Mistwood

“I can find out,” Ven said eagerly, straightening. “You’ll let me, won’t you? I have dozens of books, everything ever written about the Shifter. And spells, and lore…I’ll find out why you’re reacting the way you are.”

It would be dangerous, because he was Albin’s apprentice—but if he could help her figure out what had happened to her, and to the powers Rokan was relying upon, it would be well worth the risk.

“All right,” Isabel said slowly, exuding reluctance.

Ven tried to nod gravely but could not repress his grin. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then? At dawn?”

Isabel nodded and turned her back on him before she could give in to the urge to grin back.

She wasn’t sure, as she continued down the stairs, whether she had the answer to her original question. If Rokan’s reign was the result of a decade-old coup, his right to rule was open to question in a way no Samornian king’s had been for centuries. He certainly had reason to seek out extra protection. But why choose a form of protection that was just as likely to turn on him?

Whatever his reasons, he had gambled correctly. She was on his side. Despite what she now knew, every part of her yearned to wipe away the fear she had seen in his eyes, to ease the tension that seemed always a part of him. And she was the Shifter. Her instincts were infallible.

Should be infallible.

What would happen to the Shifter if there was no one left for her to protect? Would she drift apart, back to fog and wind, with no more reason to exist? Would she find something else to do?

Or someone else to protect?

She went to Ven’s room the next morning, and every morning after that. She didn’t have to push much to get him to talk about her; she was all he wanted to talk about. And it was reassuring, in a way, to listen to him go on endlessly about the exploits of the Shifter—tales he had read or been told or heard in song. In the past, it seemed, she had been all-knowing and nearly all-powerful. His stories tweaked memories that made it easy for her to pretend she still was, and to believe she would be again.

The only thing he ever asked her was whether the tales were true. She told him they all were, even the most wildly implausible ones, and he never doubted her. His awe grew daily.

She spent the rest of each day at court, gathering information she could use to advise, and impress, Rokan. Her store of knowledge became more solid with every fragment and nuance. Sometimes her memory would surprise her with sudden spurts of information—about the growing threat of the Raellian Empire, or the long-standing enmity between two northern dukes, or the intricacies of the Green Islands trade routes. But she couldn’t control when that happened, so she couldn’t rely on it. What she could depend on, it soon became clear, was her ability to ferret out secrets with frightening efficiency.

On the fourth day, she went to meet Rokan in his bedchamber. He had asked for the meeting—until then, he had been too busy to do more than occasionally exchange a few sentences with her—and Isabel’s anticipation grew as the morning dragged on.

But Rokan wasn’t in his bedchamber when she got there.

This was the first time she had seen his room in the daylight; it was decorated much like her own, but in maroon and gold rather than green, with tables scattered among the ornate chairs. The tapestry to the right of the bed portrayed a stormy sea, all dark blue shadows and white waves and a horizon that melted into the sky. Isabel had never seen a tapestry quite like it. She studied it for a moment before turning to the guard who had half-risen from one of the polished wooden chairs along the wall.

“Er,” the guard said. “The prince—His Highness asked me to tell you to meet him in the stable yard. He said he prefers—”

Isabel was gone before the guard had a chance to finish the sentence, racing through the hall and down the stairs so fast her feet never seemed to touch the ground. She had a vague impression of shocked faces turning to watch her and knew she was moving faster than any human could have run, but she didn’t care. Her heartbeat was pounding even faster than her footsteps. If this was some sort of trap—if Rokan wasn’t in the stable yard—

Someone shouted a command as she flew past. He was behind her, so she couldn’t tell who it was—and then, suddenly, she could: a castle guard, his sword half-drawn. There was no way peripheral vision could extend that far backward, so her eyes must have actually shifted position in her head. She snapped her focus back to the corridor ahead of her.

A long, narrow set of stairs led down to the stables; when she reached them, she threw herself into the air. For a few breathless moments she hung suspended in midair, her leap carrying her out over the stairs; then she fell like a stone and landed on her feet only inches past the bottom step. She used the impact to catapult herself into the stable yard.

Rokan was mounted on a gray gelding, and a stable hand held the reins of a brown mare. Both horses startled as Isabel came to an abrupt stop; Rokan’s gelding reared, and the prince had to twist to keep from being thrown. Isabel nickered at the horse, an exact echo of the sound a stallion would use to calm a fractious mare. The gelding came back down, snorted, and stood still.

Isabel crossed the large flat stones of the yard, and the stable hand let go of the mare’s reins in his haste to get away from her. One quick glance told Isabel he wasn’t a threat; his fear was all of her, and she could hardly blame him for that. She grabbed the mare’s reins before they had finished swinging and pulled herself into the saddle.

“Next time you decide on a change of plans,” she told Rokan, “you should tell me about it yourself.”

“Right,” Rokan said faintly. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Do that.” Isabel turned the mare around in a tight circle, alert for dangers she might have missed. The stable yard was a narrow rectangle surrounded by the wooden stables on three sides, empty but for Rokan, herself, and the terrified stable hand. A moment later the guard rushed down the stairs, but stopped short at the sight of the two of them mounted. “And why are we changing our plans?”

“Because it has occurred to me that though it’s no longer safe for me to go riding alone, it’s probably safe to go riding with you.”

Isabel glanced over at the stable hand, but Rokan had pitched his voice low enough so the boy wouldn’t overhear. “Why do you need to go riding at all?”

Rokan grinned at her sideways. “If I spend one more second inside the castle, I may go mad. Insane kings are notoriously bad for their countries. So it’s your duty to indulge me in this.”

“I wouldn’t care if you were bad for your country,” Isabel said, and was surprised when Rokan’s smile dimmed. Had she implied something without intending to? “Although insane kings are probably also difficult to protect.”

“Yes. Clarisse makes that point to me often.” The smile was back, making his eyes gleam. Rokan had the type of face that became long and angular when he smiled, but the way his eyes came alive more than made up for it. “Usually when I want to go riding, in fact.”

“Well, she’s right.” Much as it annoyed Isabel to say it.

Rokan turned his horse toward the gate. “Once, when I was younger, I broke out of a formal procession and rode straight out that gate. No one saw it coming in time to stop me. I galloped directly away from the city gates for an hour before I came to my senses.” His grin didn’t fade even as he added, “My father had me beaten to within an inch of my life.”

“You put yourself in danger.” Isabel’s sympathies were with his father.

The grin did disappear then. “That’s not why he did it. I had embarrassed him.” He leaned forward and stroked his horse’s neck. The gelding snorted and pulled at the reins. “My father did not like being embarrassed.”

“Your father sounds like…quite a man.”

Rokan shrugged. “Kingship requires such men. So he always said.”

“You don’t agree?”

A lock of dark hair fell over Rokan’s forehead, and he didn’t bother to push it away as he straightened in the saddle. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out how much like him I have to be.”

Isabel remembered the portrait, the cold, judgmental gaze. She regarded Rokan through half-shut eyes. “Or how much like him you can be. I think you’ll find it’s not very much at all.”

“Thank you,” Rokan said, then blushed and laughed at the same time. “Sorry. You didn’t mean that as a compliment, did you? My father outwitted all his many enemies and ended up dying of a natural infection. I’m sure you wish I was more like him.”

“No,” Isabel said without thinking.

He raised his eyebrows, waiting for her to explain. Isabel had no explanation, so she spurred her horse toward the gate.

They rode in silence through the steep narrow streets of the capital city, past crowded houses of weathered stone and iron rails. Isabel did not like the city. There were few open spaces and fewer trees, and even the sky was blocked by the vastness of the northern mountain range. There were too many potential hiding places from which an enemy could spring.

It wasn’t until they had left the city behind and turned toward the flat lands to the south that she relaxed enough to begin talking again. “You rode alone when you came to find me, didn’t you? Will wouldn’t be much of a protector.”

Rokan, too, had relaxed once the city was behind him, swaying easily from side to side as he adjusted to the gelding’s changing gait. “There was no choice. Only members of the royal family may enter the Mistwood. The villagers tell some rather grisly stories about what happens to people who disregard that rule.”

“Do they,” Isabel said, and bared her teeth savagely. But her heart wasn’t in it. She hadn’t even known Rokan was in her woods, not until shortly before he found her. Clearly, the villagers were wrong.

She wondered how much of the lore surrounding her was wrong. Perhaps she had built up much of her own legend deliberately, to make her task easier. Maybe that was the problem now: she was trying to live up to her own lies.

The Shifter, it turned out, was not a great rider. Presumably it wasn’t a particularly useful skill for a creature who could be a horse herself if she chose. Isabel was fine when the mare walked, cantered, and even trotted; in fact, she rather enjoyed watching the mountainous terrain flattening into gentle hillsides, the grass bending ahead of the wind in dark green waves. Far ahead she could see trees beginning to dot the hillside, and the breeze that stirred her hair made her skin tingle. She could feel mist on that breeze, as faint as a whispered breath. The Mistwood was still hours of riding away, but she knew where that mist came from. It made her feel like she was the legend, like she could shift just by wishing it. It was enough to make up for the discomfort of riding.

But Rokan, it soon became apparent, liked to gallop. He liked to gallop really, really fast.

After the third time he had to wait for her to catch up, she shifted her breathing steady and said, “I would prefer that you not do that. I have enough trouble protecting you from others without worrying that you’re going to kill yourself accidentally.”

Rokan laughed, his hair in windblown tangles, his face alive with pure exhilaration. “Don’t worry about it, then. I’m an excellent rider.”

“I can’t help worrying about you. It’s part of what I am.” He smiled even more widely at that, and she said repressively, “Besides, it wouldn’t matter how good you were if someone had sabotaged your saddle. Did you even check the saddle girths?”

Rokan’s grin died, replaced by an expression of concern—which had been her goal, so there was no reason for a pang of regret. “No.” And then, challengingly: “Did you?”

“I would have been able to tell by the way your horse moved if there was any problem.”