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October 17 - October 22, 2025
“But I do want it said, loud enough so everyone hears, that I am nothing like Hauth.”
Snide, without a whit of humor, Baldwyn was as pleasant to speak to as the inside of a chamber pot.
“It seems I owe you an apology.” “You mean Elspeth wants you to apologize.” “Annoyingly, yes.”
“How does it feel, knowing you will wear the crown?” “Like falling off a horse.”
“Just when I think you’re getting tolerable, you go and open your mouth.”
“What would you have me do? Burn the castle down with everyone in it?” “That would be a start.”
I’m going to change things. I’m going to be the worst Rowan King in five hundred years.” The tips of his lips curled. “I might even enjoy it.”
Your cousin Elm has done more than Brutus Rowan or I ever could. He has looked pain in the eye—and refused to let it make a monster of him.”
“For nothing is safe, and nothing is free. Debt follows all men, no matter their plea. When the Shepherd returns, a new day shall ring. Death to the Rowans.” His gray eyes focused, homing in on Elm. “Long live the King.”
“If you do not get your asses into the castle, I’m going to tell the Shepherd King, and then the bloody trees will drag you away.
Would it kill you to be civil? I’m already dead. But yes. Decidedly.
“Neither Rowan nor Yew, but somewhere between. A pale tree in winter, neither red, gold, nor green. Black hides the bloodstain, but washes the realm. First of his name—King of the Elms.”
He was sure the Spirit of the Wood didn’t attend to the meager lives of men. But in that moment, when, after five hundred years, the mist did finally lift and he became King of Blunder, Elm looked up into the night sky. Held Ione Hawthorn close. He knew, in all the rotten, broken pieces of himself, that everything in his life had led to that moment, as if written in the lines of the trees. A crooked, wonderful circle, with his name in the heart of it.
“It’s hardly my fault, Elspeth,” he muttered under his breath, “that I am constantly surrounded by idiots.”
They stood in darkness together, near the stone. Upon it rested the ancient adornments of Aemmory Percyval Taxus and Brutus Rowan. Gilded, bloodstained. Two twisted crowns.
“None of this might have happened without you, Elspeth,” Ione whispered. “And isn’t that such a beautiful thing.”
And though it had taken slow, painful time, I knew who I was without him. I was more than the girl, the King, and the monster of Blunder’s dark, twisted tale. I was its author.
