They Hanged My Parents as Traitors, Now the Prince Needs My Heart novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Glass
At the Hunters' Feast the Regent's nephew makes the traitors' daughter pick up broken glass with her bare hands, and the Hollow Prince comes down his tower stair for the first time in ten years; she demands her parents' warrant be read aloud, and it bears his seal.
The goblet hit the flagstones at my feet and burst, and the Regent's nephew said, "Pick it up, Madoc."
I stopped with the wine jug on my hip.
Three hundred wolves were eating at the long tables of the great hall.
It was the autumn feast, the one night of the year the kitchen girls carried the food out in clean aprons.
Nobody turned around.
Nobody ever did when it was me.
"With your hands," the nephew said. "Not the cloth. A traitor's brat doesn't get a cloth."
He was twenty-six and sat with his boots on the rung of a chair that wasn't his.
His friends at the table laughed.
The man beside him looked at his plate, because his plate was the safest thing in the room.
I set the jug on the floor.
Ever since they hanged my parents, anyone in the keep who wanted to throw something at the traitors' daughter had been allowed to.
Soup, mostly.
Once a boot.
I knelt on the flagstones and started with the biggest piece.
The glass was thick and cut deep across the pad of my thumb on the first try.
I didn't flinch, and I didn't look at the shard.
I looked at him.
I picked up the next piece, and the next, and blood ran down my wrist into my sleeve.
His smile got thinner each time I didn't look away.
When I had every piece in my left palm, I stood up.
I walked the length of the table, past the Regent's own place.
I stopped in front of the nephew.
Then I tipped the glass out onto the white linen beside his plate, with a little of my blood on it.
"You dropped something, my lord," I said.
Somebody gasped.
The nephew shoved back his chair, and his hand came up.
Every fire in the hall went down at once.
All three hearths dropped to red embers, and the candles along the dais leaned over flat and stayed there.
The cold came in from the north stair, and it was the cold of a room that has been shut a long time.
Three hundred wolves went quiet and then, one table at a time, got up and bent their heads.
I didn't understand until I turned around.
A man was standing on the bottom step of the tower stair.
He was tall and thin in a dark coat with the collar open, and his black hair hung past his shoulders.
His left hand hung at his side.
Black veins ran over the back of it and up under his cuff, raised and thick, and they moved when he breathed.
Everyone in the Crown Pack knew who he was.
Prince Cadoc Gwynfor had not come down that stair in ten years.
He was two hundred and twelve years old and he could not die, and the whole valley called him the Hollow Prince.
He walked straight across the hall.
He didn't look at the nephew or at the Regent, who was standing now with his napkin in his hand.
He looked at my left hand.
He stopped an arm's length away and said, in a voice that hadn't been used much, "You're bleeding."
"It's glass," I said. "I'm fine."
"May I?"
I should have said no.
Instead I held out my hand, because I wanted to see what he would do.
He took my wrist in his bad hand.
My blood ran over the back of his fingers, and the black lines on his skin drew back.
They went back up his wrist a finger's width, and then another.
A woman near the dais cried out.
The prince's gray eyes came up to mine, and they had a ring of gold around the pupil.
"Who is she?" he said, without looking away.
"Lord Prince," said the Regent, in his soft voice, as he came down off the dais. "You should not be out of your rooms. She is nobody. A scullery girl. Bronwen Madoc, the Madoc daughter."
"Madoc," said the prince.
He said it slowly, and his jaw tightened on the last letter.
I pulled my hand out of his.
"I know what you think this is," I said. "I've heard what the old women say about the traitor's daughter and the Hollow Prince."
"Then you know I haven't come to hurt you."
"I know you've come to use me."
The hall could hear every word.
I found I didn't mind.
"I'm not a key and I'm not a cure," I said. "You can have my blood when someone has read me my parents' sentence out loud, in this hall, with all of them listening."
"There is no need," the Regent said.
"Ten years," I said. "Nobody has ever said it to my face."
The prince didn't look at the Regent.
"Bring it," he said.
A steward ran.
It took a long time, and in all that time nobody sat down.
The steward came back with a folded sheet in a red leather case.
The prince took it and opened it with his good hand.
He read it where he stood.
I watched his face while he did, and I saw it go still from the mouth upward.
At the bottom of the page was a seal in black wax, a wolf's head in a ring.
He turned the paper so the torchlight fell on it.
"That is my seal," he said.
"Then it was you," I said.
His eyes came back to mine.
"Yes," said the Hollow Prince. "I signed it."
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