“No one who enters comes back out,” the old hunter concluded, spitting into the fire as if to ward off evil. “That’s why we don’t look too deep into those trees, Your Highness. Some things are better left alone.”
I stared past the fire into the twisted darkness beyond. Had Odette wandered into those woods? Had this beast—whatever it was—taken her for his own? The thought made bile rise in my throat, but it was the first real lead I’d had in years of searching.
“My mother warned me about the forest,” I said quietly, more to myself than the men. “Told me never to enter the land forsaken. That magic had cursed it, like it cursed everything good in the world.”
“Wise woman, the queen,” Thibaut murmured. “Magic brought nothing but suffering to Durand. Your grandfather had the right of it, outlawing its practice.”
I thought of my mother’s face when she spoke of the forest—not fear, as I’d always assumed, but something more complex. Grief, perhaps. Regret. As if she knew more than she ever told me.
“Do you think it’s spreading?” I asked, voicing the concern that had plagued me through months of hunting the borderlands. “The corruption. The darkness. I’ve seen healthy forests sicken near its boundaries. Animals born wrong, with extra limbs or missing eyes.”
The men exchanged uneasy glances.
“My village lost three cows last month,” the archer said reluctantly. “Found them dead with black veins running under their skin, like their blood had turned to tar. Never seen anything like it.”
“The well water in Mistwood tastes of metal now,” another added. “And children born this winter along the forest territories... some of them aren’t right.”
A shiver passed through me that had nothing to do with the night’s chill. If the corruption was spreading, it wouldn’t stop at village wells and malformed livestock. Eventually, it would reach Durand itself. My father’s city. My people. My inheritance. Someone needed to figure out why it was growing when it hadn’t in all these years it existed.
And somewhere in that darkness might be my sister. Eleven years lost to that twisted place.
I rose abruptly, tossing what remained of my bread into the fire. “Get some rest,” I ordered. “We return to the city at first light.”
The men nodded, relief evident in their postures as they prepared their bedrolls as far from the forest edge as our campsite allowed. None questioned why I remained standing, staring into the corrupted woods as if I could pierce its secrets through will alone.
I had been raised not to enter the Forbidden Forest. Raised to fear magic and the chaos it brought. Raised to be a proper prince who followed the rules laid down by generations of Legrands before me.
But I wasn’t just a prince. I was a brother. And if there was even a chance Odette was in there, held captive by some beast that thought it could take what belonged to me—what belonged to our family—then rules meant nothing.
The tournament would have to wait. Gaspard Coventry would have to wait. I had a more important hunt to plan, one that would take me into the heart of a curse that had already stolen eleven years of my sister’s life.
And if I had to become a beast myself to get her back, so be it.
thirty
Marcel
Hell didn’t smell like brimstone and sulfur like the priests had always claimed. It reeked of despair. The kind that sank into your fur and lingered like death. Every breath I took filled my lungs with ash that never seemed to settle, coating my throat until each swallow felt like dragging glass down my esophagus. The volcanic landscape stretched endlessly before us, rivers of molten rock carving paths through blackenedearth while lightning erupted from the ground in unpredictable bursts.
None of us had expected to end up here, dragged beneath the earth when the ground opened its maw to swallow us whole. But what tortured me more than the scorching heat against my pads or the constant threat of death was the memory of Isabeau’s face as we fell. Her amber eyes wide with horror, her scream echoing in my ears long after the surface world had disappeared from view.
Three months. That’s how long we’d been trapped in this hellscape, though time meant nothing here. No sun rose or set. No moon tracked across the sky. Only the endless red glow of magma and the sporadic flashes of lightning breaking through the perpetual twilight.
I paused on a ridge of hardened obsidian, my claws clicking against the glassy surface as I surveyed the terrain ahead. The path forked around a bubbling pool of something that wasn’t quite liquid, wasn’t quite fire. Souls writhed within its depths, their translucent forms stretching and distorting as they tried to escape their prison. I’d stopped feeling horrified by such sights weeks ago. Now, I simply cataloged them as obstacles to avoid.
Something tugged at the edges of my awareness. A presence both familiar and distant. Isabeau.
Even across the boundary between realms, our bond remained. Thin as gossamer but unbreakable. I closed my eyes, focusing on the delicate thread that connected us.
She was alive. That much I could tell. But the vibrant light that was her essence had dimmed to a bare flicker. Through our connection, I sensed exhaustion so profound it bordered on unconsciousness. Not sleep. No, sleep would have been merciful. This was something worse. A state of being neither awake nor at rest, her mind and body suspended in a kind of living death.
She grows weaker,Laurent’s voice whispered through the bond that connected us brothers. Not spoken aloud. None of us could speak in these cursed forms, but we transmitted directly from mind to mind, a small mercy in our otherwise merciless existence.
I turned to see my brothers picking their way carefully along the ridge behind me. Laurent, his brown fur matted with blood and soot, favored his right hind leg where a bolt of lightning had caught him during our last crossing. Bastien, the smallest and darkest of us but somehow still the most resilient, stayed close to Laurent’s side, ready to offer support if our middle brother faltered.
I feel it too,I responded, the thought-speech requiring no sound but carrying all the weight of my worry.The Dark Lord is using her life force to sustain us here. Keeping us immortal for his torments.
Bastien’s hardened eyes narrowed in rage.Then we need to escape faster. Before there’s nothing left of her to save.
