Chapter 1 edited
CHAPTER ONE
THE BEAST KING
SERENA
They dressed me for slaughter in ivory silk.
The gown had taken six women three months to make and nearly an hour to fasten around me. Pearls crowded the bodice, heavy as stones. Silver thread curled across the skirts in winter roses, and the train pooled behind me like pale water. Everyone who entered the chamber called it beautiful. No one asked whether I could breathe.
“Stand still, my lady.”
Mara tugged the final ribbon at my back, drawing the bodice tight enough to make my lungs ache.
“I am standing still.”
“You are trembling.”
“I am cold.”
It was a lie. Morning sunlight poured through the open windows, warming the stone chamber and catching on the silver pins buried in my hair. Lavender hung in the air, softened by the sweetness of melted wax. My ivory slippers waited beside the bed, and I had refused to put them on. The cool flagstones under my bare feet were the only part of the morning that felt like mine.
Outside, church bells rolled across the estate. The courtyard seethed with servants, soldiers and guests who had travelled from every corner of the western provinces to watch Lord West give his only daughter to the king they feared more than winter.
King Elios. The Beast King. Mothers used his name to frighten stubborn children into obedience. Behave, or King Elios will come for you. Finish your supper before the Beast King smells it. Do not wander after dark, or the king’s monsters will find you. The stories changed with each teller, and every one of them ended in blood.
“Perhaps the rumours are exaggerated,” Mara said.
I met her eyes in the mirror. She had served me since I was fourteen and had never been any good at lying.
“Which ones?”
Her fingers paused against my veil. “All of them.”
“That he killed three men at a feast because one looked at him too long?”
Her mouth tightened.
“That he had an enemy king’s bones built into his throne?”
“Serena—”
“Or the ones about the women?”
Mara looked away. People whispered that rumour only when my father was out of earshot. King Elios was brutal in war, and they said he was worse in his bed. No woman who entered his private chambers spoke of what happened there. Some had been paid for their silence, according to one telling, and some had been threatened, according to another.
A travelling merchant once swore that a former lover had been carried from the palace before dawn, wrapped in a cloak because she was too broken to walk.
The merchant had been drunk. That did not mean he had lied.
“They say he has never married,” Mara murmured.
“Perhaps none of them survived long enough.”
“Do not say that.”
“Why? Everyone else does.”
A horn sounded somewhere below, and my stomach clenched. Mara reached for my hand. I pulled away before she could touch me.
“How long?”
“A rider was sighted on the northern road at dawn. The king should arrive soon.”
Soon. Such a small word for the end of a life.
I turned to the window. Banners hung from every tower, my father’s silver hawk on its field of blue, and beside them flew black standards stamped with a golden crown and dragon.
King Elios’s colours had reached our walls before he had.
Below, musicians waited near the chapel and rows of soldiers lined the gates. My father had spared no expense, because he wanted the realm to see what my obedience had bought: safe trade routes, soldiers at our border, and enough power to keep hungry lords from testing our lands.
All of it had cost only me.
A sharp knock struck the door, and my father entered without waiting for permission.
Lord West looked as though the day had been fashioned for him. Silver embroidered the cuffs and collar of his dark coat, and a ceremonial sword rested at his hip, though he had not lifted a blade in battle for more than a decade. Grey threaded his beard and lent him dignity instead of age. His eyes met mine in the mirror, and something shifted in his expression.
Regret, perhaps. Then it was gone.
“Leave us,” he said.
Mara curtsied. I caught her wrist as she passed.
“Please stay.”
She looked at me helplessly. My father’s expression hardened.
“Mara.”
She slipped from my grasp and hurried out, closing the door behind her. The silence she left was unbearable.
My father approached slowly. “You look like your mother.”
The words nearly undid me, and he knew they would. My mother had died bringing me into the world, yet grief lay close enough to the surface that a single sentence could split me open.
“You always told me she would have fought you on this.”
His jaw flexed. “Your mother understood duty.”
“She understood cruelty too.”
“Do not twist her memory because you are frightened.”
“I am furious.” I turned to face him, gathering the heavy skirts in my fists. “You never listen to me.”
“I have listened for three weeks.”
“You have stood in the room while I spoke, Father. That is a different thing.” I kept going before my courage deserted me. “I have never met him. I do not know what he looks like, or what kind of man he is when there are no soldiers watching and no ambassadors to impress.”
“He is a king.”
“That is no answer.”
“It is the only answer that matters.”
“To you.”
“To everyone.”
He crossed to the window and spoke without turning. “Frost destroyed the northern wheat before harvest. Villages along the Grey Vale are rationing bread. Lord Cassian is gathering men beyond the river, and he will cross when he believes we are weak. Without Elios’s support, there will be war before the first snow.”
“Then ask for soldiers.”
“I did.”
“And his price was me?”
My father said nothing. The silence hollowed out the space behind my ribs.
“Did you offer me, or did he demand me?”
His silence answered before his mouth did. “The marriage was my proposal.”
His shoulders sagged under the admission. I stared at him.
“You led me to the altar like a sacrificial lamb.”
“I secured your future.”
“No father. You sold it.”
His head snapped towards me. “Mind your tongue.”
“You promised a man they call a monster my body before I had ever seen his face.”
“He is no monster.”
“How would you know?”
“Monsters do not rule kingdoms for twenty years.”
“No. They simply become kings.”
His hand struck me.
The crack of it filled the chamber. My head turned with the force of the blow, heat spread across my cheek, and a silver pin pulled painfully at my scalp.
My father had never struck me before. He had not done it when I stole his horse at sixteen and nearly broke my neck leaping a fallen tree, and he had not done it when I contradicted one of his oldest allies at dinner.
Slowly, I looked back at him. His hand hung half raised. Shock crossed his face, and pride smothered it before it could become an apology.
“Rena…”
The childhood name hurt more than the slap. He had called me that when I was small enough to ride on his shoulders, when I woke from nightmares, and when fever took me at nine and he sat beside my bed for three days. No one else was permitted to use it. Mara had never dared.
“Do not call me that.”
His hand fell. “I did not want—”
“Yes, you did.”
“You left me no choice.”
A bitter laugh escaped me. “There is always a choice. You simply decided mine did not matter.”
“This marriage is for the good of our people.”
“Then marry him yourself.”
“Enough!”
I flinched, and he saw it. Pain crossed his features, and he opened his mouth to speak.
A roar rolled over the estate.
The windows rattled in their frames. The sound was deep enough to travel up through the soles of my feet and settle behind my ribs, and the hair rose along my arms. Screams tore up from the courtyard, then more of them. The music broke off mid-note. Horses shrieked, and men began shouting.
My father strode for the balcony. “What in the gods…”
I gathered my skirts, slipped my feet into the ivory slippers and followed him out. A vast shadow swept across the estate. I looked up and forgot how to breathe.
A dragon circled above the towers.
It was larger than any story had prepared me for. Each beat of its wings swept dust across the grounds in fleeting ribbons. Black scales covered its body like polished obsidian, their edges flashing gold in the morning sun, and horns swept back from its skull. Smoke curled from its nostrils and vanished into the bright sky. For one heartbeat, with the sun at its back, it seemed carved from the night itself.
It roared again, and the sound entered my bones.
Below us the courtyard dissolved. Guests fled towards the chapel, soldiers shouted orders over one another, and horses reared against their handlers. Yet the dragon sent no fire down and reached for no one with its claws. It circled, unhurried, as if it had all the time in the world.
My father gripped the stone rail until his knuckles blanched. The colour drained from his face.
“The Black Dragon.”
I glanced at him. He had said the name like someone greeting an old enemy. Fear was in it, but so was recognition.
“The Black Dragon has returned,” he whispered.
Returned?
Before I could ask what he meant, the dragon banked. One enormous wing dipped towards the earth, and its golden eyes swept the courtyard, over the soldiers, over the servants, over my father, and stopped on me.
My breath caught. It beat its wings once, sending more dust spiralling across the stones, and held my gaze. The screams dulled. The soldiers shrank to distant shapes, and even my father faded from my awareness.
There was only the dragon, and me.
Warmth bloomed beneath my ribs, sharp and sudden and strangely like recognition. I pressed a hand to my stomach, and the sensation vanished.
The dragon went on watching me. There was no hunger in that look, and no hatred. Among the hundreds gathered beneath it, I seemed to be the only one who mattered, as though it had crossed kingdoms to find me, and had been searching for me all along.
