The Darkling Prince: Into the Green, #3

By Jennifer Melzer

Krayven has only ever wanted one thing: his mother’s love. Cold and beautiful as starlight, he trails after the queen, an unseen shadow vying for affection she would never lower herself to give. Enshrouded in secrets and mystery, he watches each day as she travels to the Nether Lake and stares longingly into the deep.

He knows not what she’s looking for, and following her is forbidden, for her secrets are her own. When his father’s jester informs him that she speaks to spirits there, the boy cannot resist the lure to spy upon her in the act. Perhaps he will overhear something to shed light on the aloof woman who brought him into the world, and then went on about her life as though he wasn’t even a part of it.

What he learns while spying is enough to send him running, for some secrets are better left undiscovered, lest they wake the darkness in a heart that was born to know only pain.

The Darkling Prince is a novella that takes place between the events in Winterborn and Jack in the Green.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dragon's Gold
• Release date: Jul 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781513099408

Book preview

THE

DARKLING

PRINCE

Jennifer Melzer

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogue therein are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The Darkling Prince

Copyright © 2015 Jennifer Melzer

All rights reserved.

By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, compiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced to any information storage and retrieval system, in any form of by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express permission of Jennifer Melzer.

INTRODUCTION

Late winter brought with it the winds, carrying the distant promise of spring. She knew not what to expect of the new season in that foreboding, wretched place, but she was relatively sure it wouldn’t be green.

Whipping around her face, the waves of her hair clung to her nose and tangled between her gloved fingers as she tried to bat them away. Meredith could scarcely see in front of her, though she sensed the castle looming ever closer as she dug her feet into the slush of melting snow muddying the dirt of the path. Her boots were slick with muck, grains of glittering sand from the banks of the Nether Lake the only thing providing her with traction as she pressed onward.

Home. Though not much of a home, she mused dispassionately, it was the only one she had. The Upland faded from memory with each passing day, and the fae kingdom where she spent her true youth was little more than a spark of recollection that sometimes plagued her dreams of longing. She gripped enough hair in her hand to hold it back from her face and glared with defiance at the castle of the Goblin King. The dull grey stone, blackened with mold, was crawling with thick, dark vines that choked the life from its very walls. They spiraled across windows, blocking out the dull light of the sun, and no amount of hacking kept the hideous things away.

She couldn’t see the guards her king set upon the walls to watch after her, but she felt their eyes on her as she kicked past each earthen step carving its way upward.

Watching, always watching, and they made no bones reporting back to their wretched king of her activities. How long she stood near the lake. Who’d been with her there. How many times she stopped on the way back to lament the cold shadow clinging to what she imagined was once beautiful land. Kothar knew her every move, each activity from the moment she rose out of bed until the time she crawled back under the covers at night to stare at the still canopy overhead until sleep was the only escape from the drudgery of her life. And he made no bones mocking her for her activities.

It was more awful than she imagined, being queen of the goblin lands, but a promise was a promise, and for Christina she would suffer whatever the Goblin King threw at her. In order to see her sister returned Upland unharmed, she promised to be his bride, but she would never give him her heart. That belonged to her.

When shortly after returning Underground to serve her sentence as his queen, Meredith felt life stir in her womb. Him’s child. She worked desperately to hide the truth from a bitter, jealous king who would stop at nothing to destroy any joy he had no hand in making. The swell of her belly was impossible to hide, and since she refused to join Kothar in his bed she couldn’t pass the child off as his. In the end, she grieved the babe as dead, and sent him off with one of her maids in hopes that the Historian, Sylvanus, would see him Upland and into the care of her sister.

She did not even know if the boy made it safely to Sylvanus’s village, much less Upland. Her maid never returned, and the only reassurance she had that they crossed without incident beyond the dark veil of the Goblin Kingdom was a distant, echoing promise from her lover trapped within the Nether. She contented herself with the small triumph of keeping Kothar in the dark. He was none the wiser to her treachery, so far as she knew. He even stood beside her at the pyre, sullen to match her grief as he watched her scatter the ashes of an unkindled changeling in her child’s likeness.

One other knew of her deceit, the ancient elf, Gorigast, who helped her summon the magic needed to mold a changeling child from the earth. Despite his past betrayals, Gorigast was loyal to a fault, and though the Goblin King had restored much of his memory and returned his body to its youthful appearance—a promised reward for leading her through the Darknjan Wald and to the goblin castle Meredith forced Kothar to uphold—the old elf would never again be disloyal to his queen.

He followed her everywhere. The king’s eyes and ears, or so Kothar thought. He whispered her ever deed to his liege, and sometimes Meredith helped him aggrandize the tales on their long walks back from the Nether Lake, the two of them laughing like old friends as they scaled the walls of believability with their occasionally absurd embellishments. He was her only companion, the only person in the kingdom she dared to trust, for Kothar’s spies were everywhere.

Gorigast was much shorter than she was, padding behind her and gasping uneven breath as they trekked. Despite regaining the body of his youth, she suspected Kothar left what was inside him mostly unaltered. He had a three-thousand year old heart and lungs, and at times he tired out just walking from one end of the hall to the other, but he