BETROTHED TO THE DEVIL

THE JOURNEY

The journey north took eight days.

On the first day the road was smooth and the fields on either side were still green and Seraphine sat in the carriage and watched Aldenmere go by through the window. Villages she had heard of but never visited. A river she knew from maps but had never stood beside. Hills she had seen from the palace towers as shapes on the horizon, now close enough that she could see the individual trees on their slopes.

She had not been outside the palace walls in four years.

The last time had been a formal procession through the capital for a royal anniversary. She had sat in an open carriage in a silk dress and waved at people who cheered and she had seen almost nothing because the route was controlled and the windows of opportunity were narrow. She remembered thinking even then that it was not really being outside. It was being displayed.

This was different.

She pressed her face closer to the carriage window and watched a farmer walk behind a plow horse in a field and thought: that man has been outside his whole life. Every day. He probably does not think about it at all.

By the end of the first day the road had become rougher and the green had started going to gold and she could already feel the temperature dropping. She pulled the heavy cloak over her legs and thought of her mother pointing at it and was glad she had brought it.

The escort of forty was broken into groups. Twenty rode ahead, ten alongside, ten behind. Their captain, a solid man named Voss, checked on her at every stop with a formality that made her feel like cargo he was responsible for delivering undamaged. She was not offended. She understood the assignment.

On the third day they crossed the Kern River.

It was wider than she had imagined. She had read about it many times it was a natural border, one of the oldest in the region but reading about a river was nothing like watching it move, brown and enormous, the current strong enough that she could see it from the bridge. Their carriage slowed as they crossed and she watched the water below and felt something she could not immediately name.

Later she decided it was the feeling of a door closing.

Not with a slam. Quietly. The way doors close when there is no wind and someone simply stops holding them open.

On the fourth day it rained and she read and watched the landscape from behind a grey curtain of water and thought about the six pages of questions in her notebook and how many of them she would be able to answer and how many would stay questions.

On the fifth day the trees changed.

She noticed it before she could have explained why. The trees in the south were oak and ash and elm, old and broad, the kind of trees that made you think of summer even in autumn. The trees here were different. Darker bark. Closer together. Taller in a way that felt less like growth and more like presence. They did not lean toward the road. They simply stood near it, and the road ran between them the way a river runs between banks: tolerated, not invited.

She wrote in her journal: The trees are different here. I don't know how to describe it. They feel like they are watching.

Then she read it back and crossed it out because it sounded like one of the stories she had been trying not to take too literally.

But she left the page in, with the cross out visible.

On the sixth night they stayed at an inn that smelled of pine in exactly the way the stable master had warned her. It was not unpleasant. She decided she was in the category of people who didn't mind it, and filed this small fact away as evidence that she might be capable of adapting.

On the seventh day the road began to climb.

The mountains she had seen on maps were not dramatic the way mountains in paintings were. They were not sharp and snow capped and theatrical. They were large and grey and very permanent-looking, the kind of mountains that made you feel that they had existed before anything you knew and would continue after. The road wound between them and the light changed, coming now in long cold angles that made everything look like early morning even in the middle of the afternoon.

She stopped eating as much. Not from nerves, or not entirely. The cold was doing something to her appetite, or perhaps it was the altitude, or perhaps it was the letter on her desk that she had not opened.

She was afraid. She was certain now that she was afraid.

She did not open the letter.

On the eighth day she saw Vorreth.

They came over a rise in the road and there it was below them a wide valley, darkly green, and at the far end of it the castle. Draven. She had not expected to see it from so far away. She had imagined arriving first and then looking up and finding it above her. But the valley was long and the castle sat at the end of it clearly, unmistakably, as if it wanted to be seen from this distance specifically so that the seeing would have time to do its work before you arrived.

The stone was black.

She had known it would be black. She had read it and been told it and written it in her notes. Knowing it and seeing it were different things.

The castle was not ugly. That was what surprised her. She had prepared herself for ugly and what she got instead was severe. It stood at the edge of a dark forest with its towers rising against a sky that was very pale and very wide and it looked like something that had not been built so much as grown there, out of the same substance as the mountains and the trees.

She sat back from the window.

Captain Voss's voice came from outside. "Draven, my lady. Two hours, at this pace."

Two hours.

She looked at the letter on the seat beside her, where she had moved it that morning without quite deciding to.

She picked it up. Put it back down.

Not yet. She was afraid, yes. But there was another side to the fear, and it sat right up against the fear like a coin with two faces, and that side was something she could almost call curiosity

She wanted to see what was in there.

She looked at the castle in the valley below.

She thought: all right, then.

She sat up straight, fixed her cloak, and watched Draven grow larger as the carriage descended.