If you know they are coming, you always should hide.
Because death comes for all when the Wild Hunt does ride.
A shiver crawls its way up my spine at the memory of my nursemaid singing to me when I was a child.
“In your stories, the Eldráfn leads them.” Serath’s voice is soft, but the look she angles at me is not. “Hasled them for longer than your kingdom has existed. In your stories, he is the Hell-Thorn, Lord of the Wild Hunt.”
The ground tilts beneath my feet. I stop walking, my hand shooting out to grab something to steady myself, but there’s nothing there.
The Hell-Thorn. Lord of the Wild Hunt.
I knowthatname too. From war songs and ballads about Therison Vale, where human soldiers held the final stand against the fae hordes.
The Hell-Thorn led the charge that nearly broke the human lines. It was the Lord of the Wild Hunt who killed Lord Casric the Unbroken, and whose name was spoken in terror by the soldiers who faced him, and in grief by the families of those who didn’t come home.
My pulse is hammering now. Too fast. I can feel it in my throat, behind my eyes.
According to the stories, he vanished. The war ended with the fae broken, and the great terror of the battlefield simply … disappeared. There were no tales of his capture, no songs about his death. He was gone, as though he’d never existed at all.
And now Serath is standing here and telling me that those aren’t just stories.
He’s real.
He’s a thousand years old, if the stories are true. A thousand years of warfare, killing and hunting humans. A warrior who made seasoned soldiers run.
And I aimed my bow at him.
My hand remembers the weight of it. The way I sighted down the shaft at his chest, so certain I was the hunter.
Was he caged the entire time? The Hell-Thorn of the Wild Hunt … Had he been in an iron collar all those years, while hunters walked past and chose their quarry for the day? While noblewomen picked him to share their beds?
How is that possible? How did no one realize what he was?
I can’t breathe. My chest is too tight. My vision is starting to narrow at the edges.
“The stories …” I try to speak. Nothing comes out. I have to force the words past the tightness in my throat. “The stories say he killed?—”
“Thousands. Yes, he did.”
Thousands.
And she’s taking me back to him.
The fae I’ve been calling Cairn.
The Hell-Thorn.
THIRTY
CAIRN
“—spottedanother patrol on the road leading toward the Dell yesterday. That’s the third this week.”
I try to focus on what Therin is saying, forcing myself to study the map spread across the table and not how the connection inside my head is telling me where Alleria is.
She’s sitting on the furs near the sleeping platform, far enough from my chair that I can almost pretend she isn’t there.Almost. The bond won’t let me forget her entirely. It’s changed since the kiss. Before, I only felt her when emotions ran high—terror, humiliation, that unwanted spike of heat when I touched her. Now, there’s a constant pull at the edge of my awareness.
I know when she sleeps. I know when she wakes. I know when she’s thinking about me, even when she’s trying not to.
