1. Florian Dawnchaser

Chapter 1

Florian Dawnchaser

It was watching me again.

It felt like I was losing my mind, even after ten years of the same thing happening. Like if I told anyone what was going on they’d lock me in a padded room because I was clearly a danger to myself and others. Because I was convinced someone or something was looking over my shoulder. Into my brain. At everything that made me who I was, at every single thing I did.

And judging me.

But there was no sign of it. No physical form hanging over me, no voice in my head like the sweet chiming song of Navia, the emerald I’d resonated with when I was seven. Just a presence, silent and terrifying; frightening in large part because I thought I might be imagining it.

Fawn did that too; imagined things. She’d go on at length about the trees and flowers talking to her and speak of her dolls as though they were real children. It had always seemed harmless to me, but Father...

A shudder went through me, and I glanced around the dining room.

Empty.

Well, empty but for me, sitting in my usual spot to the right of the head of the table, and a dozen servants, busily cleaning and serving and acting as though it were any normal morning at the estate.

As though my father’s absence wasn’t a glaring red warning light that signaled the end of things.

A handsome young man started setting plates out in front of me, perfect golden croissants and cheese pastries and other tempting sweets. Just the thought of them sat heavy in my belly, and I had to force myself to reach for something to put on my plate.

I’d been reaching for my usual cheese pastry, but the presence in my mind grew heavy, making my hand fall, and it landed on a strawberry tart instead. For a moment, I stared at where my fingers were touching the thing. Manners dictated I take it instead of the intended pastry since I’d touched it, so finally, I did. I set it on my plate and stared at it. The young man seemed surprised, but it was a small thing, a slight raise of his dark eyebrows, a twitch of his lips.

I’d learned very well to read small reactions. Father said it was important to know people. I thought it was important to see the signs he was about to fly into a rage.

Staring down at my hand, at where I’d placed the pastry on my plate, the four pale spots on the back of my hand were an eternal reminder of father’s anger.

Pain lanced through my arm, and I dropped the dinner roll as the fork bit into the back of my hand, driving it into the table with the force behind the stab.

I cried out from the biting pain before I could stop myself.

“Be quiet,” Father hissed. “We don’t cry like children in this house when we receive our just punishments. And we don’t reach for things halfway across the table, we ask for someone to pass them. We aren’t fucking Sunrunners, Florian. You will learn manners.”

When he finally retracted the fork, there were four puncture wounds in the back of my hand, the utensil having bitten deep into my flesh. I held my hand to my chest and blinked back tears.

I couldn’t let them fall.

I squeezed my eyes shut tight for a moment, forcing calm through myself. Begged Navia, my newly bonded stone, to help me hold back the tears, even though her particular brand of luck seemed to have more to do with physical grace than emotional.

But I couldn’t cry.

It wasn’t allowed.

Tears would make Father angry. He’d remind me I had no right to cry, because the punishment was my own fault.

“Eat your damned dinner,” he said, his voice an arctic wind rushing down my spine.

I had to. I had to eat, because if I didn’t do as he said, things would only get worse. He might turn his fury on Fawn, who was in the process of shaping her pile of sprouts into a tower, smiling at whatever game she’d made up in her mind.

I couldn’t let him look at her.

So I wiped the blood away with my napkin, ignoring when it welled up again, and picked my own fork back up. I could ask Olivier to bandage it for me after dinner, and he’d see to it. He wouldn’t even ask me what had happened. He’d just get that tightness around his eyes that said he knew full well what had happened, and then he’d do what needed doing.

Just like we all did.

I stared at the scars, unmoving. Remembering.

Fawn didn’t eat in the dining room anymore. Not after the one time he’d done something similar to her, and she’d spent the rest of the meal sobbing loudly, fat tears rolling down her pink cheeks. If she was incapable of accepting responsibility for her behavior, he’d said, then she didn’t belong at the dinner table with civilized humans.

I hadn’t been sure if he’d been trying to imply my little sister wasn’t civilized, or that she wasn’t human.

Somehow, I suspected he believed both.

Apparently I stared at my hand, unmoving, for so long that one of the servants got worried.

“Master Dawnchaser?” she asked, coming up beside me, her steps slow and a tentative smile on her face.

She was frightened.

Of me.

Because I was every bit as bad as him sometimes. My moods flowed with the breeze, fast and changeable and terrible, like spring storms rolling through the countryside at night, striking random buildings with lightning and leaving burned husks in my wake. I’d had screaming fits over ruined shirts and tantrums based on nothing more than anger that Father had taken out on me, so I’d proceeded to give it to the innocent people who worked for the family.

I tried to do better. To be better. But it didn’t always work.

With deliberation, I turned to look at her. “Yes?”

“Is . . . is everything to your liking?”

My eyes went to the clock on the wall behind her, and I stared at it for a moment, uncomprehending.

Ten.

Ten?

It was ten in the morning. I’d been sitting at the table, staring at my hand and the strawberry tart for two hours. Had I entirely lost two hours? The other servants, the ones who’d been setting out the food, the man who’d been surprised at my choice, were gone. The whole room was still and silent, but for me and the young woman.

“Everything is fine,” I lied to her. Because she hadn’t done anything wrong. She wasn’t the reason it was a lie, and there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it.

No one could fix what was wrong.

Father had murdered the Gloombringer, and the whole of the Summerlands knew about it. It had been splashed across every news channel and every newspaper for weeks. Lord Dawnchaser, a murderer. Lord Gloombringer, dead.

And Father had disappeared. He’d sent Aunt Ivy away in the car we’d arrived in, then he’d murdered the Gloombringer, and he and his assassin had disappeared from Gloombringer Castle, as though through a stone’s powers, without a car or a plane or a fucking trace.

They’d all left me there, sitting in Gloombringer Castle, like a complete fucking tool with my thumb up my ass, unaware of what was happening until the Gloombringer servants arrived with police, looking for my father.

The only mercy was that apparently everyone knew I was a fucking useless child and hadn’t been a part of Father’s plans. They said that Rain Moonstriker and Caspian Sunrunner had vouched for me.

For me! Two men who didn’t even fucking know me, to whom I’d barely spoken more than a sentence each, to whom I’d never been anything resembling kind, had defended me in the wake of Father’s disaster.

The Gloombringer authorities had seized Father’s bags, and I supposed I could have thrown a fit, but there hadn’t seemed a point in it. I didn’t want Father’s clothes and other things, regardless of whether they had authority over them or not.

It sets a bad precedent . Father’s voice was hissing in the back of my head. You’ve let the fucking Gloombringer minions walk all over you in this, and now they’ll know they can do it again and again .

But did it? Was it a bad precedent, suggesting that a family head shouldn’t get away with murder? I couldn’t imagine a circumstance where I’d want to murder someone, let alone not be punished for the action.

Society couldn’t exist like that. The purpose of society was to protect its members, and that included protecting them from people like me.

Did it include Father? He’d always held himself above all others, so it made sense he didn’t believe rules applied to him. He thought he knew best, knew what everyone in the whole world should be doing.

That conviction just hadn’t included murder before, that I knew of.

I abandoned my tart, waving to it and then to the young woman, who was still there. “You can have it, if you want. I find I’m not terribly hungry.”

And then I stood and wandered out of the dining room, aimless and purposeless and fucking pointless as a human being. Just like always.

Navia brushed against my mind, her presence warm and comforting. It’s okay, Lucky , she whispered. Everything is going to be fine. At least we don’t have to dodge the ice man anymore .

Lucky. She’d always called me that. I’d asked about it once, and she told me I was the luckiest man alive. Not because of her, but simply because I was. It felt ridiculous, because...me? I wasn’t lucky at all.

Yeah, fine, I’d grown up the Dawnchaser heir. On an enormous estate, given all the ridiculous expensive things anyone could ever want.

When I was five, the haughty, angry stable master’s son had told me how I should be satisfied with all I had and stop whining like a little bitch.

I’d offered to switch places with him. He’d be the next Dawnchaser, and I’d spend my life mucking out horse stalls. Not that he or his father or mine would ever have allowed it, but I’d been deadly serious. I’d dreamed of it, in fact. Living such a beautiful, simple life, where if you did your job and you did it as you’d been trained, everything was fine.

A life where there was no father to change his mind about what he’d wanted and punish you anyway, because you hadn’t read his mind and changed your actions to suit him. To move the goalposts every time you succeeded at his ridiculous demands.

Get into a Moonstriker university.

Done? Why didn’t you do it better, get better grades, do more extracurricular activities, make more friends, become class president?

Get perfect grades and show those snotty Moonstrikers we’re just as smart as they are.

Done? Well, why didn’t you take a more difficult course of classes? Those were clearly too easy if you were able to get perfect grades.

Nothing was ever good enough. Nothing could ever be good enough. It made me long to be Fawn, who never cared whether Father thought she was a disappointment.

Speaking of my sister, a door at the end of the hall opened and her head poked inside, scanning the area, then her perfect spring-green eyes locked on me. They were so much brighter than my pale eyes. So much more full of life. “Is he here?” she whispered, the words loud in the silent, echoing hallway.

I shook my head. “As far as I know, he hasn’t come back yet.”

Her nervous look turned into a grin, and she burst into the room, doll held tight in her arms. “Winnie said he wasn’t back, but I wanted to be sure.”

Winnie was...well, sometimes I wondered. Ostensibly, Winnie was the doll in her arms, but I had to admit, I wondered if one of the many rocks Fawn had amassed in her rooms over the years had bonded her. She’d been talking about Winnie for years, and whoever it was, they seemed terribly clever.

The problem was that Fawn...well, if she had bonded a stone, she didn’t really have the ability to tell us that. Whenever I’d tried to ask her about the presence of a stone in her mind, or a voice speaking in her head, she’d scrunched her nose, called me silly, and gone back to talking about how she needed a bottle to feed Winnie.

Because though her twentieth birthday was in less than a month, my sister still had the mind of a child in many ways. She’d never been able to grasp math or science or...well, anything past the playroom. I’d learned about developmental disabilities while I was at university in Moonstriker lands, but Father hadn’t been the least bit interested.

No, he’d decided about Fawn the moment she’d been born, with her wide, flat nose and small, upturned eyes. She didn’t look right, he declared, and walked away.

It was my first memory.

My little sister had just been born; a miracle, everyone around us had called it. The leaders of house Dawnchaser were almost always limited to one child. No one could make sense of it, but it had caused no end of grief to the family. Oh, there were dozens of branches of the Dawnchaser family, and some of them were incredibly prolific. But once one bonded with Soz, the family stone, they had a limit. One child. And father had managed two. The whole of Dawnchaser had been prepared to celebrate.

But first, there was something not quite right about Fawn, according to Father and the doctors. The baby was too small and weak, barely moving at birth, and she struggled with one health problem after another. Infections and illnesses seemed attracted to her.

Then, less than a week after she was born, Mother had died.

I didn’t remember her.

I remembered that moment, Father judging Fawn a failure and walking away, and it had happened before Mother’s death, but...I didn’t remember Mother herself.

There were pictures. An enormous painting in the main hall of a stunningly beautiful woman with white-blonde hair and the same pale, washed-out green eyes I had. Sage green, people called it. Nothing like the electric living green of Fawn’s.

It was just another failure in a life defined by failures, my forgetting Mother. I’d had the chance. I could have remembered her. But I didn’t.

Just Father’s dark glare as he’d walked away from the perfect tiny creature who had instantly become the center of my whole world.

Fawn.

I smiled at her, coming over to wrap an arm around her waist. Might as well take advantage of Father’s continuing absence to spend more time with the only person I’d ever loved. “What are you up to today? Tea party? Picking flowers?”

Fawn’s lips drew into an annoyed moue, and she turned to look at me. “Nurse says I can’t pick the roses. Why can’t I?”

“Because they have thorns, sweeting. Do you want roses in your room? I’ll get you some.”

She hugged the doll against her chest, frowning. “I want to pick them.”

Ahh, that was something else, then. Wanting to have them and wanting to get them, those were different things.

Considering for a moment, I nodded. “Okay. I’ll talk to the gardener and get the tools we need. You can meet me out near the rosebushes. But Fawn?” I paused, laying my hands on hers, where they still rested over her doll. “Do not touch the roses without me, okay? They have thorns, and you might get hurt.”

Her eyes narrowed, as though she had to consider the options, but after a moment, she nodded. “Okay. Winnie and I will go sit in the garden. We can have a picnic. And roses.”

“And roses,” I agreed. “But no roses until I get there.”

She bit her lip and nodded, and I hoped I’d pressed enough to make her remember not to touch them without help. Sometimes things slipped her mind, or she didn’t understand that things were important. Sometimes, I thought it was one of the qualities that made her the best person I knew. She didn’t think anything was so important that she allowed it to change her. With the exception of Father, learned by long, repeated experience, she didn’t hold grudges either.

She was a miracle, and I thought the whole world would be a better place if we were all more like her.

The presence in my mind returned, hanging over me like a death shroud, serious and sad and dark. It cast a shadow on Fawn and the lovely morning, but I rolled my shoulders back and refused to allow it to change my course.

Sure, maybe the world was crashing down around our shoulders. Maybe everything was truly awful. For the moment, though, Father wasn’t there to hurt us, and it was, in fact, a beautiful morning, and my sister and I were going to gather roses, because we could.