Chapter 9: The River's Bargain
The willows were the first sign that the land itself was weeping.
We’d left the charcoal-burner’s camp behind, following the river as it twisted into a ravine. The blight’s pulse was no longer a distant thrum; it was a arrhythmic hammering against my sternum, a wrongness that made the air taste of wet iron and spoiled honey. The healthy pine and fir had given way to these willows, their trunks grotesquely twisted, their long, hair-like branches hanging limp in the still air. They were a cage of dripping green.
“It’s close,” Riven grunted, his right hand resting on the hilt of his sword. His left arm was held stiffly at his side. The gash from the Sylveran soldier’s dagger was bound tightly beneath his armor, but a dark stain was slowly seeping through the leather straps. My own magic—that shocking, unbidden command that had frozen three men in their tracks—felt like a scorched cavity behind my eyes. Using it had been like screaming with a throat full of glass.
“You’re bleeding again,” I said, my voice hoarse.
“It’s seepage. Not a fountain.” He didn’t look back. “Save your concern for whatever’s making the trees look like that.”
The ambush had been swift and brutal. They’d emerged from the mist just after dawn, four men in sylvan-green cloaks with silver oak-leaf pins. Lyra’s personal guard. Their leader had held a small, glowing lodestone that had pointed directly at me. “The tracer doesn’t lie,” he’d said. “Her Grace requires your return, Lady. Alive.”
Alive, but not necessarily intact. Riven had moved before the last word faded. He’d taken two down with terrifying efficiency, his black blade a blur. The third had gotten lucky, his dagger finding the gap in Riven’s armor at the ribs. The fourth had come for me.
I’d frozen. Not with fear, but with a dizzying array of terrible options. Princess Celestine’s combat training was theoretical. Evelyn’s knowledge was useless. And then the words had just… erupted. A language I didn’t know, from a place deep and cold and furious within me. “Kneel and be still.”
The air had thickened. The two remaining soldiers had locked up as if plunged into ice, their eyes wide with terror, muscles straining against invisible bonds. The command had drained me utterly. I’d slumped against a tree, vomiting into the bracken while Riven finished the job with two swift, precise strokes. He hadn’t said a word. Just cleaned his blade and started walking north again, leaving the bodies for the woods. I’d had to scramble to follow.
Now, hours later, the silence between us was a tangible thing, fraught with what we’d seen each other do.
“This ritual,” I finally said, picking my way over a slick, moss-covered root. “A dead god. You said it failed.”
“The first one did. Centuries ago. The entity was shattered. Its power… scattered. Became part of the land’s ley lines. A latent poison.” Riven ducked under a low-hanging curtain of branches. “The Shadow Court doesn’t want to cure the blight. They want to dredge up those shattered pieces and put them back together. They think a reconstituted god would be a weapon they could control.”
“And they need me for that.” The pieces were slotting into a horrifying picture. “Because my magic is… new. From outside.”
“It’s a catalyst.” He stopped, bracing a hand against a willow’s trunk. He was breathing a little too carefully. “Their first ritual caused the blight. A side effect of trying to wake a corpse. They need a specific kind of spark to complete the process. A soul that has crossed the veil twice. A reincarnate. It’s theoretical. Or it was. Until you showed up.”
The chill that went through me had nothing to do with the damp. “Lyra knows.”
“Lyra suspects. The tracer was keyed to residual signature of the magic you used in her sanctum. The root-and-stone stuff. It’s unique. It pinged on their sensors.” He pushed off the tree and kept walking. “My brother’s spymaster intercepted their communications. That’s how I got the contract.”
I remembered his confession from the night before, offered in the dark. My brother seeks a remedy in control. “So you’re not here to stop the ritual. You’re here to intercept the ritualist. To bring them and their knowledge back to the king.”
“To bring the means back. So my brother can decide whether to destroy it or use it himself.” His voice was flat, devoid of any pretense of heroism. “The Crown cannot allow a rival power to wield a god. Even a dead one. It’s not altruism. It’s realpolitik.”
The word hung in the sodden air. It was the least romantic, most believable motive I’d heard yet. “And where do I fit into your brother’s realpolitik?”
He finally glanced back, his grey eyes assessing. “As a component. One of immense value. And immense risk. A captured ritualist is a treasure. A captured princess who is also a key… that’s a predicament. Do you neutralize the key? Or do you try to own the lock?”
“You’re saying I shouldn’t trust you.”
“I’m saying you’re a fool if you do.” He turned forward again. “But right now, my goal aligns with yours. The Shadow Court wants to use you to complete their ritual. I need to find their ritualist before that happens. Therefore, for the moment, I am invested in keeping you out of their hands. It’s a simple equation.”
It was. Cold, clean, and utterly mercenary. A part of me, the part that had played a hundred games of intrigue, respected it. It was honest. The other part, the one living this, wanted to scream.
The riverbank began to constrict, the water churning faster against black rocks. The willows grew denser, their roots creating a tangled maze at the water’s edge. The pull was almost unbearable now, a hook in my navel dragging me forward.
“There,” Riven whispered.
Ahead, the riverbank curved around a massive, ancient willow. Its trunk was wider than a cottage, hollowed out by time and rot. Its branches formed a cavernous space beneath, shrouded from the sky. And from that hollow, the wrongness pulsed like a sick heart.
The ground around it was bare. Not blighted and grey, but scoured clean, as if washed by a torrent. The stones were smooth, polished. In the center of the cleared space, facing the hollow tree, was a circle of those same smooth stones. An altar.
“Don’t step in the circle,” Riven breathed, moving forward with predator’s caution.
We approached from the side, using the thick垂れ willow branches as cover. The hollow inside the trunk was deep and dark. And there, nestled in the shadows, was a figure.
A woman. She was kneeling, her back to us, wearing simple homespun wool stained with earth and something darker. Her hair was a wild tangle of brown. Before her, on a flat stone, were arranged crude implements: a clay bowl full of a viscous black liquid, a knife of flint, a cluster of wilted white flowers that made my vision swim to look at.
She was chanting. The language was guttural, full of clicks and glottal stops that hurt the ears. With each phrase, the pulse in the land gave a sickly throb.
“The ritualist,” I murmured.
“No,” Riven said, his voice tight with a new tension. “Look at her hands.”
The woman raised them. They were shaking, the fingers swollen and crusted with dirt. Peasant’s hands. Desperate hands. She wasn’t conducting a grand working. She was pleading.
“It’s a remnant,” Riven hissed. “A local. Someone who’s found a scrape of the old ritual’s instructions and is trying to use it. She’s not creating the blight. She’s trying to bargain with it.”
As we watched, she picked up the flint knife. Her chant rose to a fever pitch. She brought the blade toward her own outstretched palm.
“She’s going to feed it,” I said, understanding dawning with horror. “That’s the shift we felt. She’s offering it a piece of herself.”
“And it’s taking it. Making her part of the network.” Riven’s hand tightened on his sword. “If she completes that cut, she becomes an anchor. A permanent beacon for the hunger. We have to stop her.”
“How? Yell ‘surprise’?”
“You freeze her. Like you did the soldiers.”
The burned cavity behind my eyes throbbed in protest. “I can’t. I don’t even know how I did it.”
“Figure it out. Or I go in there and stop her the messy way.” His gaze was uncompromising. “Your choice, Eva. Catalyst or bystander?”
The woman’s voice cracked on a high note. The knife hovered over her palm. The black liquid in the bowl began to bubble, though no fire was near it.
There was no time for strategy. No time to weigh trust. There was only the visceral, screaming wrongness of what was about to happen, and the memory of those words tearing their way out of me.
I didn’t try to command. I didn’t try to speak. I just focused on that wrongness, on the desperate, tragic energy of the woman, and I pushed.
It wasn’t a word. It was a wave of negation, of solid air. It left me in a silent, breath-stealing rush.
The woman in the hollow jerked as if slapped. The flint knife clattered onto the stone. The bubbling liquid stilled. She slumped forward, unconscious or just broken, her chant cut off.
The sudden silence was deafening.
Riven was already moving. He crossed the scoured ground in quick, silent strides, knelt by the woman, and checked her neck for a pulse. He pried the bowl from her limp fingers and upended it onto the dirt. The black liquid soaked in without a sound.
“It’s done,” he called back, his voice low. “For now.”
I stumbled out from behind the branches, my legs watery. The effort hadn’t drained me like the command had. It had hollowed me in a different way, left me feeling thin and translucent. I looked at the woman’s face. She was young, maybe my age, with lines of hunger and grief etched deep. A farmer’s daughter. A desperate soul trying to save a blighted field, or a sick child, by talking to the sickness itself.
“She’s alive,” Riven said. “Sleeping. She’ll wake with a hell of a headache and no memory of the last few hours.” He stood, wiping his hand on his cloak. “Lucky for her.”
“This isn’t the source,” I said, the realization cold. “She’s just a symptom. A mosquito drawn to a wound.”
“Correct.” Riven’s gaze was fixed on the far side of the river. “The real epicenter is further in. This was just a… devotional site. A proof of concept.” He looked at me, and for the first time, I saw something like genuine calculation in his eyes, stripped of the mercenary’s disdain. “You stopped her without a verbal command. You’re learning to shape it.”
“It felt like shoving a wall.”
“Effective, if inelegant.” He nodded toward the north. “The pull is stronger now. Cleaner. She was creating static. Now she’s offline.” He turned to go, then paused, looking back at the unconscious woman. “We should move her. Leave her in the woods nearby. If the Shadow Court finds her here, they’ll extract what she knows. It won’t be pleasant.”
It was a moment of mercy. Unexpected. I helped him lift her. She was lighter than she looked. We carried her a hundred yards upstream, laying her in a dry thicket of ferns well away from the river’s pull. Riven placed a silver coin from his pouch in her hand. “For the headache,” he muttered, as if embarrassed by the gesture.
As we returned to the willow, the first true raindrops began to fall, pattering on the broad leaves. The storm that had been threatening all day was finally breaking.
We stood under the skeletal canopy of the great willow, looking at the scoured circle, the altar, the hollow that had almost claimed a soul. The pulse in the land was a clear, insistent drumbeat now, pulling us toward the heart of the timberlands.
“The king wants the means,” I said quietly, the rain masking our words. “The Shadow Court wants the god. What do you want, Riven? Really?”
He was silent for a long time, watching the rain darken the stones of the altar.
“I want to burn the instructions,” he said finally, his voice barely a whisper. “I want to salt the earth where the god fell. I want my brother to rule a kingdom that isn’t built on a secret grave.” He looked at me, rainwater tracing paths through the grime on his face. “But I took his coin. So my wants don’t matter. Only my orders.”
The confession hung between us, more intimate than any secret about dead queens or lost gods. It was the confession of a man trapped by his own loyalties.
“Orders can change,” I said.
A faint, grim smile touched his lips. “So can allegiances.”
He pushed away from the tree. “We need shelter. And you need to eat. That little display cost you.” He pointed to a rocky overhang further up the ravine, a dark slit in the mossy stone. “There. We wait out the rain. Then we follow the pulse to its end.”
I followed him, the rain now a steady, cold drizzle. The overhang was shallow but dry, smelling of wet stone and old animal dens. We shrugged off our packs. I pulled out the last of Mara’s bread and cheese, split it silently. He took his share without thanks, eating with methodical focus.
As we sat in the dim light, listening to the rain and the distant, ever-present pulse, I understood the new shape of the board. I was the key. Riven was the sword. His brother and the Shadow Court were the players. And somewhere in the dark timberlands ahead was the lock—a shattered, hungry thing that everyone wanted to either use or destroy.
Riven finished his food, leaned his head back against the stone, and closed his eyes. But I saw his hand rest on the hilt of his dagger, his thumb rubbing a familiar groove in the pommel. A reminder. A promise.
The game was no longer about romance or even survival. It was about possession. And I had just decided, watching the rain sheet down over the twisted willows, that I refused to be possessed.
The pulse in the earth agreed. It quickened. It was waiting.
It was waiting.
The rain fell harder, sheeting off the overhang in a translucent curtain that blurred the world into watery greens and greys. Riven’s breathing had evened into the shallow rhythm of a soldier’s rest. I watched the pulse in the land through my own closed eyelids, a map of malevolent light only I could see. It led north, always north, into the darkest part of the timberlands where the trees were said to be so old they remembered songs in languages no human mouth could shape.
My fingers traced the outline of the music box through the cloth in my pocket. A stolen heirloom, a key to nothing. Or a key to everything. Lyra wanted it. Drevik probably wanted it. I was beginning to suspect it wasn’t a key at all, but a seal. Something meant to keep a door closed.
A low, resonant vibration shuddered up through the stone at my back. It wasn’t the blight’s pulse. This was deeper, heavier, a subsonic hum that made my teeth ache.
Riven’s eyes snapped open. He was on his feet before the last pebble stopped skittering, his dagger in his hand. “What was that?”
“Not the blight,” I whispered, scrambling up. The vibration came again, a sustained note that shook water from the leaves above us. It was followed by a sound I couldn’t place—a vast, leathery rustle, like a dozen sails collapsing in a windless void.
We peered out into the rain. The world was a monochrome wash. The willow grove downstream was a smudge of darker grey. The river churned, white-frothed and angry.
Then the air above the river rippled.
It wasn’t the rain. The rain fell in straight, relentless lines. This was a distortion in the atmosphere itself, a shimmering heat-haze in the cool damp, coalescing into a form that was both impossible and instantly, primally recognizable.
Wings. Enormous, bat-like wings, veined with a faint, sickly phosphorescence. They swept down, and the gust of air they displaced was a physical wall. It hit the overhang with a roar, spraying us with stinging water and debris. I staggered back, my ears popping.
The creature that followed the wings into the river valley was not the glorious, jewel-scaled beast of legend. This thing was the color of a week-old bruise, its hide slick with rain and something oily. Its body was elongated, serpentine, but built with a terrible, muscular density. Its head was a wedge of bone and horn, eyes like cold, black pits set deep above a mouth lined with jagged, crystalline teeth that gleamed with their own internal light.
A dragon. The word was absurd, a child’s fairy tale. But there it was, landing on the far bank with an earth-shaking thud that made the ground lurch. It folded its wings with a sound like snapping wet canvas.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” I breathed, the words torn away by the wind. My mind, traitorously, scrabbled for purchase. This wasn’t in the handbook. In all my otome game knowledge, dragons were decorative background art, mythic creatures mentioned in lore books to be read by firelight. They weren’t interactive. They didn’t come down in the rain smelling of ozone and rotten meat.
Riven shoved me hard, pressing me back against the stone wall. “Don’t move. Don’t breathe.”
Its head swung on a neck thicker than a tree trunk, those pit-like eyes scanning. It snuffed the air, a sound like a blacksmith’s bellows. It was looking for something.
For the pulse. For the source.
For the disturbance we had just made.
It took a step toward the willow grove, its taloned foot sinking deep into the soft earth of the bank. It lowered its head, sniffing at the scoured circle, at the altar. A low, rumbling growl vibrated in the air, a sound that bypassed the ears and rattled the spine.
It knew. It knew someone had been meddling.
Then, with a suddenness that stopped my heart, its head snapped up. It turned. It looked directly at our overhang.
It hadn’t seen us. It had felt us. Felt the residual energy from my push, from Riven’s wound, from the living warmth of two hearts beating in terror.
Riven’s grip on my arm was iron. “When I say run, you go up the ravine. Don’t look back.”
The dragon took another step toward us. And another. Its movement was not clumsy. It was terrifyingly fluid, a predator’s graceful stalk. Each step was a quiet earthquake.
“Riven—”
“Now.”
He broke from the overhang, not up the ravine, but diagonally away from me, toward the river. He yelled, a wordless, raw challenge, and threw his dagger. It was a hopeless, glorious gesture. The blade glanced off a scale on the creature’s forearm with a spark and a ping.
The dragon’s attention pivoted to him, a distraction so blatant and suicidal I couldn’t even breathe.
It worked. For a second. The creature’s head swung toward Riven, a hint of almost intelligent curiosity in its hollow gaze. It exhaled, and a plume of shimmering, corrosive mist sprayed from its nostrils, eating into the ground where Riven had just been standing.
He was fast, rolling behind a boulder. But he was wounded. And he was human.
My feet were rooted. The meta-commentary in my brain was screaming in static. This is not part of the route! There is no dragon capture event! The romanceable characters are supposed to be humanoid! I fumbled for my pack, for anything, as if I had a player’s inventory screen. A healing potion. A teleport scroll. Something.
There was only cheese, a blanket, and a useless music box.
The dragon lost interest in the dodging, irritating morsel. Its head swung back to the overhang. To me. It took one final, deliberate step, and lowered its massive head until one of those black eyes, larger than my torso, was level with my hiding place.
I saw my reflection in its obsidian surface: tiny, pale, drenched.
Its mouth opened slightly, not to bite, but to taste the air. A forked tongue, glowing faintly blue at the tips, flickered out.
Then a talon, each curved claw the size of a scythe, hooked into the space above me. Stone cracked and groaned. The overhang shattered.
I stumbled into the open, falling onto the slick mud. The dragon’s head loomed over me, blotting out the sky. This was it. The game over screen no one warned me about. Not a political assassination, not a magical backfire, but being eaten by a random monster in a side-quest zone. The ultimate glitch.
I looked at my chard—my hands, my useless, empty hands—and had the hysterical, clear thought: The tutorial did NOT cover this.
The talon didn’t crush me. It closed around me, surprisingly delicate, cageing me in a prison of hard, cold keratin. The pressure was immense, squeezing the air from my lungs. I was lifted into the air, the world dropping away in a nauseating whirl of grey and green.
I saw Riven, a small, dark figure below, sprinting toward the river’s edge, his face a mask of fury and helplessness. He shouted something I couldn’t hear.
Then the wings beat down, once, twice, with a sound like the world tearing.
The ground vanished. The ravine became a ditch. The timberlands spread out below like a rumpled, wet carpet. The dragon banked, turning north, following the pulse, and my stomach lurched into my throat.
It wasn’t eating me. Not yet.
It was taking me.