CHAPTER 1
Calliope
I cry the most when the sun sets.
When I double over, clutching myself to keep from coming apart.
I see his shadow, ever moving along the line of trees as I’ve watched for a season already, while I stand brightly lit in my golden castle. Here, day and night, the candles and torches burn, keeping me in the light lest I freeze to death.
Already my fingertips are cold as the sun retreats into the horizon. Soon, my handmaids will scurry around me. Fussing and tugging at me to come away from the darkness of the window, lest I freeze.
To come further into the candlelight, so the curse befallen me will be without its prize for one more day.
My golden castle, built for my mother on the site of an ancient war garrison, a wedding gift from my father for his beloved, who died giving birth to me. Now it’s my prison, despite the way its grand columns sparkle in the sunlight, flecks of gold mixed incomprehensibly with the stone. Surfaces that gleam crimson in the sunset or the light of dawn, reflecting and refracting.
Beautiful. Precious. Priceless. But still a cage.
The empty hollow in my chest darkens as I lose sight of his outline, hands pulling at my arms, worried voices chiming in my ears as I slip backwards, sending a message through the darkness with my eyes.
With my heart.
I see you. I feel you.
I love you.
Last spring we met, at a gathering meant to celebrate the coming of a new prince to the north. Our neighbors have not always been our friends here in Aramoth, but a tense truce has been held between our kingdoms and families for more than a decade now. I still remember the terror, as I was a little girl when the bloodshed stopped.
I think of the day my handsome and loving father rode out to meet the northern Dennith King. He sent all other Aramoth troops back behind the walls of the city; unable to fathom another child losing its father. Another mother wailing as the body of her son was brought into the square on a wagon piled with his comrades, none of whom would know the sunshine of tomorrow.
King Harrig of the North met my father on the field between the golden castle and the dark forest, the no man’s land where Dennith begins and Aramoth ends.
Both mounted on black stallions, the rode out in silence and stared at one another. The horses armored as well as the men they carried, snorting and pawing the ground, sensing the tension from their riders filtering down through the saddles and into their own hearts. Wondering if today they would give their own lives for a war between men that simply used them as tools of battle.
Instead, as I stood watching from this castle he built for a mother I never knew, my father drew his sword, and a deep breath filled my lungs as I prayed.
He looked so tiny against the Dennith King, a man half again my father’s size. Their people trace their line of descent to the orcs that roamed this land centuries ago. Sometimes, they mated with humans, creating a new race that drew the ire of both men and orcs alike, those that felt they were pure bloods and any others were destined to be their slaves. But where the orcs perished, the Dennith were able to continue, adapting to a changing world in a way their progenitors could not.
There are still those that call them “orc-kin” behind their backs, insinuating that they are something less than either side of their family tree.
But not me, and not my father.
King Harrig drew his sword as well, pointing it at my father’s throat, and my heart faltered behind the velvet and ribbons of my hopeful yellow dress.
I screamed as their swords clashed in the air above their heads, slapping my hands over my ears. My father’s death bellow was sure to be the next sound carried on the wind, and yet there was only silence.
Instead, as the sky opened up, they lowered their weapons. Rain fell with a thunderous storm that washed away the years of drought and warring, and lit up the sky with bolts of lightning that encircled the two enemies in a cage of jagged light.
By the time the storm was over, so was the war. The gods brought peace through the thunder and into the hearts of the two Kings in a truce that would be held by a handshake and a nod.
Until, on the morning of the twilight of winter, the gods took back what they’d given. Smiting my father with a fever from which he never woke.
That same month, the Northern King was ambushed on the road between the fire mountains by simple bandits. They were easily killed by the King and his men, much stronger and well-armed than the humans stupid enough to engage them.