I placed my other hand on top of his and met his eyes. “Where there is still life,” I said, “there is always hope.”
Like A Real Princess Again
“When can I see my father?” I asked.
I’d been waiting for days, locked away in my room. Granted, it was a lot more comfortable here than the dungeons. At least I had food and water, but I was still a prisoner here. They still didn’t trust me.
“Soon, Princess,” Anastia said. “Your mother has appointed three handmaidens to your service. Ellain, Presha, and Margot.”
The girls walked into the room, each one bowing to me in turn.
“For what reason?” I asked.
“For whatever reason I say,” she snapped. “Why do you have to be so defiant?”
I lowered my head. I was still learning my way around this new me.
Of course, this wasn’t new. Not really. I was a curious shadowling, questioning everything and breaking the rules when I thought I wouldn’t get caught. Even then, before my heart had been broken and all my deepest, strongest loyalties tested by fire, I had been a defiant girl.
I’d never liked being bathed and dressed by maidens, and I didn’t want to invite them into my chambers. It seemed like an invasion of my privacy rather than a benefit to being royalty. I didn’t want someone in my chambers at all times, waiting on my every need and desire. I wanted to be alone and free to think or speak to whoever I damn well wanted without a dozen pairs of eyes staring back at me, watching my every move. Judging my every choice.
Over the past several decades, I’d gotten used to that privacy. I’d built so many walls around myself that no one dared to even think about disturbing me when I didn’t want to be disturbed.
Yet, like a mouse caught in a wheel, here I was again: a princess in a castle with three young girls staring at me like I was some kind of mutant.
“Go ahead,” I said to the girl in front of me. Her eyes were about as wide as they could get, and I could tell she was trying very hard not to stare at the bruises and cuts on my wrists and neck.
Did they know I’d been kept in the dungeon? Would the people of the King’s City know it? Or would they be fed some lie about how I’d been captured by an enemy and had fought my way home after all this time?
If I knew my father, there would be many lies. Make them believe whatever it is you most desperately need them to believe, and never let yourself be made vulnerable by the truth. This is how I was raised, and I used to have an appreciation for that type of manipulation.
But somewhere along the way, I’d started to crave the actual truth. Lies felt like burns against my tongue, and I couldn’t stand to play those types of games with people.
Something told me I’d have to get used to lying again if I wanted to survive the next few months, or however long I’d be a prisoner in this old home of mine.
The oldest girl, Presha, snapped her fingers and more than a dozen dresses floated into the room. She waved her hand and the large armoire in my dressing room opened up. The dresses arranged themselves according to color inside the wardrobe.
The other two girls went to work, pulling jewels and brushes from their bags. They dressed me from head to toe in amber-colored robes that slid across the stone floor when I walked. Margot stood on a stool and braided my hair, but it wasn’t the simple long braid I’d been wearing for years. Instead, she created an intricate network of miniature braids, each one tied and twisted around the next until it was impossible to tell where one ended and another began.
I let them do what they wanted. I didn’t care. This dress was never going to be as comfortable as my leather pants and t-shirts, but it didn’t matter. If this was what it was going to take for them to see me as a princess again, then it was worth it.
They fussed for an hour, dragging brushes across my cheeks and placing gemstones in each braid. I had to resist the urge to pull it all out and scream at them to leave me the hell alone.
“You look beautiful,” Presha said. She smiled at me, proud of her work. “You look like a real princess again.”
She put her hands on my shoulders and spun me toward the mirror that lined the wall on one side of the dressing room.
I wasn’t prepared for the way the transformation affected me.
I hardly recognized the woman in the mirror. This woman was soft and elegant.
I looked like my mother.
For all my talk of being strong and making them pay, I was nearly brought to my knees by the sight of my own face. Every painful memory and hope I used to carry inside myself pushed its way through the doors of my heart, demanding to be seen and heard and, worst of all, felt.
I nearly begged them to take me back to the dungeons.
“Are you okay, Princess?” Presha asked, placing her hand on my arm.
I closed my eyes and counted to five, inhaling the pain and breathing it back out again. By the time I opened my eyes, I was calm, the tears forced deep down inside.
“I’m fine,” I said, giving her a smile I hoped looked sincere. “It’s just been so long since I was home. It’s a little overwhelming.”
“I’m sure,” she said. “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through out there. I hear the lands outside the castle are very dangerous these days. You must be brave to have fought your way here to see your father.”
So it was definitely going to be a game of lies.
“Not so very brave,” I said. “Just homesick and dying to see my father again.”
The lie rolled off my tongue like honey, but it tasted like shit.
“He will call for you soon,” she said. “I’m sure he is anxious to see you as well.”
I stepped through the door of the dressing chamber and into the main room of suites.
I had no idea what Anastia had in store for me, but whatever it was, I’d rather stay in my room, thank you very much.
I was here to get information about the Council’s plans, but if they wouldn’t even let me talk to my own father, this was going to take a lot longer than I’d hoped.
“You look exceptional,” Anastia said when she returned. “Your former schoolmates and friends will be so happy to see you looking well.”
I nearly groaned. My only true friends from the time I lived here were long gone, which meant she was taking me to spend time with people I despised. Wouldn’t this be fun?
For the second time that week, I was paraded through the halls of my father’s castles, the eyes of the people of the court fastened to my face, some of them wide-eyed at my transformation.
I raised my chin and floated through the halls, careful to keep my expression serene and grateful. Gone was the defiant girl in leather who’d learned to shoot an arrow through the heart of any enemy. Gone was the broken girl who’d sat in the dungeons, almost wishing that life was over.
I was a princess.
God help me.
The next few weeks of my life were filled with mundane luncheons and lessons. All of my mother’s friends wanted to welcome me home and take me to tea. I did my best to act interested in their lives and to answer questions about where I’d been, never telling them the truth.
Every chance I got, I told them I was thankful to be home and that I desperately missed my father. But still, he never called for me. He never came to see me, and neither did my mother. They were either avoiding me or punishing me, neither of which were particularly fun.
Finally, though, Anastia announced that it was time to see him. Presha and the other girls dressed me in the finest blue gown from my wardrobe. They fastened flowers in my hair—my father’s favorite blue lilies from the valley near the frosted mountain.
My heart pounded as I walked toward the golden doors with their black obsidian handles. They swung open as the guards grew closer and we marched inside the king’s chambers.
It had been a very long time since I’d set foot in this room. Not since I was a shadowling. I paused, nearly stumbling over my own feet as I stared at him. My fathe
r sat hunched behind his desk, his weight resting against a long, thin scepter made of gold and encrusted with stones of various colors, a large diamond resting on the top.
Without thinking, I raised my hand to my lips and drew in a breath. How was that demon my father? What had happened to him over the years?
I’d seen him briefly in the throne room when Aerden and I had first been brought here, but he looked even worse than I’d remembered. Weak and diminished. He was not at all the big, strong demon I’d looked up to as a shadowling. He was a ghost of himself, and the man I once admired was gone.
Behind me, one of the guards cleared his throat and nudged the back of my leg.
My instinct was to turn and wrap my hands around the guard’s throat for even daring to touch me. Instead, I forced one foot in front of the other and dropped my hand to my side.
I kept my eyes on my father the rest of the way to his desk, trying to come to terms with what my eyes were seeing before I reached him. The degradation was startling. He looked physically smaller, hunched forward with a dingy white beard. The light in his deep-green eyes had dulled to an ugly gray.
As we drew closer, the guards at the front of our little parade peeled off and surrounded the king on all sides, as if he needed to be protected even from his own daughter.
I stopped a few feet in front of his large stone desk. I lowered my head, not daring to look him in the eyes. It wasn’t that I was afraid of being disrespectful or breaking some type of custom. It was more that I simply couldn’t bear seeing him this way.
Had I done this to him?
The thought nearly broke me, and my knees buckled slightly. Ezrah, who’d been standing to the side, rushed to me, gripping my arm and letting me rest my weight against him.
“Easy,” he whispered. “Be strong.”
I nodded and found my footing. Once I was sure of myself, I let my knees fall to the floor deliberately. Not out of sorrow or shock, but out of purposeful surrender.
I needed my father to believe that I was home and that I belonged to him once again.
“Father,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“You do not speak to the king unless you have been spoken to,” his head guard said. He stepped toward me, his hand raised as if he actually meant to strike me.
If he’d dared to touch a hair on my head, this whole charade would have been over, and I’d have been thrown in the dungeons for killing a guard with my bare hands.
“Bartrem, stand down,” my father said. The sound of his voice, still booming and strong and deep baritone after all these years, brought fresh tears to my eyes. There was still a part of him that was the same inside this shell of a demon. “Come to me, my sweet girl.”
I lifted my eyes to him and he nodded, extending one hand toward me and motioning for me to join him.
I walked around the massive desk and fell again at his feet, my head bowed and my tears flowing freely.
To hear my father call me his sweet girl broke my heart in two. How could I viciously despise every choice he made and yet still love him with such fierceness? How could I yearn to throw my arms around him like a child and yet also want to pierce his heart with a dagger?
Maybe I was a traitor, after all.
A traitor to him, but a hero to my people. It wasn’t an easy thing to understand, and I hated the feelings that battled inside of me.
I believed in the choices I’d made. I believed in the work I had done to save so many demons who’d been stolen from our lands. But there was a part of me that still felt ashamed for what I had done to my father. I was his only child and owed him my allegiance and my loyalty.
Instead, I’d abandoned him to follow after a demon who was never going to marry me or love me the way I once believed he did. I’d left my own family in order to help strangers. I had given up the part of myself that had once been sweet and soft and vulnerable to be a warrior instead. And as much as I believed I loved it, there was still a part of me that mourned the loss of this life. There was still a young girl inside me who missed her father desperately and wanted to go back to a time when things were much simpler, before I knew anything about the Order of Shadows and their intent to steal all strong demons for their own purposes.
It wasn’t fair that I’d had to abandon it all. It wasn’t fair that I was constantly being forced to choose.
“Why are you crying, my dear Lazalea?” he asked. My father touched my chin with his finger and lifted it upward. “If you have truly come home to us, this is a day for joy, not sorrow.”
His demeanor was so different from the day Aerden and I were brought here. That day my father had barely even listened to what I had to say. He’d refused to let me speak. Why the sudden change of heart? Had my performance with Anastia really been so convincing?
“I cry for the things I have done,” I said. “For the pain I’ve caused you.”
“Do you know how many times I have dreamed of this moment?” he said softly. When I looked up at him, there were tears in his own dull gray eyes. “To see you here before me in your gowns again, looking like a true princess? It hurt me to put you in those dungeons, and I’m sorry it had to be done. But if it allowed you the time to reflect on what that demon, Denaer, forced you to do, then it was the best thing for all of us.”
I studied him, surprised to hear him blame everything that happened on Jackson. Was that truly what he believed? That I had blindly followed my betrothed?
I could use this to my advantage. After all, wasn’t that truly the reason I’d left the castle in the first place? If it hadn’t been for Jackson, I never would have left my father’s side.
Who cared that Jackson had begged me to stay home? He had never forced me to join him, but my father didn’t need to know that.
“I was blinded by what I believed was love. Duty,” I said. “But now I see the truth. You are the only one I owe my loyalty to, my king. I will not leave you again.”
“I knew it,” he whispered, caressing my braids and touching my shoulder. “All this time I knew that you were not yourself when you were with him. You never meant to hurt me or your mother. You were simply lost, and now you have returned to us.”
My gut twisted. Making him believe these things would only hurt him more, but what choice did I have? This was the path to life for me and for my people, no matter the cost.
I reached for his hand and met his eyes. “Yes, Father,” I said, wiping a tear from his cheek. “I am home.”
Far Away
My sister sat on the steps leading up to the castle’s entrance, her skirts billowing out across the stone.
I sat down next to her, wondering if she was still upset with me. We hadn’t spoken in days.
“It’s incredible, really,” she said.
“What?”
“This place,” she said, motioning in the air. “This city. I’ve been sitting out here nearly all day, just watching them. I never dreamed humans and demons could live together so peacefully. They seem happy.”
“They are happy,” I said. “I wish you could have known the king. He was truly a great demon, worthy of his station in life. The things we heard about the King of the South as shadowlings were all lies, meant to keep us away from this place so that we wouldn’t see this for ourselves. So that we wouldn’t know what kind of peace could come from living together like this.”
“How did he die?” she asked.
“He died saving Harper’s life,” I said. “He didn’t always approve of our war against the Order. He thought it was better to keep his people safe than to fight, but, unlike the King of the North, he didn’t pick and choose who to save. He invited everyone to live here, and he wanted us to stay with him instead of fighting. But we had no choice. Not if we wanted Aerden to be free. I think the king finally understood that at the end. He brought his soldiers to our final battle against the sapphire priestess, arriving just as she struck Harper down and nearly killed her. The king sacrificed what was left of his life to save hers.”
Illana was quiet, her eyes sweeping over the streets, watching the day-to-day life of the citizens living here in the domed city.
“I can’t say that I understand love the way you do,” she said. “But I do know what it’s like to lose someone close to you. I know what it’s like to wonder every single day if they are still alive or if they’re ever coming home. I should have followed you and helped, but I was afraid. I’m sorry.”
“And I’m sorry for what I said to you the other day. I didn’t want to hurt you,” I said. “I just need for you to understand what this is like for me. You may not agree with my methods, but I can’t just sit around and wait for something to happen. I have to find her, Illana. Every minute she’s gone, it’s like a noose tightens around my heart.”
“What if we went home?” she asked. “Lea and Aerden are already there. Maybe if we went together and talked to our parents—”
“I can’t go back there,” I said. “Not like that. Not to ask for their help again. You know how they were when Aerden was taken. They didn’t so much as lift a finger to save him. Why would they help me rescue the heir to the Southern Kingdom? A girl who is half-human?”
“Maybe together we could convince them, Jackson. We should at least try.”
“Right now they have both Lea and Aerden locked away in the dungeons for treason,” I said. “Do you really think we could just walk in there and ask for help fighting this war? Best-case scenario they throw us in the dungeons, too, instead of killing us on the spot.”
“They would never do that,” she said.
“How do you know what they would do?” I asked. “In their eyes, I’m a traitor, much worse than Lea or Aerden. Aerden was taken against his will, and Lea was only doing her duty by remaining with her betrothed. I’m the one who defied them. I’m the one who took her away and opened her eyes to the Order’s evil. They won’t welcome me home with open arms, and I think you know that. Besides, they don’t know the first thing about fighting against the Order or finding the emerald priestess. The king has locked himself away so that he doesn’t have to think about the Order of Shadows and what they’ve done to the Shadow World.”
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