Chapter One
Borrowed Feelings
The stench of horse manure was the least of what clung to me.
Someone was watching.
I didn’t need to turn to know it. Her disgust rose bitter on my tongue, cutting through hay dust and animal heat. Beneath it came something slower, sweeter—worse—coating the back of my throat.
Pity.
Heat crawled up my neck, but I kept my expression still. No flinch when fear brushed my thoughts. No reaction when resentment scraped too close. No sign that any of it reached me.
One mistake was all it would take. Castle servants survived by becoming part of the furniture: useful, unnoticed, quiet enough that no one wondered what they had once been.
Difference was never overlooked across Wesland. It was claimed.
The High King’s Collectors saw to that.
Anyone who noticed something strange risked being noticed in return. Yet the spy across the room, who had made a study of me these past months, seemed determined to test the rule. Her curiosity was not loud, not careless enough for anyone else to catch, but it kept finding me all the same—under lowered lashes, beneath the silence, past the grime I wore like armor.
Today, it pressed closer.
I drove the pitchfork into straw so brittle it broke around the tines. Nothing grew strong under the Haze—not the hay, not the foals, not us.
Lift. Turn. Dump.
The tines bit the floor with a crack. From the tack room, the stablemaster’s snore hitched, then settled back into its usual drunken rumble.
Rumors about the “wild girl dragged from the woods” had spread quickly through the Under King’s castle. Most believed me to be feral. Most kept their distance.
Not this girl.
Curiosity like hers carried a cost. Few lived long enough to learn it twice.
Before her persistence could pry at the seams of my indifference, alarm prickled through me. A different presence reached me from beyond the stable doors: warmth, steady and weighty—unmistakably his.
The hinges shrieked. Tucked behind a hay bale, the girl stopped breathing. A sliver of daylight spilled across the aisle, pale and bloodless, without enough warmth to trouble the shadows.
Outside, clouds dragged across the pall without thinning it. Footsteps crossed the threshold.
From the tack room, the stablemaster’s snore broke off. He stumbled out, blinking against the light, wiping his hands on his soiled apron.
“Your Highness,” he croaked, hastily straightening.
I kept my gaze lowered as the prince’s presence took command of the stable. That steady warmth pressed into the gloom, sharp against all the places I had gone numb.
Borrowed feelings always came at me in pieces: stuttering fear, sour resentment, grief fraying at the edges.
His did not. He was all warmth—contained, unbroken, unreadable.
That was its own kind of danger.
I bent lower, letting filthy strands slip from beneath my headscarf. In a gray country, anything bright got noticed. Let him see grime and nothing else.
“Your Highness,” the stablemaster repeated, too quickly. “Everything is as it should be. The mares are healthy. The feed measured. The slave at her duties.”
My grip tightened around the pitchfork handle.
Boots halted just before me. A cloak shifted; straw rustled beneath his weight.
“Carry on,” Prince Held Sterkte said.
But he didn’t move away.
Against my will, my eyes lifted.
He stood a few steps from me, framed in weak winter light, his broad shoulders filling the narrow aisle. A crimson cloak fell down his back, fastened with the High King’s mark: a flame of dark metal bent downward, feeding on itself. The Keeping Flame. The emblem swallowed what little brightness reached it, though that same light caught in the prince’s gold hair. His expression remained cool, composed, as if he were assessing timber and tack instead of flesh and bone.
His gaze should have slid past me.
It did not.
His sapphire eyes held mine for a heartbeat. There was no disdain in them, no idle curiosity. Only something else. Something close enough to recognition fractured my breath—then vanished before I could grasp it.
Heat flared beneath the grime on my cheeks. I shoved it down and drove the pitchfork into the straw again, harder than necessary.
I had imagined it. I had to have imagined it.
The years had carved me into someone unrecognizable. Hunger had sharpened my bones; grief had hollowed the rest.
Worry had barely begun to burrow when the stablemaster hurried to my side, clearing his throat as he tried to reclaim control. “This one knows to keep her head down these days. Does what she’s told.”
His meaty hand slammed between my shoulders, fingers grinding into the half-healed welts he had raised there days ago.
Pain flashed, white and blinding.
I did not move.
Stale ale soured his breath as he leaned in close, his fingers closing around the nape of my neck like a collar being fitted. “Show proper respect,” he muttered, forcing my head down.
His touch sent a jolt through me. Contact always sharpened everything. Emotion grew louder, clearer, crueler. His contempt cut deep, razor-smooth and cold.
A single step struck stone before us.
Measured. Unhurried.
The prince said nothing, but the air shifted. The stablemaster faltered, and a sharp, metallic taste flooded my mouth: fear—not mine.
He jerked back, releasing me. His laugh came thin and wavering. “No use wasting words on this one. Dull beasts learn by the hand.”
I kept my head bowed.
Lift. Turn. Dump.
Beside me, he shuffled his feet. “Your Highness . . . if I might show you the new winter fittings . . .”
Cloak and cold air moved together. The prince stepped through the stable doors, and the stablemaster hurried after him. Beyond them, two kitchen runners skipped across the yard, singing the rhyme every child in Wesland knew:
Count the light, one, two, three.
Hide before the dark finds thee.
When the final ember dies,
Don’t let the Donker see your eyes.
The doors thudded shut, cutting off their voices and what little winter brightness the Haze allowed. We had all learned the words long before we understood that the dying light was no game.
How was it that Prince Held Sterkte walked beneath the same failing sky as the rest of us, yet seemed untouched by its ending? Even after he was gone, the imprint of his presence lingered—warmth remembered in a place that had long forgotten it.
