Chapter 1: Devil’s Night

With a scream loud enough to shake her home, Orpheia tore her arms across the dining table. Any dish within her reach went flying onto the floor. Glass shattered and stained the room’s rug. Orpheia collapsed back into her chair, breathless and dizzy. She curled her legs up to her chest and let the silken layers of her skirt drown out her sobs.

A frantic servant girl stumbled back a step. Guilt contorted her face. “Ma’am, would you like me to fetch—”

“No,” Orpheia blurted out. Her tears chewed up her voice and left it strangled. Orpheia tightened her hand around the letter. The Terrsolis royal seal, which marked its corner, haunted her like the dead; it burned into the backs of her eyelids. “Do not get my father. He mustn’t know of this. It would break him.”

Lord Samhain could not learn of this arrangement. Not yet. Not until Orpheia could create a plan. Her father would want to flee, but Terrsolis would never allow it. They would be hunted down and slaughtered, just as their brethren had been all across the lands. In order to protect her loved ones, Orpheia would have to be clever. Cleverer than the previous woman that the Solian royal family preyed on; her mother.

Orpheia excused herself from the empty dining table with an improper mumble. As she dragged her gown across the floor, she avoided the prying eyes of her concerned staff, all of whom poked their heads into the corridor to catch glimpses of Orpheia’s inky black tears. She had suffered a great deal as a child, exactly eight years and one day prior, on the very day her mother was murdered for confiding in evil incarnate. But not by her people’s hands. Such cruelty could only be conjured in the minds of the Solians; people born of the violent, ruthless kingdom Terrsolis. They were sworn enemies of Orpheia’s people, a dying breed known as Umbranians. Umbranians had often been hunted throughout history, despite being a harmless people. From their earliest days, Umbranians were dragged from their homes and slain with stakes, pitchforks, and torches. The bloodshed never subsided, even when Orpheia’s mother gave herself to the Solians as a sacrifice, accepting an offer for her hand in marriage to the tyrant King Malachi. From the moment Malachi laid eyes on her, he was stricken with lust, seeing her grand beauty and physical bounty while secretly lurking among the last remaining Umbranian city. Neither the fact that she had a husband nor that she had a daughter swayed the king. For he was the type of man who took whatever he wanted, no matter the cost.

Orpheia was only nine years of age when she stopped her mother from cutting off her finger. She was drunkenly wailing in the kitchen in the dead of night. Orpheia tore the butcher’s knife from her hands and climbed into her mother’s arms to soothe her tears. When she asked her why she wished to mutilate herself, Orpheia was told by her mother that it would be better for her to have nine fingers than to remove the wedding ring that her once true love, Lord Samhain, had given her upon their wedding.

It was on Orpheia’s tenth birthday, a day which she shared with her people’s most sacred celebration, that she bore witness to her mother being burned at the stake in her manor’s courtyard. The terror that she endured at such a young age, listening to her mother’s rabid voice as she screamed out one final prayer, sent Orpheia into a state of shock from which she did not return until her raven hair was the color of pure silver moonlight and her tears fell in heavy black splotches. The Umbranian’s reigning superior witch at the time declared Orpheia had been reborn as a spectre; a being with a strong bond to the moon goddess, Lu’a. But there was no one to guide Orpheia in her new identity, as the last living Umbranian spectre had been killed some time ago. Had she been born centuries before, Orpheia might have been heralded as a great Lu’a priestess. But Orpheia was a girl of fretful misfortune, as the fate she had inherited was far worse than death. Such a fate had been scrawled out before her in decorative swoops and swirls and stamped with the Terrsolis seal. Inside the letter was an invitation to bear the crown of Terrsolis and live for the rest of her days with King Meyrick. In exchange, the Solians would swear to end the brutal killing of all Umbranian.

Orpheia swallowed a curse as she chucked the ink-stained letter into a roaring hearth that towered over everything in her bookshelf-lined study. She stepped back so as not to breathe in the toxic fumes of the Terrsolis king’s poisonous poetry. He had the audacity to declare her as beautiful as her mother, offering Orpheia a treat of honey-laced words, then dare to trick her with a sneaky line such as, “If you truly wish to free those whom you adore, then all I ask is for you to adore them no longer. Love me instead. Only me. Sit at the foot of my throne with your heart in my hand and your lips upon my lap, and I will spare those who share your witch-tainted blood.” What filth. He requested a wife, yet brazenly desired a concubine. Orpheia shuddered at the thought of her offering the same bloodline that slaughtered her mother with the privilege of enjoying her flesh. She was not a whore; not even to royalty. And especially not to any Solian.

Orpheia slammed her palms against the solid oak surface of her workbench, which was littered with herbs, gemstones, and animal pieces from creatures both big and small. Umbranians prided themselves on having as little waste as possible when it came to hunting the land of its resources, so any bones that could not be carved into jewelry, whiskers too small to be woven together, or blood too rich to be cooked into stew, was given to witches in exchange for protection and peace. But their spells were growing weaker, as spiritualism could only do so much when faced with hordes of blood-hungry soldiers. King Malachi’s nephew had recently taken the Terrsolis throne, and rumors had been circulating that he was far more ruthless and vile than any other man in his lineage before him. The letter he had given Orpheia—the very one she had rendered to ash—then began scooping back up into a small jar, had proved that fact. King Meyrick wasn’t just asking Orpheia to be his bride; he was threatening her with annihilation if she refused. Ten thousand men were preparing their arms that very night, basking under the same waxing gibbous on a hillside not far from the city’s borders. King Meyrick promised to drench the land in hellfire that would scorch the earth to its roots on the Umbranian’s most sacred holiday: All Hallows Eve. It was also Orpheia’s nineteenth birthday, though the excitement of celebrating the occasion had been tainted by the scent of her mother’s scorching flesh long ago.