Perhaps I should have killed him too. A pleasure, to be sure, but a messy pleasure. I have not survived this long by letting collateral lives pile up on my ledger. And by the time he left us, the narrow margin by which I could have accomplished all that must be done was passed.
Five days. It will be five days now before the next delivery. Before my next opportunity for escape. Because I must escape; this has never been a suicide mission. I’ve often wished it was, for it would certainly make my task easier. Were that the case, I would have killed her long before now.
But I must return with her heart intact. Or else…
Bring back her heart, sweet prince. Bring it to me, or I will have your brother’s heart instead. I will rip it from his breast and devour it while he yet screams. And you will watch, my darling. Even as you stand at the stake. Even as your flesh burns. And you will know that it was your failure that brought this fate upon him and yourself.
The hissing voice burns into my brain. A stink of sulfur stings my nostrils.
Do not fail me, beloved. Bring back this sacrifice for your goddess.
A stroke of fingers down my cheek, along the line of my jaw. The razor edge of talons against my throat—
With a sharp inhale of breath, I open my eyes, returning to the present. To this cold, subterranean hall, far from the fires of Drathoridan. Far from the pits, the stench of burning flesh. Far from my goddess’s eyes.
But those eyes are ever on me. Even here, even with half a world between us. I cannot escape her. No one can.
So I will not fail. I will fulfill her every wish.
But I cannot hope to remain hidden for another five days. Rumor will spread. One stray word from the princess and my presence here in Stromin Palace will be disastrously revealed. Then the manhunt will begin, and any hope I had of escaping with my prize—and saving my brother—will be lost.
No. There’s only one option left to me now.
“Damn,” I growl once more. Then, turning on heel, I slip into shadows. The time has come. I’ve always known this contingency might be my fate. I thought perhaps I could avoid it, could render it entirely unnecessary. No other choice remains to me, however.
I must take up my true name once again. A name I forswore long ago. And with that name, I will become her champion.
With that name, I will become her death.
4
Rosie
My story is a common one.
You may find any number of women of approximately my age who could tell the same basic tale with a few small tweaks to the details. If you stood on the main street of any country village in the Unified Kingdoms and threw a stone, chances are you’d hit another poor orphan girl who lost her family in a dracori raid, fled inland, and scraped out a life for herself surrounded by strangers.
Granted, not every orphan girl was lucky enough to land headfirst in the gruff graces of a woman like Mistress Iliyani. Half-elf and composed entirely out of hard edges, she was a grim but fair woman who had no use for a gangly millstone of an orphan child hanging around her neck. After her initial attempts to foist me off on some unwilling peasant family or another, she sighed and declared: “Well, at the very least, you can make yourself useful.”
So I was put to work. First as a grunt: chopping, stirring,scraping, plucking, hauling, mucking…the unending list of tasks required to keep a thriving apothecary in business. Later, I graduated to fetch-and-carry girl, running errands across the country for my mistress to “spare her old bones,” as she put it. Bearing in mind, I’ve seen her carry a fully grown billy goat on her back for five miles without breaking a sweat. There’s nothing wrong with her bones.
When I turned sixteen, Iliyani informed me that I could either sign on as her official apprentice and train to take over the business from her one day—though how this was to be managed, I never could quite discern; half elf that she is, she will likely outlive me by a good century—or I could marry Farmer Giles of Horlim, the next town over, and be stepmother to his seven children.
It wasn’t a difficult choice.
All that to say, life was fairly ordinary. For the last many years, I’ve learned the intricate ins and outs of the apothecary’s trade, traveled up and down the quiet green kingdom of Anfalen, foraged for the herbs and roots and minerals needed for my mistress’s various medicines, and treated any number of fascinating patients. Oh, there were the usual butcher, baker, and candlestick maker and all their sundry friends and relatives, of course. But living so near Inamaer Forest as we did, a well-known border between this world and the Utherlynd, we found ourselves more often than not serving Utherkynd. A vampyr suffering from bloodfever, or a kobold with a case of sulfur rot. I’ve treated beautiful korrigans for head lice, tommy-knockers for lung blight, harpies with early-onset molt, and once a chimera with an ingrown fang.
And every solstice night, a party of ethereal elves would appear under moonlight to drink with Mistress Iliyani and dance on her lawn until sunrise. When the first rays of dawn touchedtheir faces, they would transform back into gnarled, wrinkled, bent little crones, with cracked voices and quick eyes, utterly unlike the beings I’d glimpsed through the shutters the night before. One by one, they slipped back into the forest, not to be seen again until the next solstice.
It was a simple life, but an interesting one. An apothecary is always treated with respect wherever she goes, and as the apothecary’s apprentice, I enjoyed my standing in the village of Gartsworth. Occasionally, Mistress Iliyani would take on a second apprentice—such as Tim, bless his heart—and there would be more company for a little while. They never stayed long. The strangeness of Inamaer Forest drove them to seek placements elsewhere.
But I loved it. I felt at home, walking under the spreading branches of the younger trees that grew along the fringes. I never ventured deep; I had more sense than that. But I breathed in the air of Utherlynd, tasted the indescribable hint of magic on the tip of my tongue, and knew to the very depths of my bones that this was where I belonged.
Until one night—about a month ago now—when the king’s men, led by the formidable Captain Norlan, thundered into the cottage yard, declaring the time had come for me to leave my place of refuge. The High King had summoned the Dragon Princess, Roselle Pandracor, to present herself at Stromin Palace. The Hour of Destiny was at hand.
To which I answered: “What in the hell-blazes are you going on about?”
No one spoke. Fifteen armed men mounted on brutal battle chargers, moonlight glittering on their armor, and they all just sat there, dead silent. Watching me. I got the unsettling and utterly inexplicable feeling that they were…afraid.
