When Nelle Wychthorn was forced to sign herself away in marriage, she should have read the contract's fine print. Because she signs not with ink, but with blood. And that changes everything.
Season 1 'Of Crows and Thorns'
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Fiery Nelle, the isolat...
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Spinning away, I stalked along the broken cobblestones crusted with moss until I was dead center at the back of the temple. My shoulders rounded forward as I toed the stone beneath my feet, crushing blades of grass where they poked free. A thick swell of loss and resentment choked up my throat, and it took a long moment to regain control, to remind myself that Nelle was not for me.
Nelle's distinctive fragrance swept ahead of her, before quick, clipped steps brought her in to stand in front of me. I squared my shoulders and knotted my arms across my chest. Perhaps it seemed an aggressive gesture but it was also defensive.
Her eyes were glacial and her mouth petulant. "I don't want to stand with you and your family—"
"Tough, you're with us tonight. You don't want to be up there with your family. Not at that altar. Nor standing beside the Horned Gods either."
That was why we couldn't let her near the altar.
Faced with the tithe she'd comforted at the tithe prison, along with the sacrifice, and the seductive power resonating from the Horned Gods, it could make her slip. The best we could do was keep her as far away from the dais as possible and the simplest way to do that was for Nelle to stand amongst us. She was unraveling, my little bird. Today she'd proved that with her rage and lack of self-control.
A shudder rippled through her slight figure and her complexion paled. Soft blue light from the wildfyre glanced along the sharp lines of her cheeks. Anxious eyes flitted away, and she absentmindedly scratched her fingernails against her upper arm as she stared at the temple. At the lichen creeping over weather-worn grooves that curved into a monstrous wingtip. "With everything going on between us...I hadn't time to think about the ceremony." She instinctively shifted closer to me. Her shoulder was a hair's breadth away from my arm and caused all the fine hair on my body to rise. My heartbeat kicked up a notch to match hers. "I don't come here very often," she continued, her voice barely a whisper. "I've rarely been inside... I haven't witnessed this kind of ceremony before."
It was going to be brutal tonight.
Urstlo was one of the three Horned Gods who would perform the blessing. It wasn't anything I wished for her to meet. Sirro, of course, would be attending, but as for the identity of the third Horned God, I didn't know who or what it would be.
Who the fuck knew how Nelle was going to react?
But Marissa understood my father's veiled offer disguised as demand. Despite those pills clouding her mind and emotions, Marissa knew how dangerous it was for her daughter to be standing at the altar beside the Horned Gods, with that innocent death performed right in front of her and nowhere else to look. The Crowthers were the only ones who could shield Nelle without raising suspicion.
And perhaps, she agreed so readily with my father because of what she'd shared with me last night. She suspected her husband was capable of doing anything to keep himself as Great House, even taking his own daughter's life, which was why she wanted Nelle as far away from Byron as possible.
