The world around me grows dark around the edges.
I’m wrenched into a world of shadows.
Hard floor beneath me. The burning ache of iron shackles around my wrists.
Pain screams through my shoulders and I choke and kick, my lungs spewing water as someone slaps me between the shoulder blades again.
I retch and retch, until my eyes are bugging out of my head. Just when I think my brain is going to explode from the pressure, it’s finally gone. Air. I can breathe again. And the first lungful tastes as sweet as Night’s Bloom—the most delicious poison I’ve ever tasted, and the most painful.
It was a dream.
It was all a dream.
Keir. The island. The cauldron.
Soraya.
Because the next words reveal the nightmare: “Get up, dog.” A boot drives into my middle, and I cry out and curl around it, as someone grabs a fistful of my hair and wrenches me close to his face. “The king wants to see you.”
3
The guards haul me to the throne room.
There’s another supplicant on his knees before the throne and I’m relieved I’m not the center of attention as I’m dragged through a ring of guards.
“Please, my king. Please.” A wraith begs for mercy, clasping his hands together as he scrambles forward to try and touch the king’s boots. “I have been a loyal servant for nearly a century—”
“Show me,” the king says, his voice echoing through the throne room.
Guards pin the wraith and tear his shirt open, hauling his head back by the hair so the king can see his chest. All three of them wear gloves and they move with grim, ruthless efficiency, as if they dare not get too close.
The entire court draws back with a gasp. Horror fills the guards’ faces—hardened wraiths who’ve killed time and time again for their king and yet, they tremble at this.
I know what they’re looking at, even with his back toward me.
I’ve seen it too many times.
A dark, mottling across the skin that sometimes resembles a bruise over the heart at first. Except it keeps spreading, creeping across the ribs and shoulders, little snaking tendrils that wind down arms and abdomens. It never reaches the legs. By the time it’s gone that far, you can see it in a wraith’s eyes—dark veins bleeding through the whites of their eyes as if in warning.
The blight.
One last mocking twist of the curse the fae gifted us with long ago,
“It’s not contagious!” the wraith screams. “The lore masters say it’s not contagious!”
But my father’s face is implacable. He pushes to his feet, fury hardening his jaw. “How dare you bring this among our people? How dare you hide it?”
“You promised us a cure!” The wraith cries, and for the first time his anger overtakes his good sense. “You said you would break the curse. You said you would fix this blight upon us!”
“And fix it I shall. Guards.” My father waves at his men. “Remove him from this court before his carelessness afflicts us all.”
“No!”
My heart kicks into my throat, but it’s all over in a matter of seconds. Steel flashing in the torchlight. The meaty thud as a head hits the ground and bounces.
I turn my face away, eyes clenched shut as I swallow the pool of saliva in my mouth. Curse it. I was hoping to find him in a generous mood. A little tremor shivers down my spine as I lift my eyes to my king.
I’m next.
And my eyes can’t help finding the body of the wraith as the guards drag it from the throne room by its heels. A scarlet trail paints the floors behind it, and someone has its head by the hair.
The Forbidden Court is not a kind place to live.
Once we were as glorious as the fae, albeit the darker of the courts. Unblessed by the goddess, they named us, saying that she had turned her face from our kind.
We weren’t always wraiths.
Once we were a court within the Seelie hegemony, until the other courts turned on us during the Dragon Wars. A mighty battle against the dragons was fought—a battle we should have won—but treachery ruled the day.
I don’t know whether our long-ago king stabbed the king of the Dawn Court’s son in the back, or whether the Crown Prince of Dawn—fueled by an age-old resentment—forced a duel upon the field in which he was not prepared to win. Accounts vary, depending upon whom you listen to.
Either way, the Prince of Dawn died and his father swore vengeance. He named us tainted and proclaimed our unruly blood was costing the Blessed courts the war. He called us Unblessed—a blight on the Goddess’s glory.
With the blessing of the other courts, King Anselm forged a weapon that stripped the fae magic from our bodies. He said that if we were no longer of the light, then the sun would shun us. It burned our skin, burned our eyes, and forced us into the night. Our immortality bled from us, leaving us sickly and dying. My grandfather, Prince Rakulh, was forced to curse us into a new form in order to survive.
Now we are the Forbidden.
No longer fae. Wraiths, instead. The shadow remnants of our fair brethren, with our pale skin, darkened claws and twisted magics.
Thankfully, I resemble my fae mother more than my father—enough to make it possible to walk among the Blessed courts with a little glamor to hide my glowing skin. It looks as luminescent as moonlight if I don’t tamp my magic down inside me behind chains of glamor. After years of doing it, it’s almost as natural as breathing.
I can walk beneath the sun.
And my ability to heal and regenerate is almost fae-like.
But in recent years it’s become clear the curse Prince Rakulh used to save us is slowly destroying us.
Rumors of the blight whisper through court. Everyone’s heard of someone who has an uncle, a brother, a grandmother who’s suffered from it by
