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All I could do was sit—trapped and burning with hatred—as she told herself to do something I would never do—abandon my family. Her plan was so insidious in its simplicity. I would lose all sense of myself, believing myself to be the princess, while she ran off with the jewels and gold she spent a year hiding away, waiting until she had a new face that would take her safely out of town.
“If something goes wrong, there is only one way to break the curse,” she told herself through me. “True love. A confession of love for your true self and with your true name. He must know and love you, the real you, not the borrowed face you wear. When that love is sealed with a kiss borne of truth and sacrifice, all that you are and once were will return.
“Remember this in case something goes wrong and you have no choice but to reclaim your body. Thankfully, your true lovewill always be with you.” She held out her hand to Kaelan, a smile as warm on her lips as the one beaming on his. “Kaelan will protect you, watch over you, and bring you back when the time is right.”
“Yes,” he said. “I will. I love you always, my princess. Forever until the end of time.”
“And after.”
I would’ve vomited if the bile could escape my throat. Not just for their sickening display, but for the certainty that this was the last night of my life. True love would never free me. I’d spend the last of my days with a man who believes me to be someone else. Even if he discovered love somewhere in the depths of his black, twisted soul... My name. He would never know my name.
“I believe that’s it,” Emiana said, rising. “Am I forgetting anything, my love?”
“No, my heart. After the change, we’ll walk straight past the guards into my quarters. They’ll think I took one of the war wives out for a taste. As soon as she’s married, we’ll both be free.”
“Let’s not waste another minute. Father has been sending guards to check on me at night to make sure I haven’t run.”
“Get comfortable,” he said. “I’ll take care of her.”
Getting comfortable for Princess Emiana was stripping naked and lying down on her silky, voluminous sheets.
Kaelan tugged off my clothes and left me on the cold floor—legs locks and jaw trapped. I shook as chill spread through me, tears stinging my eyes.
How did this happen? Only that morning, I was singing in the garden with Savia, smiling at our garden patch’s healthy, growing vegetables. Now I was in trouble the likes of which cracked my spirit. Of course this barbaric spell was named forbidden. It was a curse that allowed you to steal someone’s life. To rip away their image, memories, and future, take it foryourself, and leave them stranded in the misery you’re fleeing. What kind of desperate person created such a spell?
How desperate must you be to use it?
The princess of Lyrica trading lives with a poor, random girl she called “little whore,” she wasn’t desperate. She was terrified... of Alisdair Shadowsoul.
I knew as much about the ruler of our enemy kingdom as anyone in Lyrica did.
All of faekin lived in harmony until Alisdair Shadowsoul. Peace and goodwill throughout the lands wasn’t enough for the peasant faeman. He wanted power, a kingdom, and complete and total dominion over all in his path.
No one knows how he did it, what spell he used, or how he discovered such a terrible spell in the first place. All that was known was that on one terrible day, he tore his heart from his chest, cursed it, and hid it somewhere in the lands that became the kingdom of Wind and Wild.
Our magics—or at least, the magic of those still allowed to use it—were connected to our hearts, feelings, and emotions in so many ways. The explosive destruction of fury. The tenderness and majesty in magic fueled by love. The fits and starts of nerves, and the bubbling, brightness of happiness.
But if all that was taken away, and one was just an empty, soulless vessel of magic who wielded it with cold efficiency? Alisdair Shadowsoul answered that question: you become the most powerful faeman in history... at the expense of everything you are.
Shadowsoul changed.
Without his heart, he began turning into a beast. Half fae, half animal, he became the father of a new race—the faeriken.
On the very spot where he hid his cursed heart, grasping vines, jagged bush, overgrown trees, craggy rocks, and perilouscliffs sprung up surrounding him. A deadly, twisting forest that would one day become the kingdom of Wind and Wild.
If that was the end of his tale, Princess Emiana’s madness would not be the start of mine, but it got worse. So much worse, for the cursed heart was not content to contain its evil.
It spread through the soil and into the closest neighboring villages. At first, no one thought anything of it, until they began to change. Warped from reasoned, normal-mannered faekin turned into feral, snarling beasts—half fae, half animal.
That was when the kings and queens of old realized we were in trouble. If the heart wasn’t found and destroyed, the curse would continue spreading until it struck down every kingdom and every fae. Thus, they went to war. A war that’s lasted a thousand years, with no end in sight.
Shadowsoul did not take well to being attacked. He was certainly unmoved by pleas, treaties, begging, or bribes. Instead, he claimed the faeriken suffering under his curse as his subjects, and set them to fight the very fae trying to save them and themselves.
Our men would come back from the battlefield, speaking of fangs, claws, gills, fur, long ears, and beaks. They spoke of men who lost their souls long ago.
And Shadowsoul was responsible for all of it.
Hundreds of years later, Shadowsoul sat on a throne carved from the land’s misery, ruling over a drooling, snarling pack of cursed beasts, and watching my people die in a war we couldn’t lose, because we fought for our home and our souls.
