Spring hadn’t yet warmed the north when a sudden cold snap dropped a few days of light snow over everything.
Along both sides of the road that marked the border between Ardmore and Kilmore, the withered weeds still wore traces of it.
That’s when their convoy came out of the fog at the end of the road.
Out front rode an armored soldier, sword at his side, sitting a strong horse like he owned the whole valley, broad-shouldered, sharp-eyed, watching the road ahead of him.
Behind him came two lines of riders, straight-backed as young pines, their armor gone silver with frost.
The sound of all those hooves together made them look like an army on the march.
But then the carriage rolled out of the mist behind them, and anyone watching would’ve known that this wasn’t an army.
It was an escort.
The riders kept to both sides of the road, the carriage boxed safely in the middle.
It was a good-sized carriage, though with plain wooden fittings, nothing fancy, pulled by two sturdy horses walking side by side.
Inside the carriage, the princess lifted the curtain herself and looked out.
“My lady, once we’re past Tiger’s Head Pass, we’ll be out of Ardmore for good.
I’ll miss it something awful,” Róisín said, and there was real sadness in her voice.
She wasn’t wrong to feel it.
The princess was stretched out on a cushion worked with lotus flowers, Aunt Bríd sitting quietly across from them, the three of them sharing the carriage.
The princess was dressed richer than either of them.
There was no mistaking who the lady of this whole procession was.
All this, just for her.
She wasn’t yet twenty, and unmarried.
A snow-white fox fur was wrapped close around her, so only her face showed.
Her lips were pale.
She had always looked a little delicate.
But her skin was fair as the snow outside, and her black hair fell like water.
Even worn down from the road, she knew she still turned heads.
At Róisín’s words, she opened her eyes properly and looked out past the curtain herself.
Something inside her pulled tight, and she couldn’t quite keep the reluctance off her face.
Even that small movement, the way she turned her head, the way she looked out, came with a kind of grace she couldn’t help.
She’d always had a coldness to her, distant, like something out of a painting: clouds and a pale moon.
Róisín saw her face fall and knew straightaway she’d put it there.
“My lady, I, I only meant.”
She fumbled for the words, scratching at her head, flustered, and the princess found herself laughing despite everything.
“Enough with the ‘I.’ I’ll miss it too.
But we’ve already stayed two months past when we should have left.
If we don’t go now, they’ll only send more letters from Dunmore.”
“And why should they get to press you?
She’s not even your real mother,” Róisín said, indignant on her behalf.
“She has no right to,” the princess said, looking out at the far green hills, “but there are others who’d rather I not stay in Ardmore much longer.”
In this life, she was daughter to the King of Devlin.
The girl whose body she now wore had gone through the ice with her twin brother at seven years old.
The boy never woke again.
The girl did, except it was the princess who opened her eyes.
She had died of heart disease in her old life and woken up in a body just as fragile, which felt like a cruel joke even now.
Heaven, she’d thought at the time, if I’m being given a second chance, couldn’t you have thrown in a sturdier heart?
Still, she hadn’t wasted the gift.
She did everything the physicians asked of her because a second life was not something to spend carelessly.
As it turned out, aside from the weakness the cold water had left behind, there had been nothing else wrong with this body.
No hidden illness waiting to finish the job.
Better, in its way, than the one she’d had before.
Six months after the accident, once she’d recovered enough, they sent her off to her mother’s side of the family, the Delaneys, who held Ardmore, under the excuse that she needed further treatment.
She stayed eight years.
Those years, surrounded by people who loved her and got along with each other, were the best of her life, in either one.
Two years ago, the King of Devlin’s household sent for her without warning.
She’d grown up, they said, and shouldn’t burden her grandfather’s family any longer.
Then last autumn, her stepmother started talking marriage.
A good girl, all grown, time to think about matches.
And just as that conversation was getting serious, word came from Ardmore that Lady Deirdre had fallen ill and was asking for her granddaughter.
So they sent her to see her.
Lady Deirdre was Lord Eamon Delaney’s wife, her grandmother on her mother’s side.
Nobody could argue with a granddaughter wanting to see a sick grandmother who’d raised her.
So the marriage talk got shelved.
Of course, it had all been an excuse.
When she got to Ardmore, her grandmother wasn’t sick at all.
It had just been a way to keep her stepmother from rushing her into some hasty match.
She came back to Ardmore last autumn and stayed two months.
Letters came from Devlin pushing for her return, and Lady Deirdre turned every one of them away, blaming the heavy winter snow for making the roads too dangerous.
Ardmore sat right on Kilmore’s border, and the hill tribes had always had their eyes on it.
The Delaneys had held it for generations.
Every man in that family learned to fight, and their soldiers and horses were second to none.
Fifty years back, when the old order was falling apart and the whole land was in chaos, King Diarmuid the Founder spent his own family fortune raising an army out of local fighters, and within a few years he’d become the most powerful man in the land.
Lord Fergus Delaney, moved by what Diarmuid had built, was the one who finally bent the knee and named him his lord.
In return, Diarmuid let the Delaneys keep Ardmore and guard Kilmore’s border, same as always.
But forty years was a long time, and the current king of Kilmore had grown wary of a family that commanded a hundred thousand soldiers.
The whole relationship between Ardmore and the crown had gone thin and careful.
She was the King of Devlin’s daughter.
They called her the Princess of Ardmore.
And the King of Devlin was King Diarmuid’s grandson, son of the late Crown Prince Tadhg.
No king let a prince of the blood marry into a border family.
After all her years in Ardmore, she had no doubt the crown already watched her closely.
She’d spent a warm, happy New Year in Ardmore, and the moment spring started, Dunmore sent another letter demanding her return.
They were afraid, she thought, that she’d never leave, and even more afraid she’d grow too close to her mother’s family.
She could see the game being played underneath all that back and forth.
Her marriage mattered more to them than she’d realized.
This time, she had no excuse left to stay, and she didn’t want her grandfather openly defying the crown on her account.
So she climbed into the carriage and left, under everyone’s watchful eyes.
She had no idea yet what was waiting for her back home.
The hill tribes had been restless the past few years, raiding south more often, and the roads weren’t what they used to be.
Her grandfather, worried sick about her traveling alone, had picked fifty of his best armored soldiers to see her safely there.
“Who are these ‘others,’ anyway?” Róisín asked.
The princess said nothing.
“The road’s tiring enough without you pestering the lady half to death,” Aunt Bríd scolded from her corner, quiet until now.
She knew how hard things already were for the princess.
“Sorry, Aunt Bríd.
Maybe I should just ride instead,” Róisín said, looking properly sorry for herself.
Bríd probably would’ve let her.
The girl was only fifteen or sixteen, raised in Ardmore, full of energy, and she’d trained with the princess’s father and brothers same as the princess had.
Sitting still in a carriage for days on end was its own kind of torture for her.
Bríd was just about to nod when the sound of galloping horses came from somewhere up ahead.
Captain Cormac hauled his reins back hard, threw up a hand to signal a stop, and swung down off his horse to come to the carriage.
He couldn’t see them through the curtain, but he bowed his head anyway, respectful as always.
“My lady.
More bodies up ahead.
Refugees.”
Silence, for a moment.
Then, in a voice gone cold, the princess said, “Same as before.
Bury them where they lie.”
“Aye, my lady.”
Then, before he left, she asked, “How many, this time?”
“Thirty or forty, from what I could see at a glance.”
“Thirty or forty.”
She said it quietly, her eyes lowering, her face going still.
They’d only been ten days out of Dunmore, and once they’d left the country near the capital behind, the closer they got to Kilmore’s heartland, the more bodies they found along the road.
They’d already buried a hundred and sixty-two.
This made it more than two hundred.
And that was just one region.
Just the ones left lying out in the open where anyone could see.
In a kingdom that was still, technically, considered stable.
In places she couldn’t see, who knew how many more had died?
War, famine, sickness, disaster, whatever the cause, this many dead refugees only meant one thing: the whole land was sliding toward ruin.
The chaos of the coming age was already beginning.
Kilmore looked fine on the surface, but underneath, the rot had set in.
The wound was already festering, already breeding the kind of sickness that would eventually eat the whole thing alive.
And she knew something else, too.
In four years, Kilmore would collapse completely.
After that, there’d be nothing left to stop the raiders from pouring south, and the kingdom would fall.
The start of a hundred years of chaos.
The land would run with blood, and its people would scatter to the winds.
Historians would call it, one day, the Ruin of the North.
She didn’t want to see that kind of hell come to pass, but she was only one person, and not a powerful one.
These days she could barely look after herself, let alone stop history.
All she could manage, when she had the means, were small mercies, like burying these poor souls instead of leaving them for the crows.
Cormac had his men and the stronger servants start digging, but partway through moving one of the bodies, his face went hard.
A clean knife wound, right there for anyone to see.
His thick brows drew together.
“Stay alert!” he shouted, and his voice carried.
No sooner had he said it than they heard it.
Hoofbeats, faint at first, then the trees started shaking and dust rose up off the road.
The sound kept building, closer and closer, like the ground itself was starting to shake.
Riders came around the bend at the far end of the road.
Raiders, by the look of their pointed caps and the bows slung across their backs, faces rougher and harder than anything from the south.
They came on fast, whooping, whips cracking.
The horses pulling the carriage went skittish, snorting and stamping, like they could feel something bad coming.
The whole carriage rocked, and the driver hauled the reins tight to settle them.
The princess was thrown sideways, her shoulder cracking against the wall, and Róisín grabbed her before she went further.
She pulled the curtain back and saw Cormac hurrying toward them, armor clattering, face grim.
“My lady, there are hill raiders blocking the road ahead.
Bandits, most likely, from around here.”
Bríd and Róisín both went pale and moved instinctively to shield her.
The princess pushed past them, took a breath, and asked Cormac straight out, “How many?
Can we hold them off?”
Her voice came out steadier than she expected, nothing like the panic he must have braced for.
She could see it catch him off guard.
“Under a hundred.
We’re Ardmore men, my lady.
Trained soldiers, every one of us.
One against five is nothing to us, and our arms and armor are better besides.
We’ll push them back.
Don’t be afraid.”
When it came to a fight, Cormac’s whole bearing changed, steady, sure of himself.
The princess nodded, holding his gaze, letting him see she trusted him.
“I believe in you, Captain.”
And she meant it, not just in him, but in every man her grandfather had chosen to guard her.
They wouldn’t have been picked if they weren’t brave and loyal both.
She wasn’t a fighter herself.
Her best move was to stay out of the way, trust the men around her, and not become a burden.
Cormac left the biggest of the servants to guard the carriage and rode off with his men to meet the raiders.
Tiger’s Head Pass sat right on Kilmore’s edge, with raider country just to the northwest.
With the kingdom weakening, they’d taken to raiding the border more and more, robbing whatever caravans passed through.
On horseback, with a bow, they were vicious.
Servants and ordinary guards didn’t stand a chance against them.
When they struck, the men died and the women were taken.
It got bad enough, people said, that some resorted to eating the dead, and others took their own lives rather than live with what had happened to them.
These raiders were bold, but clever too, always slipping past Kilmore’s checkpoints and patrols.
The king didn’t want to commit a real army to the border, and kept the Ardmore forces well away from it, which only made the raiders bolder still.
Tiger’s Head Pass, ringed by mountains with only the one road through, was perfect for an ambush.
The raiders lurked nearby, ready to swoop down on anyone passing, then vanish back into the hills.
A few days back they’d killed some refugees and gotten nothing but a few loaves of bread for it.
Today, seeing this caravan, a dozen loaded carts, more, they figured their luck had finally turned after days of scraping by.
Good grain.
Silver.
Fair-skinned women.
All right there for the taking.
Big caravan or not, these were just southern folk, no real threat.
They’d probably wet themselves before the horses even got close.
Or so the raiders thought.
They were about to find out how wrong they were.
“How are these southerners so tough?” the raider leader shouted, barely dodging Cormac’s blade, though it still caught his arm and left a streak of blood on his sleeve.
Even while fighting Cormac off, he kept ordering his men to break through and get to the carriage, but they couldn’t crack the wall Cormac’s soldiers had formed.
Fifty armored men against a hundred raiders, and still Cormac’s line held, proof enough that his confidence hadn’t been empty talk.
The fight dragged on, and the raiders were starting to waver, weighing whether this fat prize was worth dying over, when another sound came from behind the caravan, back along the road they’d already traveled.
The men Cormac had left guarding the rear heard it and went pale.
“Riders!
Coming up behind us!”
One of them ran forward, terrified, to tell Cormac.
Cormac’s face, normally so hard to read, showed real surprise at that.
“Reinforcements for the raiders?”
He gave quick orders to his second and rode back himself to see.
The hoofbeats grew louder, maybe twenty or thirty riders, by the sound.
Even as reinforcements, that wasn’t a number that should’ve worried him.
Still, he planted himself with his blade out front, eyes fixed on the road behind them.
The riders came around the bend from the mountain pass, and finally they could see them properly.
Cormac’s eyes went wide.
His grip tightened on his sword without him meaning to, like he’d just come face to face with something far worse than raiders.
Every muscle in him went tight, and even his horse seemed to catch his fear, pawing nervously at the ground.
There weren’t many of them, just as he’d guessed, twenty, maybe.
But something about those twenty men put a fear in him that a hundred raiders hadn’t managed.
Especially their leader.
Masked, and still there was a weight to him, an authority coming off him and his horse both, like some warlord straight off a battlefield, worse than any ordinary general.
That kind of presence didn’t come from nowhere.
This was no common bandit.
Even in the cold morning air, sweat broke out across Cormac’s back.
The raiders spotted the newcomers too, and seeing they looked like their own kind rather than southerners, they lit up with relief and started waving them over, shouting.
None of them could understand a word of it, but the gestures were clear enough.
They were trying to recruit them.
The fight had stalled, and Cormac’s stomach kept sinking lower.
These raiders were known for it, burning, killing, taking whatever they wanted.
Their caravan clearly had money written all over it.
Even as strangers to each other, these two groups would likely find it easy enough to join forces.
The hundred raiders hadn’t scared him half as much as these twenty did.
These men had the look of soldiers who’d been through real war, over and over.
He didn’t know if he could protect the princess from something like that.
His mind was already made up by the time he wheeled his horse back around, dismounted, and dropped to one knee by the carriage.
“My lady, raiders ahead, and now these behind us too.
I haven’t the strength to hold off both.
The best I can do is cut you a path out.
Please, take a horse and ride ahead.
We’ll hold them here as long as we can.”
The three women inside the carriage all went white at once.
“My lady!”
“My lady!”
Bríd and Róisín were both frightened out of their wits.
The princess was more startled than scared.
Cormac wasn’t a man given to boasting, and he certainly wasn’t a coward.
He’d reassured her himself only minutes ago.
For him to change his mind this fast meant whatever had come up behind them was worse than anything they’d faced yet.
What kind of men could put that kind of fear into him, enough to send her running?
Given the danger, of course some part of her wanted to live.
But…
“That plan won’t work.
Not even close.”
The wind gusted into the carriage and threw her hair loose across her face, black against white, striking even now.
Her eyes, just as cold, were steady, and she thought that steadiness stood out even more against how frightened everyone else looked.
It was the first time Cormac had seen her set her jaw like that.
He opened his mouth to argue, but she didn’t let him get the words out.
“This ground is a trap on its own.
Even if you get me clear, there’s nowhere to run to but this same road.
They outnumber us.
They can split off a group to chase me down without even weakening their main force.
If they catch me alone, cut off from everyone, that’s worse than staying.
That’s my first point.”
“Second, we’re already outnumbered here.
Splitting our own men in two is the last thing we should do.
Our only real chance is staying together, one blade instead of two half blades.
And if I run now, what’s left of the men’s spirit?
None.
That’s my second point.”
“So whatever way you look at it, our best chance, the only real chance, is standing together and facing this head on.”
Cormac had nothing left to say to that.
She could see him blaming himself for even suggesting it.