A signal to fall back. And Mother Rianna’s gift of protection, bestowed upon Queen Evanora’s line millennium ago.

  Having carried out her final duty, Gianna fell to her knees, her breaths coming in laboured bouts as she felt her heart begin to slow. She looked back for her sisters, tears blurring her vision. “Maybel. Take care of her.”

  Shaila knelt before her, their knees touching. Gianna’s eyes focused enough for her to see the tears streaming down her Second’s cheeks. “She will know how strong and brave her mother was,” she said, her gaze flickering to Nissa. “The Legacies will raise her. We vow it, by blood and soul.”

  Gianna nodded, satisfied. A tear rolled down her face. “Tell her I love her. And my mother—”

  Nissa placed a hand on her shoulder. “Queen Evanora will know you died honorably alongside your sisters. You will go down in history as the General Princess who was loyal to Ravynia until the very end. There will be stories and songs in your name. The Legacies will tell them.”

  Gianna felt Mother Rianna’s pull in her chest, welcoming and right. “Shaila.” A sob broke her voice. Her best friend leaned forward, a hand on the back of Gianna’s neck, their foreheads pressed together as they said their final goodbye.

  “I love you,” Gianna whispered in the space between them.

  “I love you, too,” Shaila returned, voice thick with emotion Gianna had never heard before.

  “Lead Ravynia to victory, whenever that may be.” Gianna closed her eyes, acknowledging the fight leaving her body, her spirit lifted away on a gentle breeze with her last breath.

  ༺═──────────────═༻

  The Ravyn witches fled their great city, Ravynia, after the death of their General Princess Gianna. They vowed to return again one day, when witches were no longer hunted and executed, and were able to live freely as they’d once been.

  The Witch Queen Evanora was devastated by the death of her only daughter. Driven by her grief and anger, she cursed the Kingdom of Lithera with a sickness so terrible that the humans would drop like raindrops, fast and endlessly.

  For five hundred years, Death’s Shadow ravaged Lithera’s weak people.

  Until a girl was born with blood and power that could save

  them

  all.

  Part One

  † ~ †

  From the Ashes

  Chapter One

  She must have been dreaming.

  Dreaming of this boy with the dark hair and the blue eyes who made her hands tremble and her heart beat uncontrollably.

  She was supposed to have never seen him again. She didn’t ever want to see him again. She must have been dreaming. This isn’t real. This is not real, Wren told herself. Over and over, a mantra in her head. Please, please, please. This can’t be real.

  He was smiling at her. It was getting increasingly harder to breathe.

  Her vision blurred and Wren felt like she might faint.

  “Cormac,” Wren gasped out, “what—what—”

  His eyes were too vivid to be anything but real.

  She drew in a shaky breath, tried again. “What are you d-doing?”

  His smile fell. “I was looking for you.”

  Hearing that voice again was like swallowing her own dagger, cutting off any means of getting air down.

  “No. No, you can’t. Please—”

  “Calm down, Wren. I don’t want to hurt you.” He took several steps towards her. Her limbs froze in place, chest tightening almost unbearably. Cormac continued to advance on her until he was barely two feet away. The knife in Wren’s hand slid free, landing with a dull thud on the soft grass of her clearing.

  Too close, she thought. He was standing too close, but she couldn’t move her lips, couldn’t move at all.

  “Wren,” he said quietly, “it’s okay.”

  She wanted to laugh. Wren wished her mouth would listen to her so she could tell him all the reasons why it wasn’t okay. You’re a liar, she wanted to scream at him, a miserable, hurtful, liar. You said you loved me. Was it all a lie, Cormac? Everything we were? Wren wanted to tell him all of it, everything. How it had felt to lose him. How it had felt when he’d abandoned her in the one moment in which she’d needed him most. But she just couldn’t push those words past her lips.

  She knew he wasn’t here to help her, to attempt to fix what he had broken.

  He’d broken so much of her.

  The blue of his eyes pierced all the way to the heart she tried so desperately to hide.

  He who’d known her like no one else. Who had held that heart and punched his fist through it. Who would have watched her bleed gold until she turned to ash.

  “Please.” The splintered, whispered plea fractured Wren’s two lips apart and she hated herself for it.

  “I’m sorry.” There were a thousand million unsaid words in his eyes, so much raw emotion displayed there that Wren had to drop her gaze to the ground.

  Cormac’s hand reached out for her.

  A bolt of pure, unadulterated panic rushed through Wren, rocking her backwards and off balance. No, no, no, no, NO. She lurched away, flicking her dagger up into the air with her boot to catch it by the hilt. “What are you doing?” she said softly.

  His mouth opened to reply, but she didn’t give him a chance.

  “Why are you here, Cor?” She thought she knew the answer—she just didn’t want to believe he could actually do this to her.

  All he did was look at her with those eyes that made her think his heart was breaking just as much as hers.

  “Why?” The word strangled its way out. “If you can’t even tell me that much, then I think you should leave,” she said as though this small clearing in the middle of Marawood were her house and he had barged in uninvited.

  But in this oddly twisted reality, that was close to the truth.

  Cormac murmured just loud enough for her to hear, “I can’t do that.”

  A spike of that familiar anger shot through her. “Tell me why or leave?”

  He clenched his strong jaw.

  “You know what he’ll do to me, don’t you?” Wren asked him, tears of anger or fear sparking—she wasn’t sure which. “Do you realize what you’re doing? I’ll die, Cor. Are you really so heartless? Have you really changed that much from the boy who claimed to love me?”

  “It doesn’t matter! I don’t have a choice, Wren,” he fired back, eyes wide.

  “No,” she objected. “You’ve just been made to believe you don’t have a choice. There’s a difference.” Her tears threatened to fall, exposing her weakness. She balled up her fist for some semblance of control, nails digging into the flesh of her palm. “I am not the villain here. Not unless you make me one.”

  They stood at an impasse for a long moment, Wren watching the war waging inside Cormac’s head. He wore no visible weapons, though she knew they had to be on him somewhere. Perhaps a knife tucked into his old brown boot or beneath his light-coloured cotton shirt. He was a poor shot and had never wielded anything bigger than a short blade, so if it came down to it, they would be evenly matched.

  Except that Wren had always been better using daggers.

  “I wish things were different,” Cormac broke the silence, his words cutting through the blue-sky treetops swaying in the wind. “I’m sorry, little bird.”

  Wren slowly began backing away, putting distance between them, unsure of what his next move would be. “Cormac,” she warned, lifting her knife, prepared to defend herself. Even against the one person she never thought she’d have to.

  He sighed, walking forward, and suddenly she froze up again—paralyzed by the possibilities of him. And when there was less than a foot of space between them and she had to tilt her head back to look him in the eye, she whispered, “Who are you?”

  She could hear the intense pounding of her heart in her ears when he leaned in close, noses nearly brushing as one of his hands came up to caress her face. “Yours,” he breathed. “Still yours.” And he kissed her.

  A thousand emotions erupted within her, clashing and igniting and fraying the fabric of her existence. Anger, sadness, repulsion, alarm, helplessness, heartache, but most strongly a sense of want that overpowered everything in the next second. She was caught between knowing she should pull away and wanting to hang on as tight as she could.

  She was saved from finding out which impulse was stronger by Cormac, who pulled away but stayed holding on to her.

  “What…?” Wren trailed off, lifting her hand to touch her fingers to her tingling lips, as confused as ever. Her eyelids fluttered, one of her knees giving out. Cormac supported her with an arm around her waist. “You…what’s happening?” The words came outstretched in time, her tongue turning to lead in her mouth.

  “I’m so sorry.” His voice floated around in her head, and she felt him remove her dagger from her hand. She tried to reach for it, her attempt futile as both her legs gave out from beneath her and she had to latch onto his arms to keep some shred of her dwindling dignity.

  Wren thought Cormac said more, but her mind was too slow to process his words before they disappeared. A blackness was creeping in from the edges of her vision like ink spilling across a page. “Please.” She sounded so quiet, Wren wondered if her plea even broke the surface of the world.

  Without another moment to ponder where she would wake or the fact that he had tricked her, she drifted into the endless abyss of oblivion.

  Chapter Two

  There was something different permeating the air of Evaleer. Something Ace just couldn’t quite put the tip of his sword on.

  The capital city was usually buzzing with life from sunrise to sundown, loud and populated and vibrant—all the things Ace loved about it. Today, fewer people braved the cobblestone streets, the colours seemingly dulled though the sun goddess Rava shone bright in a blue sky up above.

  He wondered briefly if it had anything to do with the plague.

  Ace jumped out of the way of a horse drawn carriage, tipping his head to the driver with a grin. He came here when he craved the anonymity of the crowds and when he needed a break from being who he was and all that that entailed.

  He made his way to his usual tavern, The Margrave—the best place in his opinion to hear the latest rumours not just about the secluded royal family and nobles, but also news from all over the continent.

  Anyone who was anyone on these streets gathered here. Ace included.

  He sauntered over to a table in the back, taking a seat where he could observe the whole room. Just like the rest of the city, not many patrons frequented the tables—a group of men played cards close to Ace, and two women dressed in far too expensive clothes for a place like this chatted at a table by the door, throwing the men dirty looks when they got too loud. Only a couple other people lingered at the bar or leaned against the dark wood panels of the walls.

  Ace wasn’t exactly complaining in this instance. All the easier to listen. He dialed into the conversation the men were having.

  “Less and less arrive every week,” one of them was saying, his back to Ace.

  “More worried over the gold you’d be missin’ from them deliveries, aren’t ya?” the burly man across the table shot back, his gravelly voice grating on Ace’s ears.

  “Doesn’t matter what worries me most, Port,” he rebutted easily. “Those trade routes are important for more than just me.” His accent wasn’t nearly as thick as his opponent’s, the words flowing from his lips.

  The other man rolled his eyes. “Whatever, cap.”

  A different voice snapped, “Watch it.” That… That was not a man. Ace craned his neck, attempting to peer around the slick-tongued man at what must have been a woman sitting directly in front of him, but only managed to catch a glimpse of plaited blonde hair.

  “Have any of ya heard about the girl the king’s chasin’ after? Supposedly she’s Cebrevenese,” another patron at the table cut in, defusing the tension.

  Someone else refuted, “I thought it was only half Cebrevenese.”

  “Does it matter?” interjected the burly man from before. “There ain’t no way it’s human, let alone from ‘nother continent. She’d be most likely a witch.”

  “Should’ve burned her when they had the chance,” agreed the last player. “Saved anyone the trouble of deliverin’ her to His Royal Majesty.”

  Royal titles were often thrown around like insults in these parts. Ace believed it had plenty to do with the fact that neither the king nor his son and heir had made a public appearance in years. No one even knew what the twenty-year-old prince looked like anymore.

  And even less of the population had any faith in him as the next king.

  One of the other men spoke out, “The Bloodbird’s said to be roaming Marawood and we all know there’s some strange magic in that forest. If you go in, there’s no telling if you’ll make it back out again.”

  There it was. The Bloodbird. The name that spread like wildfire all over the Kingdom of Lithera until it was known everywhere that a girl of seventeen was said to bear the gold blood that cured those sick with the plague.

  Ace wasn’t often in the habit of believing everything he heard.

  The people of Evaleer were reminded every day of the sickness that ravaged the continent by the scent of death and rotten corpses that wafted from the southwest of the city—where the burial grounds lay in masses for those who died of the plague. For five hundred years, Lithians dropped dead in the streets or in their homes or at a secluded infirmary in the north where severe patients were brought into care if they could afford it. The entire kingdom had been forced to adapt to living with an incurable plague, and it had been normalized over the centuries.

  What a pathetic existence it was.

  No one knew the origins of the plague, commonly known as Death’s Shadow. It had swept across the continent after Lithera won the War of Seven Battles against the Witch Queendom of Ravynia, killing thousands of humans in that first wave. From then on, the cases had been excruciating and steady, limiting the population of the kingdom.

  It was no short of a miracle that this girl and her curious origins had been brought to light now, of all times. There was only a matter of time until she was found—if she existed at all.

  “We are not in the habit of bounty hunting,” that same harshly accented female voice chimed.

  “Well then, all the more reward for us,” one man admonished with a sardonic smile. The table roared with laughter before the conversation moved on to less interesting topics.

  Ace turned his attention to the pair of women seated by the door he’d noted earlier, dressed more appropriately for a tea parlour than a tavern. He was certainly intrigued to hear what they had come to a place like The Margrave to chat about. For it certainly was not the latest style trends.

  “I couldn’t imagine a more horrible outcome,” the dark-haired one who sat on the left exclaimed.

  “Well then let us hope the king manages to knock some sense into him before the time comes.” The other woman lifted her mug of ale and took a dainty sip. Ace almost laughed out loud.

  But his laughter died when the dark-haired woman added, “What he needs is a wife. Someone to teach him patience and a feeling of responsibility. He may be the Crown Prince, but he is still accountable for his actions.”

  Ace leaned forward, dropping his forearms to the table.

  The woman on the right caught his eye across the room, her cheeks flushing pink at his attention. He broke her stare quickly, acting disinterested as he stood up from his seat.

  He had little to no experience when it came to women, and he wasn’t looking to start anything now.

  Suddenly deciding he had somewhere else to be—which was indeed true—Ace made for the door, keeping his sea green gaze trained on the door ahead of him. Without pause, he pushed his way outside, barreling straight into a young woman on the street in the process.

  He swiftly caught her around the waist, ensuring she stayed on her feet. “Sorry, I—” Ace blurted, though his words cut off sharply when he met her eyes and the sun goddess dulled in comparison.

  She was considerably shorter than him, long dark hair and brown skin covered in freckles. This close, she tipped her head back to look up at him with startling wide copper eyes framed by black lashes, her mouth parting slightly.

  He could’ve sworn time stilled for a moment, his heart pounding in his ears. Or was that hers, thundering so loud he could have sworn the world shook? Hardly any space separated them, one of his arms still looped around her waist. Their breaths mingled as he watched colour flush along her cheeks, sure that his reddened as well.

  And then she was pulled away from him, a man who appeared to be close to his age stepping between them. “Watch where you’re going.” Ace was almost certain he’d meant for the words to come across as a threat.

  The woman was watching him ardently, and it almost physically pained him to tear his eyes away from her. “I’ll keep that in mind,” Ace drawled, his lips quirking up in a half grin. He held the sky-blue stare of the man, silently challenging him to step closer.

  He remained unmoving, and Ace had to commend him for that.

  The man pivoted, and Ace’s gaze pinned to the firm grip he kept on the woman’s arm as he practically dragged her away down the street.

  He stood outside The Margrave, simply staring after the pair for a long minute. She looked back at him just once, her expression troubled and curious.

  His mouth pressed into a firm line. Had she felt the undeniable charge in the air, the same as him? Or had it all just been in his head?

  Did it matter? It can’t. Not to me.

  So Ace turned back toward the north end of Evaleer, where Farrador Castle loomed, stone spires piercing the sky. He trudged up the streets, hands in his pockets and in reach of the ornate sword that swung at his hip. Reaching the stone walls that surrounded the palace, he waited for the guard posted atop the eastern wall to circle around before he emerged into plain sight. Hugging the side of the wall, Ace edged along until he found the seams of the hidden door carved into the stone bricks. Throwing his body weight into it, he managed to open it enough to squeeze his broad frame through, shoving it closed behind him.