The weight of the world had shifted from the crown I once expected to wear to the crushing burden of a blood-seal that pulsed against my skin.
The village square was a blur of weeping faces and flickering torches as the Iron Empire soldiers began to herd my people toward the western gates. They were alive. That was the only thought that kept my knees from buckling as Kai-Zin's massive hand remained clamped around my wrist.
"The bargain is struck," I whispered, though my voice was barely audible over the wind. "Now let me say goodbye to them."
"You have already said your goodbyes, Sun-Hee," Kai-Zin replied. His voice was like the grinding of tectonic plates. "From this moment on, you do not look back. You only look at what is yours."
He turned me away from the square, ignoring my frantic glance toward Min-Ah and Commander Joon. Before I could protest, he signaled to a group of female attendants who had emerged from the shadows of the palace. They did not wear the soft, colorful silks of Haneul-Bi. They were dressed in rigid, charcoal-grey uniforms that looked more like armor than clothing.
"Strip her," Kai-Zin commanded.
My breath hitched. "What? Here?"
"The silks of a fallen house have no place in my carriage," he said, his amber eyes tracking the movement of my throat. "You will not carry the scent of your father's failure into my domain."
The women moved with terrifying speed. They ignored my struggles, their hands cold and efficient as they unpinned the gold phoenix brooch from my shoulder and began to unravel the layers of my royal hanbok.
One by one, the symbols of my status fell into the mud. The fine, hand-painted silk that had been a gift for my twentieth birthday was discarded as if it were rags. I stood trembling in the freezing night air, reduced to my thin inner shift, feeling more exposed than I ever had in my life.
Kai-Zin watched the entire process with a clinical, predatory focus. He did not look away when my shoulders were bared to the wind.
Instead, he reached up and unclasped his own cloak. It was a massive thing, made of heavy, midnight-black wool and lined with the thick fur of a mountain wolf. It carried the scent of woodsmoke, old leather, and something primal that made my skin prickle.
He stepped forward, the heat radiating from his body feeling like a furnace against my chilled skin. He wrapped the cloak around me, the sheer weight of it nearly pulling me to the ground.
He pulled the collar high, tucking my ink-black hair beneath the fur, effectively swallowing me in his shadow.
"Now," he said, his hand finding the small of my back to propel me forward. "We leave."
Waiting at the edge of the courtyard was a carriage that looked like it had been forged in the heart of a volcano. It was made of blackened iron and dark wood, reinforced with silver filigree that depicted wolves mid-hunt. Six massive black horses, their eyes clouded with a strange, milky haze, stamped their hooves against the stones.
Kai-Zin lifted me into the carriage as if I weighed nothing. The interior was a suffocating luxury of velvet and furs, but there were no windows, only small, barred slats near the roof that allowed slivers of moonlight to pierce the dark. The door slammed shut with a heavy, mechanical thud, and the sound of a bolt sliding into place echoed through the cabin.
I scrambled to the furthest corner of the bench, pulling his heavy cloak tightly around myself. I wanted to disappear into the upholstery.
The carriage lurched forward, the rhythmic jolting of the wheels marking the beginning of a three-day journey toward a place that lived only in the darkest of my kingdom's legends.
Kai-Zin sat directly across from me. In the cramped space, he seemed even larger than he had in the library. His knees nearly touched mine, and the sheer density of his presence made the air feel thin. He did not lean back. He sat perfectly upright, his hands resting on his thighs, his gaze fixed on my face with an intensity that felt like a physical touch.
For the first hour, the only sound was the creaking of the wood and the distant, haunting howls of the Shadow-Wolves following in our wake. I tried to keep my eyes closed, to pretend I was back in the palace gardens, but I could feel his stare.
It was constant.
Unwavering.
He was watching the way my chest rose and fell with my panicked breaths. He was watching the way my fingers clutched the fur of his cloak.
"Why?" I finally burst out, unable to endure the silence a second longer. "Why wait two hundred years? Why my bloodline? There are dozens of other clans with more power, more gold, more land."
Kai-Zin leaned forward slightly, the movement causing the silver armor on his shoulders to chink softly. "Gold is a human obsession, Sun-Hee. Land is a temporary prize. My kind does not care for such trifles."
"Then what do you care for?" I hissed, my fear momentarily eclipsed by a spark of my old fire.
"Balance," he replied. "My blood is a storm. It has been screaming for two centuries, tearing at the walls of my mind until there was nothing left but the hunt. Your ancestors carried the only light capable of stilling that storm. I did not choose you. The debt chose you. The stars themselves carved your name into my bones before you were even a thought in your mother's womb."
I shivered, and it was not from the cold. The way he spoke was not the way a man spoke to a woman. It was the way a starving man spoke of bread. There was no romance in it, only a terrifying, ancient necessity.
"I am a person," I said, my voice trembling. "Not a cure. Not a biological key. I am a woman who had a family and a home."
"You were a princess," he corrected coldly. "And now you are a prisoner of the Shadows. The sooner you stop mourning the girl you were, the sooner you will survive the woman you must become."
The night dragged on. Every time I drifted toward a fitful sleep, the carriage would hit a rut, and I would jerk awake to find him in exactly the same position. He did not sleep. He did not eat. He simply existed in the dark, a predator watching its captive.
By the second day, the claustrophobia began to set in. The lack of sunlight and the constant proximity to him were starting to unravel my mind. I felt as though the iron walls of the carriage were shrinking, pressing in on me. I tried to move to the other side of the bench to get a better view through the slats, but as I shifted, my foot caught on his boot.
I gasped, frozen, expecting a reprimand.
Kai-Zin did not pull his foot away. Instead, he reached out and grabbed my ankle, his grip firm but not painful. He pulled me toward the center of the carriage until I was sitting directly in front of him.
"Stay still," he commanded.
"I can't breathe in here," I whispered, my eyes stinging with frustrated tears. "Please. Just for a moment. Let me see the sky."
"The sky offers you nothing now," he said. He reached out, his long fingers trailing up from my ankle to the hem of the cloak. He didn't stop until his hand rested near my knee. "The Shadow Palace is the only world you need to concern yourself with."
He began to move closer, sliding off his seat and kneeling in the narrow space between the benches. I pressed my back against the wall, but there was nowhere to go. He loomed over me, his shadow completely eclipsing the small amount of moonlight in the cabin.
I held my breath, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I expected violence. I expected him to demand something absurd or something I couldn't give.
Instead, he tilted his head. His eyes flared a brilliant, molten gold, the pupils slitting like a cat's. He leaned in, his face hovering just inches from mine. I could feel the heat of his breath on my cheek. He moved his head to the side, burying his face in the crook of my neck, just beneath my ear.
A low, guttural growl vibrated through his chest and into mine. I felt his nose graze my skin, inhaling deeply, as if he were trying to pull the very soul out of my body through my pores.
"You smell of it," he murmured, his voice a dark, rough caress that sent a jolt of pure electricity down my spine. "The golden warmth. The sun on the valley floor."
He shifted, his lips brushing against the pulse point in my neck where the blood-seal lived. I gasped, my hands instinctively reaching up to push against his shoulders, but they felt like solid stone.
"I have dreamt of this scent every night for two hundred years," he growled, his voice dropping to a register that was almost animalistic. "I have tasted it in the air while I slept in the ice. I have searched every corner of this wretched earth for it."
He pulled back just enough to look me in the eyes. The madness was there, swirling in the amber depths, a hunger so vast it threatened to swallow us both.
"And now that I have found it," he whispered, his hand coming up to cup the side of my face, his thumb stroking my lower lip. "I am never letting it go. Not even when the world burns."
He didn't move away. He stayed there, his face inches from mine, his scent of frost and shadow surrounding me until I couldn't remember what the sun felt like. I was trapped in the gilded carriage with a monster who had finally found his prize, and as the carriage rumbled deeper into the mountains, I realized that the Princess of Haneul-Bi was truly dead.
Only the General's captive remained.