“Sunshine, what’s happening?” asked her partner. “Sunshine?”
The woman twitched, turned, another seed curling roots down into the side of her neck—and lunged for her partner.
Papa took my shoulder and pulled me back out of the way. Around us, dignitaries were beginning to tear at one another’s dresses and robes. One of them looked at me, and the whites of her eyes bled black—as if ink had been set into them.
The woodcurse—the seeds.
“Sprout, you need to . . . to lea—” His hands began to shake as he tried to pry a seed out of his arm, but the roots were too deep, and it pulled at his skin, too. He gave me a fearful look.
“Run, Sprout,” he whispered, his breath ragged.
The banquet table flipped as a large man fell back across it, two other diving after him. The woman in front of me began to tear at her dress as she began to change. Her bones popped and the back of her dress split, ridges rising out of her spine like poison barbs.
Roots began to weave up under the skin on Papa’s face, his left eye fully black.
“Run,” he begged. “Cerys, r—”
Fright clutched at my throat. Papa stumbled forward, reaching out toward me, his teeth lengthening, the wrinkled skin across his face beginning to fracture, a bone-white skull underneath.
“Your Majesty!” I heard the seneschal screech, and I looked up as a dignitary attacked Wen. She barely had room to dodge. In her right hand was the barest flicker of a flame.
“Wen!” I cried. I hiked up my dress and ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time, dodging past the guards as they pulled at their helmets. They screamed in pain as the seeds burrowed into their muscles and bones, twisting them.
I knew what it looked like. I had seen it in my nightmares since the day Mother came back to us, not quite herself anymore.
The seneschal howled in pain as an Eriksenburg noble bit into her arm. The crown dropped from her grip and went rolling across the terrace. I shouted at Wen to grab it, but a guard attacked her. She took the sword from the guard’s belt and slammed the hilt into their stomach, knocking them off the terrace and into the rosebushes below. She backed toward the crown, fire sparking in her hand, her teeth gritted.
A shadow climbed the steps. The same one I’d seen earlier, outside the garden wall. Now, in the flickering torchlight, I could see his features. Dark hair hung in greasy strands, obscuring his face, and he moved in a jerky motion. He outstretched his hand.
“Give me the crown,” the man ordered in that same hissing voice as he prowled toward Wen.
She went to throw her fire at him when another guard lost control and lunged, but instead she slammed the flat of her blade into his face, and he tumbled to the ground.
The stranger stepped over the man, close and closer still. Mist swirled around him like a cape.
“It does not belong to you,” he went on, and from the tips of his shoulders, thorns grew like spikes, trailing down the sides of his arms to his hands. His tanned skin was sallow—deathly so—and the twisting, snarling briars that wrapped around his body seemed to make him move like a puppet. “Give me the crown.”
“What do you want with it?” Wen asked the stranger. She tightened her grip on the sword. “Where are you from—Voryn?”
The stranger chuckled. “As if Voryn could help you now. I have come for what is ours. What has always been ours.”
The flame in Wen’s hand flickered softer—softer—strangely soft. And then it went out.
“Wen . . . ,” I whispered fearfully, staring at a black mark on the side of her neck, slowly growing, spreading. “You . . . you’re . . .”
Wen stepped back toward the crown on the far side of the terrace. “This thing is a puppet, Cerys. It’s from the wood.”
“But—but what about you? What do I do?”
She glanced down to the crown at her heel and kicked it toward me. It skidded along the cobblestones and rested at my feet. “Take the crown. Don’t let him get it.” She grimaced as the veins spread up the side of her neck, toward her face. “Don’t let me get it, either,” she added. The blade glinted orange in the lantern light as she leveled it against the woodcursed stranger. “Go, Cerys.”
She was giving me time. I didn’t want to leave her—I couldn’t leave her—but I couldn’t stay here with the crown, either.
“Take it and run!” she cried.
I grabbed the crown—
And I ran.
I ran into the castle and through the great hall, with King Sunder’s cerulean eyes boring down into me as I ran away with his crown. There was no one in sight, and the mist covered the entire castle, and in it I saw shapes moving, vaguely human shadows that looked up from whatever they were feasting on and set off after me.
I fled toward the front of the castle, to the impossibly large and heavy wooden doors, and slammed my shoulder against them, pushing with all my might to open them.
The sound of a sword point sliding against the flagstones made me shudder. I glanced over my shoulder, and there was the woodcursed stranger with the sword Wen had used. He looked like a nightmare stalking down the great hall, grinning to show those unnaturally sharp and white teeth.
“Don’t run, Cerys,” he whispered. How did he know my name? He stretched out his hand. “Just give me the crown, and I’ll save your princess.”
“She’s a queen,” I snapped, clutching the crown tightly against my chest, its twig-like prongs poking sharply into my hands, and I pushed harder against the door. It gave a groan and opened just enough for me to escape.
I slipped out into the front courtyard, the gates open in front of me, and past them the King’s Road down to the Village-in-the-Valley. The night was brisk and unnaturally dark, and lightning crackled overhead and illuminated the sea of fog between me and the village. In it, creatures who’d once been Aloriyans prowled with glowing red eyes and dagger-sharp claws, digging their heels onto the soft dirt of the road, blocking me from escape.
The woodcursed stranger opened the heavy wooden doors with one hand, monstrously strong. They swung closed with a thundering boom behind him. “They won’t let you leave, Cerys,” he said. “They won’t let me leave, either. Give me the crown. Then this will be over.”
“Who are you? Why do you know my name?” I snapped, tightening my grip on the crown. The prongs pressed into my palms so sharply I was afraid they’d cut.
He had me trapped, and there was nowhere to go.
No. I refused to believe that.
He came closer, cocking his head to the side in that same strange jerky motion. But this time he tilted his head back a little, just enough so his black hair parted out of his face. Another streak of lightning lit the skies.
I drew back when I saw his face.
He smiled, cold and cruel. “I know you because you left me in that forest, Cerys Levina. You left me to die.”
It couldn’t be—and yet I knew it was. Unlike the prince, his portrait still hung in his father’s tavern in the center of town. He had been dead for years, and yet he didn’t appear to have aged a day. Mud stuck to his deathly grayish skin, leaves and brambles knotted into his dark hair. When he smiled, his teeth were white and speckled with dirt, and his eyes were sunken and bled through with black. The woodcurse, it seemed, hadn’t gotten to him after all, but it was only because of the gaping wound in his chest, torn open, blood dried to the dark leathers of his armor. He was dead.