by Jaymin Eve
The Princess Must Die
Storm Princess Saga
Everly Frost
Jaymin Eve
The Princess Must Die
Storm Princess Saga
Book One
Everly Frost and Jaymin Eve
Copyright © 2018 by Everly Frost and Jaymin Eve
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead are purely coincidental.
Jacket design: Tamara Kokic
Frost, Everly
Eve, Jaymin
The Princess Must Die
For information on reproducing sections of this book or sales of this book, go to
www.JayminEve.com or www.EverlyFrost.com
[email protected]
[email protected]
ISBN-13: 978-1721899036
ISBN-10: 1721899030
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
The Princess Must Strike
Acknowledgments
Also by Authors
For those who tame the storms.
May you live as gently as a summer rain shower, as powerfully as thunder, as brightly as lightning in a clear sky, and as eternally as the air we breathe.
1
The first crackles of lightning scatter across my skin as the perfect storm swirls above me. Its been building since yesterday—from the moment I last subdued it.
The Storm Vault is so high that normally I can’t see the eye of the storm, but this one’s growing so fast that the dark center is an expanding mass before my eyes.
It’s coming for me.
The Vault is constructed of thick stone, hundreds of feet high and wide, and lined with about a million protective spells. There’s only one way in and one way out—through an ante-room that leads to another airtight room. There are three sealed doors between me and the rest of Erawind.
I don’t kid myself. It’s not the doors or the spells that keep the storm under control.
It’s me.
I call the powerful force to me, coaxing it down, ignoring the intense fear that rises inside me.
Curse my survival instincts. If I listened to them, I’d run as far and fast as I could away from this place. But there’s no escape from my daily task.
Centuries ago, the gargoyles conjured dark magic to create the perfect storm to wipe out the elven race. Hundreds of elves lost their lives while the Elven Command tried to subdue the storm—but they couldn’t destroy it. Realizing they had no choice but to contain its fury, the elves created the Storm Vault and tried to trap the storm inside.
But even their most powerful spells couldn’t keep it here. At the moment when the storm’s fury would have destroyed the last spellcaster, her young daughter burst through the Vault’s defenses and ran to her. That’s when a miracle happened. The girl absorbed the power of the storm into her body. The storm calmed for the first time.
That girl was the first Storm Princess. I’m the fourth.
I’ll stay in my role until another princess is revealed and replaces me. There’s no retirement. No choice. If I try to leave, the storm will follow me.
Until it latches onto another Storm Princess, I’m a living, breathing lightning rod. And if I die before another princess is revealed, the storm will be unleashed. We’re connected, the storm and I. As long as I’m alive, the perfect storm remains under control.
I control it. Even if it doesn’t feel that way.
I murmur, “C’mon, Beast, what have you got for me today?”
I’ve been calling it the ‘beast’ for as long as I’ve been coming to the Vault—every day since I was eighteen when the storm chose me. That was seven years ago.
I stand firm as a streak of lightning blazes from the distance, striking me as fast as I can blink. It zaps the soft spot between my shoulder and my collarbone, and despite my preparedness, a soft ‘oh’ escapes my lips. Somehow, it always knows where to hurt me most. I roll my shoulders and focus on my breathing, knowing that if I stay calm, the strikes won’t hurt as much.
My job is simple: absorb the elements. Take the worst of the storm into my body to keep it from exploding from the Vault. I do this every day. Every day the storm calms, and then it builds again. Again and again, I come here to calm it. I should be used to my daily ritual, but somehow the storm always finds ways to surprise me.
Right now, it’s the lightning I need to worry about.
Another strike licks fire across the back of my neck and I know it’s time to move. I lift my hands above my head, slowly drawing them down and across my body, controlling my breathing as I step into a warrior’s routine.
The princess before me was a dancer named Mai Reverie. I don’t have the grace for dancing. Combat moves are the closest I get.
The next strike falls directly through the circle of my arms, but it curves at the last moment. It follows the angle of my arms, curling to match my form, traveling an inch above my skin, moving with me instead of against me.
Another strike follows, joining the first and spreading across my body, curling around me in a white and blue light show. Strike by strike, the lightning follows my movements. As fast as I absorb one strike, another one hits, but the contact is soft now. Sometimes I feel like the storm is an angry child who wants only to be noticed, to have someone take care of it.
The first time the lightning moved with me, nobody believed me. Only my personal advisor, Elise, is allowed into the ante-room to watch me through the large glass panels on that side of the Vault. One day, my bonded partner will be allowed in here too, but for now Elise is my only witness and even she struggles to believe what she sees.
The lightning plays across my skin and taps my shoulder.
I grin. “Oh, you want my attention, do you?”
But my smile quickly fades, because the light show disperses and I realize that the tap to my shoulder was a warning. The atmospheric force bearing down on me is stronger than ever. It presses against me with suffocating density; like a blanket through which I can’t breathe. I gasp against the sudden pressure. Then, just as fast, it lifts.
I look up and wish I hadn’t. Storm clouds gather at unnerving speed. The lightning gives way to something worse.
Rain.
I never feared rain before I became the Princess. Sure, it’s wet and cold, but the rain produced by the perfect storm is something else—sharp as needles, intense, drowning.
I take a deep breath. It’s the last one I’ll get for a while.
A blast of thunder tears my hearing to shreds and then the rain buck
ets down. I can’t absorb it in the same way that I absorb the lightning. All I can do is hold onto it like I’m some sort of rain magnet.
Water fills the space around me as if I’m standing in an invisible orb. There are drains beneath me, but they’re never fast enough. In moments, I’ll be swimming…
The rain sweeps down, flattening my hair against my back, drowning my clothing in ice. Sometimes the rain is hot like lava. The first time it burned me, it shocked me to my core.
Today, it’s cold. So cold. I shudder so hard I lose my warrior pose.
That’s when the rain’s tone changes.
I frown, still holding my breath.
A whisper reaches me through the pounding flood of water. I strain to identify the sound, but I can’t make it out.
My feet are covered in the deluge and it rises to my calves, then my waist. As new raindrops hit the surface around me, I sense a melody in it, sounds I’ve never heard before, but I’m not sure how that’s possible.
I stretch out my arms, palms upward to the strange new beat. Raindrops slam my skin. I struggle to focus on the swooshing whispers, trying to hear…
Curse, curse, curse…
Your husband…
If the rain weren’t pushing down on me so hard, my eyebrows would have risen into my hair. As it is, all I manage is a wonky, single eyebrow lift.
I don’t have a husband. Not yet.
But my twenty-fifth birthday is a month away and I’m required to bond. All Princesses have to, because there comes a time when we can’t control the storm on our own. We need to share the physical burden and only the strongest male elf can share it with us. He can’t control the storm like we can—he can’t use its power—but he acts as an extra buffer, an extension of our own bodies so to speak.
I dare to take a breath, inhaling needles of cold water, and shout into the growing wind. “What do you mean?”
Death.
Not by choice. By curse.
Death? What the…?
If I die and another princess isn’t waiting to replace me, the elements will break out of the Storm Vault and tear Erawind to shreds. It’s the reason everyone treats me like I’m made of porcelain. My death would unleash the fury that killed so many elves long ago and nearly destroyed my home.
A dozen curse words rest on the end of my tongue but I don’t let them loose. Elves believe that language holds power and a word spoken aloud in anger returns that anger to the speaker. I can swear inside my head as much as I like, but a spoken curse word is just that—a curse. And right now, I’m already hearing ‘curse’ way more than I want to.
“How?” I scream.
Your husband will kill you.
Not by choice.
I freeze. Still it repeats, over and over and the message is loud and clear: My husband is going to kill me. It won’t be because he wants to. He’s going to be cursed.
Against my will, I’m shaken to my core. Still the rain pours down and I can’t listen to it anymore. I slap my hands over my ears. For the first time, my resolve slips. I’ve been calming the storm for so long that it’s a part of my life. A strange part, that’s for sure, but something I do to keep my people safe. Now I want nothing more than to escape. The rain is talking to me, for heaven’s sake!
Fear gives way to frustration and something else I haven’t felt for a long time—panic. I struggle against that emotion. The last time I felt panic that bad, I hurt someone I cared about.
I struggle to push the emotion away, but it clouds my logic and rises like the rainwater, rushing against me.
The orb of water has almost reached my neck. My hair floats behind me. My arms are immersed. I can’t feel my feet. It’s so cold that my toes have turned numb. At the same time, the lightning returns.
It crackles around me and through me. It glows like electric eels in the water, lighting me up. And still the rain whispers to me… Kill, curse, husband, kill, curse…
“Enough!”
With as much strength as I can muster, I push my arms upward, willing the lightning to follow my movement like it did before. The glowing strings of electricity speed upward, leaping from the water like spears. The lightning doesn’t stop there. Airborne once more, it strikes upward, lashing into the heart of the storm above me. Striking itself with my will.
An enormous crack slams my hearing so loudly that I scream.
Instantly, the rain stops. The water drains away into the floor. The thunderclouds disperse. All that remains is a wisp of white fog.
The storm is gone.
I stopped the storm, but not in the way I usually do. Normally, I wait patiently for it to do its thing. Today, I fought back. Somehow, I turned it on itself.
I drop to the floor, exhausted and drenched, hands loose at my sides, hair streaming down my back. There was a time I thought it would be fun to conquer the Vault wearing boots and leather like some kind of warrior princess. It turned out that was a good way to ruin expensive leather and chafe myself in all sorts of uncomfortable ways. The Princess before me wore a flowing white dress and floated on the water, meditating, even through the lightning strikes.
These days I opt for a black, full-body swimsuit made of thick material. Unfortunately, all attempts to waterproof it turned out to be useless. But it saves my dignity when I emerge from the Vault looking like a wet cat.
I drag myself to the first door, my whole body filled with worry, barely glancing up to see Elise pressed against the glass. Her hand moves, but I’m too tired to interpret what she’s trying to signal. She steps back as I push the door open. It’s spelled to open only for me so nobody else can get through it.
There’s enough light for me to see the worry written across her face. “Princess, you need to—”
My panic resurfaces and I babble over the top of her. “It’s gone wild, Elise. I can’t predict what’s going to happen in there anymore. I don’t know how much longer I can contain it on my own.” As much as I hate to admit it, I need to bond. Although, if I believe the whispering rain’s prediction that my husband will kill me, getting married is the worst thing I could do.
I shake my head and then freeze, realizing what Elise was trying to warn me about.
We aren’t alone.
Two male elves wait in the shadows near the far door, one taller than the other.
Before Elise can speak again, the taller male steps into the light, but his head is down so I can’t see his face. In a single fluid movement, he drops to one knee, both palms raised toward me.
I stare in shock at the red stone he holds out to me in his open hands.
Every Elven House has a heartstone. All of them are priceless, irreplaceable, but this one is… legendary.
The size of my fist, the rock casts ruby light around us from a thousand carefully cut facets. There’s no mistaking it. It was the first heartstone ever created—the first true heart.
This stone belongs to the House of Rath.
My heart jumps. The male’s head is still down. All I can see is his hair: light brown, with a telltale kick on one side. I almost reach out to run my hands through it. It’s been so long…
I haven’t seen Baelen Rath since we were teenagers. Or, more correctly, since the day I almost killed him.
His name passes my lips before I can stop myself. “Bae.”
If he heard me, he hides it. His arms don’t waver.
The heartstone glints at me.
The male beside him steps into the light, unsmiling, staring at me. “Princess, the stone is offered to you.”
I blink. “What?”
The male’s forbidding expression turns to confusion. He spins to Elise. “Is she not aware of the protocols?”
Elise is ashen, her face paler than I’ve ever seen it. She doesn’t touch me—that would be dangerous right now—but her hand lifts in my direction. “Princess?”
The protocols…
Bae looks up for the first time and I catch my breath. His green eyes pierce mine. The cut of his ja
w is unyielding. I follow the shape of his high cheekbones to his chin and the pulse at his neck.
Then he tilts his head to reveal the scar that cuts from his right temple down the side of his face and curves behind his ear. The scar splits at his jawline and slashes beneath his chin like a curling vine, as if a single wound wasn’t enough.
His voice is like ice as he turns the scar fully into the light. “This is what you wanted to see?”
“I… No…” My voice fails me. He’s wrong. I don’t want to see the scar. I want to see that he’s okay despite it.
But the fact that he’s holding his family’s heartstone out to me—offering it to me—means that he intends to be a champion in the fight for my hand. He intends to fight for me. By taking the stone, I will show him that I accept his nomination.
The thing is, the protocols force me to take it. The whole process is designed to make it look like I have a choice, but I don’t. If I refuse to accept him as a champion, then I’ll dishonor his entire House.
The problem is… he’s the only one left. He’s the only remaining Rath. The fight for my hand isn’t all about battle. It’s a game of wits first and strength last. But the final fight between the two remaining champions is to the death. It’s designed that way so the loser doesn’t live to challenge the marriage bond. If Bae fights and dies, his House will die with him.
The scar is a painful reminder that I almost ended his life once. I can’t do it again.
I take a step back. “I can’t…”
His advisor freezes beside him. I recognize the male elf as the same one who served the late Commander Rath. Baelen’s father passed away last year. I attended the wake and it was my first chance in seven years to speak with Bae. But a funeral is the one time that a Princess’s wishes don’t hold sway and despite trying to reach Baelen, I’d barely seen him from a distance before my personal guard whisked me away.