Things weren’t much better for her. Despite their body warmth, the temperature began to drop significantly. No matter how tightly she wrapped her skins and blankets, the cold pressed in from all sides, burrowing into any gap it could find. In the dark, she shivered. She tried to lock her jaw, but her teeth chattered.
Arme’s armor creaked and he said, “Princess?”
“Y-Yes?”
“Are you well?”
No. “Y-Yes.”
“Your teeth are chattering. I can hear your bones trembling.”
“G-good thing I am a s-solid woman. It will serve to keep me w-warm through the night.”
“Must you always mock yourself mercilessly?”
Despite the cold fighting her facial expressions, Annise frowned. “How else would I m-mock myself? I’m the D-D-Dread King’s daughter, so mercy d-doesn’t exist in my vocabulary.”
“You should not mock yourself at all.”
“If I d-don’t, someone else will.” And why do you care what I do?
His sigh was so heavy it seemed to fill the entire tent. “You haven’t changed at all,” he said. Before she could ask him how he knew anything about how she’d changed or not changed, he asked, “Are you sure you’re well?”
“I’m f-f-f-f—” She couldn’t get the word out, her throat knotted with ropes of cold air.
“What can I do?”
The question was so innocent that Annise forgot for a moment that he was the one who’d kicked out the platform beneath her mother’s feet. He was just a person, like her, trying to survive. And he wanted to help her.
She swallowed twice, trying to generate enough saliva to speak. She knew they only had one choice. “We h-have to sh-share body heat.” She felt her face flush, and was glad he couldn’t see it. It wasn’t that she’d never gone for a roll in the snow before. There was dashing Rory Kettlejoy in the hayloft in the stables. She’d been shocked when he’d taken her hand and led her up the ladder. He’d groped clumsily at her round hips and said her body was “wondrous,” a word she’d never have used to describe herself. Of course, later when she’d overheard him bragging about his exploits to the other lordlings, he’d compared her to a mamoothen. She’d pretended it was a compliment, because the wild beasts were incredibly strong—like her.
But this was different. She didn’t even know this man, and what he’d done to her mother… It didn’t matter in this moment. This was about survival. Nothing more.
“I—” He paused for a moment, then said, “Yes. I can do that.” Creaks and groans. He bumped her twice as he tried to twist around without bringing down the whole tent. Annise froze, as slowly, tentatively, he roped an enormous arm around her, cinching at her waist. Embarrassed by just how much waist she had, she grabbed his hand and moved it higher, to her ribcage, the only spot on her body where things thinned out a little. His armored body was stone-hard against her back.
“This isn’t g-going to work,” Annise said. “It’s l-like sleeping next to a s-suit of armor. You’re cold. And all edges and p-plates. You have to l-lose the armor.”
She heard him hold his breath for a moment, and then let it out. “I will do it,” he finally said. “But you must promise me one thing.”
“What?”
“When the light of morning arrives, do not look at me until I’ve replaced my armor.”
Annise was so cold she would’ve promised to never look at him again, if that’s what he wanted. “Yes. I p-promise.”
With considerably more shifting and grunting, Arme began removing his armor, which was quite an ordeal. Twice Annise said “Ow!” when he poked her with it, and thrice she simply bit her tongue. After what seemed like half the night, he slipped behind her and resumed the position, remembering to place his arm around her at her ribcage, a gesture she couldn’t help but appreciate.
It was all different this time. His body was still huge and muscled, but so much warmer, like she was sleeping within a fire. “Thank you,” she sighed.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
And then they slept in their cocoon.
Heavy breathing stirred Annise awake. As she stared at the inside of the thick white tent, it took her a few seconds to remember where she was.
Frozen hell, she thought. She could still feel Arme’s body knitted behind her. Sometime during the night, they’d seemed to meld together, his knees nestled behind her knees, his chest pressed tightly against her back, his midsection pushing gently against—
She cringed, remembering the way her mother’s body bounced as the rope tightened.
She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but grab Arme’s hand—which was still wrapped around her ribcage—and—
She stopped, sucking in a throat-burning gulp of frigid air.
Steaming pile of mamoothen dung, she thought, staring at the bare skin on the back of his hand. It wasn’t pale exactly. More like a window frosted by cold winter air. And on the other side of the window were twisting snakes, as black as ebony, running up his wrist to his arm, vanishing under the sleeve of his knight’s tunic.
Veins, Annise’s mind labelled them. Black veins. She’d seen how dark his blood was the day before as it trickled onto the snow. She’d thought it was a trick of the light, but no.
His blood was black.
Reflexively, her body stiffened.
His hand fluttered and then recoiled, disappearing behind her. She started to turn, but Arme said, “Don’t.”
She froze.
“You promised not to look at me.”
“I didn’t mean to, I just awoke and your hand was there and—”
“It’s fine. Just let me don my armor. Please.”
The plea in his voice gave her pause. How could a man so strong, so fierce in battle, be so afraid of his own skin? She was the one afraid of the tower of mirrors.
“I won’t look,” she said. He grunted and pulled back, and immediately a rush of cool air surrounded her.
Armor clanked as the wind howled and battered the sides of their tent. Annise’s mind was racing, and she couldn’t get the image of his strange skin and stranger veins out of her head. She opened her mouth twice to speak, but didn’t know what to say. Finally, she could hold back no longer. “What is wrong with you?” The second the blunt question spilled from her lips, she thought, I’m a frozen-headed yak brain. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
To her surprise, Arme laughed. “To answer that question, it could take years.”
“What I meant was, what happened to you? To your skin. To your veins. Were you born with that…condition?”
“Don’t worry, princess, it’s not contagious.”
Heat rushed to Annise’s cheeks. “I’m not worried about that. Just…” She’d heard of the Southron plague, which ate its victims alive from the inside out. And of course she’d read streams about an eastern flesh-eating disease called mottle, which affected the skin in strange and terrifying ways. But she’d never heard of anything like this. “Does it hurt? Is it hurting you?”
He laughed again, and Annise found it to be a surprisingly pleasant sound. “No. And I wasn’t born with it.”
“Then what happened? Were you cursed somehow?” Arch was always telling Annise that one day she would be cursed by a sorcerer because of her sins, all her swearing and lusting after various knights and lordlings. She’d never believed him, until now.
“Something like that,” Arme said. “You may turn.”
Slowly, she eased around to find him fully covered again, his mesh facemask and eye slits aimed right at her. He moved closer to her, and she noticed one of his gloves remained off. He slid his hand toward her.
She swallowed, but didn’t recoil.
She took his hand in hers, raising it toward her eyes so she could inspect his skin more closely.
“Most people fear me,” Arme said. “But you keep attacking me.” She could sense a smile behind his facemask.
“When you grow up with the
Dread King as your father, there’s not much that scares you,” Annise said. She ran a finger over his skin, which was as smooth as silk, save for the black veins, protruding like rolling hills. “Tell me what happened. I command it.”
“You command it?” Again, there was something different in the knight’s tone. Something less gruff.
“You swore to protect me,” she said. “And I need to know about what happened to you in order to feel…protected.” Even to her, it sounded weak.
“Once upon a time,” the knight started. “I was a little boy named Tarin.”
Annise dropped his hand. Wait. Wait. That name… “I knew a boy called Tarin,” Annise whispered. “He was the horsemaster’s son. When I was a girl. I played with him. He was my friend. He—he died.”
“Close enough,” Arme said.
It couldn’t be. Could it? When Annise had lost Tarin, she’d punched holes in a bale of hay for three days straight. Then she’d gone to the practice fields for the first time and bested half the young lordlings in combat. The other half had been too scared to face her.
She remembered how she’d found out. Her mother had told her. It was one of the few times her mother had spoken to just her, without others present. She’d seemed so sad, so broken. Then again, her mother had always seemed fragile and broken, save for the very end as she stood on the gallows.
“But I attended your day of mourning. I cried for you. If not you, then who was in the casket?”
“I don’t know,” Tarin said. “Probably rocks. My parents would’ve wanted to hide the truth. And anyway, to them I really was dead.”
“I don’t understand. You didn’t die?” His odd words from the night before came to mind: You haven’t changed at all. He’d known her from when she was a big-boned girl eating everything in sight and knocking the boys into the snow. And yes, mocking herself mercilessly. I guess I haven’t changed much since then, Annise mused.
“Clearly not,” Tarin said.
“Where have you been all these years?”
“On the eastern edge of the kingdom. I trained in Walburg, then later in Darrin. I joined the army.”
“But you’re barely a year my elder,” Annise said.
“We all must fight some time, and I grew up faster than most,” Tarin said. “I’ve protected against eastern invasion along the Black Cliffs for three years.”
“You fought in the Battle of the Razor?”
He nodded.
“But they say many died,” Annise said, still trying to comprehend that the man hunched before her was the scrawny little boy she’d played with as a child.
“Thousands,” Tarin said. “But not me.”
Annise needed to fill the gap between her childhood and now. She still didn’t understand. “My mother said you had a rare bone condition. A defect, she called it. She said there was nothing anyone could do. I saw you lying in bed, unable to walk. I mourned for you.”
“She helped me.”
Annise stared into his eye slits. “How? Why?”
Tarin paused to pull his glove on and then said, “She found a woman, a sorceress, she—”
“A witch? My mother would never do that.” For all her faults, Queen Sabria Loren had been a deeply religious woman, worshipping Wrath like all westerners. In Knight’s End, where her mother had been from, they didn’t hire witches, they burned them.
“She did.”
Annise shook her head. Mysteries on top of mysteries.
Tarin continued. “She loved my mother. Your mother was never comfortable in the north. My mother was one of her few friends. The queen visited us often, broke bread with us, laughed with us…”
“I didn’t know.”
“She didn’t tell you, and she forbid me to.”
“So the witch…”
“The woman, she made me drink a dark liquid. It was vile and burned my throat on the way down, but she held my nose and forced me to swallow. It made me feel better. Then my body started changing, transforming.”
Any anger and cruel intentions she’d had toward the knight fell away like a discarded cloak, leaving her feeling cold and naked. “I’m so sorry,” Annise said.
“Don’t be. Your mother saved me.”
“Did it hurt. The transformation?”
“No,” Tarin said. His response was too quick, and Annise had already seen the grimace, the flicker of a painful memory in his eyes.
She chose not to press the issue. She understood wanting to forget the past. “But now…”
“Now there is something evil inside me, something black. I can always feel it, trying to claw its way out, to make me do things I don’t want to do. When you cheat death there is always a price to pay.”
“But you’re not evil,” Annise said. He’d saved them. Saved her. She likely would’ve already perished on the tundra if not for the warmth of his body.
“Like you said, I killed your mother, the same woman who spared my life. A woman I loved as much as my own mother.”
“Because she asked you to. In order to save Arch and I.” Was she really defending him? Did he really deserve it? Yes, she thought. He does.
He shook his head, the dark mesh shifting from side to side. “Sometimes I don’t know. I thought I was doing what she wanted, but as she hung there, I felt the darkness inside of me squirming. It was excited. It was giddy. It wanted me to do it.”
“But that’s not why you did it, right? You did it for my mother.”
“I—I don’t know. I think I did, but I can’t be certain. And it’s not the first time I’ve killed without being sure of the reasons… I see them in my sleep. Countless men. Women too. The easterners have both in their armies.”
Annise’s blood ran cold. Whatever he’d done, he was dangerous, if only because of what the witch had put into his body. She didn’t know what to say.
“I won’t hurt you,” Tarin said quickly. “I swear it. I’m ashamed of what I am, and what I’ve done, but I will do right by you. I will protect you until I am dead.”
“I never asked you to do that.” Still, the thought of him wanting to be her protector chased away the chill sweeping through her.
“Try to stop me.”
Her stomach growled, and Annise chewed on everything he’d said for a minute, wishing his words were food. “When you are ready, I want to see you. The real you—your face.”
“I can’t do that,” Arme—Tarin—said. “Unlike you, I do not wear my scars so well, my lady.”
Annise frowned, puzzled. “Me? I bear no scars.”
“Not on the outside. But your eyes are the windows to your scars.”
Annise knew he was right. If the outside of her body was the pampered, well-fed form of a princess, her soul had been sliced to ribbons. Her father’s sins were there. Her unfulfilling relationship with her mother, too. The names she’d been called her entire life, even if they’d always been whispered behind cupped hands. And now, her mother’s death and her separation from Arch. There was a worse one, too. The long, ragged scar that seemed to eclipse all the others. Her dead brother, taken far too soon. She couldn’t lose another brother. She had to find Arch before it was too late.
“I bare no scars, Sir,” Annise said again. She rummaged through their supplies and turned away.
Fourteen
The Eastern Kingdom, Ferria, Ironwood
Roan
Roan’s heart skipped a beat.
The three princes continued laughing as the king’s decree echoed through the circular hall. Execute him…execute him...execute him…
Then the king himself laughed, a deep-throated “Har-har-har!” that rumbled through Roan’s bones. Apparently just the suggestion of his demise was enough to provide a day’s worth of entertainment for the king and his sons.
Gwendolyn, her cat-like eyes still boring into him, was the only one not laughing. But she was smirking. Snakes, has the entire Four Kingdoms gone mad? That’s when Roan realized something. “You’re jesting,” he said.
> “This one’s as quick as an ore monkey!” the king declared, still guffawing loudly.
“You’re not going to kill me,” Roan said.
“Not today,” Gareth said. “I cannot vouch for tomorrow, however.”
This gallows humor was something Roan was not accustomed to. In the south, you said what you meant and meant what you said. If you spoke of someone’s death, you were fully prepared to carry it out.
Gwendolyn offered Roan a hand, and he accepted it. As she pulled him to his feet, he marveled at the strength contained within her slender body. Her lips quirked as she released him, stepping back to resume her position beside the metal throne, which was rippling like the surface of a disturbed pond. Roan struggled to hold his head up, his energy sapped.
“Back to business,” the king said. “We’ve been hearing stirrings from the north.”
“Wait,” Roan said. They’d just watched his lifemark heal him from a fatal sword wound. “What about me?”
The king raised a thick eyebrow. “You bear a skinmark, correct?”
There was clearly no denying it. He nodded. “On my chest.”
“Can you heal only yourself, or others too?”
Roan considered lying, but had the sinking feeling they would find a way to uncover the falsehood. They could cut a child wide open and he’d have no choice but to use his power to save her, killing himself in the process. He certainly wouldn’t put such an act past Gwendolyn. “I can heal others. But only to a point. Using my mark drains my energy. The more grievous the injury”—he gestured to where the forest dweller had sunk her blade into his flesh—“the more effort it takes.” And if the injury is life-threatening, I shall die in their place. He held the last part back. They didn’t need to know. Not yet.
The king stroked his magnificent beard. “Typically you would be given a choice at this point. Serve the crown, that’s me”—he pointed to one of the molded swords atop the crest of his metal helmet—“or live whatever life you choose.” He paused, and Roan had the feeling that he wasn’t the typical case. “However, you are not from here, so you have no choice. You will serve me, or I will display your head on a pike. Does that answer your question?”