Page 1 of Labyrinthine
PROLOGUE
Starsfall was once sacred.Then, the gods abandoned it, and us, to the mercy of a man who had none.
My father.
The priests say it was necessary. That the gods were merciful. Clever. Brilliant. That they saved Starsfall and Larksbind from the curse of magic and stopped the war that had turned into a feast of fire and flesh. From the blight that made our rivers run red with the blood of youth and choked our skies with smoke from the pyres that never stopped burning.
But it’s what men don’t say that tells the real story.
They don’t speak of the way silence settled like ash after the gods turned away, or how my father stepped into that silence. How he shaped himself into the image of a savior, but there were always fractures in the mask—hairline cracks where his cruelty leaked through.
They don’t say that binding the magic in Starsfall smothered the kingdom’s heartbeat, or that even the gods could not unmake it. For even they don’t hold that power. So the priests don’t tell tales of sorcery that is more than mere destruction. More than spells and storms and fire. That is power born from pain, woven into the land and its blood.
They say the binding was a sacrifice.
But it wasn’t made by them.
It was mine.
Made without my consent, breathed into me the moment I was born—for when the gods bound Starsfall’s magic, they bound me with it. Because the curse they feared wasn’t the land’s fury or a king’s wrath. It was his daughter’s.
What lives in me is old and patient. Made of darkness and death. Power that remembers. Magic that seethes and rebels and waits. That doesn’t forget the sound of screaming. That seeks the light—that hunts for it through the small hours of the night—to destroy it.
They say the gods locked Starsfall’s magic away in a contest whose rules are written in blood. That the Reaping is the cost of peace. A sacred rite. The priests whisper that the gods found a way to contain two monsters who might ruin the world. My father, with his craving for power and his eternal quest for more. His child, with her magic that could destroy all the gods had created. But what they really did was put a blade in my father’s hand and called it mercy.
Each year, ten men from Larksbind enter the Reaping. Ten lives offered like prayer, like tribute. They hope to win my hand in battle, and with it, the magic bound inside my blood. If I marry a man from Larksbind, the power returns to them. Peace, they say. Balance. But if a man from Starsfall wins my heart and earns redemption through love, our kingdom’s magic stays with us.
And that makes my father hungry. A man who would bleed the world dry to have magic on his side.
The gods must have thought a balance had been found. That mortals would rise to meet the trials of combat or the heart. That someone would survive long enough to reach me, and that mortals would, somehow, learn compassion through suffering. Perhaps they even thought that my father’s hunger would burn itself out.
But he is not the kind of man who fades with time. He is the kind that rots deeper.
Over the years, he’s made certain no suitor survives the Reaping and none comes close to claiming me.
He’s twisted the trials until they’re nothing but slaughter. Changed the rules, the terrain, the odds. Turned them into a show of blood and fear. The people cheer. The priests bless the carnage. No one remembers it was meant to be anything else.
And each year, the outcome is the same.
I remain unmarried.
Unclaimed.
And with every failed Reaping, my father comes closer to claiming what should never be his.
Because long ago, he made another bargain. One hidden in the fine print of gods and law, a deal no one speaks of.
If no man reaches me before my twenty-fifth name day, the magic bound in the Reaping reverts to him. Not to the kingdom. Not to the land. Not to me.
Him.
So he waits. And bleeds them all dry.
Until only I remain. A crown with no court. A throne with no allies. A girl with no choices left but one.
Or so they say.
CHAPTER ONE
