“Oh, horse feathers,” I whispered, already kicking off Brigida’s borrowed boots.
fifty-one
Alain
Water filled my lungs like liquid fire. The shock of it paralyzed me for precious seconds as the current dragged me under, twisting my body like a doll in a child’s uncaring hands. Pain bloomed fresh from the gryphon’s bite in my side, blood clouding the water around me in crimson wisps that disappeared downriver faster than I could track them. I’d faced death before, on battlefields where men screamed and swordssang, but drowning was different. Intimate and silent and terrifyingly patient for my surrender.
I broke the surface, gasping, the forest canopy spinning above me in sickening circles. The river pulled me along, indifferent to my struggle, to my royal blood, to the woman I’d left standing on the shore with horror etched across her features. Isabeau. Her name floated through my mind like driftwood, something to cling to as the current yanked me under again.
My hands clawed at nothing, at water that refused to provide purchase. The wound in my side screamed with each desperate movement, the beast’s teeth having torn through muscle and perhaps worse. The cold should have numbed it, should have offered some mercy, but instead it sharpened the pain to a knife’s edge that sliced through whatever composure I had left.
I surfaced again, choking on river water and my own blood. A fallen log rushed past, so close I felt splinters graze my shoulder, but my reflexes were already dulling, my fingers too numb to grasp it. Isabeau’s face flashed before me. Not as she’d looked moments ago on the shore, but as she’d been in her tower room, golden in candlelight, reading from a book I’d brought her. Her voice had been soft then, her eyes lit with an intelligence that put my royal tutors to shame.
And I’d locked her away like a prize, like a possession. Just as Gaspard had done.
The thought lanced through me sharper than the pain in my side. I’d become what I despised, and now I was paying for it, carried away by a river that cared nothing for my regrets.
"Isabeau," I tried to call to apologize, but water rushed into my mouth, stealing my words as it had stolen everything else. My lungs burned. My vision darkened at the edges. The weight of my sodden clothes pulled me down, down, into depths I couldn’t fathom.
I remembered swimming as a boy, Theron pushing me into the palace fountain when I was six. I hadn’t known how to swim then either, but Father had pulled me out, his face a storm of anger directed not at me but at my brother."A prince must learn to swim,"he’d said afterward, not unkindly, as servants wrapped me in towels."The water doesn’t care about your title."
How right he’d been. This river didn’t give a damn that I was Prince Alain Legrand, second son of Durand. It simply carried me, tumbled me, dragged me along its course with the same indifference it showed to fallen leaves and broken branches.
Another sharp pain as something beneath the surface like a rock or a submerged tree, scraped along my back. I twisted away reflexively, but the movement cost me, sending fresh agony radiating from the gryphon’s deep bite. My head dipped below the surface again, and this time I lacked the strength to fight my way back up.
Strange, how calm it felt beneath the water. The current still pulled, but down here the world was muffled, peaceful in its way. Sunlight filtered through in wavering patterns, dancing across my face in a farewell caress. My lungs screamed for air, but the pain in my side had faded to a distant throb, as if it belonged to someone else entirely.
Was this how drowning felt? This strange serenity, this detachment? My body seemed far away, my thoughts coming slower, dreamlike. I should fight. Should kick toward the surface, toward life and duty and the woman I’d ridden through the night to find. But my limbs wouldn’t obey, heavy as castle stones, and the light above grew dimmer with each sluggish beat of my heart.
Blood loss. My mind supplied the diagnosis with clinical detachment. The gryphon’s attack had opened me up like a butcher with a spring lamb, and now my life was seeping away,carried downstream faster than my body. Perhaps it was fitting. I’d failed at everything that mattered. Failed to protect Isabeau from my father’s judgment. Failed to believe her when she spoke of beasts and curses. Failed to be anything more than another man who thought he knew better than she did about her own life.
Darkness crept further into my vision, like ink spilled across parchment. I wasn’t afraid, not exactly. Just... regretful. Sorry that I wouldn’t see what became of her, wouldn’t know if she found her beasts, wouldn’t witness what might have grown between us if I’d been wiser, better, more worthy of her trust.
My chest convulsed, my body making one last desperate attempt to survive despite my mind’s surrender. Water rushed in where air should be, and the pain that followed was like nothing I’d experienced before. It was as if my insides were being scoured with steel wool, every nerve ending aflame.
Then, as quickly as it came, the pain receded. Replaced by a strange warmth that spread from my center outward. The darkness at the edges of my vision retreated, not into clarity but into a different kind of light—watery, wavering, the blue-green luminescence of algae on summer nights.
The water around me changed. No longer brown with silt and my own blood, but clear as crystal, glowing with an inner light that seemed to pulse in time with my failing heartbeat. I drifted, suspended in this new medium that was neither water nor air but something in between, something that didn’t burn my lungs or drag me down.
A face formed in the water’s reflection before me, coalescing from light and memory and perhaps something more. Golden hair floated around features I knew as well as my own, though I hadn’t seen them in years except in palace portraits. Eyes that held no color, no center, yet more ethereal. She gazed at me with an expression caught between sorrow and joy.
"Odette,"I tried to say, but no sound came, only bubbles that floated upward in perfect spheres, catching the light as they rose.
My sister. Missing at sixteen, they’d said. Visiting my mother’s friend for the summer for etiquette training. Later, I’d hear whispers among the servants—about curses and changelings and the strange color of Odette’s eyes—but I’d dismissed them as peasant superstitions. Odette was my sister.
Yet here she was, or some mirage of her, suspended in the water before me. A woman grown, beautiful and serene, with something ancient in her gaze that hadn’t been there in life.
"Hold on, little brother,"her voice came, not through water but directly into my mind. Clear as temple bells, warm as mulled wine on winter nights."This isn’t your time. This isn’t your river."
I wanted to ask what she meant, wanted to reach for her, to touch the sister I’d mourned for most of my life. But my body remained unresponsive, floating in this strange illuminated water that wasn’t quite water, suspended between life and death like a fly in amber.
Odette continued, her form shifting, rippling like her reflection in disturbed water."The veil thins when life hangs in balance. Listen to her, Alain. Listen to Isabeau. The forest speaks through her, as it once spoke through me."
Questions crowded my fading mind. How did she know Isabeau? What did she mean about the forest speaking? Was this real, or just the hallucination of a drowning man’s oxygen-starved brain?
"There’s no time,"Odette said, as if hearing my thoughts. Perhaps she was. "The darkness spreads. The beasts suffer. They need her, and she’ll need you." A smile ghosted across her luminous face."You always were the stubborn one. The one who did what was right rather than what was expected. Don’t stop now."
Her hand reached out, passing through the water with impossible grace to touch my cheek. The contact felt real—warm fingers against cold skin—and with it came a surge of something like strength, like hope, flowing into my body from that single point of connection.
