How much farther to Voryn? I didn’t know—the wood seemed endless. Did the city even exist? Did it still stand, or was it just ruins? And if we made it, would the haughty, mythical people said to live there even let us in?
There wasn’t enough time.
Fox growled, a rumble deep in his chest, and in my fright I glanced behind me at him and met his inky-black eyes.
In them I didn’t see Fox at all.
Bruise-like roots spiderwebbed across his face. He bared frightfully sharp teeth and grabbed me roughly, his claws sinking into the flesh of my arms, and I prayed he wouldn’t break the skin, afraid of what would happen if I were to bleed on him now.
Suddenly, Vala burst through a dense wall of trees. A thick limb slammed against my chest and threw both Fox and me off her back. I tumbled to the ground with great force and felt something inside of my chest pop—and then a sharp pain.
Black spots danced in my vision. I took an excruciating breath, and the black spots bloomed, but the moment before I fell unconscious, I thought I saw a city of shining obsidian built into the wall of the mountains, torchlights gleaming across the rooftops like rubies.
Voryn.
It was real.
20
Corrupted
Fox
I DREAMED OF blood. The city colored in it. Guards chained me up, dragged me through the streets, people screaming. I remembered the smell of blood pumping through quick, fearful hearts. And the smell of fear.
That smell was not like Daisy. It was vicious. Hot and sharp and sweet.
“What do we do with him, Grandmaster?” one of them asked. The words tumbled through my head. I almost knew them. I clung to them. He held a sword, and it glinted in the torchlight.
“Wait until the woodcurse takes him,” a woman replied. “I doubt the public will want to see a half-human monster die at the pyre.”
I shifted in my chains, curling in against myself, trying to hold on to what I was—who I was.
Who was I?
The flower girl had called me a fox—what was her name? Soft and sweet. Sweet like blood, sweet like food. Sweet—I wanted to taste how sweet. I was starving. I was hungry.
I was—
What was—
Who was—
I?
21
The Monstrous
Cerys
I OPENED MY eyes.
Sunshine spilled in through a small window by my bed. My first thought was that it was strange that light would come in through my window—my room faced west, toward the baker’s shop, and the only light I really saw was just before sunset.
Until I remembered the forest, and Wen, turned into that hideous bone-eater, and Fox.
Fox, who was turning into a monster, too.
I tried to move, but my side flared with a sharp pain, and I sucked in an agonizing breath. My hands went to a bandage against my side, just underneath my arm. I had to find my clothes and find Fox. I wrenched the blanket off. Purplish-yellow bruises covered my skin—they didn’t look fresh. How long had I been unconscious?
The room I found myself in was small, with blue-patterned wallpaper and old wooden paneling. The mattress was lumpy, and a sweet-smelling incense burned on the nightstand. There was little else in the room—a washbasin on the other side, some liquids in various vials, my boots below them. My sash—the one with the crown tied to it—was nowhere to be found. I hoped Vala had it.
But where was Fox?
As I gingerly pushed myself to the edge of the bed, a girl, maybe ten or twelve years old, came into the room. Her dark hair was in a braid down her back, the kind my mother used to wear and weave dandelions into in the spring, and her skin was a warm brown. She wore a simple uniform emblazoned with a raven crest. I’d never seen that sigil before.
My heart began to race.
She gave me a wide-eyed blink and dropped the bowl of soup in her hands. The contents spilled out over the floor. “You’re awake!” she cried. “I must tell Petra—and the Grandmaster! I’ll be right back; stay there!”
“No, wait!” I tried to stop her, wincing as my side flared with pain, but she was already turning out of the doorway.
It was then that I remembered seeing, just before I blacked out, a city carved into the cliffside of the mountain, sharp and black as obsidian.
Was this—Voryn?
I didn’t have time to wonder. Voryn or not, I had to find Fox and Vala.
Pushing myself to the edge of the bed again, I tried to stand, but my legs wouldn’t cooperate. I hit the floor hard, pain shooting up my kneecaps. I took a quick breath, doubling over. I could barely stand, never mind walk, without pain piercing my side.
The girl came back a few minutes later with a woman in pristine white robes, and they helped me back onto the bed. The woman appeared to be a doctor. Her hair was long and brown, pulled into a simple bun, and her face was narrow and solemn. She looked about thirty, but when she spoke, her voice was old and crackling, like a wood fire, a sound that matched the smoky orange-gray of her eyes. She told me that I had two bruised ribs and stitches in my injured hand, and I had been asleep for four days—but she told me that I was safe.
Vala had brought us to Voryn.
The impossible city.
It was real, and we had made it.
I grabbed the doctor by the wrist and asked, “What about Fox? Is he okay?”
She didn’t say anything. Instead, she dedicated her concentration to unwrapping my injured hand and applying a salve that smelled like honey. Then she started to rewrap it meticulously.
“Please answer me.”
“I cannot.”
“What do you mean you can’t? Where is he? Is he okay? He needs help and—”
A cold, sharp voice interrupted me. “Your . . . companion . . . has been detained in the prison.”
A woman stood in the doorway. She wore long emerald-green robes, much like the seneschal’s coronation attire, and she looked to be around Seneschal Weiss’s age as well, her graying eyebrows thin and her long hair fixed in a high ponytail. Her pale skin was old and leathery, speckled with brown freckles. She held herself with the regal authority of someone of royal blood, and I resisted the urge to bow to her. I was too angry for that.
“What do you mean,” I snapped, “by detained?”
The woman gave the doctor a glance, and she promptly gathered up her medicines and gauze and slipped out of the room. Then the woman came closer, her arms tucked into her long sleeves. “Your companion has been corrupted by the wood.”
“Yes, but surely you can save him,” I argued impatiently, and she gave me a strange look. One that found an uneasiness settle in my belly. “. . . Can’t you save him?”
“There is no saving one who is cursed, child.”
“But . . . but this is Voryn. You have survived in the wood for centuries. It was you who gave us the crown that protects us from the wood. The Lady of the Wilds must know how to do something!”
“Ah. So you are an Aloriyan.” She gently sat down on the stool the doctor had occupied and gave me a scrutinizing look. “No one else would believe such lies.”
“Wh-what?” My vision began to narrow. I’d traveled through the wood. I’d risked my life. To get here.
And—and Fox had been right.
The woman went on. “Our Lady has not been seen for centuries. And we are no more capable of surviving the woodcurse than you. I’m surprised you even made it through the fog. It’s near impenetrable. It’s a miracle that only your companion was taken by the curse and not you both.”
Her words were like stones dropping from a terrifying height. Crack. Crack. Crack. I sucked in a breath, trying to keep myself calm, but the room was beginning to spin.
No, this couldn’t be right. It didn’t make sense. In all the legends, the Lady protected the enchanted people of Voryn. She had given King Sunder the crown.
All of this—everything—was wrong.
I had so many questions. But one was more important than the rest, at least at the moment.
“What will happen to Fox?”
She smoothed her robe across her lap. “He will be relieved of his curse.”
A seed of hope blossomed in my chest. “So there is a cure?”
“No, child. I mean we will execute him.”
My eyes widened. The hope burst in my chest.
“We rarely allow the woodcursed through our walls to begin with,” she continued. “Your friend had not been fully infected when you had arrived, but that is no longer the case. We cannot risk a cursed person within the city walls any longer. We will set him aflame tonight.”
“Aflame?”
“We burn the wicked of the wood,” replied the woman coldly, and left me speechless.
Fox was going to die.
“Your companion is gone. Only the husk remains,” she added, trying to be tender. She set a hand on my arm, soothing. She reminded me of the villagers who told me that my mother was gone. That the wood took her that day when I survived, along with Prince Lorne and Seren.
They’re gone, they repeated, over and over again.
And now, again, I was the only one to have survived the wood.
“Let me see him,” I said. I curled my hands into fists and felt the blood squelch out from between the stitches on my hand, dampening the gauze. “Please. Let me say goodbye.”
“And why should we do that?” the woman asked. “You are from the outside. For all we know, you could be another trick of the Wildwood. Another attempt to destroy us. We have not survived this long by trusting anything that comes to us from outside our walls.”
“I’m not.”
“Then how are you not woodcursed? The scar on your neck says you should be.”
Shit. I touched the bloom-shaped mark on the back of my neck. It was something I couldn’t deny. From what little I knew of Voryn, I was sure they could spot any sign of the woodcurse, living with the wood as they did. But maybe I could use it to bargain. “I’ll tell you,” I replied. “But you must let me see him first.”
The old woman inclined her head. Her eyes were the color of butterscotch. They should have been warm, but they reminded me of gems instead—cold and old and rare. She wouldn’t be taken for a fool, and I had the distinct feeling that she wasn’t the kind of person I could lie to and live to tell about it.