For of course Elina could never be expected to leave with Kilian if that’s what he ended up doing. Likewise, he couldn’t demand that she stay either. Part of him itched to order her to do what he wanted simply because he could, but he buried that awful inclination away.
No. Elina deserved to decide what she wanted to do with her own life – to have free choice. How could Kilian deny her the one thing he was stripped of, after all?
A flash of movement outside brought Kilian out of his head. Elina was nowhere to be seen. For one agonisingly long second Kilian didn’t know what to do or think, for at the end of the day if Elina had somehow been spirited away what could he do, stuck in the castle as he were?
But then Elina appeared – in the hot springs. She had fallen in, resurfacing from the water with a shocked and appalled expression on her face.
Kilian couldn’t help it; he burst out laughing, the mirthful sound echoing around the dining hall and amplified ten times over. Elina couldn’t hear him, of course, and she was unaware that she was being watched as she slipped and struggled out of the hot springs and onto the snow, shivering violently within seconds.
“Marielle!” he called out, knowing that the servant in question was probably nearby. Perhaps because she was the one he’d first shown kindness to, Marielle had in turn been the first of the castle’s staff to warm to him. And now that Elina was far less Kilian’s personal servant and more a willing companion, Marielle had stepped in to fill her shoes.
“Yes, sire?” she asked politely as she stepped foot into the dining hall.
“Prepare a bath in my room. I rather think somebody needs it.”
Sneaking a glance through the window, Marielle’s lips twitched when she spied Elina. She nodded her head at Kilian before retreating from the hall. Once Kilian could no longer see Elina through the window he, too, exited the hall, stalking purposefully down the main corridor. Knowing that Elina wouldn’t be using the front doors but rather the servant’s entrance, he took a few detours with quickening strides, hoping to reach the door before Elina entered the castle.
He made it just in time to catch her coming in, sodden, freezing and looking thoroughly ashamed of herself.
“Have a nice swim?” Kilian chided, his voice full of laughter he could barely suppress.
Elina’s mouth widened into a shaky, wordless O at the sight of him. His lips quirked upwards at the expression, then with no further comment he bodily lifted Elina over his shoulder and carried her away.
She cried out in surprise. “K-Kilian, what are you –”
“You’ve given me plenty of baths; it’s high time I gave you one.”
Elina had nothing to say in response, though Kilian felt her heart rate accelerate against his back as her hands clenched and unclenched his shirt.
A coiling down below his stomach told him the bath was unlikely to be a solo one.
Chapter Nineteen
Elina
“Kilian…?”
Elina spoke his name very softly, testing to see if the man was awake. But Kilian was fast asleep beside her, snoring quietly as he rolled onto his back. In the moonlight he was so pale Elina thought he looked more a statue than a living thing. Only the gentle rise and fall of his chest belied the fact that Kilian was a mortal, breathing man.
Kilian was looking much better now that he’d gotten over his alcohol withdrawal. His appetite had voraciously returned, too, and he’d started taking much better care of his appearance. Though he’d been handsome in his wild, unkempt state, now that Kilian was groomed and fed Elina came to the conclusion that he was undeniably beautiful.
With a tentative finger she prodded his cheek. Nothing. Kilian didn’t even stir. And so Elina slowly crept out of bed, locating her undershirt on the floor before realising that she’d definitely wake the sleeping prince if she tried to lace on her dress.
She glanced at the door leading to Kilian’s cavernous selection of clothes that he rarely touched. Slipping on her undershirt, Elina tiptoed over and perused through his trousers with only the light from the moon to guide her eyes. Eventually she came across a dark pair that seemed as if they were far too short for Kilian – likely a relic from his younger days. As quietly as possible she pulled them on, somewhat impressed that they fit reasonably well if she ignored how tight they were around her hips.
Elina knew where the creaky floorboards were in Kilian’s chambers by now, so it wasn’t difficult to largely avoid them in order to sneak out to the corridor. She teased tangles out of her hair with her fingers and braided her hair down her back as she walked, alternately peering then shying away as she passed through shadow, then moonlight, then shadow as a result of the tall, narrow windows that punctuated the walls.
Now that she had left Kilian’s room Elina had to admit that she really didn’t know what she was looking for, surrounded by swathes of empty, cold, magic-ridden castle walls.
It’s hardly as if Adrian and Scarlett were helpful on that front. They were so vague! How am I supposed to know what I’m looking for when I see it? It’s not as if I’m well-versed in magic myself.
Real magic – true, powerful curses and spells – was so rare these days. Elina knew from the books she’d read growing up that some countries didn’t believe it existed at all. For a while in her youth she had entertained this idea, simply because she wanted to hate her so-called magician father rather than long to meet him.
Elina had no such naivety to fall back on now. She knew magic was real. The dangerous kind.
She had to work out what was going on.
Though Elina had spent almost a month in the Hale family castle she was still unfamiliar with much of it. Kilian had only recently wanted the place cleaned up after months of allowing it to go to ruin, so aside from his own chambers, the servants quarters, throne room and dining hall Elina didn’t know what much else of the castle was actually used for.
She climbed down the grand staircase first; the dining hall was at the bottom, with a sprawling ballroom attached on its left. Vaguely recalling that Kilian once told her there was a library to the right of the hall, she tentatively pushed on what was hopefully a promising door.
Peering through the darkness, and treading on feet made silent from a layer of dust, Elina realised very quickly that the room wasn’t a library so much as a parlour room which happened to contain a few bookshelves.
I suppose Kilian would consider that a library, she mused, using what little light was available to try and discern the titles of the heavy tomes closest to her. He doesn’t seem like much of a reader.
Many of the books were handsomely-bound encyclopaedias and atlases. A few were record books, full of lists of farm stocks, taxes, town names and various other things Kilian definitely needed to know about but deliberately hadn’t bothered learning.
But nothing stood out. If Adrian was sure Elina would know what she was looking for when she saw it then it definitely wasn’t in the parlour. Exiting, she briefly tried the dining room, which she already knew likely held nothing of interest. She paused in front of several portraits of the royal family through the years, smothering a laugh when she came across one in which a scowling, huffing boy of around four seemed to try his best to ruin the portrait.
That must be Kilian, she thought, sparing a look at his older brother Gabriel, who looked every inch the perfect prince. My mother thought so, too, but if he really was ‘perfect’ then why has he still sent no word back to Kilian about why he’s delayed at the border?
Shaking her head, Elina left the room and headed back up the grand staircase, and then up a further set of stairs that headed in a westward direction. The entire wing of the castle she entered was grandly decorated; it didn’t take her long to realise that she must be in the actual king’s chambers. It was only in realising this that Elina acknowledged that Kilian’s chambers were, indeed, his own rooms. He’d probably lived in them from infancy.
He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who’d take over his pa
rents’ room, even if it was the king’s bedroom, she mused. When she reached a highly polished, heavy set of wooden doors Elina felt her heart beat quicken. An overwhelming desire to run back downstairs to Kilian’s bed without continuing her search hit her, but upon noticing that one of the doors was ajar her curiosity overtook that desire.
The door swung silently outward despite its weight. Inspecting the lushly carpeted floor Elina noticed that there were footsteps through the dust, leading to a desk the size of Elina’s own bedroom back at her mother’s house.
She walked towards it, careful to tread only in the footprints already embedded in the dust. On top of the dark, gnarled grain of the table sat a silver locket, shining in a narrow ray of moonlight that had wormed its way between the heavy, velvet curtains covering a full wall of the room.
Elina agonised over whether to touch it. But, just as when she couldn’t help asking Scarlett about her complicated family history, Elina’s reluctance quickly burned away in the face of something new and interesting. She picked up the locket, appreciating how the silver was etched with a complicated, beautiful pattern of vines and flowers on both sides.
When she pried it open a lock of silvery-blonde hair fell to the floor. Panicking, Elina only just managed to grab it before it brushed against the dust, securely replacing it back inside the locket and flinging the piece of jewellery onto the table before running out of the king’s chambers without so much as another glance around.
I don’t care what Adrian said, she thought as she fled down the stairs, I have no idea what to look for. Even if I combed the castle a hundred times I’d come up blank.
When she reached the bottom of the grand staircase Elina became aware that her hair had come undone from its braid. She shook it out and, in the process, saw the door to the ballroom out of the corner of her eye. She’d never been in before. It had only recently been cleared of dust, and Elina knew she’d be lying if she said she didn’t want to look inside. So she walked over as quickly as she dared and opened the door, taking a moment to adjust to the relative blinding brightness of the room over the corridor.
Much of the southern wall of the ballroom was made of gilded-framed glass, providing a full view over the castle grounds and the mountain on which it was nestled into. The windows let in an overwhelming amount of moonlight, casting the enormous room in silvery, ethereal light. It was freezing, but that somehow added to the magical feel of the room. But the feeling was magical in the poetic sense; Elina sensed nothing awry about the place.
Taking a deep breath – though she wasn’t sure why she was nervous – Elina entered the room, bare feet echoing on the polished floor. For a few moments she imagined herself dressed up to dance, instead of in an insubstantial white shirt and a royal prince’s old trousers. She twirled and leapt across the length of the room, reassured by the quickness of her feet and her sense of balance. It had been too long since Elina hadn’t been wrapped in restrictive winter clothes.
Spring can’t come quickly enough, Elina thought. This time, however, the thought had nothing to do with leaving Alder alongside her mother. No, it had to do with spring feasts and summer dances and swimming in the mountain lakes and forcing Kilian along to experience all of these things with her – things she had previously experienced alone or not at all.
Elina knew she had to get back to bed. She’d been away too long and Kilian was sure to notice her absence soon. But the feeling of space around her – a space with nobody in it but her and the moon – was intoxicating. It was somehow the closest thing to freedom she had ever felt.
“Dancing by yourself seems awfully lonely.”
Elina stopped so abruptly at the voice that she tripped over her feet. For there, by the doorway, stood Kilian, yawning good-naturedly and looking ridiculous in his ragged overcoat. It made her think of the one she was making him – the one that was mere days away from completion.
She almost grinned, but something about the way Kilian was looking at her now that he’d finished yawning stopped her. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said quietly, her voice reverberating off the walls turning it to a shout.
Kilian flicked his eyes downward. “Are those my trousers?”
“Possibly. Want them back?”
“No; they look good on you,” he replied, shaking his head slightly. Kilian’s hair caught the moonlight, turning it to silver. Elina had never once cared for the way the blonde hair of Alder looked beneath the sun and the moon before, but it was different with Kilian.
Everything was different with Kilian.
“Why are you in here, anyway?” he continued, walking towards Elina whilst flinching at the freezing temperature of the floor.
“I…couldn’t sleep.”
“You should have woken me up.”
“You were too peaceful to wake up.”
Kilian barked out a laugh as if the notion of him being peaceful was too incredulous to believe. When he reached Elina he bowed deeply, though it seemed more a mockery of a bow rather than a sincere one, especially considering his wretched clothes and slept-on hair.
Elina eyed him warily. “What are you doing, Kilian?”
“About to ask you to dance, of course,” he replied, eyes glinting in the moonlight like ice as he held out a hand. “Though I must admit to being rather bad at it, given that I tend to avoid any and all social events befitting my station.”
Elina slid a tentative hand into his; a shiver ran up her spine when he snaked his other hand around her back, beneath her shirt. “I thought you enjoyed such events so you could get drunk and disappoint your family?”
Kilian laughed harder at that. Pulling Elina closer to him, he took a step back and then another when she followed. Clumsily he spun her beneath his arm. “The point being that I was drunk instead of dancing, or too busy falling into bed with a –”
“I get it,” Elina cut in, rolling her eyes. A few steps later and Kilian seemed to have found some kind of rhythm to follow and, a few steps after that, Elina almost felt as if they were beginning to glide across the floor. She frowned. “I thought you said you were bad at this?”
“I am, comparatively. My brother’s outstanding at it; my parents were even better. But I guess the lessons they forced me to attend as a child haven’t been entirely obliterated by my alcohol consumption throughout the years.”
“You are so spoiled.”
“I know.”
When Elina reached up and kissed him Kilian looked somewhat surprised. But then he ran a hand up through her hair, crushing her lips back against his with an intensity that stopped their dancing altogether.
“What were you really doing, wandering the castle in the middle of the night?” he asked, voice a low, unsteady growl that told Elina it would be a long time before either of them fell back asleep once they returned to Kilian’s bed.
She smiled slightly. “Looking for magic.”
“Did you find any?”
“No.” Elina pulled Kilian towards the door by his hand, interlacing her fingers through his. “Only you.”
Chapter Twenty
Kilian
Kilian was spending more and more of his time sat by various windows in the castle, watching the world go by whilst he was locked up inside. Especially when Elina returned to her mother’s house, though at his insistence those occurrences had grown less and less frequent. He knew he should feel bad for taking up all of her time.
He didn’t.
Kilian simply didn’t have it in him to feel guilty about tearing Elina away from her mother and the town that now loved her in order to satisfy his own desires to be with her. Drunk or not, that part of him would never change. He felt good when he was with Elina. Useful. Motivated. Wanted. And he knew Elina enjoyed spending time with him too, so at the end of the day Kilian reasoned his selfishness wasn’t hurting anyone.
But then he thought of Elina’s mother, Lily, who Kilian had to constantly remind himself had been ill. She’d been the primary reason Elina had accepted
his original deal; considering how unfairly he’d treated Elina back then she clearly had to love her mother very much to put up with him in exchange for her health.
I suppose I can’t expect everyone to have an unhealthy relationship with their parents, like me.
Not for the first time in recent weeks Kilian thought of his own mother. He’d never had a bad relationship with her, so to speak, but because she’d been so sickly after giving birth to Kilian and largely committed to bed rest for her health he had hated her. She’d always been too unwell to spend time with him. The looks his father gave him were even worse, too; they told Kilian all he needed to know, even as a child.
Kilian’s father blamed him for his wife’s deterioration. It was unbearable. It was almost a relief when his mother died shortly after his sixth birthday, though in truth Kilian had grieved in secret, when nobody was watching. Always in secret.
He supposed that habit had carried on throughout his life – to acknowledge feelings only when alone.
Because I was lonely.
That was what he’d screamed at Elina, the moment he finally started to let her in even though he hadn’t wanted to. She could have retreated. Could have run away. Instead, she stayed, and now Kilian couldn’t imagine coping through a single day within the castle without her.
“I need to do something for her mother,” he decided aloud, thinking about perhaps insisting a little stronger that Elina bring her up to stay in the castle. That way she could spend more time with her mother without Kilian having to sacrifice his own time with her.
He laughed derisively at how poorly-functioning a human being he was. Lily Brodeur has her shop. That was one of the reasons Elina never wanted to move her to the castle. Who am I to ask the woman to give up her family’s business simply for my benefit?
Kilian’s heart lightened immediately when he spied Elina making her way across the snow towards the castle. She was struggling with a large box in her arms; curious, he spared a few seconds to check his appearance in a mirror – something he’d never have done for anyone before – then lounged back on his bed as if he hadn’t been impatiently watching and waiting from the moment he opened his eyes that morning for Elina to arrive.
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