The Shadow Queen (2 page)

N
OTHING HAD BEEN
right in the castle since her mother’s death. Her father’s smile had disappeared, and a brittle imposter had taken its place. Her younger brother had begun screaming in the dead of night, trapped in nightmares he couldn’t remember upon waking. And the faint tingle of magic in the princess’s palms that her mother had laughingly told her would one day make flowers bloom and birds sing had become a fierce burn of power that stung her veins and shook the ground if the princess wasn’t careful.

She’d been desperate for a change—for some way to return the castle to the happy place it used to be. So when the king of Morcant began pressuring her father to marry another Morcantian of the king’s choice in order to keep the alliance between Morcant and Ravenspire strong, and her father announced that he was marrying the princess’s aunt Irina, a woman who’d never set foot in Ravenspire until her sister was buried, the princess began to hope.

At first, it seemed the princess’s wish had been granted. Irina charmed the young prince into calling her mama, and his nightmares all but disappeared. She coaxed smiles out of the king, and his hollow cheeks grew round again as she tempted his appetite with lavish feasts nearly every night. And she took the princess under her wing, sharing the secrets of the magic that ran through their blood.

It was almost like having a mother again. Almost like being happy.

But it was all a lie.

Understanding dawned slowly, like prickles of pain in a limb gone numb. The princess began noticing things that shouldn’t be. Apples in a bowl that gleamed beneath the candlelight but spilled rot once the skin was punctured. Apples her father, her brother, and the castle staff ate nightly until every bit of them had disappeared.

Apples Irina said were for those without magic in their blood.

As the king and his staff became glassy-eyed puppets, dependent upon Irina for their every thought, the dungeons filled with those who refused to give Irina what she wanted. Ambassadors from other kingdoms left in anger at the king’s refusal to speak to them unless he first asked Irina what to say. And whispers of magic threaded throughout the castle, a web of deceit it seemed only the princess could detect.

Scared that she was losing her father, the princess decided to find a way to break Irina’s control over the castle and everyone in it.

The princess chose her moment carefully. The warmth of day still lingered outside, but the air in the castle’s entrance hall was
cool and comfortable, and the family often spent their evenings watching through massive windowpanes as the stars came to life. The princess’s father sat beside Irina, dull and vague, while they watched the prince play with the pet snake the queen had given him for his seventh birthday. Members of the royal guard stood watch nearby, their eyes focused on the queen they somehow adored more than life itself.

The faint aroma of apples filled the air, and the lingering stain of rot smeared the teeth of those who smiled at Irina.

The princess’s bare hands trembled as she wrapped them around Irina’s arm, and fear left a bitter taste in her mouth. Her magic burned down her veins and pooled in her palms, and she felt the heart of the queen—vicious, determined, and strong—surge against her hands.

Her heart pounding, her legs trembling, the princess said the incantor that would change everything.

“
Nakh`rashk
. Find the threads of Irina’s magic and scatter them to the four winds.”

The queen jerked her arm free, but it was too late. Power leaped from the princess’s palms, slammed into the queen, and then shot to the gleaming marble floor where it exploded into a thousand tendrils of brilliant light. The light snaked over the floor, touching the palace guard, the prince, and the king before streaking throughout the castle to tear into pieces the fabric of lies Irina had built her new life upon.

The king, his eyes clear, his memory of the last six months restored, shouted for Irina to be put to death for treason. The palace guard, released of their bespelled adoration, rushed to do his bidding. And Irina, one hand reaching to punish the princess
who had betrayed her and one reaching to bespell the king again, hesitated for a split second between the two.

In a heartbeat, the palace guard were upon her. The king pushed the prince and princess behind him. Swords flashed. Screams rose.

And then Irina began to laugh.

The princess shivered deep within as the guards closest to the queen fell back, clutching their faces while their skin peeled away from their bones and their blood bubbled like soup left too long on the fire.

“Take your brother and run!” the king shouted as he put the prince’s hand in hers. “Protect him.”

The princess snatched her brother’s hand and pulled him toward a small doorway that led to the servants’ hall.

Irina scooped up the prince’s pet snake and with a whisper turned him into an enormous black viper. The snake slithered across the bloodstained marble and sank his fangs into the king.

“No!” The princess turned back for her father, but Irina raised her arms above her head and slammed her palms into the wall behind her.

Instantly, the stone shuddered and twisted. The princess screamed as the floor buckled, heaving upward and throwing her against a pillar that was quickly disintegrating into dust. All around her, the walls were crumbling, the floor was cracking, and the snake was attacking anyone still left alive.

The princess locked eyes with the queen, a lake of blood and horror between them, and Irina smiled as the wall behind the princess exploded outward to crush the girl into dust.

Chunks of stone crashed around the princess, leaving her
a small circle of space full of acrid dust. She was trapped, the debris above her creaking and sliding as the floor shuddered. She was going to die, and there would be no one left to protect her brother from the monster who’d taken Ravenspire’s throne.

A large dark hand reached through a space in the debris, wrapped around the princess’s wrist, and pulled her through the narrow opening between the pile of rubble and the servants’ hall. Gabril, the head of her father’s palace guard, crouched before her, his brown eyes steady on hers, his voice calm.

“Can you run?” he asked as he scooped the prince onto his shoulders.

The princess didn’t want to run. She wanted to see her father. She wanted to stay in her home.

She wanted to fight.

But though the queen had said that the princess was the daughter she’d never had, Irina had kept the knowledge of how to use magic as a weapon for herself alone.

And so, as the walls caved in behind them, the princess put her hand in Gabril’s, told her brother everything would be all right, and ran.

“W
ERE YOU SEEN
?” Gabril asked, his dark skin gilded with the last rays of the setting sun as he motioned Lorelai and Leo into the barn. The former guardsman had gray sprinkled throughout his short black hair now, and tiny lines were etched around his eyes. He still carried himself like a soldier, but the cost of trying to keep the queen from discovering that the prince and princess were still alive showed in the slight stoop of his shoulders and the worry that filled his eyes when he thought no one was looking.

“No.” Lorelai Diederich, crown princess of Ravenspire and fugitive at large, hurried into the dim interior. The barn was tucked away at the edges of an abandoned farm just outside the mountain village of Felsigen and was so dilapidated, a good stiff wind might flatten it.

“You’re sure?” Gabril’s voice was urgent as he stepped past the princess to help her brother Leo pull a heavily loaded hay cart into the barn.

“Please. You’re talking about the Royal Rogues. Nobody sees
us unless we want to be seen.” Leo gave the hay cart one last push inside and then pulled the door shut. He glanced down at his filthy trousers and heaved a sigh. “Although we really should rethink these disguises.”

“I told you, we aren’t calling ourselves the Royal Rogues. And our disguises are fine.” Lorelai’s gloved fingers fumbled with the buttons of her ragged coat.

“If by fine you mean hideous, then, yes, they are.” Leo rubbed at the dirt he’d smudged on his face earlier in the afternoon—part of his attempt to look like an unkempt farm boy in case anyone caught sight of him waiting beside the road that led from Felsigen to the queen’s northeast garrison. “And I have several other excellent suggestions for names. The Plucky Pair. The Royal Robbers, though personally I think that makes us sound too much like criminals—”

“We are criminals.” Lorelai folded up her coat and laid it beside her travel pack. “At least in the eyes of the queen.”

“A minor detail.” Leo ran his hand over the sacks of loot that were neatly stacked on the hay cart.

“We made good progress tonight,” Lorelai said as Gabril counted the sacks full of the village’s meager food supply—a food supply Irina had demanded as taxes, even though her garrison already had enough food to feed every village in the Falkrain Mountains for several months. Not that the starving villagers would see a bit of it. Irina would use some of it to feed her army, and let the rest of it rot as a message to remind everyone that she owned Ravenspire down to the last stalk of wheat. “That makes six robberies in two months. Six villages of people who are now loyal to us and will support me when I go after the throne. If
we keep up this pace, we’ll have gained the loyalty of the entire Falkrains by spring.”

Leo gave her a charming, lopsided smile. “Think how much easier it would be to earn the peasants’ loyalty if we had a name to go with our reputation. We could be the Daring Duo—”

“You could be hanging for your crimes if we don’t move on to the next village,” Gabril said quietly. “Now let’s focus on what needs to be done so we can leave at first light, just in case you were seen.”

“We weren’t,” Lorelai said as her white gyrfalcon soared in through the open loft window and perched on the princess’s shoulder, her talons digging into the leather brace Lorelai had fashioned to be worn on her shoulder. A dead mouse dangled from the bird’s beak.

“I hid in the treasury wagon before it left Felsigen. Sasha distracted them with a fake attack when they were an hour outside the village.” Lorelai ran a gloved finger down her bird’s back. “And Leo—”

“Did the most incredible impression of a Morcantian farm boy you’ve ever heard.” He sped up the cadence of his voice, hitting his consonants hard and running all the sounds together. “I was a Morcantian peasant angry that the blight in Ravenspire is seeping across the border and killing my goats.”

“He yelled at the treasury officers long enough to give me time to hide in the wagon, but they never got a good look at him.” Lorelai shoved the dangling mouse away from her face.

Gift. For you. Dinner.
Sasha’s thoughts flitted through Lorelai’s mind with quick precision.

Thank you, but I don’t eat mice.
Lorelai’s throat closed as the
little body brushed against her hair while images of Sasha’s beak enthusiastically shredding the mouse’s skin to get to its internal organs blazed from her bird’s mind into hers. She swallowed hard to avoid insulting Sasha’s gift by gagging out loud. Most of the time she was grateful for the day nine years earlier when she’d found the dying baby gyrfalcon and sent her magic into the bird to heal her. But sometimes the telepathic link that had formed between them as a result gave Lorelai far too much information about the inner workings of her bird’s mind.

Strange human. Delicious mouse.
Sasha spread her wings and glided to the barn floor, where she tore into her prize with relish.

“My performance was impeccable.” Leo looked smug as he wiped dust from his curly black hair.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Lorelai said as Gabril finished inspecting the bags and then limped over to a sizable crack in the barn’s wall to peer outside. “You’ve never even been to Morcant. You overheard one conversation three years ago, and you sound like you were born there. I couldn’t do that if you aimed an arrow at my heart.”

Leo grinned. “That’s because you’re good at magic, and I’m good at everything else.”

Gabril turned from the door. “Enough talking. Lorelai needs to practice while there’s still light left to see. Leo, take the sacks up to the loft. My contact in the village will collect them and distribute the food to those in need.”

Leo looked aggrieved. “I’m always the one who has to do the heavy lifting.”

Lorelai’s smile was smug. “That’s because I’m good at magic, and you’re good at everything else.”

“That was cruel, Lorelai.” Leo sighed dramatically and hefted the first sack. Gabril fetched a bundled-up blanket from the corner of the barn and laid it on the floor. When he opened it, several items lay beneath the dim light filtering in through the cracks in the walls. There was a length of rope, a tinderbox, and a brilliant green jewel half the size of Lorelai’s palm.

Lorelai’s stomach clenched, and the air felt too thick to breathe as she slowly crouched beside the blanket and pulled off her gloves. The fabric stuck to her suddenly clammy skin.

It wasn’t enough to rob treasury wagons and build loyalty among the peasants. It wasn’t enough to escalate the robberies and gradually move further south—closer and closer to Konigstaadt, the capital of Ravenspire—to widen her base of support while she weakened the queen’s.

Confronting the most powerful
mardushka
to come out of Morcant in a century required a careful, step-by-step plan. Nine years ago, Lorelai had challenged the queen, and her father had paid the price because Lorelai hadn’t thought through every possible way her plan could go wrong.

She wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

“I bartered for these from an Eldrian refugee. None of them have touched Ravenspire soil,” Gabril said.

Lorelai nodded and thanked the heavens that her voice didn’t shake as she said, “So there’s no chance the magic Irina is using to drain the land tainted these, and no chance that if I touch them, Irina’s magic will recognize mine and tell her that I’m still alive.”

“And exactly where to find us,” Leo said in his I’m-being-helpful voice from the loft above. “Don’t forget about that.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” she said. The knowledge that if she touched something that was bespelled by Irina—which could be anything in Ravenspire considering how much magic Irina used to keep herself on the throne—the queen would come for them was the silent fear that crouched in the corner of her mind and kept her thinking, planning, and thinking some more every hour of the day.

The only way she could become stronger was to practice her magic whenever Gabril found items that couldn’t possibly have been touched by the queen’s magic that threaded its way deep throughout the kingdom. Magic that was sucking the heart of the land dry, withering crops and destroying livestock as it forced the living heart of everything it touched to submit to the will of Ravenspire’s queen.

“You don’t have to do this,” Gabril said softly as Lorelai hesitated, her hand hovering over the three objects on the blanket. “You’ve already had a long day. If you want to practice tomorrow night instead—”

“I’ll practice now.” Her voice shook a little.

“You know how to do this,” he said. “Use the incantor that works best for what you want to do. Let your power do the work for you. You’re as strong willed as they come. You can subdue the heart of any living thing, or any object made from a living thing. You don’t have to fear what you are, Lorelai. Being a
mardushka
isn’t a choice. It’s how you use your power that matters.”

She let him think she was afraid of her magic. Of being a
mardushka
in Ravenspire, where outside of Irina and the princess, practitioners of magic didn’t exist. Where magic wasn’t passed through bloodlines as it was in Lorelai’s mother’s kingdom of
Morcant, but was feared, and the rare
mardushka
who left her home country and traveled south into Ravenspire was cursed by peasants and nobility alike.

Letting him believe she feared her own power was better than admitting that she could still remember the warmth of Irina’s arm beneath her hand and the shape of her lips as she spoke the incantor to undo all Irina’s spells. Still hear the screams and smell the blood as the castle itself turned against everyone but the queen.

Still feel the weight of Leo’s hand in hers as her father spent his last words telling her to protect her brother.

If she wasn’t stronger than Irina, she wouldn’t be able to protect Leo. She wouldn’t be able to save her kingdom.

She’d fail.

Swiftly she picked up the green jewel. Its jagged edges gleamed in the dull light, and its weight was a solid presence. Her jaw clenched until it ached, and her power responded to the determination in her heart.

Magic rushed through her veins and gathered in her palms, sparking and burning and begging for release. The heart of the jewel surged to meet her power and put up no resistance to her will.

“
Rast`lozh!
Become the image that is in my mind.” Her magic flooded the emerald. She threw it into the air, and it exploded into a hundred razor-sharp needles that hovered, all pointed toward the barn’s door, waiting for a threat that wasn’t going to appear.

“You called your magic much faster this time,” Gabril said, approval warming his eyes.

“I thought of Irina.” Or more precisely, how badly she wanted Irina to pay for killing their father and stealing their kingdom.

“Any residual weariness?” he asked.

“Plenty. Thanks for asking.” Leo widened his eyes at the look Gabril gave him, then quickly hefted another sack and started back up the ladder.

Lorelai slowly lowered her hand. The needles rushed together and fused into the stone again. “Not really. Jewels don’t put up much resistance to magic. They like to change form. Now, if you really want me to test the limits of my magic and how much it will drain me to forcibly subdue something, you should let me heal your leg.”

“Not a chance,” Gabril said as he pressed his fist against his left leg. He’d broken it the night he’d rescued the two of them and hadn’t taken the time to have a doctor properly set because his priority had been putting as much distance as possible between the children and the queen. Lorelai’s determination to heal him and his determination to refuse her formed the backbone of an argument that had worn a groove through their relationship for the past nine years.

“Gabril—”

“I spent months bespelled to follow Irina’s every whim. I don’t know how long residual magic lingers on someone Irina has touched, but we aren’t risking it. If you use magic to heal me, and any of Irina’s magic remains, she’ll learn that you’re alive before you’re ready to challenge her for the throne, and she’ll hunt you relentlessly.” His tone warned her not to argue. “We aren’t risking that for an old man’s leg.”

Lorelai locked gazes with him, magic burning in her palms.

“Now that we have that settled, who wants to help me with the last of these sacks before it’s so dark that I misjudge the ladder and fall to my untimely death?” Leo asked.

Gabril leaned forward and brushed his hand over Lorelai’s long, black hair. “I’m fine. My leg hardly bothers me.”

“You’re a terrible liar.”

His smile was gentle. “So are you.” He lowered his voice as Leo took the last sack up the ladder. “You’re as strong as Irina, Lorelai. As a child of eight with only a few months of training, you were strong enough to undo the spells of a full-fledged
mardushka
. You’ve only grown stronger since.”

“But I could miss something. I could make a mistake.” Her heart thudded painfully as she forced herself to say, “I could lose, and then there will be no one left to protect Ravenspire.”

To protect Leo.

“Is that why the plan you put into place this past summer is supposed to take eighteen months before you’re finally ready to face the queen?”

“Eighteen months is forever,” Leo said as he hopped off the ladder and walked toward them. “We could just head to the capital now and yell, ‘Surprise, you slimy coward! We’re not dead, but you’re about to be!’ and then you can turn her into a pile of fungus.”

“And what if I can’t?” Her words hung in the air, punctuated by Sasha cracking open the mouse’s bones and pecking at the marrow.

Leo crouched beside her and met her gaze. His brown eyes, so like hers, were serious for once. “You can. You never let anything stop you.”

“I just have to be sure of every contingency.” She placed the jewel back on the blanket and reached for her gloves with trembling fingers. “I have to be sure I can succeed.”

“You don’t go into battle because you’re sure of victory,” Gabril said. “You go into battle because it’s the right thing to do. Now get some sleep. We leave at dawn.”