The Forbidden Forest didn't want apologies. It didn't care about bloodlines, or blasphemy, or the "sinful" nature the High Priest had preached about. To the ancient oaks and the suffocating black moss, Seraphine was just another dying thing.
Seven hundred and thirty days.
That was how long it had been since she had stopped living and started merely surviving.
Seraphine knelt in the damp loam, her movements silent, predatory. Two years of exile had stripped the "statue of grace" down to the bone, forging something sharper in its place. She wore a cloak of rough-spun wool, dyed the color of dying moss—wool she had sheared, spun, and woven herself from the wild sheep that roamed the ridges.
Her hands were encased in fitted gloves made of cured rabbit skin, hiding the black vines that crawled down to her knuckles like ink spills.
She dug into the earth with a crude tool she had fashioned herself—a jagged shard of rusted iron bound to a deer bone handle with dried sinew.
It was ugly. It was sharp. It was the only thing in the world that belonged to her.
Foxglove, she listed mentally, careful not to nick the roots with the iron shard. Belladonna for the fever. Yarrow for the blood. One mistake is all the forest needs.
A biting wind hissed through the canopy. Seraphine's hand flew instantly to her hood, yanking it low over her brow. Beneath the wool, the curse pulsed. The black rose on her collarbone felt heavy, its thorns vibrating against her skin as if they were drinking her anxiety.
Don't look back, she told herself, her grip tightening on the bone handle. The girl who lived in a palace is dead. You are a ghost. Ghosts don't remember.
Then, the silence shattered.
It wasn't the wind. It was the scream of a horse—high, frantic, and terrified—followed by the thunder of hooves losing their grip on the rain-slicked ridge above.
Seraphine froze. Her heart slammed against the curse mark.
In the Forbidden Forest, a wolf was a threat. A bear was a challenge. But a stranger? A stranger was a death sentence. A stranger meant eyes. Eyes meant judgment. Eyes meant someone running back to the capital to tell the Prince that the "Monster" was still breathing.
Run, her instincts screamed. Vanish. Let the forest eat them.
Then came the crash—the sickening, wet thud of heavy bodies hitting the earth. Silence followed, broken only by a ragged, human groan.
"Help..."
The voice was deep, a rich baritone reduced to a broken wheeze.
Seraphine stood at the edge of the clearing, paralyzed, gripping her rusted tool like a dagger. She stared up at the ridge. She owed this world nothing. They had thrown rotten fruit at her. They had called her a murderer for a crime she failed to commit and a monster for a curse she didn't choose. Why should she save a soul from a world that had discarded her?
She turned to leave.
But as she moved, the rough wool of her cloak brushed against her neck, agitating the mark. The Goddess's voice echoed in her memory, cold and absolute: You used your power to trample the light.
If she left him to die in the mud, she wasn't just a victim anymore. She was exactly what Julian said she was.
"Damn it," she hissed, her voice rusty from disuse.
She shoved the digging tool into her belt and scrambled up the embankment, boots slipping on rotting leaves. At the top, the smell of copper and pine hit her. A massive bay stallion was thrashing, its leg broken. A few yards away, a man lay face-down in a bed of crushed ferns.
He wasn't moving.
Seraphine approached him with the caution of a feral cat. She grabbed his shoulder, her rabbit-skin gloves sinking into fine charcoal wool.
This was no peasant. The fabric, the stitching—it screamed of wealth. This was high nobility.
She rolled him over.
Her breath hitched in her throat.
He was young—perhaps her age—and devastatingly handsome, even with blood matting his dark hair. His features were sharp, aristocratic, but without the softness of the pampered lords she used to dance with.
His lashes fluttered. Then, his eyes opened.
Amber.
They were the color of sun-drenched resin, vivid and startlingly clear.
Panic, cold and sharp, spiked through her. Seraphine flinched, jerking her head to the side so her hair fell forward like a curtain. She shielded the left side of her face, hiding the black vines, hiding the monster. She peered at him through the chestnut strands, her single visible emerald eye wide with terror.
"Am I..." The man coughed, a delirious, bloody smile touching his lips. "Am I dead? Have I finally met the spirit of the woods?"
Seraphine's voice came out cold, the ghost of her royal training snapping into place as a defense mechanism.
"You aren't dead, though your horse certainly tried," she clipped out. "And I am no spirit. I am the only thing standing between you and a very lonely grave. Now, stop talking. You've likely cracked a rib."
The man blinked, struggling to focus on her silhouette through the shadows of her hood. He didn't look at her cloak. He didn't look at the dirt. He looked right at her.
"A spirit with a bite..." he murmured, his vision swimming. He tried to reach out, his hand fumbling toward her. "Your eyes..."
Seraphine stiffened, ready to bolt. Here it comes. The scream. The revulsion.
"I've never seen anything like them," he whispered, sounding genuinely awestruck. "Like emeralds hidden in the brush."
The world seemed to tilt on its axis.
He didn't recoil.
"Wait here," she choked out, standing up so abruptly she nearly tripped. She kept her face turned away, terrified that if the light hit her just right, the illusion would shatter. "If you move, the wolves will find you. Do you understand?"
"I'll stay..." he promised, his eyes sliding shut. "Wouldn't want to disappoint... a lady with eyes like that."
Seraphine didn't wait. She turned and ran.
She scrambled back toward her hut, her breath coming in short, panicked gasps. Her hand flew to her cheek, feeling the jagged, unnatural texture of the vines through the rough leather of her homemade gloves.
He saw me, she thought, her pulse deafening. He looked right at me, and he didn't see a monster.
It was terrifying.
Hate she could handle. Disgust was familiar. But this? This made her feel fragile. She had spent two years building a fortress of ice around her heart, and with one delirious compliment, this amber-eyed stranger had cracked the walls.
She burst into her hut, hands shaking as she fumbled with the wooden latch. She told herself she was only helping him so he would leave. She would patch him up, put him on the road, and be done with it.
But as she grabbed her medicine box—a hollowed-out log filled with dried herbs—Seraphine caught a glimpse of her reflection in a shard of broken mirror propped against the wall.
For the first time in two years, she didn't just see the Villainess. She saw a girl who was terrified of being human again.
Next Chapter:
Chapter 2: The Hermit's Medicine
Seraphine must bring the unconscious stranger into her home. As she tends to his wounds, the close proximity makes it harder to hide her curse—and the man's curiosity begins to grow.