Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

SHADOW DREAMS

I was burning.

I was burning—and the fire hadn’t even touched me yet.

Flames licked, ebbed, and flowed like living creatures, twisting—no, contorting to touch me. Shadows danced within them, and I swore I saw faces of pain peering up at me.

I backed up a step. And then another. My spine collided with a pole. I whipped around to face my obstacle, the object I’d need to break through to run from the fire.

But it was a man, not a pole. A man who stared down at me, his eyes glowing. His features were hard to make out. I could only see his eyes, so close to my own they reflected my nearly engulfed figure. I whirled again to see those burning shadows rear as if they were one unified cobra, ready to strike. They lunged, and I struggled back, trying to move, but the man wouldn’t budge, and they were close, so close, I tried to scream, but it died in my throat?—

I woke, gasping at the crisp air of my cool, shadowed room. Moonlight flooded the pinon floors, soothing my pounding heartbeat as I refocused on the surrounding reality. On the hills faintly illuminated past my window. On the small washbasin set across from my bed. On the familiar woolen blanket tugging on my skin.

Home, I was home. Safe.

I let my head fall dramatically back into my pillow.

I heaved a sigh, the soft light of the moon lulling me back to sleep.

I’d definitely been reading too many novels.

The dream stuck to me like an invisible oil the entire next day. I rose, like I always did, to start a fire in the kitchen.

I hesitated that morning. The idea of seeing flames felt oddly nauseating. But my mother would be up soon, and I knew baking could not be done without a fire.

I stared at the flames, entranced, searching for the shadows that visited me in the night. But the logs burned harmlessly, as they had the morning before and the morning before that.

“Oh no. It’s finally happened. She’s gone mad.”

The flat joke snapped my gaze from the stove.

My brother Danson sported a crooked grin, crossing his arms. “Should I call the healer? Brilliant, actually. A claim of insanity might be the only thing that could get you out of Spring Day.”

“I’m not that desperate,” I muttered, rolling my eyes. Though I hid it, I cringed within at the mention of our town’s upcoming match-making event.

Danson’s brows rose. “Oh really? I’ve seen you do far more to avoid the Argenti male population.”

“That is because the Argenti male population is full of leering brutes,” I snapped, shooing him away from the kitchen. “Shouldn’t you be waking Javis? Shifts start in a half hour.”

My eldest brother flashed his winning smile and backed away, hands raised. “It’s no secret you’ve been unimpressed with the other members of my sex, but I’m just saying, we’re not all that bad. Maybe it’s time you branch out of your normal… circles. And try to breathe a little less… fire.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, exhaling with a loud sigh. “I’ll take that into consideration.”

He was gone with a wink, dragging my youngest brother—eyes half-open—through the front door of our log cabin.

They would head to the mines, my father in tow. Our town, Argention, made its living primarily through silver mining, a trade my whole family participated in. My father and brothers mined the silver, and my mother and I worked it. We worked it so hard that it sometimes left rashes on my skin. It was a grueling process. Melting, cooling, hammering. Melting, cooling, and hammering again. Coins, jewelry, beads, serving dishes, and more were all sold by the townswomen to travelers and merchants.

We rarely kept our wares, not needing the finery, but occasionally one trinket made its way out of the selling basket. On my eighteenth birthday, almost two years ago, my father bade me select my favorite of my mother’s creations. A small dragon—devastatingly intricate in its carving—hung around my neck ever since.

My brothers had teased me endlessly, calling me firebreather . It was somewhat of a masculine choice, I supposed. Not a flower, nor a heart, nor a simple shape. But it seemed powerful, a feeling rarely afforded to the young ladies of my village. My mother had smiled knowingly when I’d chosen it, as if she’d fashioned it for me in the first place.

“Are you just going to stare off into the distance, letting the garden wither away, or will you be getting on with your chores this morning?” My mother’s sharp voice, lined with weariness, cut through the room. She appeared, tying an apron around her waist. “The plants won’t water themselves, dear.”

I nodded, not complaining for a moment about the upcoming ache I knew would line my arms after my thousandth trip to the well. I tugged on my mud boots and woolen jacket, inhaling the scent of the smoky stove before ducking out the door.

I was home. I was safe, at home.

I only wondered if that was all there was to life. If there could be more.

After morning chores, it was my duty to drop off all new silver creations and a fresh basket of my mother’s jams at the seller stands in the market. The elderly women who weren’t strong enough to work the silver maintained the booths on behalf of the town. They might not have been strong enough to work physically, but they haggled mercilessly with the merchants who came to trade their exotic foods and new fashions for Argenti silver. My father always grunted when he saw those merchant caravans cresting the Argen hills, making the descent into our valley. I never knew if his grunt meant approval, for they bought the silver he and my brothers mined, or if it meant a sort of silent regret since he and my brothers would have to return to the mines the next day.

But today—something felt different at the market. The cobbled roads, humble shack stands, the smell of roasting nuts and fresh bread were all the same. But a thickness filled the air that raised the fine hairs on my arm.

A familiar face greeted me as I handed over our wares to my mother’s most trusted seller. “Fine day,” Miralvda remarked, gesturing to the general hustle of the market and gleaming sky.

I nodded, fondness blooming in my chest, settling my unease. Miralvda—one of the elderly in town—never gossiped, never pried into who I would choose to match with on Spring Day. I would have picked her as our seller every time, had my mother not thought it imprudent. We had to maintain a bench of trusted partners—it was risky to play favorites.

“You seem chipper this morning.” I smiled as she thumbed each piece of silver, inspecting our work. “I think it’s some of her best?—”

Something shoved into me, and I stumbled forward, nearly toppling the table. Before I could catch myself, strong hands guided me back to stand.

I pivoted, pulling myself out of the stranger’s grip.

“Apologies miss. It’s rather crowded in these stalls, and I am rather large.”

Indeed. I was staring at quite possibly the largest man I’d ever seen.

Miralvda’s eyes shot back and forth from us as if she’d launch herself between me and this wolf.

“N—no problem,” I stammered, looking at the man. He pushed back the hood of his black cloak, revealing a face so carved it almost looked gaunt. It would have been unfair to describe him as anything but beautiful. Eerily so, his beauty seemed impossible. His eyes were as blue as deep water.

“May I help you with something?” Miralvda’s tone sharpened into something harsher than I’d ever heard her use with a customer.

The man’s head inclined slightly. He inquired about her selection of silver cuffs when I saw them. A collection of men scattered throughout the crowd—the largest men I’d ever seen, just like the one before me, with angled jaws and black cloaks drawn low over their faces. They were not akin to the usual types I saw at the market: scraggly old traders, pompously dressed capitolites, or young adventure seekers. I knew at once they were all together, even though they were dispersed throughout the market, some examining goods, some meandering quietly, some surveying the crowd.

I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Were they soldiers? They weren’t in uniform, at least no uniform I’d ever seen before. And how could they all be so impossibly large?

“Terra,” my best friend Gia broke my trance, appearing by my side. Her empty basket indicated she’d already dropped off her mother’s goods.

“Are you finished? We could walk back together.” She pointedly ignored the man next to us, who was shooting me a glance every other second.

I exhaled, relieved. “Yes, let’s.” I gave Miralvda a nod, who returned it in kind. Gia just linked our arms and steered us away from the table. We slipped out a small side exit next to Miralvda’s stand.

When we were far enough, I let out another breath. “Did you see those men?” I asked, hushed. “The huge ones, with black cloaks. Sprinkled throughout the market like… ants.”

Gia shrugged, the motion lined with a slight tension in her shoulders. “Foreigners, most likely.”

I shuddered. “They gave me the strangest feeling. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”

Gia gave me a sidelong glance that could have been mistaken for an eye roll. “You just want to get back to whatever novel is currently tucked under your mattress.” She grinned, deftly changing the subject. “Matthias, was that his name? The broad-faced knight with long waving locks of gold and washboard abdominals?”

I threw her a glance of equal amusement. “You would like to know, wouldn’t you?”

Two and a half miles stretched between our homes and the town center. Gia’s cottage was past mine, up the hill, but still opposite the forest. I loved my home, I did. But the past year or so… I’d been having dreams of grander lands, palaces filled with sparkling gowns and smoldering candles. Ships sailing fast over open ocean. They weren’t always pleasant. No, like the one the night before, sometimes the dreams were terrifying. But each morning I woke, it felt like something was yawning inside of me.

I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, as if my view would change upon reopening them.

When I did, I only saw the familiar trail home.

“You okay?” Gia’s face held genuine concern. Leave it to my best friend to never miss a thing.

I shrugged, shaking my head. Shaking free the fantasies and thoughts of a world beyond our small town.

“I’m just thinking about Spring Day tomorrow. I’m nervous, that’s all.”

But I wasn’t thinking about Spring Day at all, I was thinking about what came after. The safe and predictable life of domesticity prescribed to a girl of my age. It wasn’t that I didn’t want it. The promise of my own house and a family to warm it didn’t sound bad . But something about the thought of that life beginning now, manifesting so soon?—

“Nervous? Well, of course you are! It is your first, after all. I’d be concerned if you weren’t. Especially given Mav will be in attendance.” Gia gave me a small, knowing smile.

Her comment earned a healthy cheek reddening from me. Gia was three years my senior, and while she did not qualify to attend Spring Day due to her spoken-for status, her brother, Mav, did.

“I don’t want to talk about Mav right now.” I tried and failed to lighten my tone. “It’s not that I don’t love him fiercely, you know I do. But I—I don’t think I’m ready.” A fabricated image of me perched on a ship’s bow, wind rippling past my face, appeared in my mind.

As always, a sudden pang of guilt followed the fantasy. Mav would make a fine match. Everyone considered me lucky to have his interest.

“You two were so close when you were young,” Gia protested quietly. “You played together endlessly—so much I even felt left out for a time. And the other girls say he’s not terrible to look at…”

It was true, Mav was one of the more handsome boys in our village, athletic and strongly built. He had the same features as Gia, clear eyes set amidst pale skin, chocolate hair, strong brows, and dark sweeping lashes. He was good-natured, quick, and close to me in age—nineteen, nearing twenty. I spent countless hours with him in the hill grasses and forest creeks until our mothers finally pulled us apart for propriety’s sake. It was then I was forced into the open arms of Gia, to make a more appropriate friendship. And although she preferred gossip and hairstyles to trapping frogs for further study, we became great friends.

“And,” she continued, “we’d be double sisters. How could you not want that?” Her clear eyes questioned me, penetrative as they always were. I fixed my gaze on the path ahead, shading her from any guilt crossing my face. We had talked about it in our younger years, rejoicing in the possibility that we would cement our friendship in sisterhood. But back then, I couldn’t have imagined leaving Argention. And now…

“At least help me with my hair.” I poked her in the ribs, hoping my diversion wasn’t as obvious as it felt. “You know I’m complete rubbish when it comes to styling.”

Gia squeezed my hand. “I wouldn’t miss it. Tomorrow, one hour before sundown. And you better be washed when I get there.” She practically skipped away as I veered off the path and towards home.

Our small cottage was nestled at the edge of a thickly wooded forest, which butted up to the foot of the Argen hills. My father and brothers had built it when we’d moved to Argention from Lahar. I was only eleven or twelve then, but I still remembered the care they’d used to stack planks of pinon on one another. The precise angles of slanted edges met at a point each time, resulting in a geometrical pattern mirroring the layers of mountains.

I crossed the small field before my cottage. The uneasy feeling from the market, which had grown silent on the walk home, spread wide again in my gut. I reached the front door and spun around, half expecting to startle something or someone. But I only saw Gia disappearing over her hill. Nothing strange, nothing to validate the turmoil coiling in my belly.

I shook my head, dismissing whatever dramatics were being cooked up by my imagination. Too many novels, indeed. Stepping into my house, I attempted to will away any intrusive thoughts. Despite the valiant effort of my logical mind to puncture holes in that building shroud of intuition, I could not rid myself of the sinking feeling that someone—or something—was watching me.

“Well, look who’s home late, with not much to show for it,” my brother Javis said when I walked in with my market basket half full of Mama’s jams. I faced discerning eyes. Her work with muddled fruit was unparalleled, and we almost always sold out of her ingenious combinations of rathumby and bullionbur, gallonberry and clove.

“What distracted you today, dear sister? Laying in the meadows with Gia, daydreaming of your first Spring Day, perhaps?”

Talk like that to a sibling would have earned me a smarting handprint across my face from Mama, but Javis only got a sharp look.

“Our Terra isn’t one for the boys, Javis,” my eldest brother Danson replied. “I do not doubt that even if Mav does work up the guts to ask for a dance tomorrow, she will decline.” Though he said it as a statement, the way his eyebrows rose made it seem like a question. For a moment my family stilled, even Mama kneading dough in the kitchen, and they all looked in my direction.

“As I just told Gia…” I emphasized just to make them understand how much I disliked repeating myself, “I have no interest in a husband right now. And frankly, since you two seem set on barreling down the path towards marriage, or at least accidental fatherhood, there may soon be no one here to help Mama.” I said the last part matter-of-factly, making it seem like convenience formed my opinion, rather than a deep reluctance to sacrifice what tiny scrap of freedom I had and would surely lose when wed.

Danson choked on his drink. Mama gaped at me, probably for suggesting one of my brothers might unwittingly become a father out of wedlock. But before she could scold me, Javis quipped back. “That still doesn’t answer our question, Terra, now does it? If Mav asks you for a dance, will you say yes, or will you say no?”

“Boys, leave Terra alone and go help your father chop wood. Terra, bring me what you didn’t sell in the market today. And for the gods’ sake, can someone set the dammed table,” Mama said, fully recovered from my comment.

A few moments later, I did earn a smarting mark on my cheek after the boys had gone outside. But I could have sworn the corner of her mouth quirked up as she turned back to her kneading. It soothed the sting.

Dinner was short—not quite unusual with three miners at the table who wolfed down food quicker than a late December sun fell behind the mountains. The boys and Father spread themselves out in front of the fire in a post-meal stupor, while Mama and I tended to the dishes. We worked in silence, as usual, but something hung in the air. Something she wanted to say, but didn’t, which was unlike her. She rarely guarded her thoughts.

Later that night, long after I’d settled into bed, I used a sliver of moonlight peeking through my bedside window to read. I was lucky to have my own room—a result of having no sisters. My brothers were more than happy to sleep side by side in front of the fire in the main room. It was a position they likely would have found themselves in most nights regardless of having their own rooms, given the exhaustion in their bodies and the ale in their bellies.

I sighed into my novel’s crinkling pages. Matthias, the blonde warrior-prince-knight-hero, had just slain a magically mutated wildebeest, standing up from its mangled body only to find himself surrounded again, by wolves. He took on the predators, one by one.

C’mon, Matthias , I cheered silently. I shuttered my eyes from the page, imagining myself greeting him once the battle finished. I was his long-lost maiden, found at last, appearing from a supernatural mist. The spell that had kept me away was broken, now that he’d defeated that gruesome beast. We embraced intimately, pulling back only to examine one another. We’d barely looked at each other a moment before a straggling wolf, somehow un-slain by Matthias, leaped out of nowhere, raging red eyes trained on Matthias’s neck. But I was quick, too quick for the wolf, raising my hip dagger to its throat before it could bite into my returned love, making me the hero?—

I jolted at the sound of my father’s footsteps outside. I quickly tucked my book between the sheets before he crept into my room. He sat down next to me, and though I did not stir, he spoke.

“You do not have to accept his offer tomorrow, Terra. It is your choice. But you must understand the gravity of the situation. Spring Day may seem routine and archaic to you, but to Argention it’s a proud tradition. A dance means you will be entering into a promise with him. A promise that you will be courted with the intention of marriage. Do not make a promise you cannot keep.

“I have little to give you in this world, Terra, and this world will take more from you than it will share. But if there’s one thing I ever say that you remember, let it be this. There is a little voice inside of you—something old and knowing and of the universe. It is not the thoughts that swirl in our minds or the stories we tell ourselves, but rather a deep wisdom that lives in our gut. This is your intuition. Seek it out, and it will be your guiding compass. If you don’t know what decision to make, it will lead you. If you are blind, it will see for you. If you are afraid, it will be brave. Should you feel alone one day, remember, you are not. Because it is there.”

And with that, he gave my hair a loving stroke and got up.

I released a shaky breath. Did Father just tell me to refuse Mav? No, he loved Mav like a third son, and some days more than his own, depending on what mischief my brothers had gotten into.

But the words he didn’t say were the ones that struck me. Words I’d heard from everyone else in my family, from the other ladies in the market, from the traders in the square. From my teachers and the seamstress and the patrons who bought my mother’s jams. Hell, even Gia had implied it.

You may never do better than Mav, Terra. He’s a good one, Terra. He will love you. He will be true to you. You would be stupid to turn him down.

The thought reverberated through me. Every single day. One that a small voice, coming from somewhere within me, refused to accept.