“What now?” Prince Gareth asks.
I laugh. “Now, we lay here.”
“And do what?”
I can’t help but grin. “Watch the clouds. Feel the grass under you. Listen to the wind racing through the trees, or the sound of the waves crashing on the rocks below the cliffs.”
“I guess I could go over battle strategies,” he offers, sounding a little helpless.
Leaning up over Prince Alaric, I stare at the man, my heart softening even further. “What makes you happy?”
His gaze moves to me and lingers for a very long time.
My cheeks heat for reasons I don’t understand. “Just think of something that makes you happy and relax.”
Settling back down, we all lay together for a very long time. Our dragons, not far from us, lay together too, basking in the sun. I can sense how content Ebron is, and it makes me happy and frightened all at the same time. It seems the more time he spends with their dragons, the less likely any chance at escaping a marriage with them will be. Hell, he made it clear there was no escape. That this was going to happen. It’s just still so hard to accept.
My thoughts drift over just how big of assholes these three have been to me, and I try to think of anything that could erase the hurt between us and fail. A relationship needs trust. Ours has none. I wonder if there could ever be a day where that changes.
Probably not.
I’m surprised by how long we lay there together, sucking on honeysuckle, and breathing in all the good that the world brings to our doorstep. I realize that I’ve had some tension inside of me too, ever since they got here, but it slowly starts to ease. It doesn’t disappear—I’m not sure if it could ever disappear with them—but it’s not a sharp thing inside of me any longer.
“Why do we even need to learn to relax?” Prince Lucien asks, breaking the silence.
I take a second to form my thoughts. “When you get married, you’ll be a husband. When you have children, you’ll be a father. Do you really want to always be incapable of being the man your loved ones need because all you know how to be is a soldier? Won’t your children deserve more than that from you?”
None of them answer, so I press on. “What was your father like growing up?”
I think that no one will answer, but Prince Alaric finally does. “I think he was a different father to all three of us, because he had a different relationship with our mothers. But, mostly, he was either gone, riding his dragon– you haven’t met Cindral yet, but she comes to the academy when she gets bored– or he was running our country. He set out expectations for us, and we were expected to meet them.”
“Was there no love? No tenderness?”
Prince Gareth laughs dryly. “Those are not words we associate with our father.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
Prince Lucien shrugs beside me and tosses a flower. “That’s how fathers are.”
“No, that’s not how they all are,” I tell him, speaking without thinking. “My father is a man of few words. He expects respect, and he expects that we will be well-behaved, but he was never harsh with us. My brothers and I always knew he loved us and would do anything for us.” My heart aches a little as the words come spilling out. “When I was really tiny, I fell in love with fairies. I read as many books as I could about them, listened to as many stories as I could about them, and talked non-stop to my father about them. I'm sure I was irritating him, but he never once told me to stop. He always just listened quietly. And then one day when I got home from school, I found that he’d left a little carved fairy on my bed. He’d made it just for me, and I loved that little fairy so much. It was just one of the many little things he did to show me he loved me.”
After a moment, Prince Alaric says, “My father has never done something like that.”
“He wasn’t like that with me either,” Prince Lucien says.
“Nor I,” Prince Gareth says, and there’s a note of sadness to his words.
“It sounds like your father might have been a good king, but he wasn’t a good dad. Was he a good partner to your moms at least?”
“No,” all three say at the same time, and the word is charged with emotion.
“Why not?” I ask.
They seem reluctant to answer, but Prince Alaric finally does. “If I’m to believe the stories about my mother, she was a young lady from the other side of the continent who my father seduced. She believed that he wanted to marry her, but when he learned that she was pregnant he still refused to. Her family was rather conservative, so the whole thing was a matter of great shame to them. My mother stayed here until I was born, then handed me off to my father and went home, never to return.”
“And how is she doing now?” I ask, saddened by his story.
He shrugs, trying too hard to look casual. “I don’t know. She’s never responded to any of my letters.”
