The Savage and the Swan Read online

  His sword twirled in the air before he caught it with a flourish that ended with his booted feet braced apart. “Show me.”

  “I do not need to show you anything—” Air sliced from my throat as his blade lunged for my hand, and I dived out of the way, tripping over the long skirt of my nightgown. Wincing, I blinked up at the dirt, rock, and tree-root-packed ceiling of the cave. “I’ll have your head—argh,” I screamed and rolled, strands of my long golden hair embedded in the dirt beneath the stranger’s sword.

  Breathing hard, I gaped at its owner, who glared down at me with his arms crossed. “I see. You wish to die.”

  “I do not,” I spat, hurrying to my feet.

  Stepping forward, he drew uncomfortably close, close enough for me to see tiny flecks of black within his deep blue eyes and the vast length of his golden lashes that framed them. “They will have their way with you. Mark my words, Princess, and then you will be discarded.” Every word was pushed from between perfect white teeth, the canines on either side sharper than any I’d seen before, and my neck cricked back farther as he loomed over me. “Treaty or no, the human kingdom tolerates our lot at best, and would rather see you burn than married to their precious bratty prince.”

  Lifting the hacked strands of my hair, he watched them regrow in his palm, but I didn’t remove my eyes from him. From the rigid, harsh cut of his square jaw peppered with days’ old stubble. His nose, strong and straight, twitched as his nostrils flared and he stepped back.

  As if I could finally breathe again, I swallowed gulping lungfuls of damp, earthen air.

  I’d never been that close to a blood Fae before—I’d never even spent time in the same proximity as one. The closest I’d come was hearing their bellowing howls and cries from our dungeon if they’d been captured spying or sneaking too close to the castle.

  Even before the attacks had begun, there had been nothing but silence since the first war. Nothing but a deep, brewing tension for years and years as the two lands became separated by more than growing water.

  And so I’d never known, hadn’t even heard that being as close as this stranger and I had just been, could extinguish breath and rational thought.

  “He’ll take you,” he murmured now. “Of that, I am sure, but for what purpose? He’ll never mate with you, never be allowed to keep you, so”—he turned—“I guess we wait and see.”

  Flustered and shaken, I ignored the warning lurking beneath his last words. “I need to go,” I said, trembling as I spied the sword I’d dropped. “They’ll soon come looking for me.”

  “Do you always do as you’re told?” A caressing taunt but he didn’t stop at one. “Do you always coast along the waves of this rotten life, hoping for better instead of taking action?”

  Rage unfurled from somewhere deep inside me, unexpected but not alarming enough to halt my tongue. “Stop it. You have no idea what you’re even saying.”

  “Oh, but I do,” he said, brushing his thumb beneath his plump lower lip. “And I fight with everything I am, everything I am not, for all that I am.” His gaze grew lupine, both bright and dark, as it slid over me. “Are you a tool or a weapon, sunshine?” My mouth dried, and he barked, “Become a weapon no one can wield. Pick up the sword.”

  Tears welled but not from fear. No, they came from someplace I’d rather not visit, but thankfully, I did not have to. I allowed it enough freedom to bend down and rip at my nightgown, the material now sitting just above my knees as I rose with the sword.

  The crimson guard didn’t look at my legs. He didn’t take his attention from my face as I braced my feet apart, inhaled deeply through my nose, and nodded.

  I danced around his first strike, and when he turned, our swords met with a resounding clash, my shoulder barking from his strength.

  Sweeping back, I advanced when he did and ducked beneath his arm. He laughed and then struck with so much force, I had to jump, and our blades met in the air, the downswing of mine saving my hand.

  “Better,” he said, standing back.

  I swiped sweat from my brow, knowing he’d been holding back—not knowing why but appreciating it all the same.

  In circles and leaps, we parried, blood trickling from my arm and leg. The cuts weren’t deep, I could tell, but they were enough to fuel the fire this stranger had stoked to life.

  And with noises leaving me that I hadn’t known myself capable of, I lunged over and over.

  He met me blow for blow, and I knew I would never best him, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t about that, and I refused to let it stop me from trying and failing and trying again.

  “The moon leaves,” he said when we separated once more, his face free of perspiration while mine dripped. “And so must you.”

  In clumps and heaves, my breath left me, lifting and lowering my chest, and finally, the crimson dared a glimpse at my body. His lips slackened, and he seemed to shake himself free of whatever thoughts had taken his mind.

  He turned and headed back inside the hollowed tree.

  “Your sword,” I called out.

  “Keep it,” he returned without looking back. “We will meet again.” And then he was nothing but shadow eaten by darkness.

  I was halfway home, the sun smearing the dark mountains beyond the castle in the distance, when I realized I hadn’t gotten his name.

  “Opal,” my mother called up the stairs of my tower the following morning. “Stars above, what is wrong with you?” she asked, opening the door to my chambers. “It’s almost noon.”

  Groaning, I gathered the blankets higher over my body, certain the cuts and nicks I’d garnered overnight had healed but not wanting to risk her seeing in case they hadn’t. “I had trouble sleeping.”

  Not a lie. When I’d gotten home after I’d hidden the crimson guard’s sword beneath an old carriage wheel in the fields beyond the castle grounds, I’d stared at the whorl bedecked ceiling in a trance, half wondering if I’d dreamed of meeting him.

  Until I remembered what I’d overheard beforehand and the reason I’d fled to my rarely visited safe place of solitude. I wasn’t sure of much these days, but I was sure it was no longer safe, and that I would likely return regardless.

  Mother pulled the thick lace drapes apart, the breeze sailing in to bid us hello. She smiled, always pleased by this, but that smile fell when she laid eyes on me. “You’re filthy.”

  Shit. Perhaps that guard was right, and I was nothing but stupid. For I hadn’t even thought to check my reflection in the mirror above my dressing table before falling into bed. “I forgot to bathe yesterday,” I murmured.

  After staring at me for moments I feared would unthread the truth, Sinshell’s queen tutted, muttering to herself as she sang out the door for Linka to come draw me a bath. Returning, her features, though only finely lined considering she was nearing two hundred years of age, creased deeply. “Hurry. Your father and I await you for lunch.”

  My stomach hollowed. Both fear and hunger. “I need to tend to the south gardens.”

  “You need to do no such thing,” she scolded with warmth. “Make haste, the food wastes.”

  I refrained from rolling my eyes at her overused words and threw off the bedding when she’d left.

  Linka arrived as I was undressing, a pixie who held mild elemental abilities, and got straight to work on filling the deep tub in the adjoining chamber. A gasp pulled my spine taut, and I turned before the dressing table to find her fingers, so pale they were a soft pink, flutter to her mouth. “Opal, what in the stars happened to you?”

  Shifting slightly, I spied what she saw in the mirror above the perfume I’d crafted and bottled myself, various combs, my tiara, rouge, the half-read books, and inwardly cringed. “Oh.” I thought quickly, hoping it was enough. “I had a late training session yesterday.”

  “Your father is not usually so…” Linka tried and failed to find the right words, and she was right.

  “He was in a mood, I guess,” I mumbled, then sped past her into the bathing roo
m.

  Caramel and vanilla wafted from the warm depths of the tub, and I climbed in. Feeling stiffer than I’d thought I’d be, I was thankful for the salted ginger Linka had tossed in to aid in faster healing.

  “I thought your father was busy meeting with his generals yesterday afternoon.”

  Stars shun me. I knew that lilt to her deep voice, the spark in her vivid cerulean eyes. She’d sniffed out my lie, something I too often forgot pixies were adept at doing, and now she wouldn’t quit.

  I could trust her. We’d known one another since I was a youngling of seven years and she was growing into her womanhood and entering service to the Gracewood castle. But if it came down to it, I was painfully aware that trust would only extend so far if she feared I was in danger.

  “I ran into a soldier in the fields beyond the castle,” I murmured, tugging the washcloth from her outstretched hand and dunking it into the water.

  “Your fallen tree, you mean. The remaining crossover.” Her brow was raised when I looked up, annoyed I’d told her of the crossover in my excitement after finding it some years ago in my youth. “Now is not the time for riddles, Opal. You’ve bruises on your hips and elbows, scratches that have yet to heal, too.”

  I hadn’t realized the crimson male’s sword had hit me so hard and frowned into the cloth as I scrubbed my face. Not his sword, I remembered, but the times I’d fallen while dodging it.

  “Fine,” I huffed, scrubbing my arms. “I expressed my concern over not having enough practice of late, and he decided to humor me.”

  “Who is this soldier? Elhn?” She meant my father’s favored captain, who’d often trained me when he was unavailable while growing through my maturing years. It just so happened that Father was too often unavailable.

  That was until I’d had a slight tantrum one afternoon and had almost done something unforgivable. Elhn had thought me unwell, but Father had known otherwise. And nowadays, he said my skills were enough that I could wait until he was free.

  The crimson wolf would most certainly disagree.

  I might not know as much as I wished I did, but I did know one thing. Father had agreed to train me himself because he’d do whatever it took to keep my secrets hidden. It would do no good for word of my gifts to spread, evoke fear, and place a target upon my back, nor would they help save this dying realm.

  “No,” I said in a tone curt enough to suggest I would say no more.

  Sighing, Linka mercifully let it go, her next words carrying a different type of wariness. “Look, I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but I don’t want you blindsided…”

  “I know,” I said, dunking the cloth. “About Prince Bron.”

  Linka quit fussing with the shelves behind me that housed oils, salts, combs, and cloths, coming away with a large one of the latter for me to dry myself with. “You know they wish to see you two marry.”

  “I overheard them discussing it, yes,” I said and finished cleaning myself.

  Silence trickled with the water as I wrung the cloth and hung it over the rim of the tub before stepping out. Linka wrapped me, tucking the edges of the cloth under my arm as she met my eyes, hers reaching my chin. “I think I now understand why you trained when you’ve no need to.”

  Indeed, it had been some winters since I’d last taken up a sword with my father. He could say he had more pressing matters to tend to with Vordane’s forces stealing into our kingdom in small groups to assassinate nobility and high-ranking officials, and the continuous ambushes upon the Royal Cove. Though the latter dwelled in Errin, the human kingdom, we all needed use of it for trade due to the narrow entrances and cliffs surrounding the rest of the northeastern lands of Nodoya.

  A weakness of which the blood king was aware.

  “A game,” my father had concluded a few months ago in a meeting with his war council. “He plays with us. We are the mice, and he is the feral cat, weakening us while he readies himself for a killing blow.”

  I’d listened outside the doors, my heart in my throat and the roses I’d plucked from the gardens to melt and bottle crushed in my trembling hand.

  Helpless. As their sole heir, my brother dying before I was born alongside my grandparents in the battle of falling bridges, I wasn’t locked away, but I was given little freedom to help in this seemingly endless war.

  And that guard last night, the enemy who could and perhaps should have slaughtered me, had given me a stale reminder of that.

  I could be a weapon. I could help. Instead, they wished for me to be a tool.

  “It’s for your own protection,” my father ground out from the head of the table as he chewed his venison, his fingers curling into a fist over the giant slab of wood. “Not only that but you will carry on our bloodline. With their protection, you can make haste in ensuring that happens. Send the babe across the seas to the other realms, I care not. But mark my words, Opal.” His voice lowered. “He will come for us, and it’s time we’re more proactive instead of denying this fact. It is clear now that we cannot defeat him. No one can. When he says it’s our time…” He spread his hands, not bothering to finish a sentence that didn’t need completing.

  The crimson guard had said the same.

  Mark my words.

  A babe. Across the sea. Every emotionless word out of his mouth pushed my panic higher, my fork nearly bending in my hand. “I cannot mate with a human.”

  “Of course, you won’t,” my mother said from beside me. “Should they agree to the betrothal, Elhn will accompany you to Castle Errin as your personal guard. He will see to that duty himself.”

  Duty.

  Dizziness swamped me. It didn’t matter that I didn’t want this or that I wasn’t ready for any of it. I couldn’t so much as fathom a time when I would be. They knew that. My parents were well aware of the fact that I was younger than many of our kind would deem appropriate to create another life.

  But that was my role, my duty, and I carried no delusions. My existence, my father’s detachment, my mother’s stern worry, my inability to create a life outside of this castle—my purpose was clear to everyone. Most of all me.

  I was loved, and I knew that, but I was alone. A princess but a replacement for a much-loved prince. A way to carry our family name forward into an uncertain future. Nothing more.

  A tool.

  I didn’t dare look over at Elhn, who I knew was standing in the doorway, hands behind his back, heavy gaze upon me. Older than my mother by at least a decade, he was handsome if not a bit cold, but he was also mated. To ask this of him… “And what if they don’t agree?”

  My mother gave my father a look that said she’d asked that very same question. “They will,” my father said, then nothing else as he finished his wine.

  The dark unspooled slowly as though time did not wish for me to leave the safety of our moonstone fortress and race through the kitchens and fields in search of the hidden sword.

  Regardless, two nights later, I waited until the occupants of the castle were slumbering, and that was exactly what I did.

  He was already there, and I wasn’t sure why I was both relieved and jittery at seeing his shadowed form seated upon the last link between our lands.

  His voice was crisp and toneless as though saying something at all annoyed him. “I came last eve, but you never did.”

  My palm nearly slipped as I hauled myself through the hole to take a seat on the other side of it, just as we’d done the other night. “Doesn’t your king need you?” The question might have been more dry than I’d intended, but surely, he had to know what a monster his ruler was if he hadn’t yet sought to take me to him or harm me.

  Acknowledging that perhaps not all crimson creatures were heartless killers who wanted us dead wasn’t something I was comfortable with doing just yet, but I’d often wondered if that were indeed the case.

  If perhaps there were some—just enough to turn the tide of this war.

  The guard said nothing. When I settled over the moss-blanketed wood, my furred boot
s dangling mere feet from his own, which were pointed, knee-high, and black leather, I looked over to find him grinning down at a small dagger in his hands. “He is likely too busy with one of his many lovers to care about my whereabouts.” Plunging the dagger into the tree, tearing a hole in the skirt of my nightgown, he said, “I trust you can use one?”

  “I can,” I said, though I hadn’t as much training with one as I’d had with a sword. Staring down at the dark hilt, etched and crusted with worn rubies, I shook my head. “Why did you come back?”

  “Honest answer?”

  “Always,” I said, tired of being kept in the dark until it was too late.

  “You intrigue me, sunshine. Just a little.” He made to rise and jump down through the hole but paused and lowered when I looked behind him to the muddy wall of the cliff. “What is it?”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “A secret,” he said, and I knew he was smiling by the darker cadence of his voice before I allowed myself to look at him. “Tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine.”

  Unsure why when I was only staring into his glittering blue eyes, I felt my cheeks heat. “Keep that secret, but tell me your name.”

  His head tilted, the action entirely too lupine, and purred, “We’re nowhere near getting to know one another in that sense.” Jumping down through the hole, he continued, knowing I’d hear. “Fear not, I’ll let you know when it’s almost time so you can shout it to the stars.”

  My cheeks burned hotter, and I was thankful he could not see. “Shameless,” I muttered, plucking the dagger free and following him down through the tree and into the cave.

  His eyes widened when I stripped out of my nightgown and tossed it to the dirt near the entrance of the tree. I held my lips between my teeth, glancing down at my leather training pants and long thermal. “I thought it best to wear more appropriate clothing.”