More fortress than residence, it looms like it’s been carved from night itself, a collection of sharp angles and watchful turrets poking through a halo of drifting fog.
My heart drops to my stomach with a sickening thud.
Actually, I take that fortress comment back. It looks like a prison. A prison that a human with soft plant magic and not an iota of fighting skills could never hope to escape.
“Not so eager to be let out now, eh?”
I don’t realize that someone’s opened the other carriage door behind me until I turn to see an upright creature covered in off-white fur. His long, angular face is framed by a set of small curled horns, and tufts of pale-blue hair cling to his chin like an unkempt beard.
He wears a black-on-black uniform, so aggressively dark it blends into the shadows behind him, making him look like a disembodied head floating above a stiff collar.
“Please, there’s been a mistake!” I clamor out of the carriage with the exact opposite of the utmost comportment an Aralyssean royal is always expected to display. “I’m not Princess Seraphyne, and this letter proves it!”
I thrust it in his face.
The escort responds with an awful, mocking bray. “Think a Mountain Goat knows how to read, Princess?”
So, he’s one of the Mountain Goats. I’ve never seen one myself, having carried out most of my life behind the palace walls, but I heard that they were the only ones allowed to traverse the Stone Realm. If you want to reach the Capital City by land, you either pay for an extremely expensive Mountain Goat escort, who both guide and pull the carriage, or risk the wrath of the Stone Fae horde for traveling without payment through their wastelands.
His delivery of the word “Princess” does not sound nearly as respectful as the tone I’ve been required to use with that title all of my life.
Also: “I’m not a princess. The only reason I know how to read and write is because my mother taught me along with the princess—therealprincess. If you could just take that letter to someone who can decipher it?—”
“I can read.” Another male with brown fur and three sets of horns appears beside the first driver and snatches the letter from my hand with a cloven—and apparently opposable—hoof. “Yup,yup…” he says as he reads over the letter. “This was what I was afraid of when I saw they had to drug her just to get her into the coach.”
I breathe a huge sigh of relief. Thank goodness Princess Seraphyne left that letter explaining how she sent me in her place so that she?—
“The palace guard warned me that the princess was the cowardly type,” the brown Mountain Goat finishes. “Told me she’d do and say just about anything to convince us to turn back around.”
He shakes his head at the white goat. “That’s why I told you it was best to ignore her and not bother stopping until we reached our final destination, sprout horn.”
My heart stops. They don’t believe me, even with the letter.
“Wait,” I begin to say.
But before I can make my case, the brown goat balls up the parchment and tosses it over his shoulder. Just like that, my one lifeline out of this mess is swallowed by the mountain’s hulking shadows.
My blood runs cold with the realization: They don’t care who I truly am. Only that I showed up in white.
“Come on, Princess.” The first Mountain Goat shoves me forward with a rounded—but somehow still sharp—opposable hoof toward a set of castle doors. Black, of course, and covered in obsidian studs that glitter in the low moonlight. “The king’s not going to marry himself under the Eryx moon before he slits your throat right after the pledges are done.”
“You’re not…” My heart clogs my voice box, and I have to swallow it down to ask, “You’re not serious about him killing me right after he marries me?”
More braying laughs.
“Sure, us Mountain Goats are known throughout the realms for our sparkling sense of humor,” the shaggier brown answers with another hard hoof shove that sends me stumbling forward.
I clamp my lips. Pray to a couple of the nicer moons. Then hopefully ask, “Are Mountain Goats known for?—”
“No,” the first goat answers flatly before I can finish.
“Moist!” I curse in the old ancestral language that royals—and therefore their dutiful handmaidens—are required to learn. “Seriously, there’s been a mistake. If you could just let me go back and get that letter, I could show you that my handwriting looks nothing like hers?—”
The second goat cuts me off when he steps forward to rap three times on a massive set of ebony double doors. The doors creak open, seemingly of their own accord.
Is this kingdom powered by shadow magic then, as opposed to the light magic that my father and I inherited from a long ago fae ancestor? I suppose that would explain the black-on-black color scheme.
Papa… My last image of him flashes through my mind.
