Their Hidden Princess novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Third Hunter
Elsbeth slips into Blackstone in disguise, meets the two men from her dream, and when her betrothed is named Commandant and sets them to hunt the princess, she volunteers to hunt herself; on the dark stair both men touch her at once and the spark hits all three.
The night my father promised me to a man I hated, I dreamed of two others.
They stood on a black cliff under a white moon.
One was golden and laughing. The other was dark and didn't smile at all.
Both of them reached for me.
My mother used to say Aldermoor women dream true on the night of a betrothal.
So eleven days later I cut the royal crest off my riding coat and ran.
Now I stood in the rain at the gate of Blackstone Academy with forged papers and borrowed boots.
I had forty days to find those two men.
On the forty-first, the law would hand me to the Lord Marshal.
The clerk in the gatehouse held my papers up to his lantern.
"Beth. Hedge-knight's daughter. From the Fenmarch." He snorted. "The Fenmarch doesn't have knights. It has frogs."
The cadets in line behind me laughed.
"Then my father was a very brave frog," I said.
"This seal is still wet, girl."
It was. My old nurse had stamped it two nights ago at her kitchen table.
A hand reached past my shoulder and took the papers.
"She's with me," a man said. "I dropped her letter of entry in the lake. Blame me."
I turned around.
Fair hair, soaked flat. Blue eyes. A white shirt open at the throat, and the easy smile of a man nobody had ever told no.
He was the golden one from my dream.
My knees went loose.
The clerk sighed. "Lysander Ingleby, that's the fourth letter you've lost this year."
"I'm a tragedy." Lysander handed the papers back to me and winked. "Go on, Frog Knight. Before he reads them properly."
I went.
He fell in beside me under the arch. "You're welcome, by the way."
"I didn't ask for help."
"You were about to be sent home to your frogs. I could hear it in his voice."
The path ran past the sparring yard, where a crowd had made a ring in the mud.
In the middle, a dark-haired man in a black sleeveless shirt was putting cadets on the ground one after another.
He didn't speak. He just waited for the next one.
He was the other one.
My heart started banging so hard I thought the whole yard could hear it.
"Roan Dunstan," Lysander said. "My best friend. Don't tell our fathers."
Roan looked up, saw Lysander, and then saw me.
"New," he said. "Want a turn?"
Every sensible part of me said no.
"Yes," I said, and dropped my bag in the mud.
The crowd laughed again.
My mother's old guard had trained me for twelve years, mostly by knocking me over.
Roan came in slow.
I ducked his arm, hooked his knee and drove my shoulder into his ribs.
He didn't fall.
But he slid back a full step, and the laughing stopped.
He looked at me for a long second.
"Again," he said.
A bell rang from the great hall before he could make me regret it.
The great hall smelled of wet wool and candle smoke.
Two hundred cadets stood in rows under the banners of the great packs.
A short girl with red curls squeezed in beside me and dripped on my boots.
"Maudie Tibbett," she whispered. "I'm your roommate. I already took the good bed. I'm not sorry."
I nearly laughed.
Then I looked at the high table, and the laugh died in my throat.
The old Commandant's chair had a new man in it.
Black coat. Silver braid. Grey at the temples.
Caius Varrick. Lord Marshal of the Aldermark. My betrothed.
The morning after the betrothal, he'd taken my chin through my veil in front of the whole court.
"After the Crown Moon," he'd said, "you'll learn to kneel."
He had never once seen my face without that veil.
I kept my head down anyway.
Varrick rose.
"Your Commandant has retired," he said. "By order of the Council, I hold Blackstone until the Crown Moon."
A sleek blonde cadet with a pearl pin on her tie handed him a small framed portrait.
"My niece, Clarice," he said. "She'll be my eyes when I'm busy."
Clarice smiled at the hall.
Varrick held the portrait up.
It was me at nineteen, hair pinned under pearls, before the scar through my eyebrow.
"Princess Elsbeth has run from her duty and her husband," he said. "She's a spoiled girl with no sense, and she is hiding somewhere in this kingdom."
Clarice laughed out loud.
"She will be found inside forty days," Varrick said. "She'll be brought back to me on her knees. And she'll be wed on them."
Some of the cadets laughed with him.
My nails cut into my palms.
"The Council has let me make it worth your while," Varrick said. "The pack whose hunter brings her to me gets the Vale of Ashes."
The hall went up.
The Ingleby river pack and the Dunstan mountain pack had bled over that valley for six years.
"Lysander Ingleby. Roan Dunstan. You'll lead the hunt."
Both of them stood.
Lysander wasn't smiling anymore. Roan's jaw was tight.
Varrick set my portrait down on the table, face up.
"A wolf that runs gets put down," he said. "A wife that runs gets broken. She'll learn."
I could keep my head down for forty days and pray.
Or I could stand beside the only two men in this hall I needed, and hear every move the hunt made before it made it.
"I'll hunt her too," I said.
My voice rang off the rafters.
Two hundred heads turned.
"Oh, you absolute lunatic," Maudie breathed.
Varrick's pale eyes found me. "And who are you?"
"Beth, my lord. From the Fenmarch."
"Why would a packless nobody hunt a princess?"
"Because I'm a girl who ran away from home," I said. "I know where we hide."
The hall laughed.
Varrick didn't.
He studied me so long my spine went cold.
"Then hunt, Beth from the Fenmarch," he said. "Fail me, and you go home in a cart."
After, the back stair was black. Somebody had let every candle gutter.
I heard boots on the steps above me.
"You're either very brave or very stupid," Roan said in the dark.
"Both," Lysander said behind me. "I like her."
My heel slipped off the wet stone.
Roan caught my bare wrist.
Lysander caught my bare hand.
Lightning went through all three of us.
It cracked up my arm and down my spine, so hard I tasted silver.
Roan swore.
Lysander didn't let go.
"Did you feel that?" he whispered.
Roan's grip tightened on my wrist. "Did you?"
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