Few would ever venture inside willingly, but if you find the heart of the barrow, then you can sidestep into another Other World, another barrow.
And walk out of it a thousand miles from where you entered.
The fae don’t use them, considering them haunted. It’s forbidden to enter one, and without a ward against the barrow’s magic, you can be lost to the Other Worlds.
But my father’s been slowly mapping their paths, sending his wraithen scouts to test the pathways. Many don’t return—the issue with exploring such newfound paths is that nobody knows the dangers of a dragon’s dreams until it’s too late. But the risk is work the reward in my father’s eyes.
He yearns to deliver an army right into the heart of any court in the land if he so wishes.
The Blessed fae would be practically defenseless.
But first we have to shatter our curse so his wraithen armies can walk beneath the sunlight without being struck down.
I saunter through an ancient arch of a broken castle, a shiver running over my skin as I exit the barrow. Sound intrudes again. A chatter of squirrels nearby. None of the fae know just how vulnerable they are. They barely even guard these places.
The jingle of tack echoes through the air.
There. Sunlight sparking off something bright. A carriage, by the look of it. One drawn by a brace of matching fae horses, their coats rippling silver beneath the light. I hide in the shadows, my heart skipping a beat.
Keir.
He’s here.
In the flesh.
Suddenly, I can taste betrayal in my mouth and my heart skips a beat. Keir and I spoke once of trust and I remember the look in his eyes when he realized who and what I truly was.
There’s no coming back from that.
For either of us.
But he doesn’t need the horn. He merely wants it in order to control its power.
And I need it.
I watch the carriage spill into the clearing below us, where it draws to a halt and someone steps down from it. I can barely see him. A tall figure, garbed in a cloak. Tugging his gloves from his fingers, he circles the ruins. Looking for me, I think.
Keir.
I Sift through the shadows, watching him stalk through the broken stone towers. His shoulders are broader than I remember.
To see him in my dreams was dangerous enough, but there’s a potency about him in the flesh that can’t be denied. He towers a good five inches over me, and every inch of him is lean, hard-cut muscle. To see him is to be reminded of what he is all over again. A predator in the body of a handsome fae prince. Hard. Dangerous. Lethal. There’s something sinuous about the way he moves, as if, even after centuries of pretending to be fae, the dragon still exists.
“Zemira?” he calls, the wind caressing his shirt against his body.
I Sift through shadows, following him.
“I know you’re here,” he whispers, and somehow the breeze carries his words right to my ear.
I peer from around the stone arch I’m hiding within.
Gone. He’s gone.
I press my back to the stone wall and swallow. I’m still half in the shadows. He can’t see me. But he’ll have sensed me.
Wind stirs through the ruins.
I can almost hear a roughened laugh.
He’s hunting me, and we both know it.
Sound whispers to the left of me—perhaps a boot on stone.
I turn right and slam directly into a hard chest. It’s almost an exact reenactment of the night I first met him.
Gloved hands capture my forearms and the prince’s shadow falls over me. He tears me back out of the shadows, and the shock of sudden light is near blinding. My fae half protects me from the burn of sunlight, but it still hurts my eyes.
“Here you are,” he breathes, his voice rough-edged with delight.
He’s real. Real and solid, and I can smell his cologne—something spicy that never fails to twist my insides. Hot, golden eyes lock upon me. He’s not even bothering to hide the dragon within him—or maybe now I know it’s there, I can see it.
The first time I laid eyes upon him, he’d been a target, a means to an end. I’d been focusing so hard on my mission—get into the Court of Dreams, ensure nobody broke my cover as the Lady Merisel, and find the Dragon’s Heart—that I’d relegated the actual prince of the court to merely a male I needed to avoid.
Instead, he was everything I could have dreamed of.
I was wraithenborn. A monster in a fae world.
And if I looked back on the events of this summer, it’s easy to see where I went wrong.
The first time a boy kissed me, I was sixteen and preparing for my final trials. The kiss took me by surprise—he was the son of one of my trainers, brought in to spar with me over the autumn—and until that final night, neither of us had thought the best of the other. He was handsome, cocky, frustratingly arrogant. I didn’t even really care for him.
Five of the trainees make it through the final trials, and our particular year was incredibly competitive. I’d spent half the night polishing my blades and trying to calm my racing heart, when Rian gave me a piece of information about the forthcoming trials that might save my life. Maybe he felt sorry for me. Maybe those hours of earnest sparring had earned me some slight reprieve. After years of barely daring to let another into my life, his kindness made me falter where nothing else could have.
It was the first time I let down my walls.
And when I survived, I fell into his bed with a desperation neither of us could quench. I needed some sort of connection to another living being after Soraya’s betrayal. I wanted to be something else, someone else. I wanted to bury myself in Rian’s arms and pretend I was merely a fae princess somewhere in the Blessed
