Bran touched a finger to the crumbling bannister as he walked up the stairwell to his private quarters. The sluagh trailed behind him, whispering behind their hands that the king was here. He’d arrived, they were saved, they could finally be happy.

The weight of their expectations pressed down on his shoulders so thoroughly he couldn’t breathe.

Was being a king supposed to be easy? He’d always thought it would be. His father lounged in the throne room all day, having food hand-fed to him by slaves and daughters who doted upon him. His mother watched the proceedings of her people, only interfering to scream at them until they raced away in fear.

That was what he knew a “ruler” to be. He’d never thought it would be like having thousands of children all scrambling for his attention.

One of the sluagh tugged on the sleeve of his coat. “Sire, if I could have a moment?”

He paused, looked down at the ugly creature, and nodded. “What is it?”

“We’d like to have more time with you.”

“Why?”

What remained of the sluagh’s brows crumpled in confusion. “To…be with you?”

And therein lay the problem. He didn’t know how to be with them. He’d never had friends, the Unseelie didn’t have those kinds of relationships, and he didn’t trust himself not to insult one of them. Or worse…

Turn into his parents.

He couldn’t tell Aisling. She’d think less of him for these thoughts since she believed him capable of more than he gave himself credit for. Was he capable of what she expected?

He didn’t’ know how to be a king. He didn’t know how to be a man who loved her, let alone someone who could take care of an entire kingdom.

Bran shook his head at the sluagh, slipped out of its grasp, and left them alone on the stairs. The dark stain of their numbers lingered for a few moments in his wake before he heard them patter in the opposite direction.

He didn’t want to be their leader. He hadn’t asked for this, for any of it, and now with a kingdom at his feet, all he felt was that he wasn’t worthy of them.

The crumbling halls tilted in front of him. They listed to the side, or perhaps, he listed to the side as he fell against the wall. Pressing a hand to his throat, he willed his body to take in a deep breath. His mind was screaming. Not words or any sensible emotion, just screaming that something was wrong, that he was dying, or someone he loved was dying, and he couldn’t stop the thoughts from threatening to drown him.

Logically, he knew it was panic. His body was convinced the end of all things barreled toward him at top speed, and he could do nothing to stop it.

Stumbling down the hall, he reached his door flustered and out of breath. He pressed a hand against the cold wood, shoved hard, then let his body fall through the opening.

Fists pressed against the floor, he forced his lungs to inhale. One breath, two, over and over until he could at least think through the dangerous red haze in his mind.

The world would not end because he was a king. The sluagh would not be released upon the human realm to feast, as they were want to do.

Was it that which bothered him so much? The responsibility of an army that could decimate not just the human realm, but the faerie courts as well?

Aisling would tell him that was a foolish worry. The sluagh didn’t want to hurt anyone. They were still good people under the garbs of darkness and shadow. Unlike Bran, she didn’t feel their hunger, didn’t listen to their innermost desires.

She didn’t know every time she walked into a room, they all turned to stare at her because they wondered what her soul would taste like.

He constantly battled against them, telling them to calm, easing their minds like she tried to do. They didn’t want their minds to ease. There would always be a part of them that wanted to be released from their bond to the Raven King so they might devour the world.

Their creator was long since dead, a millennia passed since an ancient god birthed them to end the world. The Tuatha de Danann had bound them to whatever poor soul was titled Raven King. That much Bran knew. The rest of their story had been lost in the wake of a hundred wars where the sluagh had splattered the world with blood.

A prophetic image in his mind revealed the world as the sluagh wanted. Nothing but dust and ash remained in his beloved Otherworld, and still, it was the human realm he worried about most. The faeries would fight and die gloriously. The humans would die screaming in their beds as their worst nightmares were yanked out of their souls. Then they would be turned into monsters who lusted for more souls.

Anxiety pressed down on his shoulders again, the weight unbearable. His shoulders quaked and his fingers shook where they pressed against the cold stone floor.

He couldn’t do this. He wasn’t the man for this role and yet, here he was. Forced to take care of them, forced to remain away from the only person who might have eased his worries and convinced him that things weren’t so bad.

No. He would suffer this fear in silence and alone. Aisling had already suffered enough.

Something shifted out of the corner of his room where a mirror stood alone. A portal back home, just in case the Unseelie might need him.

One of his sisters stepped forward, her head cocked to the side awkwardly, almost as if her neck had been broken.

Bran forced himself to look closer. It was important to know which one she was. Some of his siblings might try to kill him in a moment of weakness like this. Others might simply laugh at him.

“Isolde,” he said, coughing and sitting up onto his haunches. He stayed kneeling on the floor in front of his most dangerous sister, watching as she shuffled into the room.

If he was forced to choose between his siblings, he would choose her again and again. She was the most trustworthy of his dangerous family. Not the least bloodthirsty, by any means, but at least she didn’t hide her intentions.

Isolde was the oldest and had lasted as his father’s plaything for centuries. Spiderwebs of blue veins laced underneath her paper-thin, pale skin. Her neck stayed at that angle because it had been broken, countless times. It was her lips that always made him uncomfortable.

Sometime ago, when they were just children, their father had sewn her lips shut. Fifty years later, he’d allowed her to speak again. The scars still mottled the blue-tinged mouth.

Her eyes, however, his father had left sewn closed.

“Brother.” Her voice rasped through the air like the rattling of tree branches on a cold, winter’s night. “You have fallen.”

“I can still stand.”

“Can you?” She stepped closer, her hand finding the post of his bed.

She had aged, he noted. Her pitch-black hair was now peppered with silver, unusual for one of their people. Perhaps not for her. She’d suffered more in her lifetime than a thousand faeries combined.

Bran stayed where he was. Though Isolde liked others to think her weak, he knew there was an iron bar in her spine far stronger than any of his other siblings. If she wanted to attack him—and there was always a part of the Unseelie that wanted to attack—she would with a vengeance he could not stop.

“Why are you here, sister?”

“I heard tell there was a new Raven King. Father won’t stop talking about you,” she replied. A soft chuckle escaped her shivering lips. “Although, it is our brothers who are far angrier. I think, perhaps, our parents are proud of you.”

Repulsed, Bran swallowed the gorge rising in his throat. “I’ve never sought their praise.”

“No, you haven’t. Even as a child.” Isolde sank onto the edge of his bed. The billowing edges of her ragged, white nightgown caught like a web around her. “And yet, here you are.”

So, she wasn’t here to pick a fight with him. She would have attacked by now. Bran still carried a few of her scars on his ribcage. His shoulders sagged in relief.

“Are you here as a sister?” he asked. “Or as a foe?”

“Father does not know I’m here.”

A riddle for an answer, so like all his sisters who gathered information in the Otherworld and placed it in a library for safekeeping. He understood what she meant. “Then you know more about my place here than you’re letting on.”

“I always know where you are, little brother.” An unusually soft expression crossed her face. “You were always my favorite.”

“And you were mine.”

“I’m sorry for the pain you suffered in the dark castle,” she whispered. “I never got to tell you that, but I think it’s important you know. I recorded every beating, every whipping, and I placed it in a black book at the highest bookcase within my section. No one else has ever seen it. I know every tear you shed, every lash you bore. Everything, little brother. I have witnessed it all.”

To have been recorded in such a way was the greatest honor one of his sisters could have given. Shock stole the words from his lips. He stared at her, knowing she couldn’t see his expression or his appreciation. What had she suffered? What did he not know about his own family?

Bran cleared his throat. “Thank you.”

Isolde nodded her crooked head.

Silence stretched between them, and he’d forgotten how uncomfortable their family was. There wasn’t a support structure of any kind. They didn’t want to help each other. They didn’t really care where the others were or how they were. For his sister to be here at all was uncharacteristic and odd.

He slowly rose from his knees and stood. “Was there something you wanted?”

“I want to help you, brother.”

“I don’t need your help. The Unseelie ways no longer rule in Underhill.” It felt so good to say the words.

His entire life, Bran had waited to renounce his people. He didn’t want to be a wandering fae with no connection to court or family. He didn’t want to be Unseelie any longer. Their meandering eyes, hatred of everyone and anything, but mostly, how they never seemed to care about each other as much as he’d hoped they would.

He had a chance to build something else here. Something that he believed in, that would make people’s lives better. The problem was that he didn’t think he could.

Isolde reached into the folds of her dress, pulled out a black book, then held it out to him. “I think, perhaps, this will help.”

What was his sister’s game? He didn’t recognize the tome, wouldn’t anyway since he was never in the libraries for very long. When he took the offered piece, magic laced through his body like a lightning strike.

Bran stroked the soft, leather cover and stared down at the simple journal. “What is this?”

“It’s yours.”

The words didn’t register for a moment until he realized she was saying this was his book. Every tiny detail of his life that Isolde had meticulously recorded. He flipped it open in the middle and read a particularly nasty moment when his mother had flayed the skin off his back.

This was him. Every instance, every detail, pieces of his life all written down from cover to cover by a sister he hadn’t known cared.

The dark memories threatened to rise up over his head like a wave and drown all the good he’d put back into the world.

A chilled, frail hand covered his, forcing the book to close. “This was your history, and I give it to you only because the chapter thusly must close.”

“What?” He looked at her eyes, sewn shut for centuries, and realized she saw far more than she ever let on.

She smiled with scarred lips. “Burn it, brother. The Unseelie Prince is gone, and these memories have no use here. Become the Raven King in his entirety. Learn who that person is. Your past and your future should not mix.”

It was a rare moment of kindness that she showed him, and he would not let it go to waste. Bran nodded, turned, and tossed the book into the fireplace behind him.

Watching it go up in flames felt like the start of something new.