The carriage smelled like fear.
I know, because it was mine.
They had dressed me in crimson — how fitting, I thought, that they would wrap me in the color of blood before delivering me to the creature who craved it. The gown was exquisite, I would give them that much. Layers of silk that whispered against my skin with every sway of the carriage, a corset laced so tightly I could barely draw a full breath. I had told myself that was why my breathing kept stuttering. That it was the corset. That it had nothing to do with where I was going, or what waited for me when I arrived.
I had been lying to myself for three days. I was rather good at it by now.
My name is Seraphine Voss, and I am nineteen years old, and I am so frightened that my hands have not stopped shaking since Tuesday.
I press them flat against my thighs now, willing them still, watching the dark blur of trees through the narrow carriage window. The forest has thickened around us over the last hour, ancient and dense and utterly lightless, the kind of dark that feels intentional. Like it belongs to someone. Like it is keeping watch.
I pull my gaze back inside.
Three days ago, I was a blacksmith's daughter. I woke before dawn to the smell of bread and coal smoke. I had a best friend named Mara who laughed too loudly and a little grey cat that slept on my feet and a life that was ordinary and unglamorous and so, so safe.
Then the council came to our door.
There were four of them, all men, all wearing the composed expressions of people delivering news they had already made peace with long before knocking. Their voices were smooth and practiced. A gift. An honor. A gesture of goodwill. They spoke for a long time using beautiful words that all meant the same ugly thing, and when they were finished they laid a document on my father's table and placed a quill beside it without asking whether he had questions.
My father's hand trembled when he signed.
I had watched it tremble and thought — foolishly, desperately — that he would stop. That his love for me would be louder than his fear of them. That he would push the parchment back across the table and tell them to find someone else, some other girl to wrap in silk and sacrifice.
He didn't stop.
He signed his name and then he stared at the table and I stared at him and neither of us said a word and that silence has been living inside my chest ever since, heavy and jagged, like something I accidentally swallowed.
I press my fingers against my sternum now, feeling the ache of it.
I had cried the first night. Quietly, turned toward the wall of the unfamiliar room they'd housed me in, my whole body shaking with the effort of keeping the sound inside. I had cried until I felt emptied out and hollow, and then I had lain awake in the dark and tried to remember every story I had ever heard about him.
Lord Caelan Drave.
The name alone makes my stomach drop.
He was ancient — that was the first thing people always said. Old in a way that no human mind could truly hold, centuries of existence stacked behind those eyes like rooms in a house with no end. He ruled the northern territory with an authority so absolute that even the council, who feared nothing and no one, spoke of him in carefully modulated tones. Humans who entered his castle did not often come back with cheerful reports. He was not cruel, people said — or at least, not needlessly so. But he was not safe. He was not tame. He was something that existed outside the boundaries of everything I had ever understood, and he fed on blood, and in approximately four minutes, I was going to be standing in front of him.
The carriage slows.
My heart lurches so violently I have to press a hand over it.
I hear the gates. That deep, iron groan of something enormous swinging open, and then we are moving again, up a long approach, and I cannot help it — I look out the window and my breath catches in my throat.
The castle is beautiful.
It shouldn't be. That feels like a cruelty, somehow, that the place I have been dreading for three days should be this. It rises pale and severe against the night sky, all sharp towers and luminous stone, and the grounds surrounding it are immaculate in the way that only centuries of quiet attention can produce. Black roses climb the outer walls in great dark tangles, their blooms impossibly rich in color, swaying very slightly in a wind I cannot feel from inside the carriage.
I realize I am gripping the window ledge hard enough that my knuckles have gone white.
I release it. Smooth my palms over my skirt. Breathe.
You can do this, I tell myself. You are going to walk through those doors and you are going to stay calm and you are going to be—
The carriage door opens and the cold hits me like a wall.
A servant helps me down — human, young, eyes carefully averted — and I step onto the stone path and the night wraps around my bare shoulders and I feel suddenly, acutely, impossibly small. The castle looms before me, warm amber light bleeding through its tall windows, and for one wild moment I want to run. I want to gather my skirts and run back through those iron gates and into the black forest and disappear completely, become someone they can never find, someone who was never handed over like an apology.
But the gates have already closed.