Princess of Thorns

He smiles as he lifts one arm, motioning for the horses behind him to turn. “I helped Crimsin escape western Norvere when she was little,” he says as Ror and I pull our horses alongside his. “She was eight, but so tiny I could hold her in one arm and still have room left over for a loaf of bread.” He chuckles as he urges his mount forward. “She slept most of the way, drooling on my arm like—”

“Please don’t embarrass me, my lord,” Crimsin says with an exaggerated pout. “I’ve convinced the princes to go swimming with my friends and me tomorrow morning. If you keep telling tales, they’ll decide they don’t want to come.”

“There won’t be much time for entertainment, Crimsin,” Lord Heven warns, affection still obvious in his voice. “There are serious matters to be discussed.”

“But surely you can spare the princes for an hour. I’ll take them to the swimming hole to the northwest,” she says, her eyes sliding my way. “It’s a magical spot.”

Northwest, the direction she told Ror to run to meet her witch aunt.

I nod in recognition of her warning, my stomach begi

She’s either crazy and should be locked away to spare the world her madness … or Lord Heven isn’t the kindly man he’s pretending to be.

The possibility makes a knot of foreboding tighten in my chest as I pull Alama to a stop next to Ror, awaiting my turn to be swallowed by the Feeding Hills.

Chapter Sixteen

Aurora

There isn’t enough air to breathe.

The passage through the mountains narrows and the ceiling drops so severely that the men must dose the torches and file along one horse at a time, pressing onward through suffocating darkness. The utter lack of light weighs on me like a coat made of iron, making my bones ache and my breath wheeze in and out. I do my best to control my terror, but inside I feel like a child again, a seven-year-old girl trapped in a cell beneath the castle, with beetles tearing at my skin and Mother’s tears wetting our shared pillow.

I’m not a child, of course, but I might as well be. I’ve allowed myself to be drawn into danger like a babe who grips the finger of anyone who reaches into its crib. I’m not safe here. I feel the danger lurking beneath Lord Heven’s silken promises. I didn’t miss Crimsin’s second warning. I understood what she meant when she mentioned the northwest swimming hole. She meant that—no matter how at ease she seems—I am in danger, and that I must flee to her aunt in Frysk at the first opportunity.

The opportunity doesn’t come.

Even after we emerge from the tu

I have a feeling they would, too. Lord Heven has stayed close. Very close. So close Niklaas and I haven’t had the chance to exchange a word without being overheard.

I long to ask him what he’s feeling, if his gut is screaming for him to run the way mine is, but I can’t even shoot him a look without being observed. And so I ride and smile and do my best to pretend I am among friends, and wait. …

We reach the settlement—a gathering of cottages on the far side of a waterfall that rushes over the cliff with dizzying abandon—by midafternoon. The exiles cut off the flow of the water so that we may pass over the slick stones of the riverbed, but I’m too far back to see how the feat was managed, and there is no way even a sturdy horse could pass through the rushing water without being swept over the side. Once the water is allowed to resume its flow—again via means I can’t determine—Niklaas and I are truly caught. Trapped. The settlement is built on a promontory cut off from the land around it by the river on one side and sheer drops into a cavernous gorge on every other. There will be no way out except the way we came. Should the exiles decide to allow it.

I’m careful to conceal my rising panic as Niklaas and I are shown about the settlement and assigned rooms for the night. I smile and make polite chatter throughout the feast, and put on a show of being grateful for the armed men Lord Heven assures me will be ready to march on Mercar within a few days’ time. I don’t allow myself to fully experience my dread until I am alone in my room long after dark.

I lie fully clothed on my mattress, shredding a piece of paper from the writing table into pieces, wondering when the men in the common yard will go to bed and it will finally be safe to slip across the settlement to Niklaas.

They couldn’t have put our rooms farther apart. I am in a spacious suite at the back of Lord Heven’s home, while Niklaas sleeps in a cabin three fields up the mountain, where the unmarried men live in small homes perched along the cliffs, separate from the family dwellings on the main level of the settlement. The exiles are purposefully keeping Niklaas and me separated. I wasn’t even seated near him at the banquet.

I was placed to the right of Lord Heven, while Niklaas dined at the far end of the table, near Crimsin and a mob of giggling girls. Crimsin was dripping all over him like melted candle wax by the end of the meal. If I hadn’t felt the truth in her warning, I would have believed she was a girl without a care in the world aside from convincing a handsome prince to warm her bed.

Warm her bed.

I wish Niklaas were warming my bed. It’s freezing in this room, even with all my clothes on and a quilt pulled up to my chin. I haven’t felt this chilled since I visited Jor in the mountains two Harmontynes ago, when a blizzard trapped the mountain Fey and the island Fey together in the great hall and an epic forty-eight hours of drunken gaming ensued. Jor lost his entire allowance in three hours, while I took so much gold from a pair of mountain brothers that Janin made me give it back when everyone sobered up. But then, I’ve always been lucky at cards.

If only I could say the same about quests.

“Please,” I mutter to the shadows on the beamed ceiling, willing my luck to change. Being taken captive by mercenaries was bad enough, but if I’m taken captive by my own people …

I have to find a way out and take Niklaas with me. I can’t leave him to be ransomed to his father. We must both escape. Tonight. Together we’ll find a way through the Feeding Hills and cross over into Frysk, with or without our horses.

If only the exiles would go to sleep and give me the chance to fetch him!

But Crimsin was right about the young men of the settlement. They’re thrilled out of their minds by the prospect of going to war. They’ve been drinking to it for hours, singing battle songs and hurling Feeding Tree cones into a bonfire in the middle of the common yard, shouting like naughty children when the pods explode with a sizzle of sap.

They’re ridiculous … and saddening. I’ve never been to war, but I know it won’t be the adventure they’re imagining. Even if I believed Lord Heven’s promise to hand over his army, I wouldn’t want those boys joining the campaign. We’d be better off with a smaller force of older, seasoned warriors.