Alain didn’t respond. His chest rose and fell in shallow movements, his eyes remained closed. He was alive, but barely, and I had no illusions about his chances if we stayed here. He needed real care, proper medicine, warmth. And I needed to reach the castle, to fulfill my promise to my beasts, to find the answers that might save us all.
The mare had followed us downstream, picking her way carefully along the riverbank until she stood nearby, watching with liquid brown eyes that held more understanding than any horse’s should. But she was a creature of the forest now, touched by the same magic that flowed through the trees. Of course she would find us.
I couldn’t carry Alain. Not for the distance we still needed to travel. And I couldn’t leave him here, vulnerable to whateverother corrupted creatures might be roaming the forest. There was only one option.
With the gryphon’s reluctant help—it seemed to understand that saving the prince now meant undoing the harm it had caused—I managed to boost Alain’s limp form onto the mare’s back, fighting the pain within my own body. I secured him there with strips torn from my cloak, binding him to the saddle to prevent him falling if he remained unconscious.
“Easy,” I murmured to the mare, stroking her neck as she shifted under the unfamiliar weight. “Carry him gently. He’s hurt bad.”
She nickered softly, as if promising she understood. I took her reins and began walking, leading her deeper into the forest, toward the castle where my beasts awaited. Toward home.
The gryphon paced beside us, its movements growing more agitated the farther we traveled. The shadows writhing through its form seemed to intensify, black tendrils reaching deeper into golden feathers, corrupting more of what it had once been. It was fighting something, fighting the darkness that sought to claim it completely.
“Hurry,”it seemed to urge with each restless movement, each low growl.“Time grows short.”
And it was right. I could feel the change in the forest around us, the acceleration of decay, of wrongness. What had been a slow corruption during my first stay in the castle had quickened in my absence. The darkness was spreading faster, consuming more. The sacred acre, the magical heart of the forest where the uncorrupted animals had lived, was being tainted.
Time was running out for all of us.
We reached the rose garden as twilight deepened the forest’s shadows. The blooms glowed with unnatural brightness in the gathering dark, fed by the blood of their sacrifice. My father.
I couldn’t look directly at the central structure, at the twisted throne of thorns where Papa sat, his body somehow preserved, somehow sustaining the magic that kept the worst of the darkness at bay. His sacrifice had bought the forest time—time for me to find my way back, time for me to break the curse. But even his willing sacrifice couldn’t hold forever.
Until the next Harvest Moon, the roses would feed on him. Then they would need a new sacrifice. Unless I could break the curse before then.
I led the mare past the garden, into the castle courtyard. The massive doors stood open, as if expecting me, as if they had never been closed since my departure. Inside, the great hall was exactly as I remembered. Grand, imposing, touched by the same decaying magic that affected everything in the forest.
“Come,” I said to the mare, guiding her up the wide staircase that could accommodate her size. Animals had free reign in this place, another sign of how the boundaries between human and beast had blurred under the curse’s influence.
My room was as I’d left it, though a film of dust covered everything. I led the mare through the doorway and carefully untied Alain, lowering him as gently as I could onto my bed. He moaned once but didn’t wake, his face flushed now with what was surely the beginning of fever.
I built a fire in the hearth, my hands working automatically while my mind raced. The gryphon had refused to enter the castle, pacing anxiously at the entrance before flying off toward what remained of the sacred acre. Its corruption was progressing too quickly. Soon it would be as twisted as the forest itself, another victim of the darkness that threatened to consume everything.
I heated water, cleaned Alain’s wound properly, applied fresh herbs from my own stores. The familiarity of the task steadied me, gave purpose to hands that wanted to tremble withexhaustion and delayed shock. I needed to cauterize the wound. The teeth had gone deep, too deep for herbs alone to heal. I placed a poker in the fire, watching as the metal slowly turned red-hot.
When I turned back toward the door, intending to fetch more clean clothes from the wardrobe, I froze. A memory surfaced. The wraith who had watched me during my first stay here. The pale, ghostly woman with eyes that held no color but captured scenery of her past, who had appeared and disappeared like mist, who had seemed both part of the castle and separate from it.
Gaspard brought her here to spy, and I thought she was evil. But now, with Alain unconscious in my bed, with his sister’s name echoing in my mind from the stories he’d told during my fever, something clicked into place.
“Odette,” I whispered to the empty doorway where the wraith had often stood, talking to the former version I’d met. “You were his sister.”
And more than that, she was connected to Gaspard somehow. The realization hit me like the water earlier. The wraith had appeared right before he had.
It made me wonder if she’d been here more than that one time. What had she seen to report for that villain? I didn’t have time to dwell on the hurt, and part of me knew she wasn’t in her own power like I hadn’t been under the thumb of man.
The poker glowed red in the fire, demanding my attention. Alain’s wound wouldn’t wait while I unraveled these mysteries. But as I turned back to the grim task ahead, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Odette’s presence, and her connection to both Alain and Gaspard was a piece of the puzzle I desperately needed to understand.
Alain was dying. My beasts were trapped in a land that could kill them. The magic of the forest had until the next HarvestMoon before it demanded a new sacrifice. And I was caught between them all, a woman with emerging powers I barely understood, trying to save everyone while time slipped away like water through desperate fingers.
I retrieved the poker from the fire. First things first. Save the prince. Then save the beasts. Then, perhaps, I could save myself.
If any of us survived that long. I closed my eyes and infused my magic into his body before I began to place the stoke to his wounds. His screams ripped through the air, slicing me into a thousand pieces. I took his pain and made it my own, feeling how much it hurt for him in order to keep him alive.
I wanted to say I couldn’t let him die out of being a good person, or that his kingdom needed him… But as I began to cry out with him, I understood I needed him.
fifty-three
Alain