Den of Blades and Briars: A dark fairy tale romance (The Broken Kingdoms Book 7)

My skin burned as if someone had lit a fire beneath my spine. With a jolt, I sat up. The room was silent but for the steady breaths of Ari. My wall of pillows was decimated. Somewhere in the tolls since we’d fallen asleep, he’d removed his tunic and was bare from the waist up.

Ari slept on his stomach, embracing every pillow, one knee propped up and over onto my side of the mattress. The carved planes of his back twitched. He groaned and his eyes were wild behind his lids, causing his lashes to flutter over his cheeks.

Hells, what dreams were tormenting him?

A sharp sting in my spine doubled me over. I couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t wake him. I needed to be free.

In my head I counted back to the last time I’d been forced to change. Dammit. This was the second night. How had I not paid any thought to passing days?

I slid off the bed, clutching my insides, and fumbled with the laces on my trousers. I shed them off my legs, and fought with the tunic. The only clothes I had, no doubt, should they be destroyed, Ari would certainly notice and have questions.

With haste I dug through the small pouch I’d managed to snatch before running after Ari to the docks. When I glanced inside, I cursed.

The herbs I normally placed beneath Ari’s pillow to keep him in a gentle sleep on the nights the curse forced my form to shift were growing low. I’d need to find a way to get more without him noticing, or I’d run the risk of him discovering the truth and likely killing me for how greatly he feared me.

I’d forgotten the herbs on the night of Astrid’s beating, and he’d been stirred from sleep to find me sitting beside his window. A strange place to go, but something drew me to his side of the longhouse, like a comfort radiated from him, unwanted and unnerving. But undeniable, all the same.

With trembling fingers I placed a dose of sleep herbs beneath his head, and watched as he winced through his dreams, but never woke.

Naked, I rushed to the alcove window and lifted the latches. Bile burned the back of my throat. All hells, I needed to hurry. The drop wasn’t far since the house wasn’t overly tall. Still, when I landed, I forced myself to bite back a shout when my ankle rolled wrong.

Stars were bright and the moon was high as the clouds parted. The blue light glistened over the damp soil, igniting the insatiable urge to run toward it.

Gods please.

Breath came harsher, bones ached. Panic gripped me when my legs gave out, and I was forced to crawl. I winced, on hands and knees, and forced my stiffening limbs to clamber around the thin fence rods, marking the boundary lines of the tavern.

Free of the fence, I staggered back to my feet and stumbled toward the Mossgrove. Almost there. I needed to be out of sight. To have anyone witness would be too great a risk of word reaching Astrid.

My heart felt as though it might burst. My blood scorched in my veins. When the shades of night touched my skin, every bone snapped and bent. My spine crushed in on itself. Skin hardened and sprouted black glossy feathers. I’d grown accustomed enough that I no longer screamed as the shift was forced from my blood.

Beneath the night sky, I could breathe at last, and the risk of death was gone, but the transformation was of the hells.

A tear slipped from my eye before I was flung into a new form. Small, lithe, hidden. A lone raven in a land without them. Where the ravens went, I didn’t know. After the wars it was as if they simply disappeared.

I was able to shift as I pleased, and often did. I’d shifted the night of the revel, after Ari had disappeared. I’d wanted to follow him before I’d lost him in the trees.

But on the second night, the shift was forced. An unnatural compulsion placed upon me by a brutal tyrant. If I ignored the call, if I did not step into the night, I would bend and break until I was nothing but ash.

Astrid made my lifelong prison sentence worse by manipulating my shapeshifting glamour with her ability to compel other fae to her fire ropes. One of those cursed strands was in my blood, bending me to her will.

To force a form from a shapeshifter wasn’t natural, and horridly painful, like a thousand candleflames were held a hairsbreadth from my flesh.

No mistake, if Astrid could, she’d see to it I was always a raven. Alas, my body would give out if I didn’t return to my fae form.

She’d spent the better part of a month preparing her entrapment. One coiled fire rope around my wrist, me thinking it was another way to bring me agony, but my skin didn’t burn beneath it. Astrid chanted a few ghastly words, and my flesh devoured her glamour and demanded my raven form forward every second night.

Cursed objects, even glamour, were nearly impossible to undo. I’d need to kill her, or have it shredded from my body and hope I survived.

Hard to kill the one who cursed you, when she also owned you and forbade it.

I was no stranger to curses, and was told by a Skald storyteller, once a heart is cursed it is easy to perform another. The way Ari’s king was cursed twice, once centuries ago, then again in the East.

My first curse was not given from cruelty. Not like the second. Riot knew I would be bound in servitude while he would be killed. He did it to shield me from the cruelty of the new royals lashed upon me for our family’s failure.

I tried to think of my brother’s features, tried to draw them out as a comfort, a reminder that once, folk had loved me. If I recalled correctly, he favored our mother. I did not know her since she died during my birth, but my father had always said Riot’s earthen brown eyes were the same as hers.

My father always spoke of my mother with such tenderness. I did not recall much of him, the memories were too blurred, but I knew my father had a dark, scratchy beard he’d tickle me with when he kissed my cheeks.

My heart warmed. The only bright spot since my heart began to thaw was now the memories of my family brought a somber, painfully beautiful ache to my chest. Before, I saw their faces and felt nothing.

I closed my eyes and soared higher, desperate to escape, even for a moment. Up here above the trees the world was different, simpler even. There were glassy shimmers of light across the rivers and swamplands. A glisten of dew on blossoms made the land gleam like silver dust coated the Mossgrove.

Distance. I needed distance from him.

Near Ari, my head was a torment of angst and hate and . . . so much more. In the treetop, I stared down at the tavern where he slept. I thought of how he spat venomous words, then slept beside a door as a small way to protect me.

He was utterly confusing.

The moment Ari stepped off his Ettan ship as a new ambassador, gashes still on his skin from the Northern wars, my heart . . . felt. The pain of it had come so fiercely, I’d doubled over. Rune had been at my side. He’d never seen me with so much as a smirk on my face before that day, and had been told to take me to the healers.

I’d refused, and my body responded the only way it knew how when it ached so fiercely—it shifted.

It was that day, Rune learned the truth of me.

Three turns later and he’d still not uttered a word. I didn’t know if it meant we were friends, doubtful, but there was a bit of relief knowing he understood the trouble. Almost like he looked over me.

He hated Astrid for what she was doing, and more than once the stoney-faced warrior had tended to the lashes on my back.

Once he even confessed his own secret—his heart beat for Bo. But with the reputation of blood fae, even as a Borough guard, Rune would not be a match for a Court of Hearts tracker.

When I laid eyes on the Northern ambassador again, the same, sharp anguish clutched my chest. I’d thought he was a man I wanted to look at for the rest of my days. I enjoyed his voice, his shape, his crooked grin.

There was a fleeting moment I imagined what it might be like to have his hands on me.

Ari had destroyed me; I’d been tossed in a frenzy of returning emotions I did not know how to handle without feeling like my body was splitting on all sides. I promptly decided it was better to hate him for it. To keep a healthy barrier between us.

Even with barbed words and sneers, a relentless tug in my gut to . . . I suppose . . . keep watch over the bastard grew stronger. Truth be told, when I altered forms, it was enjoyable tormenting him with small sightings.

But it did not answer why, out of everyone, he’d awakened my heart.

I didn’t know what role the ambassador had to play in my life, but when he restored heat to my heart, the shadow voice followed. A frightening clue that there was a piece of my past I did not remember.

A sharp breeze ruffled the glossy black feathers on my wings. Almost as though my wandering thoughts summoned the shadow. A breathless, eerie voice that was sharp enough to cut bone.

Little raaaaven, it sang, familiar yet new. I feel you. Do you search for me the way I yearn for you?

No! I screamed in my head and took flight again.

Shan’t be long now.

Go to the hells! I raged in my heart, enough a shrill caw slipped from my second voice.

I flew into the treetops, as if I could hide, when the only response to follow was the wicked laughter from the voice of a hidden monster.