooming in my limbs, making my muscles seize. I cursed my magic and the tether that came with it. I was barely brushing the edges of my power and yet the tether was there, yanking me back. Stomach churning, I focused everything I had into making the ghost-girl speak.
“No.” Her eyes slid past my face. She turned, not looking at the ruined village, but at a spot some yards away—at a dark shape lying too still on the ground. “It’s been days.”
I tried to swallow, but my mouth was too dry to pull it off. “If the Voyniks planned to stay here, they wouldn’t have burned the village.”
“How do you know it was burned on purpose?” Iskander asked, a slight tremor in his voice. “Anything could have happened.”
“Anything?” I stalked forward, dragging Iskander with me by the force of my pent-up anger. “Did anything happen to her?”
I pointed at the ghost-girl’s body with the tip of my arrow. She lay facedown, arms and legs splayed like she’d been running when struck. She’d probably died before she hit the ground, given the fissure of severed cloth and flesh that made up her ripped-open back. The wound was so deep, the alabaster column of her spine shone in the light like the mountains around us writ small.
Iskander sucked in a breath, stumbling back a few feet, his flight taking him straight through the dead girl’s ghost. His eyes met mine and his legs seemed to lock, like he was forcing himself to stay still. “Roven Voyniks did this?”
I nodded. “There was a cadre of soldiers tracking us south. They turned back once it became clear we were heading for Eshkaroth. They must have stopped to have fun on their way.”
It was a real struggle not to look at the ghost-girl as I spoke, to not see the silver tears running down her face or the accusation in her eyes. “You brought them here?”
Iskander licked his lips. “How do you know it was Roven? Your cousin could have—”
“Goran is a puppet.” Even speaking his name made me want to scream, my cousin who betrayed his blood and his people all for the pretense of a crown. “He hasn’t the strength to lead an army or a kingdom. That’s why he went north to Roven in the first place. Emperor Radovan gave Goran an army, let him kill our grandfather and take the throne. But the Roven army never left.
“That the throne is mine by right is beside the point. While Goran wears the Frozen Crown and pretends to be king, our countrymen are conscripted into the Roven army. And the young women?” The ghost-girl fell to her knees, her sobs stabbing through my gut. I shook my head, unable to continue.
Not even the witches were safe. Perhaps especially not the witches. Magic was a rare gift all over the world, and no one coveted it more than Radovan. His spies were everywhere, sniffing out the faintest whiff of power, abducting witches from their homes and pressing them into Radovan’s army or killing them outright if they refused to obey.
Lady Night save me if Radovan ever found out I was a witch. Nothing would stop him from coming for me.
“This,” I began, pointing at the girl’s body and the smoking ruins beyond, “was Roven’s doing. And make no mistake, it’s Roven we’re up against. My cousin might call himself king, but he bought the Frozen Crown with Radovan’s army and his own people’s blood. That army ensures his obedience to Radovan. By this time next year, Seravesh will be nothing but another province in the Roven Empire.”
“My lady, please.” Vitaly’s voice was brimming with fear. He held his sword with a white-knuckled grip, eyes scouring the tree line for enemies. “We must turn back.”
“I agree,” Lord Marr added, with an expression that couldn’t be argued with.
“But the bodies . . .” Iskander’s protest died midsentence.
“Will be attended to.” My voice sounded too brittle to my own ears as I signed the symbol of the Two-Faced God in the air over the girl. “I will avenge you,” I promised.