Realization hit me hard. I was sad because this meant that Natalie’s spare attention would be spent elsewhere. Instead of coming to visit me at the castle when she had any extra time, she would come to visit Eric. It was possible that I had just lost my best friend.
After sulking for who knows how long, I went up to my room and wrote my father a letter. I asked how he was doing and told him about the various ports I had visited. I left out a lot of details, but I updated him as much as I could. I sealed the envelope and left it on my desk so I would remember to take it down to have it delivered the following day.
* * *
The Order of Elders did not need one or two more days, they needed four. Jared found me that final day in the arena with Riley as we practiced with staffs. He had worked with me for hours each day to learn how to fight with them and I frustratingly found that I wasn’t a natural with staffs. Riley told me it was because I tried to think of the staff as a sword, but it was so much more than that.
I blocked his blows and tried to hit him, but no matter how hard I tried, his defense was unbreakable. He smacked me in the back with the staff and I stumbled forward, annoyed that he so easily defeated me for the hundredth time.
“You look better,” Jared told me as he entered the arena.
“What?” I asked.
“The first day you tried to use the staff was very painful to watch. Now you are much more at ease with it and have improved significantly,” he praised.
“Yet I sit here in the sand, defeated.”
“How long did it take you to become good enough with the sword to hold your own?” Jared asked.
“I don’t know. A few years.”
“So why do you think that you should master the staff in only a few days?”
He had a point.
“I suppose that you are right,” I said with a sigh.
“Come on, you’ve been summoned,” he said and held out his hand.
I let him help me up and asked, “Summoned by who?”
“Oh, I’m not going to deny myself the fun of watching your face when you see who it is,” he said and laughed maniacally.
“Wonderful,” I muttered. I handed Riley the staff and thanked him for another day of learning. Jared led me into the castle with a smug smile on his face the entire way. “You keep that look much longer and it may become permanent,” I teased him.
“I wish I could record this moment to see your face again and again,” he said.
“Where’s Finn?” I asked.
“On an errand,” he told me and his smirk widened.
“You sent Finn away?” I asked in shock.
“Maybe.”
Who could it be!
Jared stopped at the doors to the dining room and helped me brush the dirt off of my clothes. He tried to wipe the dirt from my face, but it only smeared it. “Well, this will have to do,” he said and then pushed open the doors and quickly stepped inside and to the right so that he could see my face.
I glared at him and then saw who was standing with Esmeralda.
“There you are, Tilia!” Esmeralda greeted.
Prince Sebastian of Blith. He had been there when Priam kidnapped me. He had woken Eric up and allowed him to contact my family to save me. I owed him, but he had also sent me a letter admitting his feelings for me. He had even signed it “your bewitched love”. Finn had told me to respond to him, to let him down, but I just never got around to it. Now he was here, in my home.
I curtsied and Sebastian took my hand to kiss the back of it. “You’ve grown lovelier since I last saw you,” Sebastian flirted.
Now I knew why Jared had sent Finn away.
“What a surprise to see you in Crilan,” I said in what I hoped was a pleasant tone.
“I was worried that you hadn’t received my letter and I have never been to Crilan before, so I thought it would be fun to stop by,” he said with a wide smile.
He had to know that I was engaged. There was no way that Blith hadn’t heard about my engagement.
“Tilia,” Esmeralda said. “Why don’t you show Prince Sebastian around the grounds?” Her eyes were sparkling with mischief and her smile was more than amused.
“Of course,” I said with a charming smile. “Right this way.”
He walked at my side and as I passed Jared, I kicked his shin. He didn’t move, but I knew it had at least stung.
“That was our dining hall where we eat our meals together,” I told Sebastian. “Up those stairs are our bedrooms.” I walked by the stairs and continued our tour. I was not about to take him near my room. Although, I could show him Finn’s room. No.
We exited the back doors. “These are the trainees’ quarters. We only have the trainees here for a brief amount of time before they take them to a different training ground. Here is the arena.”
I felt like punching someone, but I tried my hardest not to take it out on Sebastian despite his unannounced visit.
“Here are the stables…”
“Which is your horse?” he asked.
It was the first time that he had talked since the dining room.
I led him to Duke’s stall and my gentle giant stuck his head out over his stall door. “This is Duke.”
“You have the same hair color,” he commented.
“We do,” I agreed.
“I’ve never seen a horse and its rider with the same hair color. It’s cute,” he said and smiled at me as he pet Duke’s neck.
“Sebastian, may I be frank with you?”
“Of course, Tilia,” he said and stepped around Duke’s head to move closer to me.
“You have to have heard that I am engaged now.”
“I was hoping they were false rumors,” he said and played with Duke’s halter that was hanging on the wall of his stall. “I had hoped that you received my letter and your reply was just lost in transit.”
“I did receive your letter and I apologize for not responding. I was planning to, but nothing ever sounded right when I began to write it,” I admitted to him.
He seemed to take that as a good thing and stepped closer to me. “Perhaps it was just meant for you to say to me in person. We could be the greatest ruling couple of our time. Our children would be…”
“Children? Whoa there, Sebastian. I think you need to back it up a bit. I am nowhere near ready for children. And…”
“And she’s engaged to me,” Finn said angrily.
Oh boy. “Exactly. The rumors were true, he and I are engaged,” I said quickly. If he hadn’t cut me off I was about to say just that.
“And who are you?” Sebastian asked, looking over Finn like he was a transient. His clothes were surprisingly dirty and they needed to be thrown out due to the number of holes in them.
“Finn, Chief of Crilan and Tilia’s fiancé,” he replied smugly.
Sebastian’s eyes widened in shock and he looked at me. “You can’t be serious? You’re going to marry him? This will be the next King of Crilan?”
Finn began to puff up and move forward, but I stepped in front of him and said, “I am one hundred percent serious. I don’t marry for power or because it would be a good political move. I marry for love.”
“Love?” Sebastian asked with a bark of laughter. “Love is for fairy tales and morons.”
“Then I guess we are morons,” I said.
Finn hugged me from behind and then kissed the top of my head.
“I had assumed that you would be smarter than this. You have good breeding and your beauty alone would…”
“Good breeding should be reserved for horses, not people. I am the royal heir to Crilan by blood, but even if I weren’t a royal, I would still be a better person than you. It seems the apple does not fall far from the tree in your case.”
He bristled. “I am nothing like my father.”
“How soon would it have been before you tried to make me wear dresses?” I asked him. “How long would you have waited before trying to turn me into one of your daisies and
to fit into what you consider a lady?”
“You wear dresses,” he said. “I’ve seen you in them.”
“Very rarely. How would you feel if this is how I looked on a daily basis?” I asked.
“You are filthy on a daily basis?”
“Perhaps not dirty, but I dress as Esmeralda does. Dresses are too cumbersome for fighting and it’s so hard keeping them clean,” I complained.
“I see. It seems that I have made a mistake,” Sebastian said.
“Thank you for traveling all this way to see me, but titles mean nothing to me when it comes to deciding who to marry. Even if you were king, I would turn you down.”
“She should be thanking her family everyday for having that ability. Shouldn’t she, Finn?” Lance asked as he entered the barn.
“Lance? What are you doing here?” I asked in shock. Lance was a pirate captain and Finn’s half-brother. We had an unfortunate meeting during the Pirate Heist Festival and we’d barely escaped.
Finn released me so that he could stand between Lance and me. “What do you want?” he asked him.
“Captain Lance is my ride,” Sebastian said. “And it seems he too had a desire to visit your home.”
“Leave!” Finn ordered them.
“Not until I’ve come for what I want,” Sebastian growled.
I began to draw my sword, but Sebastian snapped his fingers and I froze in place. I hadn’t known he was a mage. I should have known.
“Don’t touch her!” Finn growled and moved towards Sebastian.
Lance cut him off, using the same speed that Finn had and wagged his finger at Finn. “No touching the royalty. Your fight is with me, brother.”
“I thought you said that she had magic?” Sebastian asked Lance.
“She did,” he assured him. “She buried me in sand by controlling it.”
“She should have been able to escape by now if she had magic.”
“Just take her and go,” Lance ordered him. “I’ll keep this idiot busy and meet you at the rendezvous point.”
Finn drew his sword and as Sebastian carried me over his shoulder, all I could hear was a whirlwind of steel clashing against steel.
“Don’t you fret, Tilia. We’ll be a very happy couple. You can wear your silly pants whenever you want and sooner than you think, you’ll learn to love me.”
“Never love you,” I growled.
“Oh, but you will. My Arch Mage developed a new spell for subduing prisoners that works surprisingly well to alter someone’s personality.”
“It won’t be me,” I told him. “You want me, but that will make me into someone I’m not.”
“I don’t want you. I want your good looks.”
“My family will save me. They’ll burn Blith to the ground…”
“Or we could stop you right now,” Faxon said.
He leaned against the side of the castle with his hands in his pockets as if he hadn’t a care in the world. As if I wasn’t being kidnapped.
Sebastian set me down and faced Faxon. “I’ve always wanted to fight you,” he said smugly.
Esmeralda stepped around the castle and snapped her fingers. Sebastian froze in place. “Too bad for you, that you won’t have that opportunity.”
“How?” he asked.
“You may have shields, boy, but we have much more magic than you. Faxon broke your shields and I was able to freeze you and suppress your magic. Do you feel that? You feel that empty core of yours? That’s what it’s like not to have magic. Now, I suggest that if you would like to keep your magic, you take your captain here…”
Finn dropped Lance, whom he had bound, on the ground next to Sebastian’s feet.
“…and leave my Kingdom. We’ll let this childish mistake go and Crilan and Blith will continue to be allies.”
“Faxon,” I whispered.
He held up his finger to tell me to wait.
“What will it be, Prince Sebastian?” Esmeralda asked.
“I will leave. You people really are insane,” he said.
“You tried to steal our princess to turn her into a living zombie despite knowing that we best you and your entire Kingdom in magic and fighting power, but you think we are insane? You clearly have a few years left to figure things out before you become King,” Jared told him.
“Faxon,” I called again.
Esmeralda released Sebastian from her spell and he grabbed Lance and hauled him to his feet. He walked away from the castle, towards the docks without another word or glance back.
“Well, that was fun.”
“Faxon!” I yelled angrily.
“What?” he asked in shock.
“Release his damn spell,” I ordered him.
Esmeralda and Faxon looked at me and then started laughing.
“Not funny,” I growled.
Finn poked my arm. “You can’t move?”
“No,” I growled.
“We could leave her like this,” Jared suggested.
“I will put scorpions in your beds,” I threatened them.
“Where are you going to find scorpions?” Esmeralda asked.
“I can have them shipped here.”
“Alright, I will let you go,” Faxon said. He waved his hand at me and I could move again.
“I am really tired of people trying to kidnap me. What the hell is it about me that screams, ‘please steal me away’?”
“You’re just too beautiful,” Finn told me and kissed my cheek.
“I was kidnapped four times by the time I was fourteen,” Esmeralda told me.
“Four?” I asked in shock.
She nodded. “Jared and I weren’t an item yet and I was often off on adventures around Crilan.”
“Who got you back?” I asked.
“Once, your mom caught up to my kidnappers on her horse and froze them with a spell and then left them there for the guards to go back and get. One time my father personally came to take me back from a man who was holding me for ransom.”
“The two other times were me,” Jared said.
“It was quite a while between that and the next time I was kidnapped. It seemed Jared had scared them enough to make the others rethink their plan.”
“And then came the Massacre of Judby,” Faxon said.
“Yes, well no one tried to kidnap me again after that,” Esmeralda said.
Jared hugged her and kissed her cheek. “I would do it all over again.”
“Why didn’t Faxon ever rescue you?” I asked.
“He was always at another Kingdom when it happened,” Esmeralda explained. “Which we believe was part of their plan. They knew that they couldn’t defeat both of us, but defeating me by myself wasn’t so difficult back then.”
“Is that why you spent so much time learning so many spells?” I asked.
She nodded. “Exactly. I didn’t want to be vulnerable if there was a way to avoid it.”
“It seems I keep running into magic users now that I don’t have my magic,” I complained.
“Well, how about we move on to a topic that you’ve been begging us to discuss for a week?” Jared asked.
“You finally made a decision?” I asked.
Jared nodded. “Let’s go into the dining room and discuss it.”
We started to follow them, but Finn held me back and brushed his hand down my cheek. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I answered right away.
“I came as fast as I could. Lucky for me, Lance wasn’t feeling well today so he was a tad slower than usual. I would have defeated him no matter what, but it made it easier.”
“I know. And I was about to tell Sebastian exactly what you said, but you beat me to it.”
He smiled. “I know.”
I leaned my head against his chest and exhaled. “He would have made me wear dresses every day,” I muttered.
Finn laughed and hugged me tightly. “If it were up to me, you wouldn’t have to wear clothes at all.”
I smacked his chest while I backed
away from him. “Finn!”
He kissed my glowing cheek and linked hands with me as we went to meet my family.
We sat down and I asked, “So, what is this all about?”
“I received a request for help from an acquaintance of mine,” Faxon told me.
“So, we’re going to help him?” I guessed.
“That’s what we were discussing. Their Kingdom is part of another Realm and is quite far from here,” he told me. “And, it’s regarding him.”
Oh.
“So, what are we going to do?” I asked.
“We have agreed that I must go help them. He is my problem and I cannot leave them to defend themselves against him without my assistance,” Faxon informed me.
“I’m going to go as well,” Finn said. “They are being attacked by a large group of fighters ranging from woodsmen to trained warriors and even though they have a strong fighting force, they cannot handle the vast number of his army and him at the same time.”
“So, the rumors were true. He was gathering a huge army,” I whispered in shock.
“Yes.”
“I’m going,” I said adamantly.
“Are you sure that you can handle seeing him?” Esmeralda asked me.
“Faxon will be there. If there are that many people in his army, then I should be there to help them fight.”
Jared nodded. “Good. I want to go, but with all of the unrest in Olanze lately, I feel it is best if I stay here.”
“And I will stay here as well. If something happens to Faxon, I will be able to teleport to you and bring you home,” she said. “Or, at least that is the plan.”
“When do we leave?”
“Dawn,” Faxon said. “You’ll need to pack heavy.”
“Are we teleporting?” I asked hopefully.
He shook his head. “I was only there once and I don’t want to teleport us right into a battle. We are going to sail as close as we can and then I will try to communicate with him so that we can teleport.”
“Another realm,” I murmured. I had never been outside of Olanze.
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