Only the Worthy. Morgan Rice

punching his armor. But it was useless. Hers were frail, small hands punching at a suit of metal. She might as well have been punching a boulder.

      “Who are you?” she demanded. “What do you want of me?”

      There came no response.

      Instead, he grabbed her with his gauntlet, and the next thing she knew, he turned her around, face first in the grass, and was reaching, pulling at her dress.

      Rea cried, realizing what was about to happen. She was seventeen. She had been saving herself for the perfect man. She did not want it to happen this way.

      “No!” she cried out. “Please. Anything but that. Kill me first!”

      But the knight would not listen, and she knew there was no stopping him.

      Rea shut her eyes tight, trying to make it go away, trying to transport herself to another place, another time, anywhere but here. Her nightmare came back to her, the one she had been awakened from, the one she had been having for many moons. It was this, she realized with dread, that she had been seeing. This very scene. This tree, this grass, this plateau. This storm.

      Somehow, she had foreseen it.

      Rea shut her eyes tighter and tried to imagine this wasn’t happening. She tried to determine if it was worse in the dream, or in real life.

      Soon, it was over.

      He stopped moving and lay on top of her, she too numb to move.

      She heard the sound of metal rising, felt his weight finally off of her, and she braced herself, expecting him to kill her now. She anticipated the blow of his sword. It would be a welcome relief.

      “Go on,” she said. “Do it.”

      Yet to her surprise there came no sound of a sword, but instead the soft sound of a dainty chain. She felt something cold and light being placed into her palm, and she glanced over, confused.

      She squinted in the rain and was stunned to see he had placed a gold necklace in her hand, a pendant at its end, two snakes, wrapped around a moon, a dagger between them.

      Finally, he spoke his first words.

      “When he is born,” came the dark, mysterious voice, a voice of authority, “give this to him. And send him to me.”

      She heard the knight mounting his horse, and became dimly aware of the sound of his riding away.

      Rea’s eyes grew heavy. She was too exhausted to move as she lay there in the rain. Her heart shattered, she felt sweet sleep coming on and she allowed it to embrace her. Maybe now, at least, the nightmares would stop.

      Before she let them close, she stared out at the necklace, the emblem. She squeezed it, feeling it in her hand, the gold so thick, thick enough to feed her entire village for a lifetime.

      Why had he given it to her? Why hadn’t he killed her?

      Him, he had said. Not her. He knew she would be pregnant. And he knew it would be a boy.

      How?

      Suddenly, before sweet sleep took her, it all came rushing back to her. The last piece of her dream.

      A boy. She had given birth to a boy. One born of fury. Of violence.

      A boy destined to be king.

      CHAPTER TWO

      Three Moons Later

      Rea stood alone in the forest clearing, in a daze, lost in her own world. She did not hear the stream trickling beneath her feet, did not hear the chirping of the birds in the thick wood around her, did not notice the sunlight shining through the branches, or the pack of deer that watched her close by. The entire world melted away as she stared at only one thing: the veins of the Ukanda leaf that she held in her trembling fingers. She removed her palm from the broad, green leaf, and slowly, to her horror, the color of its veins changed from green to white.

      Watching it change was like a knife in her heart.

      The Ukanda did not change colors unless the person who touched it was with child.

      Rea’s world reeled. She lost all sense of time and space as she stood there, her heart pounding in her ears, her hands trembling, and thought back to that fateful night three moons ago when her village had been pillaged, too many of her people killed to count. When he had taken her. She reached down and ran her hand over her stomach, feeling the slightest bump, feeling another wave of nausea, and finally, she understood why. She reached down and fingered the gold necklace she’d been hiding around her neck, deep beneath her clothes, of course, so that the others would not see it, and she wondered, for the millionth time, who that knight was.

      Try as she did to block them out, his final words rang again and again in her head.

      Send him to me.

      There came a sudden rustling behind her and Rea turned, startled, to see the beady eyes of Prudence, her neighbor, staring back at her. A fourteen-year-old girl who lost her family in the attack, a busybody who had always been too eager to tattle on anyone, Prudence was the last person Rea wanted to see know her news. Rea watched with horror as Prudence’s eyes drifted from Rea’s hand to the changing leaf, then widened in recognition.

      With a glare of disapproval, Prudence dropped her basket of sheets and turned and ran. Rea knew her running off could only mean one thing: she was going to inform the villagers.

      Rea’s heart sank, and she felt her first wave of fear. The villagers would demand she kill her baby, of course. They wanted no reminder of the nobles’ attack. But why did that scare her? Did she really want to keep this child, the byproduct of that monster?

      Rea’s fear surprised her, and as she dwelled on it, she realized it was a fear to keep her baby safe. That floored her. Intellectually, she did not want to have it; to do so would be a betrayal to her village and herself. It would only embolden the nobles who had raided. And it would be so easy to lose the baby; she could merely chew the Yukaba root, and with her next bathing, the child would pass.

      Yet viscerally, she felt the child inside her, and her body was telling her something that her mind was not: she wanted to keep it. To protect it. It was a child, after all.

      Rea, an only child who had never known her parents, who had suffered in this world with no one to love and no one to love her, had always desperately wanted someone to love, and someone to love her back. She was tired of being alone, of being quarantined in the poorest section of the village, of scrubbing others’ floors, doing hard labor from morning to night with no way out. She would never find a man, she knew, given her status. At least no man whom she didn’t despise. And she would likely never have a child.

      Rea felt a sudden surge of longing. This might be her only chance, she realized. And now that she was pregnant, she realized she hadn’t known how badly she wanted this child. She wanted it more than anything.

      Rea began the hike back to her village, on edge, caught up in a swirl of mixed emotions, hardly prepared to face the disapproval she knew would be awaiting her. The villagers would insist there be no surviving issue from the marauders of their town, from the men who had taken everything from them. Rea could hardly blame them; it was a common tactic for marauders to impregnate women in order to dominate and control the villages throughout the kingdom. Sometimes they would even send for the child. And having a child only fueled their cycle of violence.

      Yet still, none of that could change how she felt. A life lived inside her. She could feel it with each step she took, and she felt stronger for it. She could feel it with each heartbeat, pulsing through her own.

      Rea walked down the center of the village streets, heading back to her one-room cottage, feeling her world upside down, wondering what to think. Pregnant. She did not know how to be pregnant. She did not know how to give birth to a child. Or how to raise one. She could barely feed herself. How would she even afford it?

      Yet somehow she felt a new strength rising up within her. She felt it pumping in her veins, a strength she had only been dimly conscious of these last three moons, but which now came into crystal clear focus. It was a strength beyond hers. A strength of