One Dark Window (The Shepherd King, #1)

by Rachel Gillig

Still, it was the first time I stopped fearing the Nightmare— the voice in my head, the creature with strange yellow eyes and an eerie, smooth voice. Eleven years later, and I don’t fear him at all. Even if I should.

She didn’t pretend, Ione. She simply was.

That’s how the best lies are told—with just enough truth to be convincing.

I was born with the fever, my blood dark as night, With magic unflinching, power and might. My sights, they were endless, my ambition too vast, So I asked for more blessings, for power, amassed. The Spirit did warn me that nothing comes free, That bargains and barters all come with a fee. Though payment was dear, I paid what it cost. With blood and with bones and parts of me lost. So mind how you use them, and keep up your guard. Twelve blessings—twelve curses. Twelve Providence Cards.

“There once was a girl,” he murmured, “clever and good, who tarried in shadow in the depths of the wood. There also was a King—a shepherd by his crook, who reigned over magic and wrote the old book. The two were together, so the two were the same: “The girl, the King... and the monster they became.”

There are many different kinds of cages.

“What about you, Captain? Are you too nice for your own good?” He watched me, something I could not read flashing in his gray eyes. “No, Miss Spindle,” he said. “I’m not nice at all.”

I clenched my jaw and turned away from the dark window at the lip of the tree line, denying the Nightmare his request.

How you look is—and perhaps always has been—utterly irrelevant.

Here, in the wood, he was just a man in a black cloak seeking repentance.

“Call me Elspeth,” I said. “We’re about to commit treason together, after all.”

He stared up at me, his blue eyes glassy and wide. When he saw my eyes above my mask, I knew he did not recognize me. He’d never seen me with yellow eyes before.

The berry of rowans is red, always red. The earth at its trunk is dark with blood shed. But a Prince is a man, and a man may be bled. He came for the girl... And got the monster instead.

My aunt had told me once that my strange charcoal eyes were special, beautiful even—a dark window to the soul beneath. But as I glanced back into the looking glass, the reflection of my black eyes flickering to that bright, eerie yellow, I had to wonder... whose soul was it? The Nightmare’s? Or mine?

A doorless chamber with one dark window.

We were the thing to be feared. We were the balance.

“Then be a liar, Ravyn. Betray. Upturn the kingdom that would see you and me and Emory killed.

“It is not they who bring the reckoning, Ravyn. It is you. It is us.”

A chamber at the edge of the meadow, its one dark window, black and infinite, beckoning me forward.

We were not the same, my half sisters and I. Life had sheltered them, like pearls kept in a velvet pouch. And I—I was not made of pearls. I was made of salt.

until my body, monstrous, mirrored the hate in my heart.

We smiled, and when we stood, the world around us faded, time and space, Prince and King, child and spirit. All that remained was magic—black as ink. Powerful, vengeful, and full of fury.

When the Shepherd returns, a new day shall ring. Death to the Rowans... “Long live the King.”

The wood knows no road—no path through the snare. Only I can find the Twin Alders... “For it was I who left it there.”