Chapter 8

Chapter 8

I t had been three years since the Mark of the next queen appeared on Andrian’s chest, and he still wasn’t quite used to calling Verith home.

It was easy to pretend during the day. They—he and the other nineteen boys who’d been Marked with him—spent their days training with the best weapons masters in the kingdom, the same commanders who trained the most elite of Onita’s military. When they weren’t on the training pitch, they were in the classroom, continuing their education and learning the pieces of history that would be most valuable to a potential member of a queen’s Armature. Those history lessons, as they’d always been, were a solace to Andrian.

It was the nights when things became difficult.

He was always driven awake by a panic and fear that he could never quite place. Images would flash through his mind—the faces of his father and younger brother, Gabriel. His mother, crying quietly as she said goodbye to him through the closing door of a carriage. There were more … flashes and glimpses of a small dark-haired girl he didn’t know, teetering wildly through a lush forest of trees dripping with leaves like emeralds.

Tonight was no exception.

The dreams dissipated from his mind as he woke with a jolt, stomach in knots. A sensation coiled deep in his gut, the feeling of something yanking and grabbing at his skin before pulling pieces of him away. It felt like the night he’d been Marked but without the pain. No, this feeling didn’t hurt, but it also didn’t feel right.

His fear deepened when a hand gripped his skin, fingers digging into his arm as it roughly shook him into consciousness.

“Andrian! Wake up!” A voice whispered urgently in his ear.

It was Sebastian. Despite Andrian’s general proclivity to being a recluse, he and the boy had become friends since their arrival in the capital. They were the closest in age, the oldest amongst their group, and their companionship had come easy.

There was nothing friendly in Sebastian’s voice now, though. All Andrian heard was panic, weak and desperate.

“Andrian, seriously. Can you see us? We’re trying to turn the lights on, but it’s so dark. Ryland hit the lunestair panel, but nothing happened. We need to get Cedoric or even Kalen ? —”

Andrian’s eyes flew open as he shot from bed, a startled Sebastian falling back with a yelp. “Andrian, what in Enfara ? —”

“I—I think I know what’s wrong.” Andrian’s voice was calm, even though he felt anything but. He also saw the inky darkness spreading around them, so pitch black it was as if the depths of the pit had leaked into the world, right into their barracks.

But it wasn’t something from Enfara.

Not that it made it any less cursed.

For despite the darkness, he could still see. Not with his eyes—not exactly—but with his other senses. A new sense. The thing that seeped off his skin and coiled in his gut. Everything the darkness touched, he could feel and see and recognize.

Because the darkness was him .

A memory tickled the back of his mind, a page from a dusty textbook he’d read no more than a year ago. A book so old and worn, it was a marvel that it still existed—especially considering the dark piece of Leuxrithian history it described.

“It’s me,” he whispered, voice flat, fear and understanding still raging a war. With an instinct as natural as breathing, he pulled those shadows back into his skin.

They withdrew from the corners of the room, slowly revealing the allume lamps and lights that were all switched on during the desperate quest for illumination. When the last wisp of darkness vanished beneath his skin, Andrian faced Sebastian. The other boy sat on the edge of Andrian’s cot, eyes wide and face filled with confusion and disbelief. The rest of the boys in the room wore similar expressions as they slowly inched closer.

Andrian’s frustration burst through him like a ray of sunlight, melting his usual iciness. He wasn’t some circus trick to be marveled at. And he definitely didn’t want to be scrutinized by a room full of curious boys who he had to live with for the next eighteen years.

But even with his anger … these boys were still all he had left. Something had just happened to him. Something he didn’t understand and was terrified to face.

“You’re a reykr . One of the shadow-wielders. I didn’t … I didn’t think they still existed. I thought shadow magic was a myth,” Sebastian whispered, a soft statement that confirmed what Andrian had read on that page not long ago.

Andrian’s irritation fizzled out, ice sliding back in.

Everything in him went cold. He’d known the truth the moment he’d reached out and touched the darkness with his mind, pulling it beneath his skin. It was a power found only in the northern kingdom, the kingdom of his mother’s people. A power that had been extinct for nearly a thousand years, the legends of it rooted in a bloody and violent past. Shadow magic was a bedtime story meant to terrify children. And, besides that … Andrian lifted his head to meet his friend’s stare.

“It’s … that’s impossible, right? I’m Onitan.” He glanced back down at his empty palms, as if he could still see the magic swirling in his blood, just beneath. “No one on the continent has shadow magic. Not anymore.”

Even as he said it, he knew he was wrong. Despite the cold shock, he felt no denial; something in his soul had cracked open, and those shadows spilled out. As much as his mind snapped about in lashing anger, it was tempered by his heart.

Whatever this was, it was a part of him. Something that was always there, just buried beneath the surface until he was old enough to set it free. As simple to understand as the breath in his lungs or the beat of his heart. It wasn’t something he could understand, and at thirteen years old, he wasn’t inclined to.

“You’re right,” a soft-spoken boy with golden hair—Drystan—said. “There’s never been a reykr reported in Onita before. But you said your mother was from Leuxrith, didn’t you?”

Andrian gulped. His mother had shared so much about her culture, her people, but she’d never shared this. And those history books, the ones that spoke of the reykr … none of them were kind to those who wielded shadows. The opposite of the light magic that fueled Onita, some historians even considered it an abomination, a dark perversion of the gods’ gifts born in the shadows of the cold northern mountains.

“Does … does this mean I’m evil?” Something was quiet and broken in his question. A boy who’d only ever wanted to be accepted but faced yet another burden that would just make him more different.

“Andrian, no.” Sebastian gripped his forearm, meeting his stare. “You’re not evil. The history books are not always right; you know that better than any of us. Maybe … maybe we just don’t know everything there is to know about magic. But we’ll learn what this is and what it means. We’ll help you.”

The mumbled words of affirmation from the group of boys who’d become like brothers were the last things Andrian heard before floating into a void of shadow and starlight.

The memory shook something free within Andrian’s soul. Those feelings of brotherhood reminded him, for just a moment, who he really was. Clawing desperately for purchase, he felt his binds briefly slip free as he jolted awake.

Or … partially awake. Free from the eternal vacuum of his thoughts and memories, he still had no control, but he had awareness. Feelings. Sensations.

With a world-tilting suddenness, he became cognizant of a feminine body in his lap, of dark hair tangled in his hands. He felt lips on his but knew instantly it wasn’t her .

Her scent was wrong. He would search for that smell of eucalyptus and jasmine, hinted with cedarwood, even in death. And he knew that even if this was the afterlife, even if he was no more, he still would know that this girl in his lap with her lips on his was wrong .

The realization was enough for him to push past whatever power held him. He struggled, desperate to stop the feeling of wrongness. But he stopped, horror dripping through even his paralyzed soul as he saw a pair of forest-green eyes staring at him across a banquet hall.

Her face was so achingly, painfully, beautifully familiar. But it was also … changed. Her skin had lost its bright pallor, no longer capable of that flush he loved so much, her cheeks gaunt and her expression haunted and broken. Her mouth was gagged, and her clothes were torn and filthy, her body bound and tied in a kneeling position on the cold marble floor.

She became all he saw. The center of his entire being. He pushed against his binds with an internal roar that might’ve ripped his soul in two.

If he even had a soul left to cleave.

But just like that, with hardly a whisper of effort, the wave of shadow and darkness that had held him captive for what could’ve been an eternity washed over him again, dragging him back deep beneath the surface and wiping the images of the broken girl with dull green eyes from his consciousness.

“ Your little queen is nothing to you, and the more you fight me, the more I shall prove it. ”

The parting words, spoken in a masculine voice as dark and eternal as the shadows stretched by the sun at dusk, chased him into oblivion.