Mistwood (18 page)

Rokan came to her room early the next morning. Isabel, who still made the effort to listen for his approach, was sitting up in bed wearing the green and white riding outfit he had given her the first time he saw her.

He took a small step into her room, then another; he stopped and opened his mouth. His eyes locked on hers, half-afraid but determined. Like her riding outfit, his expression reminded her of the day they had met, when he had ridden into the Mistwood to summon a magical creature who might be his death.

He crossed the room in a few sudden, decisive strides and pulled himself up on the foot of the bed, a few feet away from her. He set his chin and said, “You were wrong.”

She kept her back straight, meeting his eyes but keeping her expression veiled. “Wrong about what?”

“I don’t want you to be the Shifter.” Rokan’s voice was quiet, and her human sense of smell told her nothing about how he felt. “I haven’t wanted that for a long time. Since before I knew it was possible for you to not be the Shifter.” A pause, and then—so quietly that even she could barely hear him—“Since before I knew I loved you.”

Without warning—though the Shifter would have seen it coming—he leaned forward and took both her hands in his.

The contact went through her with a shock. She hadn’t felt his hand around hers since that day in the Mistwood; she had forgotten the firm, callused warmth of his fingers. For a moment she almost gave in to the urge to rest her cheek against his tunic and feel his arms around her. She had wanted to do just that for so long. He was perfectly still, hardly breathing, waiting for her.

She drew in a deep shuddering breath and pulled her arms back. Rokan dropped her hands as if she had shifted them to fire. She averted her eyes, not quite quickly enough to avoid seeing the hurt in his, and struggled to find her voice.

Before she could, Rokan said—in that same quiet voice—“Is it because I killed him?”

“No,” she whispered. “You had no choice.”

“I wish I could have done it differently.” He clenched the blanket, holding his hands there with an effort. “I wish it could have happened in a way that didn’t hurt you. I wish that more than anything.”

Isabel lifted her eyes to his face and made her voice gentle. “I need a horse.”

He went absolutely still. “What?”

“I have to go to the Mistwood.”

“Isabel—” He stopped, closed his eyes. He unclenched his fingers one by one, pressing them down, before he opened his eyes. They were dark as night and watched her with a hopeless intensity. “Of course. If that’s what you need to do.”

His face was so bleak her heart twisted, and she couldn’t help herself. She slid closer to him and placed her hand gently against his cheek. She could feel the faint stubble that meant he hadn’t been shaved yet that morning, the taut line of his jaw. He lifted his hand to hold her fingers there, then let it drop back to his knee and held her instead with his eyes.

“Come back,” he whispered.

Isabel couldn’t speak. She nodded her head slowly, once, never moving her eyes from his.

He smiled then, the smile she loved—wide and unrestrained, alive with joy, as if he were free. And this time she finally did what she had been too cautious to do before, what she had wanted to do since that first day in the Mistwood.

She ran her hand down his arm, twined her fingers with his, and smiled back.

The next morning Isabel rode to the Mistwood.

The trees seemed less hostile this time when she rode into them. They still weren’t welcoming—not as they would have been for the real Shifter—but now she knew why. She rode to the center of the woods, dismounted, and carefully hobbled her horse. She knew she wouldn’t be returning as a wolf.

She waited for hours, sitting cross-legged in a bed of ferns, soaking up the power that had, she strongly suspected, given birth to the Shifter in the first place. Then she shifted.

It was hard. Not impossible, as it had been in the castle, but harder than the last time she had been in these woods. She shifted into a cat—because she had lied to Clarisse back in the beginning; it
was
her favorite form—and stretched luxuriously, arching her back and digging her claws into a pile of dead leaves.

She became a wolf, and then a bird. One last time she soared above the treetops, stretching her wings to catch the wind sweeping in from the south. She circled back and dove, landing on a low tree branch. She had planned to be a bird last, but on impulse she shifted into a squirrel and ran down the trunk. And then, finally, she became human again.

The mist swirled around her briefly and dissipated. Isabel stood for a second watching it, wondering what happened to each bit of the Shifter that had been slowly seeping out of her for weeks. Did it dissolve back into wind and fog, conscious-less and purposeless, nothing more than a breath of air? Or here, in the woods where the Shifter had been born, was it coalescing slowly, reforming, shifting back into what it had once been—or into something altogether different?

The Shifter wouldn’t have wasted time wondering about it. Isabel lifted her chin, felt the breeze caress her face, and smiled.

Then she mounted and nudged her horse lightly with her heel. The horse was all too happy to get out of the woods and broke into a full gallop as soon as he was able to. Isabel let him. Her hair, red-brown and tangled, whipped out behind her as she leaned low over his neck. When they had passed far enough beyond the last tree, she reined him in and looked back. The mist wreathed among the trees. It was probably only her imagination that made it look stronger, more alive, than it ever had before.

Her horse nickered and pulled at the reins. Isabel let him have his head, and they set off for the castle at a gallop.

LEAH CYPESS
has been writing since the fourth grade, but before becoming a full-time writer, she earned her law degree from Columbia Law School. She worked for two years at a large New York City law firm, then moved to Boston, where she now lives with her husband and two young children. This is her first novel.

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This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used to advance the fictional narrative. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

MISTWOOD
. Copyright © 2010 by Leah Cypess. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cypess, Leah.

Mistwood / by Leah Cypess.

p. cm.

“Greenwillow Books.”

Summary: Brought back from the Mistwood to protect the royal family, a girl who has no memory of being a shape-shifter encounters political and magical intrigue as she struggles with her growing feelings for the prince.

ISBN 978-0-06-195699-7 (trade bdg.)—ISBN 978-0-06-195700-0 (lib. bdg.)

[1. Kings, queens, rulers, etc.—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Loyalty—Fiction. 4. Fantasy.]

I. Title.

PZ7.C9972Mi 2010       [Fic]—dc22       2009023051

EPub Edition © March 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-200143-6

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