Page 11 of Bound to the Shadow Queen
The bond twisted like a blade beneath my ribs, my marriage vow viscerally reacting at the thought of Everly being harmed. Already, it pulled at me constantly, urging me south toward the Wilds. I cursed the shards-damned ring for making me feel anything at all.
I circled back, until my Velgrun was next to Noerwyn’s.
“And yet…” I growled, gesturing toward her unmoving stag. “You’ve called the beast to a halt.”
I was stuck trekking through the kingdom at the speed of a wounded yak and relying on the dubious information of a female who harbored as many secrets as her sister did.
“No, he stopped himself,” she argued, nudging the Velgrun with her heels.
“Why would—” I didn’t finish the question. I didn’t need to.
There was only one reason that the stags came to a halt on their own.
The smell of blood.
Sure enough, my stag began stamping his hooves restlessly in the snow, hackles raised as he pulled away from the path ahead.
Every one of my senses was on high alert. I strained to listen to the sounds of the forest for signs that we weren’t alone. Though most of the villages we passed had been untouched, there had been several smaller sites of carnage along back roads like the one we were on now.
I took a deep breath of the frozen night air. It was still and uncharged, and tasted like fresh snow and pine. No scent of whatever had gotten the Velgrun riled.
There was nothing here other than the distant trill of common owlcat and the rustle of the tiny rodents they hunted in the forest's underbrush.
But there were no growls. No eerie silences where the night hid from itself and the frostbeasts lurking in its shadows.
I silently gestured for Noerwyn to stay seated before I dismounted my stag and made my way up the hill. Just over the ridge was a cabin nestled between towering pine trees, its pale logs gleaming with a coat of frost.
It might have been cozy, if not for the slim severed arm gracing the front porch, leftover scraps from a lazy predator. One who had gotten his fill and was only hunting for sport now.
The blood was old, a deep shade of brown, while the flesh was a mottled gray, half-covered by fresh snow. More limbs littered the ground next to the cabin, as if they’d been dragged away or killed mid-run.
I ground my teeth, scanning the rest of the clearing while wondering which of the frost-cursed beasts roaming my kingdom had grown bold enough to waste their kills.
Tharnoks were messy eaters, but in a pack they stripped a carcass down to nothing. Brakhounds sometimes left bones, though not much else. Even then, scavengers would have cleaned the carrion within hours.
Something tugged at the corners of my mind.
“We’re leaving,” I barked, spinning and jerking my chin toward Noerwyn.
For once, she didn’t argue, whether because she knew the look of a house with no survivors, or because she felt the shadow of a trap as keenly as I did.
I swung into the saddle, scanning the treeline as the Velgrun shifted uncomfortably beneath me. That was when I caught it, a line etched deep into the snow near the back of the cabin. It was jagged and wrong.
Like something massive had been dragged just beneath the surface of the ground.
What in the frozen hells…
My gaze swept wider. When I strained my eyes, I noticed trees bent at unnatural angles, their bark scored with clean gouges far too high for wolves and too precise for Tharnoks.
A patch of frost shimmered strangely where the snow had caved in, as though something had tunneled beneath.
Beside me, Noerwyn’s stag tossed its head, its hooves striking the ground. She stiffened, her lips parting slightly, while her eyes locked on that broken line in the snow. Still, she didn’t speak.
Every instinct inside of me said that this was wrong. Too wrong.
The estate had been…too coincidental. Enough that I suspected the Unseelie bastards had a hand in that as well.
I could almost believe it was just another of their ploys—one more distraction. One more mess meant to tear at my kingdom’s defenses until there was nothing left to stand against them, but this felt different. Older. Darker.
