Chapter 1 - The Courtyard of Stone
The courtyard was paved in gray stone, and every stone of it seemed to be watching me.
I stood in the middle of it with my boots apart, mud from nine days of road still dried on my cheeks, and my father's golden bow held low and flat across my body.
Two knights in silver armor stood in front of me, close enough that I could hear the leather of their gauntlets creak.
Behind them, rows of soldiers lined the walls, spears upright, absolutely still, as if they had been arranged there like furniture.
I did not step forward, and I did not raise the bow.
Not yet.
At the far end of the courtyard, on a throne carved with sharp rising points, sat the Queen.
She was younger than I had expected, with long blonde hair falling over her shoulders and a gold crown that caught what little light the morning had.
Her dress was silver and gold, and her hands rested easy on the arms of the throne, the way a person rests when they have never once been afraid in that room.
She looked at me the way you look at something you have already decided to throw away.
Then she smiled, slow and satisfied, and spoke so the whole court could hear.
"You have no power here.
I have the light."
Her voice was calm, almost kind, and that was the part that made my jaw tighten.
I thought of Hollowmere, where the sun had barely cleared the hills in three years, and of my father, who had gone south carrying the truth and never come home.
I raised the bow.
My left arm stretched out straight, my hand locked around the carved golden body of it, and my right hand set the golden arrow to the string and drew it back until the triangular head sat level with my cheek.
My shoulders burned, and my forearm shook, and I did not care.
The knights behind the Queen blurred out of my focus.
There was only the throne, and the woman on it, and the arrow.
Then something happened that I had been told about but never believed.
At the arrowhead, a small point of gold light appeared.
It grew, brighter and brighter, until it spread into a blazing star-shaped flare, and the light ran along every engraved line of the bow like fire through dry grass.
My hand stayed steady.
The bow was answering me.
I held the string drawn and did not release.
Because here is the thing I could not explain to anyone in that courtyard, and barely understood myself.
I was not aiming at her.
My eyes were on the throne, but my arrow was pointed somewhere else entirely, at something behind her, and I could not have told you what it was, only that every part of me knew the shot was not hers to take.
My eyes stung, and I realized a tear had gathered at my lower lid.
I did not blink, and I did not turn my head.
The tear hung there, then slid slowly down my muddy cheek while the golden arrow burned steady beneath my sightline.
It was not fear.
I have thought about that tear many times since, and I still cannot say what it was, only that it felt like grief for something I could see dying far away, in a place I had never been.
The courtyard was silent except for the faint hum of the light.
And then, at the Queen's right hand, the oldest knight in the room went still.
Not the stillness of a man waiting for an order.
The stillness of a man who has seen a ghost.
He was gray-bearded, broad even under his silver plate, and he had stood through my whole entrance like a wall.
Now he had turned, just slightly, and he was staring at the bow in my hands.
Not at me.
At the bow.
His eyes moved along the carved golden limbs the way a man reads a letter from someone long dead.
I had never seen him before in my life.
But I knew that look, because my mother used to wear it when she spoke about my father.
And in that moment, with the string drawn and the light burning and a hundred soldiers waiting for one word from their Queen, I understood one thing with total certainty.
That old knight knew my father.
He knew exactly what I was holding, and he knew exactly who had held it before me.
And whatever he knew, I had a feeling it was the reason I was still alive.
