Two Twisted Crowns (The Shepherd King, #2)

by Rachel Gillig

I was the darkness and the darkness was me, and together we rolled with the tide, lulled toward a shore I could neither see nor hear. All was water—all was salt.

“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.”

New memories spilled into me. They were not like the others, softened by childhood or tethered by family. These were fresh—forged when I was a woman. A man, clad in a dark cloak, a mask obscuring all but his eyes. Purple and burgundy lights. Running in the mist. A hand, coarse with calluses, on my leg as I sat in a saddle. That same hand in my hair. A heartbeat in my ear—a false promise of forever.

Ione said nothing. But her eyes were burning. Vibrant hazel, they were the color of a green field, punctuated by autumn leaves. Amber sap, slipping over moss. Heat and life and anger—so much anger they flared, even in the darkness of his shadow.

Here. In the dark, on the shore. Where there was no sun, no moon. Where the mourning dove did not call at dawn and no owl announced dusk. A place of desolation—emptiness and despair. This is where his secrets were kept.

Above rowan and yew, the elm tree stands tall. It waits along borders, a sentry at call. Quiet and guarded and windblown and marred, its bark whispers stories of a boy-Prince once scarred.

And so, Ravyn Yew, your Elm I won’t touch. His life strays beyond my ravenous clutch. For a kicked pup grows teeth, and teeth sink to bone. I will need him, one day, when I harvest the throne.

“Neither Rowan nor Yew, but somewhere between. A pale tree in winter, neither red, gold, nor green. Black hides the bloodstain, forever his mark. Alone in the castle, Prince of the dark.”

You, traitorous thing, who have never truly ceded authority. Liar, thief—immune to the Chalice and Scythe—you know nothing of losing control.” His lips twisted, snarl letting to a smile. “But you will. You will learn, just as I did, what it feels like to lose yourself in the wood.”

The journey to the Twin Alders will three barters take. The first comes at water—a dark, mirrored lake.

“Don’t you understand?” he whispered. “There can be no stony facade—no pretending—after this. Death demands to be felt. It wasn’t just Gorse who died in that courtyard today.” His yellow gaze reached into the darkest parts of Ravyn. “But the Captain of the Destriers as well.”

“That was the Spirit of the Wood, beckoning you to this place,” the Nightmare whispered. “This is where people come, when they are lost to the mist.” He drew air into his nose. “Can’t you smell them?”

The wood was alive—and voracious. Trees and roots skittered forward at terrifying speeds, grasping at Ravyn and the Nightmare. They snagged at hair and skin and clothes, as if they wanted a taste of the trespassers who had breached their terrifying haunt.

Clever men died on their own terms. And if they were wary, clever, and good, they perhaps died in peace. He, apparently, was none of the three.

I could not see him, but I knew the Shepherd King with golden armor was with us. For he was the Nightmare, and the Nightmare was the King, and I was both of them.

I screamed into the dark. The Nightmare opened his mouth, and my scream became his, a horrid sound of despair and hate and rage so complete it shook the trees, dousing the arrogance in Hauth’s face and painting dread upon him.

“There was a time, once,” we said, “when rowan and yew trees grew together in the wood. They spoke in delicate rhymes—whispered tales of balance, of the Spirit of the Wood. Of magic. But time is as corrosive as salt. As rot. And now the rowan’s roots are bloodstained, and the yew tree twisted beyond all recognition. We are monsters, the pair of us.”

“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.”

One the hunter, and the other the fox who had grown so tired of being hunted, he’d forged his own snare.

The girl, he whispered, honey and oil and silk. The King… We said the final words together, our voices echoing, listless, through the dark. A final note. An eternal farewell. And the monster they became.

There was so much balance in everything that had happened since the last Equinox. It was as if all of our lives, drawn in long, separate lines, had curved together. Curved so much that all of us had become interlocking circles. As if we had been destined together. Shepherded together.