The shadow of an assassin emerged through his menacing words, and my core iced. I remembered him coated in bandit blood—how he terrified me by the way he had skillfully ended their existence. Staring down the first day of real weapons training, I grappled for composure. I felt hollow. Intimidated. Daunted by the task.
When I failed to answer, he flourished his sword and released the grip. The blade stuck in the ground, and he rapidly crossed the distance between us. “Aya, breathe.” He grasped both sides of my face.
I inhaled with a sharp high-pitched gasp.
“Stop doing that,” he scolded. “Take deeper, steadier breaths. Don’t pant so much and don’t hold your breath. You were turning blue.”
I gulped air and exhaled.
“Slower.” His hands slid down my arms and gripped my waist. “Take your time, hold the breath, then let everything out. Force the anxiety from your chest. You must fight your subconscious mind. If you can’t win that battle, you’ll be hopeless in a real one. Stop letting your emotions control your reactions.”
I closed my eyes, feeling his thumbs graze my ribs. Each steady breath cleared the fog.
“We really are going to have to start with the basics if I have to teach you breathing techniques.” He hooked his finger under my chin. For the first time, my heart didn’t break into a frenzy when he studied me. Satisfied, he retrieved his sword and took a seat against one of the many twisted wisteria trees. “You wear your emotions like a second skin.”
I sank into the grass. What had happened to the iron Princess always in such perfect balance and control? She could strike fear into her ladies with a single glance. Now she cowered like a kitchen mouse in the cupboard. When Aya replaced my reality, all my royal training disappeared. I’d lost all sense of restraint or discipline to a clumsy peasant. “It’s strange that you’ve seen my affectivity so exposed. There was a time, not so long ago, when most thought I was made of stone.”
“That’s exponentially hard to believe.” He adjusted his back against the bark.
“Dispassion is embedded in the person I used to be. It was something of a requirement.”
He cocked his head to the side. “Our agreement has me silenced on this subject. Define it for me. Am I allowed to ask questions, or am I supposed to sit here and feign aphasia?”
A tiny laugh escaped my lips. “I suppose you can ask, but no interrogating, and I want the luxury of refusing to answer without repercussion.”
“I can live with that.” He dropped the hilt of his sword, letting the blade fall to the grass as though he didn’t care about the weapon.
“Considering I have to live in dread of your ambiguity, it’s hardly a sacrifice.”
He suppressed a conspicuous grin. “It’s more problematic than you realize. Addressing the past while learning to wield a sword has benefits. Facing who you really are is difficult for most people, and tapping into one’s driving force fuels power. Becoming more deeply aware of your own sentiments and predilections will help you control them. You’re making me circumvent that. I’ll have to come up with a more creative method to get you to employ this dispassion, though I can’t say I’m looking forward to it. Your exposed affectivity is one of my favorite aspects about you. Training you correctly will cause you to lose much of that asset.”
My cheeks flushed. “I’m surprised you find anything about me appealing. I thought I was a nuisance.”
“You are absolutely a nuisance, but that doesn’t suppress the things I do find engaging about you.”
“Water and dreaming?”
“Among other traits.”
“I doubt I’ll ever master the same level of control you have.” I tucked in my feet, taking care to keep Luken’s dagger hidden beneath my skirt.
“It’s just practice,” he confessed. “Flint likes to spread the idea that I’m a lit cannon, and maybe that’s true. I’ve been judged on my actions, but not even my brothers understand the options I’ve had. Keeping my emotions contained doesn’t mean I don’t feel. I’ve just learned to manipulate them, because I wasn’t given a choice. For instance”—he leaned forwards and shuffled his hand through the back of his hair to remove stuck petals—“when battling an enemy, you must take emotion out of the situation. Anger is likely to cause you to make a fatal error or lose your footing, kill gratuitously, or take unnecessary risk to injure an adversary. Sorrow will cause you to fight weakly and ineffectively, leading to suicide. Quelling emotion until the fight is won is critical. Remaining detached is a weapon. It does immense psychological damage to an enemy. Your opponent assumes you don’t care if you live or die as long as he is destroyed in the end. If they are afraid, you gain the upper hand. Fear is lethal.”
“That’s psychological warfare,” I discerned, recalling how he had stood, cold and immovable, against a two-thousand-pound short-faced bear.
“The basic aspects. It’s not something you can master unless you dominate your own sentiment.” He chuckled. “I’m not expecting you to become a bloodcurdling psychopath overnight.”
“I suspect it was easy for you to employ such maniacal behavior,” I said snidely.
“Of the two of us, I am not the one who is legally considered insane, and remember what I said about disrespecting your instructor, Aya.”
I bit my tongue, timidly lowering my gaze.
“We need to head back before my brothers wake up. It’s become blatantly obvious Flint doesn’t like you disappearing.” He stood, shoving his sword back into the scabbard.
I took the hand he offered and dusted blooms off my dress. “He’s oddly possessive.”
“Well, he really didn’t want me to kill you.” Darric plucked several petals from the top of my head. “We’ll come back at first light tomorrow. We are going to examine that water anomaly of yours in further detail.”
I bounced with excitement. “And stay until Flint starts screaming my name across the valley.”
During the walk back to the Hovel, I paid special attention to the landscape, trying to record the trees and the placement of rocks. I wanted to remember the forest’s location.
In revealing his most secret hiding place, Darric had shown me a side of himself I’d never imagined existed, a gentleness he kept reserved. Something about sharing in his mystery fascinated me, and the growing number of similarities between us became an intriguing concept.
The cat trotted under my cloak as I paced several feet behind him, using his breathing techniques to stay calm. The clouded view I had of my stranger became lucid, and parts of him emerged that had gone unforeseen. His entire body always seemed relaxed, except for his shoulders. Often, he rolled one or the other, as if he carried every burden he had ever encountered in the tension of his upper back. The lean muscle of his triangular torso, vaguely outlined under his shirt, and the slack in his sword belt hanging low around his hips adjusted into a clearer image. Despite his knowledge and long history, he could not have been much older than me.
The details of his contemptible past were written in the telltale scars defacing his striking biceps. Flint said he was covered in his transgressions—the marks of an assassin with insane audacity. But despite the visible mistakes, he was wildly and bewilderingly handsome.
My cheeks lit fire.
Combustion was likely.
I trailed away, forcing myself to stop lustfully imagining him in a way that would allow me to see all his scarring—an amorphous image anyway, since my life had been kept chaste under the King’s repressive guard.
Darric turned around and gave me a quizzical glare. I touched my cheek, hoping the heat had dissipated. Never in my life had I thought of a man so lewdly, and of all people in Athera to invade my head without a stitch of clothing, Darric Ursygh. What the hell was happening to me?
We reached the cavern minutes before Bromly emerged, sleepy-eyed, from the Hovel. He greeted us with a lazy yawn and commenced pulling smoked pieces of bear meat off the tripod to place in a woven basket.
By the aftern
oon, Flint still had not come out of his room.
Bromly created a bowl of foul-smelling gray slurry, which he smeared on the bear skins while whistling a merry tune. Wanting to avoid the stench, I offered to rouse Flint.
Inside the Hovel, the last fur door remained closed. “Flint?”
“Aya?” he replied immediately.
I eased the pelt away from the doorframe. Flint sat on the edge of his bed, fully dressed and fiddling with his flute. Unlike Darric’s room, Flint’s had clutter everywhere. Articles of clothing were draped over the bed and nightstand and littered the floor. Two woven baskets hanging from the wall overflowed with a variety of random items: unsharpened knives, cups, dried flowers, spoiling vegetables, and old bowls full of moldy food. The sheets and furs on his bed were twisted into knots, and some of the stuffing was falling out of his mattress. In the corner, a pile of bandit swords collected dust beside his quiver and bow.
“Are you all right?” I asked, taking in the depressing condition of his room.
“I’m great.” He smiled wide. “Better now that you’re here.”
“Does your room always look like this?” I eyed the empty clothing pegs on the wall.
“Uh . . . yeah.” He scratched the side of his nose. “It’s my space. I do what I want with it.”
I backed out of the door to escape the pungent odor. “Lovely.”
He joined me outside his room, and the fur swung closed behind him. “What time is it?”
“Afternoon. Darric and Bromly are expecting you to be working.”
His upper lip quivered. “They sent ya to fetch me, huh?”
“No, I volunteered.” My eyes drifted to the unsightly bruise circling his pale neck.
“Really?” A flirtatious twinkle entered his eyes. He attempted to clasp my mangled hand, but I jerked away. “What happened to your hand?” He seethed when he saw the white bandage, his skin turning a flaming red. “Did Darric do this to you?”
“Flint, calm down,” I said, annoyed. “Darric didn’t do anything. I had a small accident, and he treated it for me.”
“Psh, like I believe that shit.”
“Believe what you want. It’s the truth.” I crossed my arms over my chest.
His angry coloration lingered as he quickly changed the subject. “At least it’s nice to see your sweet face wakin’ me up instead of Bromly’s ugly mug.” He swallowed nervously, and his larynx bobbed. “Your eyes look so pretty on your face.”
He wavered on the balls of his feet, licked his lips, and dipped his head. Alarm rushed through me when his morning breath surged through his teeth. I pushed against his chest and twisted out of the way as his lips grazed the side of my mouth.
“What are you doing?” I shrieked, flattening my back against the wall.
“I thought ya were . . . I thought ya wanted me to,” he stammered.
I slammed my fist into the doorframe. “Flint! I didn’t come in here to entertain you!”
“I meant . . . I didn’t . . . I just . . .” He held up his hands, his fingers trembling in midair.
“What? What then?” I raged.
He covered his reddened face with his hands.
I shoved off the wall and ran from the Hovel. How many times did I have to explain that I was not for the taking?
I stormed past Darric and Bromly, ignoring their confused expressions, and left the cavern.
The sun beamed down on the open valley. I lay in the grass just outside the cavern entrance and stared at the clouds. The fresh spring breeze from the mountains filled my lungs, eradicating the rancid potato breath clinging to the side of my mouth. I wiped a trace of Flint’s saliva from my cheek and listened to the lull of water rushing over the rocky riverbed.
Flint scurried out of the Hovel. His brothers eyed him suspiciously. “Women.” He shrugged with a laugh.
I sent one malicious glare in their direction and turned my attention back to the blue sky. Flint’s indecency would not get the better of me.
I spent the afternoon outside the cavern with the cat pressed against my side, staring at the puffs of white clouds as they changed shape. Everything else disappeared when I looked into the same sky that encompassed all Brisleia.
My entire life I’d craved freedom. The engagement to Prince Marcus should have provided the solution. My reasoning for opposing the marriage was becoming less clear. Perhaps this had never been about our union or relocating to Podar but my desire to run from the life of a Divine royal.
When Luken and I were younger, we would lie in the grass and stare at the blue dome above us. I wanted to turn into a bird and touch the sky. He always brought veracity. He was grounded, attached to the land the same way a tree weaves roots into the soil.
By the time Prince Marcus paraded into the Rose Court, years had passed since my brother and I wandered the palace gardens. Responsibility at Parliament and court ruled our lives. The days spent imagining our future changed from childish fantasy to reality.
“If you could have anything, anything your heart desired, what would it be?”
Luken was older than me by four years and a model of Divinity.
In the past, our parents had tried to create more heirs. It was beneficial for the Divine to produce many descendants—King O’dern and Queen Nadeani of Duval had six children—but our mother was unable to carry future pregnancies. Each expectation ended in disappointment and risked the queen’s life. Luken and I were the last of the Brisleian bloodline. The Heir and the Spare.
He lay beside me, our ears touching. The warm summer breeze pleasantly tickled our skin.
It was July the year I turned fourteen. The dreams were consuming me; I had not slept in weeks and desperately wanted to tell my brother, but I couldn’t find the courage.
In those days, Luken wasn’t being conditioned by the King to rule Brisleia. His duties were not extensive. He spent his time lazily wandering the palace, flirting with maidens, hunting, and enjoying endless hours in the bliss of childhood. It wouldn’t last. He would turn eighteen that summer and come of age.
“We have everything.” I groaned. “I don’t want more jewels or dresses.”
“I meant in a nonmaterialistic sense,” he revised.
“I don’t want to be Divine,” I whispered.
I felt his head turn towards me; his nose brushed my cheek. “That’s not something I can change for you.”
“Being King doesn’t mean you have to fix everything. I know there are things that, no matter what you do, you can’t change. But that won’t stop me from wanting it. You asked, so I answered.”
He tugged a lock of my hair and tossed the curl over my face. “If I can’t provide happiness to my own sister, then what kind of callous King would that make me?”
“A normal one.” I smoothed back the misplaced curl.
“I don’t understand. Why would you want to wish away your Divinity? It’s such a grand honor to be Divine. Everyone relies on us. Needs us. Our lives matter more than anyone else’s in Athera. We’re special. You’re special. We have the liberty of never needing to guess our purpose for living.” He pointed into the sky, directing my attention. “Look at that cloud, pristine white and soft. It’s there because the Brisleian Divine are alive.”
“Don’t you ever feel like we are in a prison?” I squeezed a handful of grass in both reality and my memories. “A beautiful prison where our shackles are disguised as fine amenities? The Divine lose their humanity in exchange for service to the people, and we have no choice in the matter. Forbidden to transcend our circumstances. Why can’t I see it like everyone else? Why can’t I understand the honor behind it and just be happy with my fate?”
Luken paused for a long moment before answering. “I can’t imagine my life any other way. I was born to this privilege, without regret. I have always been sure of one thing: I am Divine, and someday I will watch over Brisleia as the Divine King. It is my identity. That certainty keeps me strong when I feel scared about the future. I was meant for t
his, as were you. The honor lies in our ability to know our own sacrifice to Athera and be willing to give ourselves for the benefit of the planet.”
I tore my handful of grass. “It makes me selfish, doesn’t it?”
“I want to say no.”
I sighed. “But you can’t.”
He lightly shook his head. “Turning your back on the Divine and leaving the fate of millions up to chance, that would be selfish. You wanting to be like everyone else is an unusual trait for a Princess, but you deserve happiness, and I can’t blame you for it. In fact, I love you for the way you see the world. You make me think of my own Divinity in ways I never would have if you hadn’t been my sister. It’s a part of you I’m always going to cherish.”
“You’re the only one. I know I’m alone in my thinking.” I paused, seeing Elizabetta walking up the stone path. She tried to give us space to talk privately but had difficulty maintaining her distance. “Haven’t you ever thought about what it would be like to not live in the palace, to be somebody else completely?”
“No,” he answered quickly, “and for the sake of myself, I can’t. The idea of not being Divine, of waking up one day and finding the Mandala missing, terrifies me. I’m not sure I would survive if I was a nobody. I don’t want to be a nothing. I want to lead. I want to help. I want to leave my name in history, to be a better King than my forefathers. Gentle but firm. Kind and fair. Generous.”
“Maybe the only reason you think that way is because you were born to it. Because you don’t know anything else. It’s ingrained. Shouldn’t you want to be those things without needing to be Divine? Can’t ordinary people provide as much as royalty?”
“Yes, of course. But Divinity allows me to become everything I aim to be. As royalty I have always known which direction to go.” Luken sat up, twisting onto the balls of his feet, and plucked a flower from beside my head. I closed my eyes, feeling his fingers brush my temple as he laced the stem behind my ear. Momentarily, the memories invaded reality. I could feel the change in pressure from his feet pressing into the grass. I breathed in, and my lungs filled with the smell of crushed wisteria petals. Where were the roses of Alamantia Palace?
Dreams of the Fae: Transcendence Page 28