Page 9 of A Kingdom of Wild and Power
‘You were the worst of them all, brother,’ Hagan murmured to the phantom of memory. ‘You made me love you. You made me feel. And then you shattered me.’
His purple eyes locked upon those imagined golden ones, and in the vision fire began to spread, consuming, until Ash’s cheerful countenance warped into something darker. Something unrecognisable.
Evil. Twisted.
Wrong.
The Ash he had once known dissolved, and in his place sat another—a stranger wearing his friend’s face, regarding him with loathing and disdain.
Hagan’s hands curled into fists.
‘I shall never forgive you,’ he spat.
And in the shadow of his mind, Ash smiled back. A wicked, perilous smile.
‘Good,’ replied the Fire King.
Before the Great War, royal marriages between kingdoms was not necessarily common, but indeed encouraged when two kingdoms were fighting over something. It was the simplest way to calm the waters and avoid bloodbath. Most didn’t like it, but dealt with it silently. However, the witches always refused. They would not bind themselves to a foreign line.
It somehow amazes that they never saw the betrayal gathering against them.
Tabitha Wysteria
Ylva awoke, as she always did, beneath the fragile shelter of a tent woven from leaves and found, as always, a beautiful Fae man waiting for her just beyond its threshold. She had asked him countless times why he lingered there, as though he feared she might dissolve into mist if left unattended.
He never answered. He would only offer that insufferable, self-satisfied smile she loathed.
They had been on the road for days, drawing ever nearer to the village where the wolverian castle loomed in wait. The air itself seemed taut with unease, a tension that had not been present before. Their journey had stretched far longer than expected, for at every hamlet they were forced to halt, to mendwhat ruin the witches had left in their wake. By firelight Ylva had listened as the Fae whispered their thoughts: Princess Rio Hawthorne, who led them, believed the witches had not pressed beyond the castle walls, that the northern villages would remain untouched. Yet the truth along their path was cruelly plain. Every living thing between here and the royal seat had been extinguished.
Ylva often caught the weight of Fae stares upon her. She yearned to ask what it was they saw, but each time she opened her lips some unseen force urged her to silence. She glanced down at her arms, traced in pale runes almost invisible against her white skin. Yet when she moved beneath the sun, they shimmered faintly, as though her flesh itself carried a secret light.
‘Good morning to you too,’ Arden said, biting lazily into an apple. ‘As radiant as ever, I see.’
Ylva grumbled in reply.
‘Tell me,’ he pressed, amusement flickering in his tone, ‘is it customary for valkyrians to be so impossibly unapproachable at dawn?’
She finished braiding her long, white-grey hair as she strode through camp with purposeful steps.
‘You ought to eat something,’ Arden persisted.
‘Not hungry.’
She ignored the strange glimmer in his deep green eyes, something she could not name, and instead made for her white horse. A smile almost betrayed her when Arden wordlessly pressed a bag of carrots into her hands.
‘Does it have a name?’ he asked.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘You ought to give it one.’
‘Fae seem rather obsessed with naming everything.’
Arden only shrugged, taking another bite of his apple. ‘A name matters. It lends a thing its sense of self, its measure of worth. Strip away a name, and you strip away a part of the soul itself.’
Ylva regarded him for a long moment, wondering whether his words held some hidden meaning. She did not ask. Her gaze shifted instead to the small tent nearby, within which the body of Kage Blackburn was kept.
‘It will start to rot,’ she said quietly, ‘and smell.’
