Total pages in book: 208
Estimated words: 209645 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1048(@200wpm)___ 839(@250wpm)___ 699(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 209645 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1048(@200wpm)___ 839(@250wpm)___ 699(@300wpm)
He had indeed warned me never to run from him.
I just did not know the kind of consequences I would face if I did.
Now I knew.
I tried to force myself to ease.
It was difficult.
Mars did not fall asleep under me before I found slumber.
But eventually, my body demanded what my mind wished to refuse it.
And I fell asleep atop my king.
46
The Gale
Princess Elena
Fifty Miles Inside the Southern Border
WODELL
I was pacing my tent, waiting.
He would come.
He always came.
Because I was staying up, it was getting later and later when he would arrive.
But he always did.
The last two nights, it had gotten so late, I’d given up and gone to bed, only to wake when his weight shifted the pallet beneath me as he joined me on it.
He did not touch me or hold me in his arms as he had that first night he’d slept with me.
But he slept with me.
Every night since that first.
He just didn’t touch me.
Or speak to me.
Prince Cassius, my future husband and I were not getting along.
Granted, I started it. I was big enough to admit that.
And apologized for it (of a sort).
It was known by all he greatly loved his deceased wife, and although she’d died some years earlier, I’d brought that loss to the fore in a manner that was innocent, but nevertheless thoughtless.
That said, it was he who ordered my ward, Theodora, to be sent home with my mother by making an arrangement to do just that with my mother prior to the Nadirii warriors commencing their return to The Enchantments.
He did this without discussing it with me.
Mother then took Dora without discussing it with me.
And I had lost my mind.
Rightly.
She was my ward.
I made the decisions of where she went and with whom.
I would admit, he might be right about where Dora would be safest. The attack at Catrame Palace. The strength of Beast’s last quake. Sofia and Catedrais perishing in two separate assaults that came on the same night.
Every sister in The Enchantments was a witch. Even the new ones who arrived started their initiations into the ways of the craft shortly after they were settled. The very earth there was permeated by magic after the Fire King, Sky King and Green King spent their magic there millennia ago and then the Nadirii brought their magic there centuries later. Even if the Beast had risen, I would reckon the safest place on Triton would be in our charmed forest.
Indeed, Cassius had also changed the course of his daughter’s journey, making another deal with my mother that Aelia, who he had sent the order to have brought directly to him, would go to my mother in The Enchantments.
He still did not discuss any of this with me.
Mother was gone. On her way home. She knew better then to take Dora without my knowledge (or consent). And probably for this reason and the fact she was ill and weak and needed to be home in order to rest and perhaps gather some strength, she did not approach me to discuss it for she knew that conversation would be contentious.
Though in the end, she was Queen of the Nadirii. What she said went.
In other words, I’d have to do what she wished regardless.
But my mother was my mother and my queen.
Cassius was my future husband.
He didn’t get to take these decisions without discussion.
Something I had shared with him.
All right, perhaps it was something I had shouted at him.
And it could not be denied I’d learned instantly never to do that again for he’d stood there, staring at me in that brooding way of his (that was ridiculously attractive, and I wished it was not). He did this silently. And when I’d blown through my anger (something that happened quickly, it was difficult to keep yelling at someone who did not yell back), he’d waited what had to be at least a full minute, as if allowing me that time to carry on yelling at him should I have more to say, before he’d said not one word and he’d walked away.
He’d never mentioned it again.
I hadn’t either.
Then again, we’d barely spoken since.
And the cold draught that had started gusting between us when I’d thoughtlessly (albeit, I would repeat, innocently) reminded him of the loss of his wife flourished into a chilly gale that seemed to be blowing us further apart with each passing day.
This was a problem and not simply because he was to be my husband, and after he became that we needed to fight side by side to save Triton from the clutches of an unknown but entirely feared entity.
But because I liked him.
Yes, I, a Nadirii, in fact, a Nadirii princess, liked him.
A man.
An Airenzian man.
Our mortal enemy.
Indeed, the Airenzian man for he was not only prince and future king of that realm, he was prince regent, thus essentially acting king.