Reina Hart's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Reina Hart had shot a prince three days ago, and she still had not decided what to do about it. She sat on the cabin steps and rolled the last arrow between her fingers. Her father was inside grinding willow bark. The smell drifted through the door with the low murmur of a patient's cough. Reina pulled her green cloak tight and stared at the tree line. Somewhere past those pines, the forest prince sat in a court she had no right to enter. She had saved his life. She wanted to see him again. Those two facts did not add up to a reason a guard would accept at a gate. She had turned it over all morning. A physician's daughter could not walk into a royal camp and ask after a prince. She had no letter, no rank, no gift worth offering. If she showed up at the tents beyond the ridge, the guards would send her home before he ever heard her name. She stood, slung her quiver, and went into the woods anyway. Not to the court. To the spot where she had loosed the arrow. She told herself she was checking tracks. She had stopped believing that lie two visits ago. She found the clearing quiet. Then she found the horse. It stood between two birches, black as wet coal, four white feet planted like it was waiting for her. A wound crossed its flank, crusted and swollen. Not her arrow. Something wider. The horse did not spook when she stepped closer. It watched her with a red-rimmed eye and let her lay a hand on its neck. A branch cracked behind her. She turned with the bow half-drawn. A boy stepped out from a patched canvas lean-to she had walked past twice without seeing. Dark hair. Dark cloak pinned at the throat. Blue eyes she had already met once, over a bowstring, three days ago. "Don't shoot me twice," the prince said. She lowered the bow. "You're hiding." "Yes." "From who?" He looked at the horse. "My uncle." She waited. He did not go on. She understood then that he would not, and that the man he meant wore a crown he had not been born to. Reina looked at the crusted wound, then at the prince's hands, which were clean but shaking a little at the knuckles. He did not know how to dress a horse. He did not know how to dress himself out here. "My father is a physician," she said. "I can bring salve by dark." He studied her a long moment. "Tell no one." "No one," she said. She walked home with her hands steady and her chest loud. She did not need a reason to enter his court anymore. He had no court. He had a torn tent in her woods, and he had just asked her to come back.