Manifest

I think it's only fair I share this here, too. I've been polling my "Booktok" followers on what they want from a novel. So far we have a fantasy-romance setting, the enemies to lovers trope, and spice. They are voting on character attributes, names, tense, point of view...basically everything. It's a good bit of fun. They ask for it... I write it. So, without further delay, the first chapter of the Booktok masterpiece, working title of Manifest.

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My fingers are slick with sweat on the hilt of the dagger I pilfered from Uncle Kath’s armory. My uncle has been less an uncle and more my drill sergeant since I could walk–not that I’ll ever be allowed to see combat. No. That privilege is reserved for…well, anyone but me. The fact that anyone can serve in our legions, but I am sequestered behind the safety of the palace walls causes a hot flare of anger to lick down my spine. It doesn’t matter how far I've risen in the ranks. Until my witch gifts manifest, it is too great a risk, I am too great an asset to put into the field. That’s what they tell me, anyway. Uncle Kath often speaks to me of duty, of honor, of all the little ways one might serve their Queendom. “Have patience, child, your gift will make clear the path. Your path may yet not be one of war. Only time will tell. Focus instead on the other ways you might serve. Your duty is to the Queendom first, young ward.” Uncle Kath likes to hear himself talk, and unfortunately for me, he is rarely wrong. There are few things I can do before my gift manifests. No one dares speak the hard truth that I might never manifest. I am already five years late. Most witches get their gifts around the time of their eighteenth sun cycle. I’ve just crept past my twenty third, and not even an ember of power has shown. So, I am forced to focus on other things. My duty lies elsewhere, for now. My duty lies softly snoring in a bed that is outrageously too small for his massive frame.

Greyson is the most ridiculous man I’ve ever seen, all long lines and toned muscle and silvery scars that shine in the light from the window. At the moment, it looks as though he’s lost a battle with his sheets. They are twisted fitfully around his long legs, wadded at his hips. My gaze lingers on the naked skin there, tracing the cut lines that disappear beneath the sheets. I’ve seen him shirtless before, but there is something about looking at him so utterly defenseless in the moonlight that has a different kind of fire snaking down my spine. And the fact that he looks like that just makes me hate him more. Here is the man who stole everything from me. Here is the man who bested me in the ring, who pinned me in the mud and stripped away my future with a gentle press of his blade to my neck. Here is the man who utterly wrecked my life in the span of less than a minute. Everything had been riding on that duel. I’d finally gotten my uncle to agree to the wager I’d spent months crafting, one that I’d written in my own blood upon binding parchments. If I could best the greatest warriors under uncle's command, it would prove I was ready to take over a legion of my own– that I could stay alive, even without a witch-gift. I’d spent two days cutting them down with brutal efficiency. Many of them were considerably larger than I, many had killed more men and seen the battles of which I could only dream, but they lacked something I had in generous heaps: rage. I’d made it to the final duel, the final test standing between me and the freedom, the bloodlust I craved. And gods-damned Greyson Emory chose that moment to saunter into my life. I hate him. Gods, I hate him more than I imagined I could hate. And I’d imagined it was a good bit– I hate a lot of things. I hate the Faelings who prowl the abandoned witch mines of Farthwood, using them as entrance points into Riath to lay siege on Witchkind. I hate the giants who terrorize the mountain peaks of the North. I hate the Deamontics who dwell beneath the soil and send puddles of rot to the surface to infect our beasts with the Black Dread. I hate the heir of the Bog-Witch clan, who dares threaten my ascendency. I hate and hate and hate. Yes, I hate a good many things, but none so much as him. While I was still pinned in the dirt that fateful day, uncle slapped Greyson on the back in congratulations and fixed me with a glare that said, See. I told you. You aren’t ready. Then, he’d asked Greyson, as was customary when one defeated a member of the Regency witch clan, “What be your boon, warrior?” Greyson had stood, twirling his blade without a care in the world, as if he hadn’t just burned my dreams to cinders. And then he’d done the most terrible thing of all. He’d pointed the tip of his saber at me, still reeling on the ground, and chuckled, “Her. I’ll have her for a boon.” My head had gone hollow at that. Every sound drowned in the roaring that descended upon me. No. NO. NO. Everything within me roared. But honor demanded that I accept. Only if I bested Greyson in a rematch or he was killed could I be released from the boon. I’d willed my power to manifest then, to allow me to strike him down, to leave him as nothing but a smoking corpse in the ring, or perhaps to wither him into dust at the touch of a hand, like Aunt Artemis’ gift, but of course, that didn’t happen. I’d just glared. And he’d glared back, lips tugging into a self-righteous smirk, like he knew I’d tried to kill him then and failed. Fucking Greyson.

I glare at his sleeping form and flip him off with my free hand, silently cursing as I adjust my grip on the dagger…again. Just get it over with, damn it. I chastise myself and take a step closer on silent toes. I hold my breath as I stare down at him. His hair is splayed across the pillow in a wave of inky black. It looks longer like this, lying on the pillow instead of swirling around his ears in the perpetual breeze that seems to follow him everywhere he goes. The harsh lines of his face are softer in sleep, too. His lips almost look… well, not cruel when deprived of their usual sneer for once. I can do this. I need to do this. I hate him. I take a quiet breath through my nose and square my shoulders, rooting myself through the floor like Uncle Kath taught me. I’ve killed before, plenty of times. I just need to apply enough force. Human flesh is tougher than it looks and I have a feeling the skin of Greyson’s neck is going to be especially difficult to get through. The room is deathly quiet, a harbinger of what is to come, as I lean in and bring the blade to his throat. My hands shake. Eyes the color of evergreen shoot open, and before I can deprive him of his stupidly handsome head, Greyson’s hand wraps around my wrist and he flips me beneath him in a maneuver that crushes the breath from my lungs. My fingers splay in shock and he deftly catches the dagger and brings it to my neck, pinning my other arm above my head on the pillow. I couldn’t move if I wanted to. I can barely even breathe. His face etches with familiar cruelty as recognition lights his gaze. A slow smile blooms on his lips and he clicks his tongue, “I am surprised, little dove, that this is how you’ve come to be in my bed.”

“Fuck. you.” I gasp, forming the only words that really matter with my limited breath.

Greyson only laughs and leans closer, “When I do that, I’d rather not have a knife in the bed...and I’d rather you were wearing less clothes,” he eyes my thick, pocketed uniform vest and his brows rise, “going somewhere?” I struggle to suck in another breath and Greyson adjusts his weight, allowing air into my lungs, but not releasing me.

“The only reason I’m here at all is to put that knife in you,” I spit.

His eyes burn green embers at that, and he leans closer still, the knife biting painfully into the soft hollow beneath my jaw. Hot blood rolls down my neck and pools behind my ear. Greyson’s breath joins it as he whispers, “Nice try, but you’ll have to do better than that.”

Faster than I can track, Greyson is off of me and across the room, sheet clutched around his hips, Uncle Kath’s dagger dangles from his long fingers. He isn’t even in a fighting stance. That’s how confident he is that I can’t hurt him. Prick. We stare at each other for a long minute, hatred so palpable, I can taste it in the air, before Greyson clears his throat and I tear my eyes from his, only for them to land on the white knuckles he has fisted in the sheet. My nostrils flare with derision, “Are you–” I swallow, “Are you naked?”

“Why? See something you like?”

I make a gagging noise, shoot out of the bed and fling open the door. I stomp down the hall, heedless of the soldiers sleeping behind the many doors. A few poke their heads out and promptly disappear again at the sight of the wrath that must surely be brewing on my face. This was my third attempt at killing him since he’d claimed my hand those months ago. The first time, I tried poison. The brute had taken a sip, cringed, and pushed the waterskin back into my hand, whispering those same damned words, “Nice try, but you’ll have to do better than that.” I’d cocked my leg back and kicked him in the balls, hard. That was the last time he’d let me get a hit in. The second attempt, I’d thought, was particularly clever. I’d set a series of nooses, woven of the transparent silk of Etherworms, directly at head level, matching trip wires at the feet on the path through the Weeping Woods he liked to run in the mornings . I’d hoped to snare him like a rabbit, and then choke the life out of his muscled throat. No luck. One of the Bog witches had narked on me and Greyson had crawled the path on his stomach, flinging his middle finger at me in my perch on a wide branch. He’d called the words up to me, panting, “Nice try, but you’ll have to do better than that.” A sane person would have just skipped the run, or brought a blade to cut down the traps, but Greyson is certainly not sane. He seems to enjoy taunting me more than anything else. This time, I’d been certain I would succeed, and I suppose that was my downfall. I’d climbed the tree outside his second-story barracks window and slipped into his room without a sound. I figured that, until I had my witch-gift, the only way I’d best him would be to kill him in his sleep. I’d figured wrong.

“See a healer about that cut,” Greyson calls after me, not one drop of actual concern in his voice, “if you’re not careful it’ll scar.”

I flip him off again over my shoulder and reply, “I'll wear it as a reminder of the love of my betrothed.” The sound of Greyson’s dark laugh haunts my every step. I exit into the cool air of an autumn night, but feel none of its bite, my skin is so flushed in the heat of my shame. A small part of me wishes Greyson had just cut my throat and gotten it over with. The gods know one of us will kill the other sooner or later.

I skitter down the stairs and flee into the night, turning into the subterranean tunnel that connect the barracks yard to the palace training grounds. I don’t bother to be discreet like I was on my way to the pathetic assassination attempt. Everyone will know about it soon enough. Greyson will make sure they do. And then he’ll make sure that we go over all of the pitfalls of my attempt in the private training sessions I’ve been forced to attend since he bested me a little over six months ago. My Uncle says that If some random stranger can walk into the dueling ring and defeat me, I don’t deserve to command a force of my own. I hate that he is right. I also hate that Greyson is now anything but a stranger. My betrothed. My stomach sours at the thought. So, I veer away from the path that would lead me to the palace, to my bed so piled with pillows everyone believes them to be an actual joke–they aren’t, I like comfort–, and make my way to the training yard. There, I unleash my rage on an unfortunate training dummy, and when my fingers are throbbing with numbness, I run. As if I could outrun fate itself, I run, until my legs collapse beneath me and I drag myself into a wobbly heap at the base of a tree and fall asleep, blood still crusting behind my ear. The heat of Greyson’s breath is a soft taunt of remembrance on my neck as I lose myself to dreamland.