Dark Elf Lord's Secret Heir

Chapter 1

Beatrix

I press my thumb and forefinger against the last grape on the vine and test the give of its skin, the way my grandmother taught me before I could walk a straight line down these rows without falling into the salt-heather. The skin resists for half a heartbeat, then splits, and the juice that floods my tongue is dark and briny and far sweeter than it has any right to be, considering how much salt the sea throws at this hillside every winter. This vine, and 40 rows like it clinging stubbornly to the cliffs above the pans, is the only thing standing between Tidebell and true poverty. I have spent so long learning every one of its moods, and it has never once lied to me. I cannot say the same for people.

"Mama! Mama, look!"

Iris' voice carries up from the stony beach below, thin and bright against the wind, and I straighten with a hand pressed to the small of my back. She is chasing a gull-drake across the tideline, her arms flung wide, her bare feet slapping through the shallow foam as the creature wheels just out of her reach with a fish still flashing silver in its beak. She will never catch it, but she doesn’t care. Her laughter rolls up the slope and burns into my chest like sunlight, and for one clean moment, there is nothing in the world but my daughter and the gray sea and the smell of crushed grapes on my hands. Then she turns to wave at me, and the moment breaks apart the way it always does.

Her eyes catch the light a certain way, and even from here, with the wind stinging my own eyes to blurriness, I can see the color of them — indigo. Not the dark blue of a stormy ocean or the light blue of a clear sky, not a trick of shadow I can explain away to Gretchen or to myself. A deep, saturated indigo, the exact shade of a color that does not exist in any human bloodline on this coast, in any human bloodline anywhere, as far as I have ever heard tell. I feel it the way I always feel it: A cold lurch low in my stomach, like missing a step in the dark. Three years old, and she carries his eyes on her small face every single day, a secret with no lock and no key, walking around Tidebell in plain sight of anyone who cares to look closely enough. Most don't. Most see a pretty, strange-eyed child and think nothing more of it. Gretchen knows. Gareth suspects, I think, though he has never asked. And I have told no one the name that goes with those eyes, because saying it aloud feels like summoning something I am not ready to face.

Lord Tharion Vorlagh.

I do not let myself think of him often, and when I do, I am careful about which memory I choose. Not the storm of chaos magic that rolled off him like heat off a forge, not the low, arrogant drawl he used when he told me my vintage would be requisitioned for his cellars whether I liked the price or not. I think instead of the sound his shipping casks made when they split against the Tidebell rocks, staves cracking like knucklebones. Three years of his finest Vhoig acquisitions bleeding out into the tide because I had spent two nights working enchanted rot into the wood with nothing but stubbornness and a borrowed grimoire. It cost his house a fortune and bought my town an entire season of peace, because a lord too proud to admit a human woman had bested him does not advertise the manner of his defeat. That is the memory I keep. Not the other one. Never the other one.

I turn back to the vines to give my hands something honest to do, testing two more clusters for ripeness before I let myself think of anything else at all. My grandmother used to say a vintner who cannot trust her own hands has no business calling herself one, and I have been proving her right, learning this hillside's particular grammar one hard season at a time: Which slopes hold the sun longest into autumn, which rows will forgive a late harvest and which will punish it without mercy, which roots need the drainage channels widened before the winter rains come to drown them. Tidebell does not know how close it came to losing this vineyard in the very season it nearly lost me as well, back when grief for parents buried too young and a newborn daughter and a debt of pride to a dark elf lord all arrived within the same handful of impossible months. I built something out of that instead of breaking under it. I remind myself of that fact on the difficult days, and today, with storm clouds gathering where there ought to be only ordinary gray sky, I find myself reaching for the thought the way a drowning woman reaches for a rope thrown out across open water.

Below me, Iris has abandoned the gull-drake entirely in favor of a tide pool, crouched at its edge with the particular fierce concentration she brings to everything that catches her interest, poking at something with a stick longer than her arm. I let myself watch her a moment longer before Gretchen's voice reaches me, cataloguing the small, ordinary details I have learned never to take for granted: the way she hums under her breath when she is happy, tuneless and constant, the stubborn set of her jaw that I recognize from my own reflection even though nothing else about her face is mine at all. Whatever storm is coming, off the water or otherwise, I have built my entire life around keeping her safe from it, and I do not intend to stop now, however little control I have ever truly had over which storms choose to arrive.

"Beatrix!"

Gretchen's voice cuts up the path below me, tight and cold, and I turn from the vines with my heart already sinking toward my boots. She is picking her way up the hillside with more speed than her knees usually allow, back impressively straight for a working woman of 55 years. She raises one gnarled hand and points a crooked finger out toward the water, toward the horizon where the gray sea meets a grayer sky.

"Look," she says, breathless and concerned, when she reaches me. "Look at that."

I look, and my stomach does the same cold lurch it did a few minutes ago, except this time there is no indigo-eyed explanation for it. A line of black clouds is stacking up over the water, churning and thickening even as I watch, moving in fast off the deep water where the fishermen refuse to say what lives there. This is not an ordinary autumn squall. This has a wrongness to it, a density, the kind of storm that arrives already angry.

"That came up quickly," I muse absently, which is a foolish thing to say. My mind is already running through the list of things that need doing — the nets need brought in, the salt racks along the pans need covering before the rain turns them to slush, Iris needs to be indoors before the wind picks up enough to knock a child flat on the rocks.

"Too quickly," Gretchen agrees. She has lived by this sea longer than I have been alive, and there is a grim set to her mouth that I have learned not to argue with. "I don't like the color of it. Get your girl."

I am already moving, already calling Iris' name down the slope, my voice carrying the particular sharpness that tells her this is not a game, not right now. She comes at a run, damp and sandy and full of questions about the gull-drake that got away, and I scoop her up onto my hip without breaking stride, feeling the solid, familiar weight of her settle against me the way it has every day for three years.

"Storm's coming, love," I tell her, and she goes quiet in that way she does when she can tell my voice means business, tucking her face against my shoulder as we start down toward the cottage. Behind us, the vines shiver in a wind that smells suddenly of iron and salt, and I do not look back at the black line on the horizon because I already know it is closer than it was a minute ago.

I do not believe in omens. I have told myself that for three years, ever since a certain dark elf lord's eyes taught me that the things I do not believe in have a way of arriving on my doorstep regardless, but as I carry my daughter down through the salt-heather with the sky going the color of a fresh bruise above us, I find myself gripping her a little tighter than the wind alone requires, and I do not examine too closely why.