A Court of Stars and Ice

Chapter 1

I was thoroughly, royally fucked.

My knees hit the ground with a jolt that rattled my bones as I was thrown into the musty dungeon cell. I turned just in time to catch my sister as she was thrown just like I was, still half blind from my eyes trying to adjust to the dark. We would remain here until our trial the next day with Keir, Steward of the Hewn City. Until we were sentenced to death, most likely.

My sister started to cry, and as I wrapped her in my arms I fought the urge to do so myself. She's seen me cry a only few times before in my life: the first was 9 years ago when our mother died before our eyes at the hands of our abusive father, and the second that day a year ago that the City elders scented the start of my younger sister's cycle and immediately announced that she'd been long ago sold off to marriage like a prized mare to Henrix, a member of one of the most vile and corrupt families in the Court of Nightmares. A marriage that would have been the death of everything good in her. Possibly even the death of her herself. At the time of the announcement she was only sixteen; she wouldn't be required to marry him until she turned twenty-one.

But this marriage would never come to be. Because here in the Hewn City, women were seen as objects made and fit for the ownership of males. Here, her worth only lay in her virginity, her "purity" as they liked to refer to it as. A female that has lain with a male before marriage is tainted. Undesirable. Ruined. All things that my sister has been called over and over, as now everyone in the City knows that she is pregnant. Growing up we'd always heard tales of the Morrigan and of her fall from favor when she'd soiled herself with a bastard Illyrian. The stories of what they did to her were the contents of our nightmares, were woven into the wicked songs sung during the summer month campfires. My sister had fallen in love with a young boy her age, and the result of their secret relationship was the pregnancy that would have no effect on him but would change our lives forever.

For the past three months that she's been pregnant we'd done everything in our power to keep her pregnancy a secret while we figured out a plan: always claiming she felt too sick to attend dinners and balls and other court events, requesting in-home private tutors for her schooling, and dousing her in obscene amounts of lavender or eucalyptus oil whenever she was required to make an appearance. I'd promised her that somehow I'd get her out of the City before anyone scented the baby on her. I'd never failed at anything so spectacularly in my life. For months I planned and plotted, and on the night of the grand ball that kicked off the spring courting season, I helped her to reach the underground tunnels that burrow through the mountains and access the other courts. She was to reach the northern border of the Winter Court within a few days and then seek out our aunt and uncle for refuge, where she could be free to love who she wants and raise her child in a place where she didn't need to go to sleep each night with fear in her heart. I promised her as she left that I'd find a way to meet her there one day, but I knew as I watched her disappear into the darkness of the tunnels that it would most likely be the last time I'd ever see her. The second anyone in the Hewn City, particularly Henrix and his wretched father, found out that she was gone, they'd stop at nothing to get her back before she crossed the Night Court border and it became too late. I was prepared for the horrible ways they'd torture and kill me if it meant my sister and her baby could be safe.

But, we quickly found out that we'd been betrayed. My sister, as sweet and innocent as good as she was, was apparently also equally as stupid. She'd left a note – a goodbye note I assume, or a love note confessing the presence of the baby and the escape we'd planned in order to save it – for the asshole lover that got her in this situation in the first place. And the second he opened her letter, he took it straight to Keir and the Court elders, presumably to gain their favor. Elsbeth had been in the tunnels for all of ten minutes when she was caught and dragged back to the court of Nightmares, kicking and screaming and already covered in scrapes and bruises from the brutality of the guards that grabbed her. They'd brought her front and center to the elders at the ball and had thrown me down beside her. The asshole read the letter she wrote to the entire court, with a sickening smirk dancing on his face, and then had laughed at the devastation on her face. On both of our faces. We'd been cursed at and spat on the entire painful trip from the ballroom to the dungeons several levels below. Oh, how miserably I had failed.