Cinda Chima - The Demon King

Dancer lifted his chin. “I told them my name. I said I was Fire Dancer of Marisa Pines Camp.” He hesitated. “But he seemed to know me as Hayden.”

Willo closed her eyes and shook her head slightly. Her next words surprised Han. “What about Hunts Alone?” she asked. “Did he speak? Do they know his name?”

Dancer cocked his head, thinking. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t remember him introducing himself.” He laughed bitterly. “They probably won’t remember anything but his arrow, aimed at their black wizard hearts.”

Willo swung around, facing Dancer, so Han could no longer see her face. “He turned a bow on them?” she said, her voice cracking on the word bow .

Dancer shrugged. “The one called Micah, he had an amulet. He was jinxing me. Hunts Alone made him stop.”

Han held his breath, waiting for Dancer to tell Willo that Han had taken the amulet, but he didn’t.

Willo sighed, looking troubled. “I’ll speak to the queen. This has to stop. She needs to enforce the Naéming and keep wizards out of the mountains. If she doesn’t, the Demonai warriors will.”

This was astonishing, Willo talking about what the queen needed to do. She made it sound as if speaking to the queen was an everyday thing. She was the matriarch, but still. Han tried to imagine what it would be like, meeting the queen.

Your Exalted Majesty. I’m Han Plantslinger. Mud-digger. Former streetlord of the Raggers.

Willo and Dancer had moved on to another topic. Willo leaned forward, putting her hand over Dancer’s. “How are you feeling?”

Dancer pulled his hand free and canted his body away. “I’m well,” he said stiffly.

She eyed him for a long moment. “Have you been taking the flying rowan?” she persisted. “I have more if you—”

“I’ve been taking it,” Dancer interrupted. “I have plenty.”

“Is it working?” she asked, reaching for him again. As a healer, she used touch for diagnosis and for healing itself.

Dancer stood, evading her hand. “I’m well,” he repeated, with flat finality. “I’m going to go find Hunts Alone.” He turned toward the doorway where Han was lurking.

“Tell him to eat with us,” Willo called after Dancer.

Han was forced to beat a hasty retreat, ducking back into the sleeping chamber, so that was all he heard. But for the rest of that day, all through the evening meal, and sitting by the fire afterward, the conversation weighed on his mind.

He studied Dancer on the sly. Could he be sick? Han hadn’t noticed anything before, and he noticed nothing now, save that Dancer seemed less animated, more somber than usual. But that could be left over from the afternoon’s confrontation and the argument with his mother.

Han knew rowan, also called mountain ash. He gathered the wood and the berries, both of which were used in clan remedies. The wood was said to be good for making amulets and talismans to ward away evil. Flying rowan was especially valuable at clan markets. It grew high in the trees, and Han had learned better than to try to pass off regular rowan as the treetop kind. To the clan, anyway.

Willow had asked, “Is it working?” Had someone hexed Dancer? Were he and Willo worried that someone would? Was that why Dancer had a grudge against wizards?

Han wanted to ask, but then they would know he’d been eavesdropping. So he kept his questions to himself.

It was late afternoon when Raisa finally climbed the curving marble staircase to the queen’s tower. She ached all over; she was filthy and stank of smoke. Mellony was already in her bath. Raisa could hear her singing and splashing as she passed by her sister’s chamber at the top of the stairs. Mellony was always so damnably cheerful.

Raisa had moved into new quarters since returning from Demonai Camp—larger, more elaborate, befitting a princess heir who was almost sixteen and so of marriageable age. Originally she’d been assigned a suite of rooms close to the queen’s quarters, shrouded in velvet and damask and furnished with a massive canopied cherry bedstead and wardrobe. It felt crowded even when Raisa was all by herself.

Raisa had begged her mother to reopen an apartment at the far end of the hall that had lain barricaded and unused through living memory. There were many closed-off apartments in Fellsmarch Castle, since the court was smaller than it had been, but not many in such a prime location, with easy access to the queen.

Some longtime servants said the apartment had been abandoned because its walls of windows made it cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Others said it was cursed, that it was from this very room a thousand years ago that the Demon King had stolen Hanalea away, the incident that led to the Breaking. In this version, Hanalea herself had ordered the apartment sealed, vowing never to set foot in it again.

Legend had it that the ghost of Hanalea sometimes appeared at the window on stormy nights, hands extended, her loose hair snaking about her head, calling for Alger Waterlow.

That was just silly, Raisa thought. Who would wait at a window for a demon, let alone call his name?

When Raisa’s mother finally gave in, and the carpenters broke down the barricades, they found a suite of rooms frozen in time, as if the previous occupant had meant to return. The furniture was huddled under drop cloths to protect it from the brilliant sunlight that streamed through dusty windows. When the drapes were removed, the fabrics gleamed, surprisingly vibrant after a thousand years.

The last occupant’s possessions lay as she’d left them. A doll dressed in an old-fashioned gown gazed out from a shelf in the corner. She had a porcelain head with vacant blue eyes and long flaxen curls. Combs and brushes cluttered the dressing table, their bristles frayed by mice, and crystal perfume bottles stood arrayed on a silvered mirror, their contents evaporated long ago.

Gowns from a lost age hung in the wardrobe, made for a tall willowy girl with a very narrow waist. Some of the fabrics crumbled under Raisa’s eager fingers.

Carved wolves graced the stone facing of the hearth. Bookshelves lined the public rooms. More books lay piled on the stand next to the bed. The ones in the bedroom were mostly romances, stories of knights and warriors and queens, written in a Valespeech with archaic phrasing. In the public rooms were shelved biographies and treatises on politics, including A History of the High Country Clan and a first edition of Adra ana ’Doria’s Rule and Rulers in the Modern Age . Raisa herself was just then plodding through it under the strict eye of the masters.

Hanalea or not, the suite had been occupied by a young girl, probably a princess. Perhaps she’d died, Raisa thought, and her parents had kept her room preserved as a shrine. That idea gave her delicious shivers.

Since the apartment was in one of the turrets, it was smaller than the rooms originally assigned to Raisa. But it felt spacious, since she had a view of the town and the mountains on three sides.

She’d dragged the bed into the space between the windows, and when it snowed, she felt like the fairy princess in the snow globe her father had brought her from Tamron years ago. On clear nights she pressed her face against the glass, pretending she was soaring in a winged ship among the stars.

Best of all, she’d discovered a sliding panel in one of the closets, which revealed a secret passageway. It snaked within the walls for what seemed like miles. The passageway led to a stairway, and the stairway led to the solarium on the roof, a glassed garden that was Raisa’s favorite place in all of Fellsmarch Castle, even though it had fallen into disrepair.