Unicorn, an unfamiliar male voice spoke into her mind, it’s a trap. Flee!
A sparkling little pixie clad in acorn shells, wielding a needle, pushed against her nose. They usually kept to themselves. What was he trying to…?
A familiar scent clung to the air, like the fresh, earthy smell after a storm, but—spiced, somehow.
Go, now! he urged.
She began to back away when metal clinked, and she bucked. Chains wove around her legs, and a heavy net landed on her back. The sting of the metal was instant and painful, burning into her skin like a brand. She screamed. The metal—sage tinted. Arcanir. They meant it to bind any magical abilities she had.
Tarquin! Mamma! Luciano!
The pixie flitted at a guard, lunging at his face, but the guard swept his hand back and forth to hit him.
No, don’t! she wanted to scream, but only a sharp braying emerged. Don’t fight! They’ll kill you!
“Capture it alive!” Captain Sondrio commanded.
The chains and the net tightened. Although she leaped and kicked, guards closed in around her, multiple squads pulling the chains taut. The pixie ignored her, harassing the guards’ faces.
Stop—please! It’s me, Bella! She tossed her head, her horn scraping against chainmail, and one of her kicks landed with a squelching crunch.
A hit struck her back, and another and another. Wooden clubs beat her to the ground. The burning chains closed around her legs and threw her off balance.
She crashed heavily on the cobblestone with a thud, pressing the searing metal deeper against her skin. It burned with agony.
A guard slashed at the air with his sword.
The pixie screamed, plummeting to the flagstones. She opened her mouth, but before she could shout, the guard stomped on him.
Witam! another unfamiliar voice chimed in her mind.
Crying out, she fought and struggled to rise, but the hits didn’t stop until she went still, and the burning didn’t stop at all, not even for a second. Weights pressed her down, one after another, the guards sitting on her as she rebelled, cheering and laughing to one another.
A small, shimmering pair of figures darted in and stole away the pixie’s body. Was he dead? Had he died trying to help her?
Her heart seized. How, how had this happened? Under Mamma’s watch, under Tarquin’s watch? War was the Belmonte trade, but she’d never known Tarquin or his men to relish violence.
She searched the courtyard and the windows for a sympathetic face, just one, any one. Her window glowed golden with candlelight, and in it stood Tarquin, his arms crossed, brow furrowed, peering down at her. The way he looked at her wasn’t with the warm eyes of the brother who loved her, but cold, hard, like a lone bronze statue in an empty town square. He watched it all. Cold. Wordless. Malevolent.
Her heart beat throbbed in her throat. He doesn’t know. If he knew…
Her entire body blazed with arcanir, pain so white hot it blinded. With the weight of the guards pressing down on her, she tried to breathe but every breath was a battle, each harder won than the last, until finally the evening sky and all around her turned to black.
Chapter 1
Four Months Later
A screech came from the marsh. Darting beneath the scant light of the stars, Dhuro found the fallen harpy writhing in the murky water and sedges, its broken wings flapping in futility.
And now you die.
Pinning its remaining arm, he slit its throat with one deep cut before burying his vjernost blade in its heart. His weapon’s sage tint glowed for a moment until the light left the monster’s eyes.
As the night breeze swept away its death rattle, he searched for any remaining threat among the marshland’s swaying vegetation. One of the dark-elf kuvari warriors rose from the greenery’s concealment, wiping the blood off her blade in the quiet. Her innumerable braids, beaded with amber, brushed over her shoulder and down her back. Kinga. Cold, calculating, capable Kinga.
She met his eyes across the undulating spikes and, as she sheathed her blade, gave him a slow once-over, twirling a white braid around her finger. Mm-hmm. He knew that look.
“Is that all of them?” his oldest sister and living bucket of cold water, Vadiha, called out.
“Yes, Vadiha,” he called back, standing up as he cleaned his blade. As the strongest warrior among Mati’s Quorum, Vadiha had been given charge of their home’s defense—a duty that required increasingly more attention these days.
“I was asking Kinga.” Vadiha approached him and, hand on her hip, sized him up dubiously. “What are you even doing here? Shouldn’t you be with the volodari?”
“I was,” he gritted out. As if his hunt were more important than the battle? “I was in my hunting blind when I heard the fighting.”
Her golden eyes narrowed. “You should’ve stayed there. As you can see, we didn’t need your help.”
“You’re welcome,” he deadpanned, walking past her and shrugging off her oh-so-kind attitude. It wasn’t enough that she’d kept him out of their army’s elite forces when they’d been at war with the light-elves of Lumia. No, she needed to keep him out of every battle and skirmish she could.
He raked a hand through his shoulder-length hair, shut his eyes, and heaved a sigh. Vadiha never missed a chance to shove his face into the sand.
“Dhuro,” she shouted.
Darkness, what else? He looked back over his shoulder and grunted.
“Mati has summoned you.”
Had she tattled to their mother? At least it gave him an exit out of this pleasant conversation. “Well then, I’d best not keep her waiting.” He gave Vadiha a reluctant nod.
Next to her, Kinga raised her eyebrows at him again in that look he knew so well. Nothing stoked the blood of a dark-elf like a good fight. Oh yes, he’d see about that look later. Although he’d spent many years among the humans with his best friend, Dakkar, and his father, he hadn’t forgotten Kinga. Not how she’d used him to climb the ranks, and... not how she used to climb him either. All told, life as a volodar hunter in his mother’s queendom wasn’t bad at all.
With an inward grin, he crept through the marshy rushes, sweeping aside their hollow stems to make his way to Heraza Gate and their home, Nozva Rozkveta.
All women wanted something, whether it was just a night’s pleasure or a stepping stone to his mother and the queen’s inner circle, the Quorum. Kinga wasn’t the only one, and never had been. No matter what it was, as long as they kept the emotional mess out of it, he didn’t care. Considering how brilliantly that emotional mess had worked for his star-crossed parents, as well as for his older brother’s decade-long doomed love affair, that was just another entry on the long list of things he never wanted or needed.
At the Gate, he beat the entry rhythm on the door, and it creaked open.
“Your Highness,” two kuvari—Gavri and Danika—said by way of greeting. They barred the stone door after him.
“Do you know where my mother is?”
“At the training grounds, I think,” Gavri answered. She'd spent time as his brother Zoran's former lover.
With a nod, Dhuro headed down the tunnel toward Central Cavern. What had that near-decade of emotional aching been for? Zoran had left to become Queen Nendra’s king-consort in Dun Mozg, and his so-called beloved Gavri had been left behind. If they’d been wiser, they would’ve kept it simple.