Page 1 of Lifebound

prologue

Lanterns glowedgolden at the edges of the ceiling of the Seelie prince’s bedroom, dim but bright enough to illuminate the woman kneeling in front of the large bed. The prince lay there, almost completely motionless, chest rising and falling steadily but slowly. His heart was becoming weaker still.

After all, he should have been buried long ago, three weeks after he first fell ill, but he hadn’t. Five seasons had turned, and he still breathed.

The queen sat on his bed, touched his face, felt the pain only a mother could feel, she told herself. And secretly she feltproudfor it, proud that she felt, that she had the capacity to hurt. It had surprised her in the beginning, and she still expected it to fade away, but it hadn’t.

Possibly because her son was still alive even if the fact made no sense—and that gave her hope.

The woman on her knees in front of the bed continued to whisper under her breath, and one of her companions who was with her tonight stayed close, drinking his wine, watching her, while the queen’s brother sat on the other side of the room with a book in his hands. He’d been sure that the answer to his nephew’s mysterious disease was written in the pages of a book somewhere since the beginning, and he had yet to give up trying to find it.

The Seelie queen kissed her son’s cold forehead and stood to go to the table near where her brother sat to pour herself a glass. The kneeling woman still whispered—theseerwho hadn’t served anybody anything since she was found and brought to the queen as a gift.

The queen was days away from ordering her beheading. A seer who could not see—what a joke, she thought, but hadn’t said so yet out loud. Something stopped her, but she wasn’t sure what.

“Your poor eyes,” she told her brother as she sipped the wine. It tasted sweet and sour, exactly like she liked. And what she liked, she always got—she was queen, after all. “Why do you insist on tormenting yourself, brother?”

He raised a brow. “Because there has to be an explanation, a record of Lyall’s disease somewhere—and I will find it.”

The queen pushed her blonde braid behind her back. “It’s not adisease,Helid—he was poisoned and you know it.”

Her brother closed the book and put it on the edge of the table. “Poisons kill, my Queen. They do not let a fae live so long in never-ending sleep.”

The queen thought about it as she looked over at the bed, at her son, once beautiful, radiant, now a hollow shell of himself. She’d seen dead men look more alive than him, yet his chest moved, and that was still all that mattered.

What when it didn’t, though?

“There are no signs of poison on him. We’ve had the best healers and alchemists and sorcerers. It’s a disease,” her brother continued, while the seer continued to wave her wrinkled hands over her golden bowl full of water that turned almost as white as milk when she began her readings.

Or rather when shetriedto read the future or the past, as she had almost every day since the prince fell ill.

Then her companion, a fae twice her size who had enough strength to carry her about the queen’s palace with ease, turned to her and bowed his head deeply.

“My Queen, if we may have a drop of blood,” he said. “For better sight.”

The queen hated the sight of blood in particular, and when she nodded, she turned her head away because she didn’t want to see him walk over to her sleeping son, take his middle finger and prick it with his small knife. Then he’d return and let a single drop of the prince’s blood fall into the bowl, where the milky white would consume it completely,useit to try to see better all the things connected with her son’s life.

The future king of the Seelie Court. One of the mightiest fae kings to have ever existed in the land of Verenthia—that’swhat he was supposed to be. That’s what she had groomed him to be since he first learned how to walk.

And nowthis. Now he’d been reduced to a living corpse, and despite having all the resources necessary and alliances that still held—if only by a string—with the other three fae Courts of Verenthia, they still were unable to find a cure.

“Hope is not lost yet,” her brother said when the queen walked to the windows that made up most of the wall behind her. She didn’t want to see yet another failure of the seer, and she was getting really tired of having to give away her son’s blood over and over in vain. It was the blood of a fae king, and these people, it seemed to her, had no regard and no respect for it.

How long until she lost it? How long until they got toher,too?

Because whoever had poisoned her son was close.Tooclose. Smart and cunning.Brave.

And if she ever found them, the stars were going to hear their screams.

Below the windows stretched the sea that poured into the darkness at the very edge of the continent. Miles and miles of uninterrupted waters that had served her Court long before she was even born and would continue to do so for millennia to come.

But what would become ofher?

What would become of her son?

Would they really die, both of them, without ensuring that the queens and kings of the future would think of their names with awe and respect?

That had always been her mother’s dream since the day she groomed her to be the king’s wife. It had always been her purpose—to live long, but not just.

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