Once Upon A [Stolen] Time (Stolen Series Book 1)

by Ahsan, Samreen

  Emma came rushing toward me and hugged my leg. “Uncle Edward, can we have breakfast now? I’m very hungry.” Her innocent face filled me with hope.

  Veronica took her by the arm. “Emma, baby, you know we are not allowed to use the royal table. I will bring your food in our room.”

  Horror crept onto Emma’s face. “I will eat here.” She ran and jumped onto my bed. “I’m not going in that room. The face scares me, Mother.”

  I stayed silent. It was too harsh for a child to see that glass box every day. I wished I had the power to remove it from her chamber, but it was a constant reminder for Veronica from King Stefan about her past actions. He’d make sure Veronica remembered till her last breath.

  I walked out of the room without listening to her silent plea. Emma was Veronica’s daughter and the love of my life. As much as I despised my father for ruining her future, Emma’s innocence kept me alive and gave me strength to look forward—to hope. They weren’t even allowed into church for mass every day, although almost the entire village attended. I had never given any thought to attending. I believed when you had no affection and compassion in your heart, you should not bother about involving yourself in religious rituals. If King Stefan thought his attendance would please Jesus, he was sorely mistaken.

  From the entire village, children as young as seven visited our royal chapel to learn religion, music, dance, hunting, reading and writing before moving into knights’ service as a squire. Although the entire kingdom was afraid of entering our haunted castle, they were forced to visit it every day on the king’s command.

  I was barely twelve when King Stefan placed me under the guidance of a highly trained knight, who taught me chivalry, how to wield a sword, how to ride a horse, and yes…how to be a man. I was not even thirteen when that man tried to take advantage of my youth, but I had no other choice because I was not allowed to show my fear to anyone. There was no room for tears in the Hue kingdom. He molested me till I turned eighteen, and I started hating my body to an extreme. Except for my innocent niece Emma and my loving sister Veronica, no one was allowed to touch me; if I had an injury, only my sister was allowed to tend me.

  I walked across the long, adumbrated corridor, the pictures of our deceased ancestors hanging on the wall—glorifying the darkness of our lives and the wickedness of our time.

  On the landing to the right side of a set of wide stairs, we had a solar room. It was built to capture sunlight, preserve all kinds of exotic plants and to allow us to enjoy the warmth in winter, but sadly, it was the darkest room in the castle. It seemed like the sun was aware of our vicious past—the past that had not been fully explained to me.

  I reached the main hall, which was illuminated by the large chandelier that burned hundreds of candles every day. My sister, as a pastime, worked with our royal chandler in making thousands of candles to be used around the castle. I was so happy—after what had happened to her, she found passion in something. She was lucky she had Emma and the candles to keep her busy.

  Emma, who was seven years old, was the most abandoned child in our kingdom. She was deprived of love from her grandfather, who deserted her when she was born. I wished I could do something to change the past.

  I had reached the main hall when I heard King Stefan’s edgy voice filling the room. “You did not attend mass again this morning.” He pulled out his chair from the dining table, and it chirped against the brick floor.

  I dragged my chair out and sat across from him, on the other side of the table. Between us, fourteen people could sit on each side. But we always sat across from each other with a distance between us. A few years ago, Veronica used to sit by my side, but after Emma’s birth, everything changed.

  “You’re friends with God. That’s enough, I guess.” I sneered at his pretentious attitude. The way he looked at me was not appealing. “Besides, God has a lot to do in this world. I’d rather not disturb him.” I looked away, toward the long corridor, not willing to steal a glance at Stefan.

  His meal was served first. I hoped Emma had been given her breakfast. Our father never bothered asking if the child needed anything. She was dead to him, and according to his predictions, the curse wouldn’t go away till Emma really was dead. Rubbish! What curse could a child bring? I had witnessed the darkness over our castle since my childhood. I was told by Haakon that it had been like this for two hundred years.

  I knew my father was hiding something from us, and there must be some secrets resting beyond these stonewalls. There had to be a genuine reason for plants and flowers not growing in our soil, sun not shining on our windows, rain never drenching our land—there must be something and I was keen to find it. The problem was, I didn’t know where to start searching. People throughout the village feared King Stefan, and no one dared to say anything about the past.

  There were some myths, stories that had been passed down generation after generation, but I didn’t know about their truthfulness. I knew there were some people in our village who knew something, but Stefan had oppressed the villagers to an extreme. If they displeased him, he’d either cut their food supply or impose more taxes on them. I knew the poor villagers were looking forward to my coronation. They assumed I had a kind heart and I’d not let them suffer as much as my father did.

  “People in church talk about you behind your back.” Stefan brought me back to reality.

  I smiled at my father’s assertions. “Really? Like what?” His comment amused me.

  He took a sip of tea. “Like, they wonder what kind of king you’d become.” He threw me a disapproving look. “They think you’re not ready to be a king yet.” He placed his teacup on the table. “They expect you to be stronger.”

  I watched him silently for a while, and finally gathered the courage to speak. “You mean as tyrannical as you?”

  “Hold your tongue, Edward.” His steely glance was enough to haunt anyone, including me. He continued in his assertive tone, “Besides, I think people are right. You still need to be stronger than you are right now. I’m not judging you by your swordsmanship or your archery.” He took a bite of bread and chewed for a while. I was sure he was processing something more lethal to say, that could pierce right through my heart. He had this habit of using words that were sharper and more fatal than any sword. I still held his gaze, waiting for him to say something. “Your heart…” He kept chewing. I knew where he was going. “Your heart needs to be stronger…and if you cannot make it so…at least keep it in a cage.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Now what did I do wrong?”

  “You think I don’t notice how you treat your sister and her illegitimate child?”

  “For God’s sake, King Stefan—she is your daughter. And Emma is not an illegitimate child. You—”

  “Enough!” He held his palm out and spoke loudly, which meant the discussion about Emma and Veronica was over. He did not even want to listen to the poor child’s name. How could you loathe someone so innocent?

  “I have to plan for your birthday. I need to send out invitations to other royal families across England and France. You need to pick a girl for your wife. We need a lady in this house.”

  Ha! Finally he thought this castle needed a lady? What about my sister, who was locked up here? And what about my desires? He expected me to pick a woman on my birthday—just like that—and make her my wife? What if her beauty turned out to be deceptive? What if I picked one and she was not able to win my heart or capture my soul? I knew Stefan would never understand. He might not know there was a sad lover living in me—who wanted to experience love, the quickening of your heartbeat, the jolt through someone’s touch, the ecstasy of someone’s love—the frenzy of poetic inspiration that made writers write so many books on the expression of love.

  Yes, I wanted to experience true love. Had my father ever experienced true love in his life? I highly doubted it. He had no heart. I heard his marriage was arranged by my grandfather. There was no room for true love in our family. My sister dared to take the ste
p and break the rule—I didn’t want to recall what had happened to her.

  Still, I was curious as to how the king had gotten married. I wanted to hear it from his mouth. “How did you meet Mother?” I took a sip from my tea.

  “Your grandfather, King William Hue, arranged a grand ball on my twenty-eighth birthday. All the royal families from across Europe were invited, and their most beautiful maidens attended.” As he spoke, I felt his mind had drifted to the past. He continued, “They were all beautiful…so my father selected one from the north of England—our families had done business for centuries.” He looked back at me, which made me realize his reminiscences were over.

  “Did you fall in love with Mother?” I asked abruptly.

  Our gazes held. For a moment I thought this was a father-son talk, but he destroyed that idea. “There is no such thing as love. You marry a woman, sleep with her, use her however it pleases you. She’ll bear your child and that’s it.” His tone became edgy. Asking him if he ever missed Mother was useless. He never did.

  “That’s her whole purpose? Sleeping with the man and bearing a child?” I didn’t know what I was looking for.

  He put another piece of bread in his mouth and started chewing. “What else is the purpose of a woman in your life, other than giving you an heir?”

  Love you.

  Touch you.

  Hug you.

  Affect you.

  Kiss you.

  Entice you.

  Ignite you.

  Excite you.

  Thrill you.

  Captivate you.

  Shatter you.

  Burn you.

  Complete you.

  There were so many things I’d want from my wife. I wanted her to be my lover first.

  “Stop reading all that poetic nonsense that you do in your free time.” He interrupted my thoughts. He was right. It was that unborn poet in me that craved all those things. In reality, my father was getting old, and I would soon be King Edward Hue. I was supposed to marry a woman of equal status and make my family with her. The emotions, the thrill, the adventure—they were all poetic desires and not for King Edward, the eighth in the Hue royal lineage.

  “Those ideas that are stirring in your mind,” he continued. “They look good when you’re reading them in books. But they don’t exist in reality. That’s why you don’t see anyone in love like that.”

  It did exist for my sister, Stefan. You killed it. I wished I had the audacity to say it out loud.

  I sighed. He would never understand. “And what about my responsibilities?”

  “What responsibilities?

  “How do I keep her happy?” I asked him. He knitted his eyebrows, which said he clearly didn’t understand. “I mean, how would I know if I’m keeping her happy?”

  “Why wouldn’t she be happy? She would be the lady of this castle.” He continued eating. “She’d look after everything here.” My appetite was already lost. I was just dragging this conversation on. “You don’t need to know about her happiness. It’s her who has to think about your happiness and your satisfaction.”

  What a dork! His ideology of married life was ridiculously insane. I was suddenly grateful that Mother died early. She didn’t have to bear all this shit.

  Still, I had the courage left to ask him one question, which I had wanted to ask for so long. Now that the topic of choosing my life partner had surfaced, I wanted to know things about my mother too.

  “Didn’t you ever bother to learn if Mother was happy with you?” I looked away for a second, and then looked him in the eye. “Was she happy with you?” His skin flushed. I thought I’d triggered something inappropriate or probably blasphemous, in his case, but I still continued asking. “You never told me…how did she die?”

  He pushed the chair back and straightened up. I’d expected him to do that. He had always avoided conversation regarding my mother. We had never seen any pictures of her in the entire castle. There were no portraits of any of the women who’d lived in this castle in the past centuries. I had never known what my mother looked like. We were told she’d died giving birth to Veronica and me.

  Without giving me any answer (which was quite expected), my father left the dining hall. I sat there for a while, staring at the chandelier holding hundreds of candles. We used thousands of candles every day, but still, there was an unmentioned and mysterious darkness in our castle. It always felt that something was buried deep within the walls. And all my life, staying in this castle, I felt that the woman in my dreams was watching me, reading me, as if she had the power to sneak into my life.

  I had the relationship with her that sleep has with eyes. I'd only get her if I shut out the world around me and just escaped into my dreams.

  I dove into my daydream once more, floating and swimming in my heaven, losing myself in her presence. There was nothing else in this castle—just me, her, and solitude.

  My time was frozen, unless she could take the step to turn the pages and come out of my dreams.

  “Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.”

  H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

  CHAPTER 3

  MYRA

  APRIL 2015

  I finally left my bed at six in the morning and went for a quick run. It had been a sleepless night for me. Since my meeting with Steve, I was unable to rest for a second. I was too curious about going to Hue Castle. I wanted to scream and share this secret with my mom as I always had with her in the past, but Steve had threatened that if I ever thought of sharing it with anyone, he’d throw me off his team and wouldn’t take me there.

  His parents knew he was going to film Hue Castle for his game prototype, but Steve hadn’t mentioned the offer he’d made me to them. After we’d made our agreement, we went back to the lunch party, where Caroline announced our engagement and told everyone the engagement party would be sometime in June, because she was planning a grand party and was also thinking of inviting the queen and the entire royal family.

  Steve was quiet all afternoon because he didn’t want to cause any hindrance in his work. And me? I still couldn’t believe I was going to go behind those walls. It didn’t even matter to me now that Caroline announced to the whole party that we were engaged. Truly, after hearing I was going to fulfill my biggest dream through Steve, I didn’t even care that I was going to get engaged to a gay man who already had a boyfriend. I’d promised to keep his secret, as well as he would keep it in his heart. What he was giving me in return was something more precious than any crown in this world.

  I was going to fulfill my deepest desire, to look behind the huge walls of the castle, and would have the privilege of going inside where no one in the past six centuries had dared or been allowed to go. The entire night I’d kept flipping back and forth on my bed—the thrill and fear didn’t let me sleep at all. Still, when I got up in the morning, I was as fresh as if I’d slept for twelve hours. Before going to bed, I searched Google, Wikipedia and even on the British Library website, but there was not much information on the castle, other than it being haunted. The reasons were not stated.

  I’d told my parents last night that Steve and I were going to spend a day together, and surprisingly my parents were too excited about the idea that Steve and I had started liking each other after our first meeting to pay much attention. My mother finally seemed contented. The smile that she wore the whole day after Caroline’s announcement was exceptional. I had never seen her so happy in my life. I didn’t want to destroy her dream. Even if I had the courage to tell her the truth, I was bound to respect Steve’s secret. I just wondered what kind of conversation Steve had with Tyler after he heard about Steve’s engagement. Would he be jealous of me? But he shouldn’t be. Steve was not my boyfriend.

  After my quick breakfast, I rushed to my room. Steve would be coming any minute. My parents had already left to open their café at seven. I took a quick shower and wore my comfiest jeans and cream-colored top. It was supposed to be a long day so I just used a gloss a
nd a bit of mascara—Steve wanted a simple girl for his game. Not that it was a filming day today. We were only going to visit the haunted castle and Steve planned to take some basic pictures.

  He told me he still had no idea how to conceptualize the game. He said he’d decide after visiting the castle.

  Steve picked me up exactly at eight in his black Audi SUV. He introduced me to Tyler—his black American boyfriend who had the physique of an athlete. Even if these two guys were not going out with each other—I would have been too excited to even think about being asked out by Steve Bernard. Although, he was sure as hell good looking—no wonder Tyler was so much in love with him.

  The castle was a one and a half hour drive away from Central London. We reached there around ten in the morning, parking outside the high walls of the castle and the grand wooden gate.

  There was another car—a white Volkswagen—parked near us. We all stepped out of the car and a woman in a grey suit also stepped out of her car. She was in her mid-fifties—the wrinkles around her eyes showed wisdom and knowledge. She had pretty brown eyes and grey hair, but I could tell that she had been very beautiful when she was young.

  “Mr. Bernard. Pleasure meeting you. I’m Julia Watson—your historian from the British Monarchy.” The lady held out her hand for a handshake.

  “Thank you so much, Ms. Watson, for meeting us at short notice. It’s an honor for us to have a tour of this forbidden castle and to have you as our guide.” Steve shook hands with Julia. “Please allow me to introduce my team members. This is Tyler Green and Myra Farrow from Excalibur.” He had just lied to her. I had no connection with this company.

  “Myra Farrow?” Julia shook hands with me, but the way she held my hand tightly and looked at me in concern was disturbing. “Where are you from, Ms. Farrow?” The question took us by surprise. Steve had told her I was from his company, but she’d easily guess I was not American.