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I felt eyes on me, smug and knowing, and was glad to escape them as I slipped inside the cover of the woods. Embarrassment slithered through me. While everyone slept out here on their bedrolls on the hard ground, we’d enjoyed the comfort and privacy of our tent.

I moved into the crush of soaring trees. My head fell back, looking up, searching for where they finished. The branches came together in the sky, tangling into a high canopy that blocked out the rising sun. Only patches of soft gray reached the forest floor.

The only time I’d departed the palace was in the company of a full retinue, and only then was it to travel to the most civilized of places, taking the smoothest, most well-traveled paths. This was a strange and mysterious place. Ageless. Magic hummed and throbbed in its bones. The dragons were long gone, but the land had not forgotten them.

I felt my solitude keenly as I walked through knee-high ferns and grass, dragging fingertips over the scratchy bark of a tree five times the width of me. I thought of Mari’s warning not to stray far, but I could not stop my legs from carrying me into the lush morning, through the dewy air, which pulsed and enveloped me like a second skin.

All of this had been kept from me while I had been cloistered away in lifeless stone walls. While I had lived overlooking a crowded city, miles away from land this wild, this free, where magic hid from those who sought to destroy it.

I felt alive.

I lifted my face to the mist, my faithful companion of late, inhaling the clean sweetness of it, tasting the new day in its fold. Birds shrilled, and I peered into the high branches, discerning a white bird, stark against so much green. I wondered how it survived, standing out so dramatically against its surroundings.

It cocked its head, turning an inquisitive pale blue eye on me, studying me unblinkingly for a long time. I wondered what it saw in me.

At last it turned, presenting a profusion of tail feathers. There, amid the abundant plumage, a needlelike stinger vibrated a warning. I blinked at that danger swathed in so much beauty.

The wild creature pushed off the branch into flight. I admired the span of its stretched wings gliding on the wind... envying such freedom as it disappeared from sight. The display reinforced how little I knew of this world beyond the safe, tidy corner of Penterra I’d left behind.

An eerie trill sounded from the distant woods. It was something different, unknown. Vaguely... human. I turned in that direction. Who knew what manner of beasts lurked in this forest? I thought of the huldras and jerked to a stop, listening for it again.

I knew I should return to camp, but when the cry did not come again, I threaded my way between the towering trees as the gray morning slid into a soft pink. Muted ribbons of light filtered down, dappling my skin as I went deeper into the forest.

Long drapes of moss sagged from lofty branches. It was a wondrous thing. Otherworldly. I passed in and out of the curtains of green, smiling to myself, imaginingIwas as free as that bird.

My fingers closed around one skein of moss, pulling the gossamer-soft length aside so that I could step ahead—only to reveal the man waiting there for me.

“Oh! You startled me.” I staggered back and flattened a hand over my suddenly pounding heart. I willed it to slow and steady.

He was no brigand. No foe. Arkin was one of my husband’s most trusted men. And yet I could not feel at ease before him, this warrior whose eyes looked upon me with such coldness. Such hate.

“Oh,” he echoed, the word full of mockery.

“I was just heading back to camp.” I motioned vaguely behind me.

“You’re going in the wrong direction.”

I nodded nervously and turned in the correct direction, suddenly eager for the protection of Fell and Mari and the other warriors, but then he was there again, moving to block me, not letting me pass.

He angled his head sharply. “I warned you. The crossing isn’t for the weak.” He swept his gaze around us then, at the dense green pressing in so thickly. “You should not have strayed this far.”

I met his mean little eyes with a lift of my chin. “I am not weak.”

“So brave, eh?” he mused, scratching the pale skin above his beard in long, curling strokes. “But I know what you really are.”

“And what is that?”

“There is nothing brave about you.” His gaze flicked over me in contempt. “Once a whipping girl... always. You’re not fit to be Lady of the Borderlands.”

Holding his stare, my stomach soured. A telling nerve twitched at my temple, and I resisted rubbing it into submission. I knew when a blow was coming. The lord chamberlain had trained me well. It was my gift. My curse. I could read the hunger for violence in a man’s expression.

My wide eyes ached in my face, unblinking, anticipating. “You think Lord Dryhten will approve if you harm me?” It was a gamble. I didn’t know my husband that well yet. He was cold and stoic, but I felt safe with him. I didn’t think he would want this. I didn’t think he woulddothis.

“Who says he will ever know?” He smiled then, a chilling, humorless grin that cut through his grizzly beard and filled me with dread. “There are many dangerous things in these woods.”

I clung to bravado. It was all I had. “Fell does not strike me as a man easily fooled.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. You seem to have made quite the fool of him.”