The Falconer Prince

Yoru did not remember the night the soldiers came for his father’s throne. He remembered only the cold — and then the woods, and the woods raising him when no one else would.

He was six when the palace burned behind him, six when an old nursemaid pressed a dagger into his hand and told him to run and not look back. He ran until his legs gave out beneath the pines, and there he stayed — not because he chose the forest, but because the forest chose not to let him die in it. He stopped thinking of himself as a prince in exile. He became something else: a boy the woods had quietly adopted, fluent in every tongue but his own.

It was nine years before he saw another half-creature like himself — though he didn’t know yet that’s what she was.

She came down out of a storm, wings first, and what he mistook for an enormous golden hawk landed badly in a clearing with an arrow through her shoulder. He pulled it free with hands that had stitched wounds on wolves and foxes a hundred times before, murmuring the same low, wordless reassurance he gave every frightened animal. It was only when the bleeding slowed and the bird’s form shifted — feathers receding into skin, talons into fingers, that fierce golden eye narrowing into a woman’s furious stare

Her name was Taka. She did not thank him. She told him, flatly, that he’d been lucky she was too injured to take his hand off at the wrist.

He liked her immediately.

It took years for “I owe you a debt” to become “I will not leave,” and longer still for that to become a marriage neither of them announced to anyone but the trees. Yoru had no court left to ask permission from, and Taka had never needed permission for anything in her life. They simply were