I nodded as Nyre nudged me again. She hopped up and down on my shoulder impatiently. "I will keep your secret too."
"Thank you. You are welcome here whenever you want, but the rest of your people are not. Be safe, young princess."
Before I had time to answer him, Nyre's talons bit into my backpack, pulling me into the sky. All I could do was grip onto the straps of the backpack and hope neither of them broke.
I'd expected a calm flight down the base of the mountains, but Nyre had other ideas. She flew with me in the opposite direction, over the peaks of the mountains. I should have felt scared, but like Vasuki had said, I shared an affinity with her as if I could almost read her thoughts. She didn't want to hurt me; she wanted to show me things. She wanted to have fun. I whooped as she spun into a dive before leveling out. My heart raced almost as much as Nyre did, but I was having the time of my life. The view was like nothing I'd ever seen before, and I saw parts of Draconis that I'd never been to. Red mountains emerged out of the snow, giving me the most impressive scenery. We flew for hours, over secluded villages and hidden valleys, and before I knew it, the sun was beginning to lower in the sky.
"I have to get home," I said to her, and she nodded, before turning in mid air. My stomach rumbled. I had food in my back pack, but as she was holding on to it, I couldn't get to it to eat and so by the time I could see the castle, I was starving. She came into land at the other side of the woods where no one would see her. No doubt there would be men on patrol looking out for dragons and the woods was the safest place I could think for her to land.
I'd only just touched down when an arrow flew past me, almost grazing my ear. Nyre launched herself from my back. taking off into the sky, flying quickly away as more arrows followed her.
"Stop it," I shouted at the shadow in the woods. I couldn't see who it was, but I could clearly see the bow in his hands.
The man stepped forward out of the woods. "Azia?"
My heart skipped a beat when I realised who it was. "Father?"
"Get back to the castle at once!" He demanded, pointing sharply at the path through the woods that would lead me back home.
"But I have something to tell you," I began, but he cut me off.
"At once!" he barked. "Don't make me repeat myself again."
He marched behind me as I walked, not letting me speak at all. When we got to my room he opened the door for me.
"I've been out looking for you all day," He hissed as I walked past him. "Don't you think I have better things to do than go looking for you? Your mother is sick, the people are frightened, my guards don't know what to do next and that's only the ones that survived the dragon attack."
His voice got louder and louder with each syllable.
"I couldn't deal with any of it. I couldn't be there to comfort the bereaved families and I had no time to organise a killing trip up the mountains, and why? Because of you!"
He shouted the last word.
"Jack," he barked. "Come here. I want you standing outside this door all night. she is not to come out at all, do you understand?"
He slammed the door shut behind me, leaving me trapped in my very own prison, with no hope of escape.
I'd not even had the chance to beg him not to go up the mountains and kill the dragons.
11th January
I found out very quickly that not even Dahlia was allowed to come to my room to visit. My father himself brought me my food, but he wouldn't stay long enough to let me talk. The strain in his face was evident as he dropped the tray of food on my side table before slamming the door shut behind him. I could do nothing but stare out of the window and wait for the men to return, men which included both my brothers. My brothers aged fifteen and sixteen. It boiled my blood that Ash and Hollis were out there, doing something important for our kingdom and they weren't even of age yet and here I was, the heir to the throne, locked in my room and engaged to someone I didn't even like.
As if he could sense my grumbling (and yes, he probably could) Caspian knocked on my door in the early afternoon. I opened it quickly.
"What do you want?" I asked, not even bothering to put on any airs and graces. He was about as welcome as dragon rot.
"I came to see how you were and bring you chocolate."
"Great," I said, snatching the chocolate bar from his hand. At that point I would have liked to slam the door in his face, but he'd managed to sidle past it and was already in my room.
I didn't say anything. I guess I was too annoyed with everything else going on to care about my feelings towards him. Sitting down on the bed, I tore off the chocolate wrapper and tore a chunk of chocolate with my teeth.
"I came to tell you that I've started arrangements for our wedding. It will be a glorious affair."
My heart dropped further at his words. I'd been so caught up in everything else, I'd not even thought about the wedding. Who even cared about a wedding when my father was starting a war with the dragons and my mother was cursed and Milo was out there looking for a witch. It kinda made the thought of wedding favours and bridesmaid dresses seem ridiculous.
"I'm not doing it." I replied plainly, laying back on the bed. "It's a ridiculous notion."
"Your father doesn't think so," Caspian argued, sitting on the end of my bed.
I grimaced at him. "My father is not himself. He doesn't know what he's doing. He doesn't really care if I marry you or not, he's only making me do it because my mother is cursed and he thinks that's what she wants."
"But he is making you do it," Caspian countered.
I sat up to face him, bringing my feet up away from him. "My mother and father barely know you. You helped my father all those years ago, but you said yourself that the curse was already beginning to wane so in reality you did nothing. You did nothing then and you are doing nothing now."
"On the contrary," he replied, inching slightly closer. Any closer and I was going to kick him off the bed. "I've been to see your mother. I saw her when she first fell into the curse, but last night your father asked me to perform some spells to see what was wrong. I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to help her."
The tightness I'd been carrying around in my chest lightened considerably at his words. "And could you?" I held my breath. If anyone could help her it was him.
He licked his lips as he thought how to word what he was about to say. "It is indeed a curse that is binding her to sleep, but I don't think it's as simple as that. She is not just sleeping. I believe she is bound to the Dream Realm."
I raised a brow. "Dream Realm?"
"We all dream," he said. "Most of us about banal things. Occasionally we have strange dreams. I myself once dreamed I turned into a toad.
"If only," I retorted through gritted teeth. "Get to the point."
"It's these strange dreams we have that take us into the Dream Realm. Unlike the normal dreams of family or whatever, the strange dreams are like postcards of our visit to another world. It is a place that many visit without realising it's real. Very few stay more than a few minutes. We wake and the Dream Realm falls away. Whoever cursed your mother put up a block when she was in the Dream Realm. Stopped her from exiting. That, I believe is how this particular curse works."
I tried to get my head around what he was telling me.
"So she is in another world, lost?"
He shook his head "I doubt she is lost. This is a world she knows well. She spent a hundred years there already. She just can't find the exit."
I heaved a deep sigh. I had a choice, either believe the lying toe-rag or throw him out of my room. As I had very little else to do with my time beyond lay on my bed and grumble about my situation, I decided to hear him out.
"She's never mentioned another world before," I said, pulling my feet even closer to me.
This time he didn't follow. "I bet she hasn't. The Dream Realm is not a nice place. There are no rules there and the landscape is made up of other people's imaginations."
"So it isn't real then
?"
"Oh, it's very real," he insisted. "It will feel as real to your mother than the real world does to you. She will be able to see, hear, smell, touch. Much of it will be familiar to her as she will have formed a lot of it with her own mind. Just because it's constantly evolving, doesn't mean it's not real. I'm not a master of the art of sleep, but I know someone who is. She studied Morpheus at the university in Urbis."
"Who's Morpheus?"
"Morpheus," Caspian said, "Is the god of sleep and dreams. The Dream Realm is his domain. He likes his fun...his dark fun."
Our kingdom had many gods that people worshipped, and I didn't believe in a single one of them. I'd never heard of Morpheus. Maybe Caspian was making this all up so I'd marry him. I wouldn't put it past him. The whole thing sounded like total boohickey.
"If the Dream Realm exists," I asked, uncertainty in my voice. "What's to stop me, or anyone else from going in there in our sleep and pulling my mother back?"
"It doesn't work like that."
No, of course it didn't. Why would anything be so simple?
"Morpheus is a trickster," he stated, staring right into my eyes, giving me an involuntary shiver. "The person you see in there might be your mother, but it also might be a trick by Morpheus. He's not a nice guy and yet he's a God so there's nothing anyone can do. If your mother is trapped in his world, whoever did it must know him. He wouldn't trap anyone without someone very close to him asking him to, but once he has them, he'll play with them."
Bile burned at the back of my throat. If he wasn't telling me this as some weird joke, the thought of it was horrific. It was hard enough knowing my mother was a sleep, but knowing she was also trapped in some kind of Dream Realm with a crazy god made everything a lot worse.
"Derillen?"
Caspian shook his head. "I know you've said it before, but I don't think Derillen is the person behind your mother's sleep this time. I think it's a copy cat. The person you think you saw was copying her. Anyone could get a horned headdress made up."
"Think I saw? I did see her and I don't understand how this is so hard for you to believe."
Caspian sighed. "I really didn't want to get into this with you. Derillen went a long time ago. She was extremely powerful. Probably the most powerful witch that ever lived. No one could defeat her, not even me."
"Which makes it more likely that the witch I saw is her."
"Actually, I think it means the opposite. Something defeated her back then. She was relentless. She wouldn't just disappear without someone making her. I just don't know who. I can't think of anyone with that much power. She took it from the gods themselves. I think Morpheus knew her and told someone else how to block the exits to the Dream Realm."
"I need to get my mother out, Caspian," I whispered, swallowing back the lump in my throat.
He brought his hand to his chin thoughtfully. "There is a way to get into the Dream Realm from ours but I do not know it. My friend studied dream lore for a long time. I could ask her to come here."
Hope rose in my chest. "Could you?"
He nodded "I will send word to her, but she will not be able to get here soon. She lives in Urbis. It's quite a journey, even on the Urbis Express."
I thought of the huge sky ships that occasionally passed by in the distant sky. I'd never travelled on one, but I'd often wondered how nice it would be to travel so high up, to see the kingdom from above. I'd had a taste of it by flying on Nyre yesterday and I wanted more.
"I appreciate it, thank you."
Caspian took my hand and for the first time, I didn't pull away.
"I owe you for everything I've done to you," he said. "What I did was wrong. I wanted your mother to like me and I wanted to marry you. I shouldn't have betrayed your trust, just to get what I wanted, but I didn't know what else to do. I hoped that if I could only get you to marry me, then maybe love would come after."
"Tell me honestly," I started, looking right into his eyes. "You talk of love and specifically of my love, but you never talk of your own. Do you love me?"
He looked at me intently, those amethyst eyes boring into me. "I cannot say I feel love. I barely know you, but I feel a connection and I feel a strong attraction to you that I wasn't prepared for. I came here to help your father out. I wasn't expecting to even like you, let alone love you, but I've seen things in you that I've never seen in anyone else. You have a bravery like no one I've ever known. Your father told me that he caught you flying in the talons of a dragon yesterday. I cannot even begin to understand how you managed something so dangerous without getting hurt or killed. I also cannot comprehend why you would want to do something so reckless, especially after what the dragons did to your father's men."
I sighed. "Is my father still mad at me?"
"Of course he is. Would you expect anything different?" he arched a brow waiting for my answer.
"The dragons aren't as bad as everyone thinks," I said, remembering my talk with Vasuki the day before.
"All evidence to the contrary."
"Just because some dragons hurt my father's men, doesn't mean that they all did." I wanted to tell him about Vasuki and the others but I'd been asked not to and Caspian had betrayed me once too often for me to trust him completely.
"No, maybe not, but they've done enough damage. I know they are fascinating creatures. I, myself would like to know more about them, but that doesn't mean you should put your life at risk to study them. Maybe their behaviour is directly related to your mother's curse, maybe not, but killing yourself to find out won't help the kingdom and it won't help your mother. You are best staying in here where your father knows you are safe until this all passes."
I sighed. "I don't want to stay in here. I'm being punished. I don't want to be a princess locked in a tower, waiting for a knight to save me. I want to be the knight and I want to save everyone else."
"And that..." Caspian said, standing up, "is half the problem. That's the reason your father won't let you out. He can't trust that you won't go and do something crazy like you did yesterday. I have something for you. I didn't want to give it to you like this, but I don't see there being a better time in the next three weeks."
He bent down to his knee and produced a box. When he opened it, I saw the most gorgeous ring in white gold with a huge amethyst set in the middle of it. It was the amethyst from his sword. The one I'd thrown from my bedroom window in the previous week.
"I don't want to ask you to marry me, I already know your answer, but I hope you'll wear it anyway. It belonged to my mother."
When I didn't move or speak, he left the box on my bed and walked to the door.
"I'll speak to my friend about Morpheus," he promised and then left, shutting the door quietly behind him.
Picking up the box, I laid back on the bed. It really was a beautiful ring. My mother would love it. I thought back to what Caspian had said about Morpheus. I'd never heard the name before, just as I'd not heard of Derillen before last week. There was so much happening, so many new names, so many people involved and yet none of it really was new. This had all been in play before I was born and instead of coming to an end, had merely been paused, ready to start again, bringing the horrors back.
Derillen was where this had all started. I'd learned her name. I'd even seen her and yet I knew nothing about her. My mother had never really talked about her life before her big sleep. The story of my father meeting her and saving her eclipsed everything that came before and whenever I'd asked her about it, she'd brushed it off saying it didn't matter anymore. But it did matter. If only I'd pushed her on the subject, maybe I'd have an idea how to solve all these problems now. If I could get to Derillen and stop the darkness she was spreading, everything else would fall into place.
I slipped the ring on my finger. It fitted perfectly. Of course it did, I expected no less from Caspian
Sighing, I pulled it off and placed it back in the box that I put on my nightstand. I couldn't think about weddings and rings. My mother was still
cursed and the kingdom was falling apart. I didn't even know if my father's men had attacked the dragons. I'd been watching from my bedroom window, and I'd not seen anyone venturing up the Fire Mountains, but that didn't mean they hadn't. It only meant that I'd not seen them.
I closed my eyes and wished for sleep even though I wasn't tired. I needed to know if Caspian's story about the Dream Realm was true. It took over an hour of tossing and turning, but eventually the darkness eclipsed the light and I found myself dreaming. I was flying with Nyre again but below me the kingdom was strange and distorted.
"Go down there," I whispered and Nyre fell into a dive so steep I had to hold on for dear life. We hurtled towards the ground at an astonishing speed. It was too quick. We were going to crash. I fell out of my bed with a scream.
My door opened.
"Azia, what happened?"
I stood, blinking the sleep from my eyes. Milo stood before me. After a moment of confusion, I saw that he was real and the Dream Realm had escaped me. I fell into his arms, exhaustion passing through me. Tears prickled my eyes.
He brought his thumb up and wiped them away.
"What's going on?"
Looking over Milo's shoulder I saw Jack watching us.
"It's okay Jack. I've got this," Milo said, following my line of sight to the old guard.
"His majesty won't approve," Jack huffed.
"It's okay Jack," I said, pulling Milo into my room. "Milo's job is to protect me. I won't be able to run away while he's here."
"That's not what I was worried ab..."
"Bye Jack." I closed the door and pulled the bolt across for good measure.
"You shouldn't have done that," Milo said, keeping his voice low. I smiled for the first time all day.
"I know, and I know I don't care. I'm just glad to have you back." I pulled him into a hug and immediately my fears fell away. Everything felt better when Milo was around, even if nothing really had changed.
Heiress of Embers Page 5