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Chapter thirty-one

Seraphina

I t was a brisk day, filled with all the crispness of autumn, although summer had only just begun. Seraphina shivered as she rode through the King’s Forest—a stretch of woods spanning a great distance behind the palace.

It was the perfect place for the courtiers to engage in a spot of hunting if they needed sport. Her father had been quite the huntsman.

She had never really taken to it, though.

But the edges of the forest were deserted, and the small army of Queensguard riding in her wake was quiet, giving her plenty of space in which she might think.

Not that there was anything to truly think about. She just had nothing else to do .

Sir Tristan was awake. Olivia was preoccupied with helping the knight get back on his feet. Duchess Edith and Duke Percival were busy planning a silly party for her thirtieth birthday.

She should be content. All was well.

Aside from the vision that still haunted her dreams every night.

And the fact there was still no news from Mysai.

Sir Easome kept reassuring her it would take time for Drakmor’s army to march through the mountains of Valnoth’s Tail—the range separating the woods and hills of Drakmor from the deserts of Arath—and reach Mysai. No doubt it would be some weeks yet before they arrived.

Which meant she had nothing at all to do in the interim. Nothing but try to avoid her betrothed. And Lord Tiberius, who had seemed rather desperate to speak with her ever since her return.

She could only imagine what he wanted now. To smother her in more jewels? To start another fight between them?

In the very next moment, though, Seraphina realized she was about to fail at one of the only two tasks left to her when she heard the rumble of masculine laughter in the near distance. She knew those voices all too well, after having had to endure the sound of them polluting her court for well over a week already.

The Crow’s Twelve Sons.

Seraphina drew her mare up short and called out to Sir Arkwright, “Let us turn back now, sir.” But it was too late.

She had already been spotted.

“Your Majesty!” came the cry of the Crow’s bronze-skinned second-in-command, whom she had come to know was named Master Fitzjesmaine after he attacked Lord Tiberius for calling him a Kunishi.

Seraphina did her best to offer a feeble smile as twenty-four eyes fixed upon her all at once. Twenty- five, once she spotted the Crow glowering at her from his place, mingled into the pack of them.

Clearing her throat, she lifted a hand in greeting, though she felt as awkward as she ever did beneath the weight of so much attention. “Good day, gentlemen,” she called back, unsure of what else to say.

They always looked at her as if she were the sigil of her family—a gleaming stag wrought from gold—come to life prancing about before them. It was as if they had never seen a woman in the flesh.

“Have you come to watch the lads at their sport, Your Majesty?” another of the Sons asked her. A large, middle-aged man whose name she didn’t know.

There were just entirely too many of them for her to remember them all.

“I’m sure she hasn’t,” the Crow answered for her, rumbling the words in that obnoxiously deep voice of his. His one eye remained firmly fixed on her, as if in challenge. “I’m sure she was just leaving.”

Lifting her chin, Seraphina arched an eyebrow at the Crow when she contradicted him—merely out of principle—with, “I’m sure I was not just leaving,” despite the fact that was exactly what she had just been wanting to do.

But now that she could see just how much her presence vexed one Aldric Hargrave, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to vex him further. His mouth twisted into a frown when she nudged her mare in closer to their little group.

She couldn’t help but present him with a sweet smile in return.

“It’s easy entertainment, Your Majesty,” the oldest man of the lot informed her with a crooked smile that revealed several missing teeth. “The boys get restless, so Mother brought them out here to wallop each other a bit.”

At the realization they were out here beating on one another, Seraphina’s heart sank. But something the older man said piqued her interest. “Mother?” she asked, flashing a glance in between the Sons in her immediate vicinity.

“Master Fitzjesmaine,” the only gentle-mannered one out of the entire group informed her with a low dip of his head.

Though she knew them to all be the natural-born sons of various Drakmori noblemen, that Son in particular out of the twelve of them was the only one who possessed a noble air. He was even wearing silk on that day rather than leather.

Its emerald hue complemented well his tawny Drakmori complexion.

“It started out as a bit of a jest,” the gentle one continued in his explanation while the Crow frowned at them both from his perch atop that monstrously large stallion of his. “Since we are the Twelve Sons, some took to calling His Highness ‘Father,’ and so it just became natural to then call his second-in-command, ah…‘Mother.’”

“Thanks for the history lesson, soft hands,” Master Fitzjesmaine called out from where he was standing near two others who looked as if they had already been mid-bout before she arrived, if the current state of their bruised faces and bloody knuckles were any indication.

She swiftly looked away, her stomach twisting uncomfortably at the sight of the blood. Instead, she focused her attention back upon the one Master Fitzjesmaine had just named soft hands . “And you are…?” she prompted him with an apologetic smile. “I fear we haven’t been properly introduced.”

The Son swept into another bow, his right hand placed over his heart. He introduced himself as, “Kynielle Flemoine, Your Majesty…though the other Sons simply call me Kyn.”

“Master Kyn, then,” Seraphina compromised, not entirely sure she wanted to handle either the name Kynielle or Flemoine on her tongue. “You are…not a Fitz?”

Master Kyn lifted a hand and made a so-so gesture when he explained in a suddenly careful tone, “Well, I am , yes, Your Majesty. We are all illegitimate here, save for His Highness himself. But, ah—”

Master Fitzjesmaine interjected with a light, “What he’s trying to say without really saying it, Your Majesty, is that Kyn’s daddy was the only one to love him enough to properly recognize him.”

“Oh,” was all the response Seraphina could manage to that bit of news before the Crow drove his great stallion between her mare and Master Kyn’s standing form.

“What are you doing?” the little man snarled at her.

She stared at him, confused by the suddenly venomous quality of his tone. “Well, I was getting to know your little mercenary band before you so rudely interrupted—”

“I’m not just going to sit there,” the Crow bit out next, his voice kept low, as he leaned in close to her. Close enough that she could feel his breath caressing her skin. Close enough that she could have reached out and brushed her fingers across the intricate network of scars written across the entirety of his visage, if she so wanted.

She would have rather gnawed off her own hand.

“And watch you flirt with my medic,” her fiancé finished on that same low snarl, luring an immediate, disbelieving laugh from her lips.

“I was merely speaking to the man—”

“Did I truly incapacitate your lover in that duel?” the Crow asked next, and Seraphina jerked her face away from his as her disgust burned like bile in the back of her throat. “I didn’t think I hit him so hard that you must now go hunting for a new stud amongst my men—”

Seraphina didn’t know what possessed her then. All she knew was that in one moment, she was simply sitting there, listening to Aldric Hargrave level those vile accusations at her, and in the next, she had slapped his face with such force she nearly knocked the man clean off his horse.

Her hand stung. The sound of steel being unsheathed rang through the air, disturbing the peacefulness of the day as her Queensguard readied themselves for potential retaliation.

But for all that she had just struck their leader, not a single one of the Twelve Sons leapt to his defense. They all stared at her, wide-eyed .

Save for Master Kyn, who glanced away when her eyes met his, his cheeks ablaze. No doubt from the prince’s accusations that they had been engaging in a flirtation of all things from a mere conversation alone.

When the Crow finally recovered and turned back to her with a fresh snarl on his lips, Seraphina held up her hand to him again, this time to demand silence rather than to threaten another blow.

“That is the last time you will suggest the Baron of Crestley and I are lovers,” she vehemently informed the Crow, her voice a good deal louder and shriller than she had originally intended.

She would have been utterly mortified by how captivated her current audience was by this whole interlude were she not otherwise struggling to keep herself from trembling her way straight off of her horse in the sudden absence of her initial adrenaline rush.

Seraphina added, while she was at it, “That is the last time you will speak a vile word against me—in my hearing or otherwise—as a matter of fact.”

“And that will be the last time you ever lay a hand on me, Your Majesty ,” the Crow tacked on for his own benefit, though there was a certain threat held in his words that had not been in her own.

Seraphina thinned her lips at the sound of it and withdrew her hand into her own personal space, more than happy to thread her fingers back through her mare’s reins. “At least that we can agree on,” she muttered under her breath, not caring if the little monster heard her or not.

When she next turned her attention to the Sons, who were all still watching them both—save for Master Kyn—she lifted her chin in clear challenge, daring any of them to utter a word about what they had just witnessed.

Only the eldest among them took her up on that challenge.

“Well, that was a good deal more entertaining than watching Tayn and Eisway beat each other to bits,” the elderly man drawled.

Some of the other Sons chuckled now with the tension finally broken.

After a few more moments passed, though, the youngest-looking fellow there dredged up the courage to ask her, “Your Majesty…is it true that there’s going to be a ball soon?”

Seraphina pursed her lips at the realization that bit of news had traveled so swiftly. “Yes, that’s true,” she confirmed simply enough.

But she blinked in surprise when the young man asked her next, “Do we have to go?”

Before she could answer him, the Crow himself rumbled a flat, “No.”

Curiosity piqued again, Seraphina slipped a sidelong glance toward the prince. “You will not be in attendance?”

The look he delivered to her was just as flat as his tone had been a moment ago when he uttered another simple, “No.”

Before she could press the matter further, the man abruptly wheeled his horse around and nudged the stallion into a trot. He rode away from her and his men without so much as a backward glance.

She sat there, watching him go as a pang of guilt suddenly pricked her. He might have deserved the strike, but she was better than all that. She wasn’t her father .

After a single moment more, she too nudged her mare into a trot and took off after him. Though his horse had the longer legs and the faster gait, the Crow did not know his way through the King’s Forest as she did. It did not take her too long to overtake him, her Queensguard riding just behind.

“Your Highness,” Seraphina attempted to politely hail him. When he continued to ignore her in favor of staring stoically ahead, though, she tossed all manners to the wayside. “Crow.”

Beyond a brief twist of his lips, still the man refused to acknowledge her.

“ Aldric ,” Seraphina sighed, finally going so far as snaking out her left hand and grasping his horse’s reins. Like that, she prepared to bodily yank both man and beast to a stop if she had to.

The look he shot her was perfectly acidic when he reined his stallion to a halt and snarled, “What do you want from me, woman?”

“I am trying to apologize to you,” she expressed, with no small amount of exasperation. A headache pounded at her right temple from the effort of simply trying to exist in the same space with this man for more than a few minutes.

His expression shifted only slightly at her confession, morphing from pure acid to bald suspicion. He wrenched his stallion’s reins from her hand and asked, “For what?”

Seraphina swallowed hard and flicked a look back toward where they had left his Twelve Sons. Though she was certain they would have preferred watching the pair of them having words deeper in the forest, it looked as if Master Fitzjesmaine had them beating each other once more instead .

“For striking you,” Seraphina explained, sparing him a brief sidelong glance with the words. “You deserved it,” she added, her tone sharpening when she rounded the full weight of her gaze upon him. He met that gaze look for look. “And I do not regret it. But…” She shifted her weight in her saddle and glanced upward, feigning interest in the overcast sky barely visible through the trees. “…But I still should not have.”

Rather than accept her apology with all the grace and dignity of a gentleman, the Crow was swift to further prove to her that he was anything but when he rumbled to her, “If this is your poor attempt to lure me to your little birthday party , Your Majesty, you are doing a horrendous job of it.”

Her gaze snapped back to him as a fresh bout of anger sparked to life within her soul. She nudged her mare even closer to the Crow’s own mount, riding up alongside him until her leg had the great misfortune to bump against his. “Please,” she hissed in turn. “Do not flatter yourself.”

Now it was his turn to snatch her mare’s reins. He kept her pinned in close while he demanded, “Then tell me what you want from me.” When she didn’t immediately answer him, his features twisted further when he demanded a second time, “ Tell me , Seraphina. I am not my brother. I take no pleasure in these games.”

For a single, mad moment, she considered doing just that.

Telling him what she wanted.

I dream of you every night , she could have said. Except it’s more like a nightmare because you’re a giant, one-eyed crow covered in blood and bound in chains. And I’m still trying to ascertain what it all means .

He would think her mad if she did. But perhaps she was.

Perhaps she was going mad.

Swallowing hard as she studied Aldric Hargrave’s face within that nearness, Seraphina tried to glean what she could from that one dark eye of his when she softly informed him instead, “Sir Dacre is awake.”

His answer was immediate, his tone just as flat as ever when he asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

She pressed her lips together, fighting hard against a sudden urge to strike him again. Violence was not the answer. It so rarely was. She knew that.

But there was something about this man in particular that made her want to reach forward and topple him off of that high horse of his.

“Because I thought you might wish to know you did not kill him,” Seraphina breathed into that space between them. “And because I want to know what sort of man you truly are underneath all those scowls of yours.”

She searched the weathered crags of his face, his every scar, his every line. She scoured every inch of his visage for any hint of even the smallest shred of remorse.

What she found was yet another frown.

“Why do you care?” the Crow growled.

“Because,” Seraphina tried to answer, but the sheer intensity of his gaze forced her to break eye contact first. She skimmed another glance about the forest and whispered, “Because I simply need to know.”

A sudden jerk on her mare’s reins sent Seraphina gasping as she lurched in her saddle. Her gaze snapped back to the Crow at once. She narrowed her eyes at him.

But he simply cocked his head and asked, “Is it a want or is it a need?”

She made a face. “What does it matter?”

“These are two very different things.”

Seraphina scoffed and tried to wrench her horse’s reins from the prince’s grip. But he held them firm within his iron grasp. “I am not going to sit out here in the middle of the woods and argue semantics with you. Unhand me,” she demanded.

“Not until you answer me,” the Crow snarled, his breath hot against her skin in the unnaturally cool air of the season. “What do you want from me? Why do you care what sort of man I am?”

“Because I need to know if you are my ally or my enemy,” Seraphina finally snapped, far more loudly than she had intended. In the wake of her shout, a flock of birds nesting in a nearby tree startled and burst into the air in a flurry of wings.

Likewise, the Crow showed more of a reaction to those words than she had as yet ever seen from him. His saddle creaked when he shifted his weight. His brow furrowed when he suddenly looked away.

She already knew what he was going to say before he even uttered the words .

“You truly are a kirei if you think I am your ally, Your Majesty,” the Crow rumbled beneath his breath. At last, he let her mare’s reins slip through his fingers.

Seraphina swallowed and gripped those reins all the more tightly as her mind raced. What was she supposed to say to that?

What was she supposed to do now?

Ever since that fateful day Alyx had first arrived in Goldreach bearing the dark news of Arath’s betrayal, Seraphina had begged the Lord on High for an answer. She had prayed for guidance as to just how she was to win this war and end the bloodshed.

But was this man truly it? Was Aldric Hargrave truly the way forward?

Or was he to be her ruin? The end of her—and the end of all things?

It was the Crow who finally broke the lingering silence between them when next he demanded, “I want our wedding to take place on your birthday.”

She couldn’t help but recoil from the abruptness of his declaration. “What?” Seraphina breathed, eyes widening with her disbelief. “You just said you are my enemy and now you speak of our wedding?”

He looked back her way and snarled, “By your own design, we are bound by a de facto betrothal. We must marry sooner or later.”

“Why not later?” she countered at once.

But he gave her no quarter. “And why not sooner?”

Seraphina stole another glance toward her Queensguard, who lingered nearby, though at a respectful distance. She could practically taste the tense energy crackling off of Sir Arkwright while he watched them bicker.

“It takes time to plan a wedding,” she hedged, wetting her lips. “My birthday simply isn’t enough time.”

He narrowed his eye. “Before Wintertide, then.”

“We can consider it,” Seraphina hedged further. “Discuss it further with my Privy Council.”

“Perhaps I should write to my brother if the idea of a Wintertide wedding doesn’t appeal,” the Crow suggested in his painfully deep and grating voice. “I’m sure he would be interested to hear about these latest objections to you upholding your end of our marital contract.”

Seraphina’s jaw tightened when she asked, “And what happened to this nonsense about you not being the sort of man to offer threats?”

“Do not mistake me, kirei,” the Crow rumbled without pause. “These words are no threat.” In the wake of those words, his one-eyed gaze suddenly dragged from her own in favor of searching her face. For what, she couldn’t even begin to fathom.

His single, dark eye scorched a trail across her brow, her cheeks, her mouth. Beneath the weight of his latest bout of scrutiny, Seraphina steeled herself—refusing to shy away.

Let him look, if he wished. Perhaps her visage might yet haunt his dreams.

It took longer than she would have liked, though, for his attention to finally return to her own gaze.

But when it did, he gifted her a final snarl of, “They are a promise.”