Volume One: The Hostage Exchange
His hand closed around her throat before she could finish the sentence meant to end him.
Not hard enough to bruise. Just enough that she felt her own pulse hammering against his palm, frantic and traitorous, while the corridor's black stone breathed cold against her back and the last torch guttered somewhere behind his shoulder. His eyes held the color of a wolf's eyes caught in lantern light, amber shot through with something darker, and they studied her with a stillness that should have frightened her more than it did.
Say it again, he murmured, so low it barely disturbed the air between them. Tell me again that you would rather die than let a Draven touch you.
She could not say it again. Not with his thumb resting, feather light, at the hollow of her throat, exactly where her own traitorous heartbeat gave her away.
That was six hours from now. First, there was the gate.
The road into the Shadowlands narrowed the moment the sun dropped behind the black ridge, as though the mountains themselves had agreed, generations ago, never to let daylight linger a moment longer than necessary. Isolde Vaskara sat with her spine perfectly straight against the carriage seat and watched the last gold light drain out of the sky through a window laced with frost, and told herself, for perhaps the hundredth time since crossing the border stone, that she was not afraid.
She was furious. That was different. Fury kept a woman's hands from shaking.
Six days ago her brother had been buried in the crypt beneath the Vaskara sky temple, his falcon armor polished for a battle he had never fought, killed by a blade that bore, according to the coroners and the court and the whispers that ran through the eastern Skylands like wildfire through dry wheat, the unmistakable signature of House Draven steel. Six days ago the kingdom of Ashvale had stood one insult away from a war that would have emptied both houses of every son and daughter old enough to hold a weapon. And six days ago the Accord had done what it had done for two hundred years: it had reached into her life with its cold, ancient hand and taken what it needed.
An heir, delivered into enemy territory, bound there for one year as living proof that the peace would hold. That was the price. That was always the price, paid alternately by whichever house the Accord's ledger judged to be owed a debt, and this year, this bloody and unforgivable year, the ledger had chosen her.
It should have been her brother's place to grieve her, not the reverse. Ronan had been the elder by three years, the steadier of the two of them, the one their mother had always trusted to inherit the falcon seat and carry the Vaskara name into whatever came next. Isolde had spent her whole life half a step behind him, learning the sun magic more slowly, arguing with the elders more loudly, and never once imagining that she would be the one left standing in the temple crypt while priests sealed his ashes into the family wall. She had not cried in front of anyone since. She did not intend to start in front of a Draven.
I will survive this, she thought, watching her own reflection ghost over the darkening glass. I will survive it, and I will find out which of them killed my brother, and I will make them answer for it even if I have to do it with my bare hands.
The carriage slowed. Ahead, through the frost-laced window, the gates of Ravenhold rose out of the mountain itself, black iron wrought into the shape of wolves mid-leap, teeth bared toward the sky, and behind them a keep so old and so dark it seemed to swallow what little moonlight reached it. Isolde had grown up hearing stories about this place, the kind mothers told to frighten children into obedience. She had never believed she would see it from the inside of its own gates, waiting to be let in like a prisoner brought to trial.
The doors of the carriage opened onto a courtyard lit by torches that burned an unnatural shade of blue, Draven shadow fire, the old magic the house had never let die no matter how the rest of the kingdom had modernized around them. And there, at the base of the keep's wide stone steps, stood the man the entire eastern Skylands called, without exception and without affection, the Blade of Draven.
Kael Draven did not step forward to greet her. He simply waited, one hand resting on the pommel of a sword he clearly did not need in order to be dangerous, watching her descend from the carriage with an expression that gave away exactly nothing. He was taller than she had expected, and younger, though nothing about the set of his shoulders or the flat, assessing weight of his gaze suggested youth. His hair was black as the gates behind him. A scar cut pale and thin along his jaw, the only imperfection in an otherwise merciless kind of handsomeness, and when his eyes finally met hers she understood, with a cold drop in her stomach, exactly why men twice his age went quiet in rooms he entered.
"Lady Vaskara." His voice was low, unhurried, each word set down like a stone in a wall he had been building his whole life. "Welcome to Ravenhold."
"I doubt that welcome is sincere."
Something flickered at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile. "It isn't. But it is correct, according to the terms your house and mine agreed to. I am told correctness matters more to your people than sincerity ever has."
He wants me to flinch, she thought. He will not have the satisfaction.
"Then let us be correct with each other, Lord Draven, and skip whatever pleasantries the Accord requires of us both. I am not here as your guest. I am here as collateral. I would rather you treated me as such than pretend otherwise."
For a moment something in his gaze sharpened, interest where she had expected only contempt, and it unsettled her far more than open hostility would have. Before he could answer, a second voice cut across the courtyard, smooth and cold as the shadow fire itself.
"Collateral that speaks its mind. How refreshing." A man emerged from the keep's doorway, silver at his temples, Draven black in his coat, and eyes that held none of his nephew's restraint. Isolde recognized him from court portraits even before Kael's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly beside her. Roran Draven, Regent of the house until Kael's formal investiture, the man half the eastern court quietly believed had wanted this war for years. "I do hope you survive the year, Lady Vaskara. It would be such a shame to lose you before we've had the chance to become properly acquainted."
The threat sat under the pleasantry the way a blade sits under silk, and Isolde felt Kael go very still beside her, a stillness that was not calm at all but something coiled and dangerous held deliberately in check.
"My uncle," Kael said, "has a talent for saying things that sound like courtesy and mean the opposite. You would do well to remember that, my lady, for as long as you remain under this roof."
"Are you warning me against your own family, Lord Draven?"
"I am telling you the truth. Ravenhold rewards those who understand which of us actually decides what happens here." His gaze did not leave hers. "That is not my uncle."
Roran's smile did not so much as waver, but something colder moved behind his eyes before he inclined his head and withdrew into the keep, leaving the torches to hiss in the sudden quiet he left behind him.
Kael led her up the wide stone steps himself, refusing the servant who came forward to take that duty, and Isolde told herself it meant nothing, that it was simply the kind of control a man like him could not resist exercising even over something as small as who carried a torch beside a hostage's shoulder. The keep's interior was colder than she expected, all black stone and silver sconces and portraits of Draven ancestors who all seemed to share his particular talent for looking at the world as though they already knew how it would disappoint them.
He stopped at last before a set of doors carved with the same leaping wolves as the gate. "Your rooms. You will not be permitted beyond the east wing without an escort, for your own protection as much as anything else. There are those in this house who would consider your death, even now, a fair trade for your brother's."
"And you? What would you consider it?"
He turned to face her fully then, and for the first time since the courtyard something almost human moved across his features, something that looked, absurdly, like exhaustion. "I would consider it a war I cannot win and do not want. That is the only reason you are safe here, Lady Vaskara. Not kindness. Strategy."
"How comforting."
"I never claimed to be a comfort." The corridor around them had gone utterly silent, the shadow fire burning low in its sconces, and she was aware, with a clarity that shamed her, of the warmth radiating off him despite the cold stone at her back, of the faint scent of leather and cedar smoke that seemed to belong to him alone. He was close now, closer than the corridor's width required, and she found herself unwilling to step back, unwilling to give him even that small a victory. The blue torchlight caught the scar along his jaw, and beneath the arrogance she thought, just for a moment, that she saw something guarded and old and unhealed. "You said, in the courtyard, that you would rather die than let a Draven touch you. Was that only for my uncle's benefit, or did you mean it?"
"I meant every word."
His hand rose, slow enough that she could have stopped it, slow enough that some small, furious, humiliating part of her did not want to, and closed around her throat exactly as it had in the vision that had opened this endless night, his thumb resting feather light over the place where her pulse betrayed her utterly.
"Say it again," he murmured.
She did not say it again.
Somewhere down the corridor a door swung shut with a sound like a verdict, and Kael's hand fell away as abruptly as it had risen, as though he had only just remembered what he was and what she was and what stood, unforgiven, between the two of them. He stepped back. The mask came down over his face again, cold and complete, and when he spoke his voice held no trace of whatever had passed between them a heartbeat before.
"Rest, Lady Vaskara. Tomorrow you will learn the rules of this house, and you will follow them, because the alternative is a war that will bury both our families before the year is out."
He left her at the door without another word.
Isolde stood alone in the unfamiliar dark of her new prison for a long moment before she let herself breathe, and even longer before she noticed the thin dark stain on the stone threshold just inside her door, old blood scrubbed at but never quite erased, and the single word someone had scratched, faint and half hidden beneath the rug's edge, into the wood beneath.
Liar.
She was still staring at it when, somewhere above her in the depths of the keep, a wolf began to howl, and did not stop.