Two Twisted Crowns (The Shepherd King #2)

The Mirror Card’s chill no longer lingered on Ravyn’s skin. He was back at Stone, but he was not warm. The cold of the dungeon clawed its way up dark, icy stairs, seeking purchase in his chest.

He held two skeleton keys in his hand. When he paused at the top of the stairs, peering down, his grip on the keys tightened. He didn’t hear his sister approach. But what kind of Destrier would she be, if he had?

“Ravyn.”

He turned, hiding his startle behind a scowl. “Jes.”

Jespyr leaned against the corridor wall, blended well enough into shadow to almost render a Mirror Card unnecessary. Her gaze lowered to the skeleton keys in Ravyn’s clutch. “You’ll need another pair of hands to open that door.”

“I was going to find a guard.”

Something shifted in her brown eyes. “I’m capable enough.”

There was an accusation somewhere in the firm notes of Jespyr’s voice. Ravyn ignored it. “The King wants to see Els—” He flinched. “He wants to know about the Twin Alders Card. In private.”

Jespyr folded her hands in a net. “Is that wise?”

“Probably not.”

The sound of the gong echoed through the castle. Its toll announced early afternoon. Midday, midnight—the hour meant little to Ravyn. All he knew of time was that he always seemed to be running out of it.

Jespyr dragged her boot over a wrinkle in the corridor rug. “Are you well enough to do this? You’ve hardly spoken about what happened. About Elspeth.”

The muscles along Ravyn’s jaw tightened. “I’m fine.”

She shook her head. “I can always tell when you’re lying. Your eyes get this vacant look.”

“Maybe that’s because they are vacant.”

“You’d like everyone to think that, wouldn’t you?” Jespyr approached—pulled the second key from his grip. “You can talk to me, you know. I’m always here, Ravyn.” The corner of Jespyr’s lip quirked. “I’m always right behind you.”

They made it to the bottom of the stairs without slipping on ice. In the antechamber, the dungeon door waited. It was twice as wide as Ravyn’s wingspan. Forged of wood from rowan trees and fortified with iron, it took both skeleton keys to unlock.

Facing their respective locks on opposite sides of the door, Ravyn and Jespyr slid their keys into place. Ravyn made sure to turn his back, lest Jespyr see his trembling fingers.

The mechanisms embedded in the stone wall released the latches. Ravyn pressed his fingers in the holds and pushed the door open just wide enough to slip through, the weight of the ancient wood great.

“Leave it open,” he said, taking both keys. “Destriers will be here soon enough to collect Erik Spindle and Tyrn Hawthorn for their inquest.” He stepped through the door.

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“No. Get a Chalice Card from the armory. Meet me at the King’s chamber.”

“Are you sure you’re all right to do this?” Jespyr asked again.

Ravyn had been a liar always out of necessity, never a fondness for the craft. It was one of the many masks he wore. And he’d worn it so long that, even when he should take it off, he didn’t always know how.

He stole into darkness. “I’m fine.”

The air grew thinner the farther north he trod. The dungeon walk sloped, falling deeper into the earth. Ravyn wrapped his arms in his cloak and kept his eyes forward, afraid if he looked too closely at the empty cells, the ghosts of all the infected children who had died there might emerge from shadow and claim him.

The walk was littered with blackened torches, this part of the dungeon rarely patrolled. Ravyn continued until he was at the end—the last cell.

The monster waited.

Flat on the floor, eyes on the ceiling—as if stargazing—what had once been Elspeth Spindle’s body lay still. Air plumed out of her—now the Shepherd King’s—mouth like dragon smoke. When Ravyn’s footsteps stilled at the foot of the cell, the Shepherd King did not turn to look, the sound of his teeth clicking together the only greeting he tendered.

A knot in Ravyn’s throat swelled. Before he could stop himself, his eyes traveled the length of Elspeth’s body.

What had once been Elspeth’s body.

“Are you awake?”

There was no answer.

Ravyn stepped forward, the cell’s iron bars like icicles beneath his hands. “I know you can hear me.”

Laughter echoed in the dark. The figure in the cell sat up slowly and turned. It took all of Ravyn not to wince. Elspeth’s black eyes were gone. In their place, catlike irises, vivid and yellow, lit by a man five hundred years dead.

The Shepherd King did not move but for his eyes. “You’re alone, Captain,” he said. It was still Elspeth’s voice. Only now, it sounded slick, oily. Wrong. “Is that wise?”

Ravyn stiffened. “Would you hurt me?”

His answer was a twisted, jagged smile. “I’d be a liar if I said I hadn’t played with the idea.”

There was no one there to overhear them. Still, Ravyn pulled his Nightmare Card from his pocket and tapped it three times.

Salt burned up his throat into his nose. Closing his eyes, Ravyn let the salt swallow him, then pushed it outward, entering the Shepherd King’s mind. He combed through darkness, searching for any hint of Elspeth.

He did not find her.

When he opened his eyes, the Shepherd King was watching him. A voice, masculine, slippery—poisonous—spoke into Ravyn’s mind. What do you want, Ravyn Yew?

Ravyn ran the back of his hand over his mouth, hiding his flinch. He was still looking at Elspeth’s body. It was her skin—lips—hands. Her tangled hair, long and black, that spilled over her shoulder. Her chest that rose with the swell of her lungs.

But just like her voice, there was something undeniably wrong about Elspeth’s body. Her fingers were rigid, curled like talons, and her posture was twisted—her shoulders too high, her back too curved.

“The King wishes to see you,” Ravyn said. “But before I bring you to him, I want two things.”

The Shepherd King unfolded himself from the ground and stood in the center of the cell. Then—too fast—he crept in front of Ravyn. “I’m listening.”

Ravyn’s grip on the bars tightened. “I want the truth. No riddles, no games. Are you truly the Shepherd King?”

Yellow eyes roved over his hands—his broken fingernails, dirt still embedded in the dry cracks of Ravyn’s skin. Elspeth’s body bent, vulturelike. “They called me that name, once.”

“What did she call you?”

For a moment, there was nothing. No movement. Not even air turned to steam from the Shepherd King’s nostrils. Then, when he seemed to have frosted over entirely, his pale fingers began to trill, as if plucking the strings of an invisible harp. “She saw me for what I truly am.” He drew the word out, whispering it into Ravyn’s mind. Nightmare.

“And you know where the Twin Alders Card is, Nightmare?”

“I do.”

“Will you take me to it?”

His voice was near and far. “I will.”

“How far is the journey?”

The Nightmare lowered his head and smiled. “Not far. Yet it is farther than you’ve ever gone before.”

Ravyn slammed his hand on the bars. “I said no goddamn games.”

“You asked for the truth. Truth bends, Ravyn Yew. We must all bend along with it. If we do not, well…” His yellow eyes flared. “Then we will break.”

He spoke with his own voice into Ravyn’s mind once more. Before your lifetime, he said, before the story of the girl, the King, and the monster, I told an older tale. One of magic, mist, and Providence Cards. Of infection and degeneration. His smile fell away. Of barters made.

“I’m familiar with The Old Book of Alders.”

“Good. For you’re about to step into it.”

Ravyn drew in a breath, the ice in the air nesting in his lungs.

“The Twin Alders is the only Card of its kind,” the Nightmare continued. “It gives its user the power to speak to our deity, the Spirit of the Wood. And it is she who guards it. She will have a price for the last Card of the Deck. Nothing comes free.”

“I’m prepared to pay whatever price she asks.” Ravyn pressed against the bars, his voice lowering. “And when I do pay, Nightmare, the Twin Alders Card will be mine. Not the King’s, not yours. Mine.”

Something shifted in those yellow eyes. “What is the second thing you wish of me, Ravyn Yew?” the Nightmare murmured.

Even with frost all around them, Ravyn could smell blood on Elspeth’s clothes. He took a step back, but it was too late. A light tremor had begun in his left hand. He knotted it into a fist. “When I bring you to the King’s chamber, you are not to harm him. You are not to do anything that might jeopardize me taking you out of Stone in search of the Twin Alders Card.”

“Rowan has agreed to my offer, then? To trade my life for young Emory’s?”

“Not fully. Which is why you need to be on your best behavior.”

The Nightmare laughed. The sound shifted through the dungeon, as if carried on dark wings. “My best behavior.” His fingers curled at his side. “By all means. Take me to your Rowan King.”

Along the dungeon wall were hooks with varying weapons and restraints. Ravyn retrieved a pair of iron cuffs fixed to a chain and opened the cell door. The Nightmare held out his wrists.

Pale, bruised skin peeked out from beneath tattered sleeves.

Ravyn bit down. “Pull your sleeves down so the iron doesn’t sit directly on your wrists. I don’t want to give Elspeth any more bruises.”

“She can’t feel them now.”

Muscles bunching in his jaw, Ravyn took care not to touch the Nightmare’s skin when he locked the cuffs in place. “Let’s go.”

Even with chains, the Nightmare’s movements were eerily quiet. It took all of Ravyn’s control not to look over his shoulder. The only reason he was certain the monster was behind him at all was because he could feel him there, wraithlike, as the two of them crept out of Stone’s frozen underbelly.

They climbed the stairs. Ravyn shook his hands, the dungeon’s icy numbness shifting into prickles along his fingertips. He was still wielding the Nightmare Card—he used it to call for Elm. His cousin did not answer.

But another voice did.

She’s dead, you fool, came a familiar, derisive tone from the depths of his mind. Why cling to hope? Even if you unite the Deck and lift the mist and cure the infection, she will not come back. She died in her room at Spindle House four nights ago. A low, rumbling laugh. All because you were ten minutes late back from your patrol.

Ravyn ripped the burgundy Card out of his pocket and tapped it three times, quelling the magic. His pulse roared in his ears. It hadn’t been the Nightmare’s voice, but another—one that mocked him, uttering his worst fears every time he used the Nightmare Card too long.

His own.

The clicking sound of teeth ricocheted off stone walls. “There was no need for your Nightmare Card, Ravyn Yew. I am the only one for a hundred cells.” He paused. “Unless you were hoping to hear another voice when you reached into my mind.”

Ravyn stopped in his tracks. “Were you there,” he said, keeping his eyes forward, forcing ice into his thinning voice, “when Elspeth and I were alone together?”

“What’s the matter, highwayman? All your rosy memories beginning to rot?”

Ravyn turned—pushed the Nightmare against the wall, his hand closing around the monster’s pale throat.

But it felt too much like her throat. It was her throat.

He ripped his hand back. “Everything was a lie.” He hadn’t let himself think it until now. And now that he was thinking it—

He’d taken knife wounds that hurt less. “Every look. Every word. You lived eleven years in Elspeth’s mind. There’s no knowing where she ended and you began.”

A smile snaked across the Nightmare’s mouth. “No knowing at all.”

Ravyn was going to be sick.

“If it is any consolation, her admiration for you was entirely one-sided. I find your stony facade excruciatingly tedious.”

Eyes closed, Ravyn turned away. “And yet you were there. When we were together.”

There was a long pause. Then, quieter than before, the Nightmare spoke. “There is a place in the darkness she and I share. Think of it as a secluded shore along dark waters. A place I forged to hide things I’d rather forget. I went there from time to time in our eleven years together. To give Elspeth reprieve. And, most recently,” he added, tapping his fingernails on the wall, “to spare myself the particulars of her rather incomprehensible attachment to you.”

Ravyn opened his eyes. “This place exists in your mind?”

Silence. Then, “For five hundred years, I fractured in the dark. A man, slowly twisting into something terrible. I saw no sun, no moon. All I could do was remember the terrible things that had happened. So I forged a place to put away the King who once lived—all his pain—all his memories. A place of rest.”

Ravyn turned. When his eyes caught the Nightmare’s yellow gaze, he knew. “That’s where she is. It’s why I can’t hear her with the Nightmare Card. You have Elspeth hidden away.” His throat burned. “Alone, in the dark.”

The Nightmare cocked his head. “I am not a dragon hording gold. The moment Elspeth touched that Nightmare Card and I slipped into her mind, her days were marked. I was her degeneration.”

No. Ravyn wouldn’t accept it. “Tell me how to reach her.”

“Why would I when it is such a delight, watching you unravel?”

Ravyn’s hand fell to his belt and the ivory hilt upon it. “You will. When we leave this wretched castle, you will tell me how to reach Elspeth.”

The Nightmare’s smile was a thinly veiled threat. “I know what I know. My secrets are deep. But long have I kept them. And long will they keep.”

King Rowan was not in his chamber.

Ravyn swore under his breath. “Wait here,” he told the Nightmare. He left the monster, shackled and bloodstained, standing in the center of the King’s pelted rugs, and headed down the royal corridor to Hauth’s room. When he stepped inside, it took all his restraint—and sheer luck for the meagerness of his lunch—that he didn’t vomit for the smell.

The High Prince’s room was overwarm, amplifying the putrid odors of blood and sickly body odor. Filick Willow stood in a line of three other Physicians at Hauth’s bedside. The King was there too, standing next to Jespyr near the hearth. He was drunk. He’d been drunk at Hauth’s bedside for three days now, tapping and untapping his own Nightmare Card, trying to reach his son’s mind.

But wherever Hauth lingered, if he lingered at all, the King could not reach him. Nor could a Scythe command life into his unseeing green eyes. The skin that peeked out from bandages and blankets was cut and scabbed. And beneath the bandages—

Hauth had been destroyed. In a way Ravyn had not seen in twenty-six years of life. Not even wolves tore their meat like that. Animals rarely killed for sport. And this—what had been done to Hauth, ripping and breaking and sloughing—went beyond sport.

It suddenly felt a terrible idea, bringing the King to face the monster who had broken his son.

Jespyr caught Ravyn’s gaze. Her jaw tensed, and she spoke into their uncle’s ear. It took the King a moment to focus. When his eyes finally honed in on Ravyn, they were dark under a furrowed brow.

“Well?” he barked when they were in the corridor. “Is she here?”

Ravyn drew in a breath of fresh air. “In your chamber, sire.”

The King’s crude fist curled around the glass neck of a decanter. “A Chalice?”

“I have one here,” Jespyr said, a sea-green Providence Card in her hand.

“Let’s see the bitch try to lie about the Twin Alders now.”

When the King wrenched his chamber door open, the Nightmare was perched like a gargoyle in an ornate high-back chair. They stared at one another, two Kings with murder behind their eyes. Rowan green, Nightmare yellow—and five hundred years of imbalance between them.

The Nightmare opened his clawlike hand in greeting. In the other, he held a silver goblet already filled with wine. “Well, then,” he said. “Let the inquest begin.”

Jespyr eyed the shackles around his wrist skeptically. She exhaled, then tapped the Chalice Card three times.

King Rowan kept the distance between him and the Nightmare’s chair wide enough a carriage could drive through. He might have been drunk, but he wasn’t stupid. He’d seen in horrid detail exactly what this monster was capable of doing when provoked. “Tell me, Elspeth Spindle, how is it you know where the Twin Alders Card is hidden?”

The Nightmare twisted a finger in the ends of Elspeth’s black hair. Ravyn watched, scorched by memory. He’d had his own hands in that hair. Run his fingers through it—sighed into it.

He jerked his eyes to the wall.

“Simple,” the Nightmare murmured. “I was there when the Card disappeared.”

The King’s gaze ripped to the Chalice in Jespyr’s hands, then back to the Nightmare, as if he could not decide which—his eyes or his ears—to distrust more. “That’s impossible.”

The Nightmare merely grinned. “Is it? Magic is a strange, fickle thing.”

“So it is magic that gives you this—this—” The King’s tongue tripped over his words. “Old knowledge of the Twin Alders?”

The corners of the Nightmare’s mouth tipped. “You could say that.”

“Where exactly is the Card hidden?” Jespyr cut in, shoulders bunching with tension.

The Nightmare gave her an indifferent glance. “Deep within a wood. A wood with no road. But to those who smell the salt—” A flash of teeth. “It beckons.”

The King regained himself with a deep, unsteady breath. His gaze flickered to Ravyn. “Was my nephew aware of your infection?”

Ravyn went cold, a thousand alarm bells ringing in his ears.

The Nightmare’s oily timbre cut through them. “Your Captain is not the all-seeing bird you imagine him to be. He knew nothing of my magic until it was too late.”

It was the truth—only slightly twisted.

A furrow broke the stone mask of Ravyn’s expression. The Nightmare noticed it and smiled, as if he knew what Ravyn had only just realized.

Providence Cards did not affect the Shepherd King. It was written in The Old Book of Alders.

For our price it was final, our bartering done. I created twelve Cards…but I cannot use one.

But they did affect Elspeth. Hauth had used a Chalice against her. Ravyn had spoken into her mind with the Nightmare Card.

And the monster in front of him was both Elspeth and the Shepherd King. The Nightmare could succumb to the Cards—and also void their magic.

It was not so different from Ravyn’s own magic. He, who could use only the Mirror, the Nightmare, and presumably the Twin Alders Providence Cards. The other nine Cards, he could not use—but neither could they be used against him. He could deny the Scythe’s compulsion, lie against Chalice.

Just as the Nightmare was doing now.

“Who knew of your infection?” the King snapped when the silence drew out too long.

“My magic was always a secret.”

“Even from your father?”

The Nightmare rolled his jaw. “That is a question for him. I do not own anything that Erik Spindle, with his callous indifference, has ever done.”

“Can you truly see Providence Cards with your magic?”

“I can.”

“And you will use it to find the final Card for me?”

The Nightmare’s expression remained unreadable. “I will. So long as you honor your side of our bargain, Rowan. Have you released Emory Yew to his parents?”

The King’s hands knotted at his sides. “Tell me where the Twin Alders is, and I will release him tonight.”

The Nightmare perked a brow. “Very well.” He drew air into his nose. “Listen closely. The journey to the twelfth Card will three barters take. The first comes at water—a dark, mirrored lake. The second begins at the neck of a wood, where you cannot turn back, though truly, you should.”

The Nightmare’s gaze shifted to Ravyn. His words came out sharp, as if to draw blood. “The last barter waits in a place with no time. A place of great sorrow and bloodshed and crime. No sword there can save you, no mask hide your face. You’ll return with the Twin Alders…

“But you’ll never leave that place.”