Chapter 1

My last name is Blackwood.

That name carries a lot of weight up here on the northern frontier. People drop their voices when they say it, drivers crack their whips a little harder when passing the estate, and the kids in town are warned to stay far away from the stone walls beyond the iron gates. We come from a long line of witches. Not the fairy-tale kind. The kind that actually terrifies people.

The estate is massive. The gray stone manor sits perched on a hillside, backing up against a long-abandoned hunting ground. The cobblestone drive outside the main gates winds all the way down to town, but that road hasn't seen a visitor in years.

The only people living on the estate were my mother, Elara, the butler, a handful of aging servants, and me. I was the firstborn, and the only child. My father died before I was born—or at least, that was the story my mother told. I grew up within those walls. My mother kept the keys to every single door, including the wrought-iron gates that led to the outside world.

The manor had as many rules as footnotes in an old tome: no leaving the main house after dinner, no stepping foot outside your bedroom on a full moon, and absolutely no documents were to be removed from the family archives. My mother claimed the rules were there to protect us. She said the outside world didn’t understand us and would only do us harm. For a long time, I believed her. Blind faith took a lot less effort than asking questions.

When I turned twenty-five, my mother finally let me go into town for provisions. It was one of the few times I'd ever been allowed off the estate. It was pouring rain that day, and the carriage wheels got bogged down in a deep rut. No matter how hard the driver cracked his whip, the horses couldn't pull us free. I stood on the side of the road under an umbrella, the hem of my dress soaked in muddy water. A man walked over. He didn't say a word; he just stepped up to the back of the carriage and put his shoulder into the wood. It took him three tries, but he finally heaved the carriage out of the mud. He straightened up, covered head to toe in muck, gave me a single nod, and walked away.

I hurried after him and asked for his name. He told me it was Caleb, and that he was a carpenter in town.

He couldn't read or write. He told me that matter-of-factly, the same way someone might tell you they were left-handed—like it was just some trivial detail. He hailed from some village down south and lived alone in a tiny room attached to the back of his woodshop. Quiet and kept to himself, that was the town's consensus on him. But he was incredible with his hands. Give him a block of wood, and he could turn it into a chair, a table, a cabinet. He once showed me a little wooden bird he was carving; the wings actually moved on hinges, though he said it was still a work in progress.

We courted for three months. Three months later, he married into the Blackwood family and moved into the manor.

There was no wedding. Instead, my mother had him sign a contract in her study. Since he couldn't read, the butler read the terms out loud to him. When it was over, Caleb picked up the pen and scratched a crooked "C" on the signature line. My mother stared at the crude mark, her face completely unreadable. The butler folded the parchment away and looked at him. "Your quarters are in the East Wing." The East Wing was the most isolated corner of the manor, sharing a wall with the stables.

During Caleb's first week at the estate, no one used his name. The butler referred to him as "the carpenter," and the servants just called him "you." At dinner, he was seated at the far end of the long dining table. He was given a set of old, tarnished silverware, separated from my mother's fine bone china by a vast chasm of silence. He never complained. He just ate his meals in silence, excused himself in silence, and vanished down the end of the hall.

Slowly, the estate's maintenance began falling on his shoulders. The firewood needed chopping, the stable roof needed patching, the broken pantry door needed replacing. No one ever asked him to do these things; everyone just expected him to handle it. And he did. I used to watch him chop wood from a second-story window. He'd roll his shirtsleeves up past his elbows and bring the ax down, splitting the logs cleanly in two with a sharp crack. He did every little chore with such quiet dedication that it almost broke my heart.

But in this house, hard work didn't buy you any respect.

He eventually found an abandoned woodshop tucked away in a corner of the estate. It was a forgotten room at the far end of the West Wing, the lock rusted shut, the inside choked with dust and broken furniture. Caleb spent three days clearing it out before hauling his old tools up from town—planes, chisels, saws, and a few carving knives. Those tools were his only worldly possessions. He laid them out meticulously on the workbench and started building again.

One night, he came into our bedroom and pressed something into my hand. It was a wooden comb, sanded perfectly smooth. A flower was carved into the back—it was supposed to be a rose, but the lines were crooked and the petals were uneven, looking more like a clumsy child's doodle. He stood there in front of me, not quite knowing what to do with his hands, the tips of his ears burning red. "I didn't do a very good job," he muttered, "but it's a solid piece of timber." I gripped the comb in my hand and asked him why he chose a rose. He didn't answer. He just gave me a small smile.

That smile stayed with me for a long time. Because it was the last unguarded smile he ever gave me.

I once found a crumpled piece of paper stuffed in his toolbag. It had a few crooked letters scrawled on it, traced out like someone just learning the alphabet. When he caught me looking at it, his ears turned red. He snatched it back, muttering, "It's nothing." I didn't think much of it at the time. An illiterate man scribbling letters on a page—what did it matter?

It wasn't until later that I realized he was trying to teach himself how to write. For our baby.

Shortly before our daughter was born, my mother called me into her study.

The room was massive, the walls lined floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves. Old tomes and scrolls of parchment were crammed tightly together, and the air was heavy with the scent of aged paper and dried herbs. My mother sat behind her heavy oak desk. Spread out in front of her was a scroll of parchment, its edges yellowed and frayed. The ink was a dark, rust-red color. It looked like dried blood.

"The family curse," my mother began, "passes only to the women. Never the men. Every firstborn Blackwood daughter inherits it."

She pointed to a passage in the middle of the parchment: The father of the firstborn’s child must willingly offer himself as a sacrifice to sever the chains of the bloodline. I stared at that line of text for a long time. My mother's voice drifted across the desk—steady, completely calm, as if she were reading off a grocery list.

"Do not mention this to Caleb. The ritual requires him to be a willing participant, but that doesn't mean he needs to know the whole truth. Tell him it's a purification ceremony. For the baby. He'll believe you. He trusts you."

She was right. He would.

"This isn't my choice," my mother added. "This is simply the way of our family."

I stood before her, my fingers white-knuckling a copy of the parchment. Outside the window, the sky had gone pitch black. A single light burned at the far end of the West Wing—the woodshop. Caleb was still out there. He had no idea what was happening tonight. He had no idea that his wife had just signed a death warrant with his name on it.

I folded the parchment and slipped it into my pocket. My fingers brushed against something else—the wooden comb. The crude, crooked rose carved into the back dug into my fingertips.

My mother said it was the only way. She said it was for the baby. She promised me Caleb would be fine.

Her eyes were so earnest, leaving absolutely no room for argument.

Up until that moment, I had never once questioned my mother's decisions.

"I... I want to talk to him." It was the first time I had ever hesitated.

My mother looked at me, a complicated expression crossing her face.