Chapter1
The Lost Invitation (Rexxan)
I’m on fire.
Searing flames dance over the right side of my body, burning everything in their wake. Their breath singes my eyelashes, evaporates the stubble on my jaw, melts the clothes that cover my chest.
I can’t scream, my entire body held hostage by white-hot agony. Everything I am—my laughter, my joy, my character, my heart—is reduced to grey ashes that sit, unrecoverable, in the hollow shell that is my body.
I am going to die.
No, Ihavedied. My heart may still be beating, but I am long dead.
“Rexxan?”
I open my eyes to see Lynna’s delicate face staring back at me, creased with kind concern in the silver moonlight. Fuck. I place a hand on my heaving chest, trying to steady my thundering heartbeat. The dream fades, but the pain lingers on, corrupting every inch of my already-broken body. Except isn’t a nightmare at all, it’s a memory.
“Don’t,” I grumble, shutting my eyes before she can try and start a conversation about it. “Just don’t. Not today.”
“You need to start seeing healers again.”
“Justdon’t.”
I hear her sigh, and the soft sound of her arms dropping down to the duvet at her sides like she does when she’s frustrated. “Then I ought to get up."
"No."
"There is much for me to do at the healing halls."
With an immaculately well-manicured hand on my chest, she leans over and presses a kiss to my cheek. Possessing her usual grace, she rises from the dark green silk sheets, golden-white hair spilling down to the small of her back as she walks over to where her gown lies neatly folded on my mahogany dining table across the room.
I watch her dress absentmindedly, twirling a knife around my fingers. Lynna and I have a mutual agreement that stretches back centuries. She has her own reasons for never wanting to marry me and I have mine, but I have come to grow very fond of her and I'd do a lot to protect her. The last man to disrespect her is buried six feet beneath his own house.
She steps into a satin ballgown, wearing plain white, as is customary for all of our healers. It does nothing to dull the glow that shrouds her; a mix of beauty and Evergreen magic. She and my personal healer, Talyn, run the Healers’s Halls and have helped give my kingdom its reputation for ground-breaking medicine and research.
The diamond-encrusted clip she puts into her famous hair snaps shut, drawing me back to the here and now. I clear my throat. "I'll get Ascan to bring you a carriage." My Head of Staff will already be up, I don't doubt. He sleeps as infrequently as I do.
"I can walk. I quite like the walk."
"It's dark."
She lets out a quiet sigh and rolls her eyes ever so slightly, knowing very well that she is one of the very few people who can get away with doing that to me. I'd take great joy in plucking the eyes out of the others. "I very much like the walk, Rexxan."
Infuriating woman.
"Then take a guard. It's dark."
She smiles at me in the mirror as she pulls a few strands of white hair from the clip, letting them frame her face.
"You're getting softer, my lord," she quips, with a small smile. She's teasing me, in her own sweet way. She'd say worse to me, I know, but it was drilled out of her in the years she spent at the most prestigious finishing school in Yterras. Everything she does is calculated and proper.
My father had these rules. Hers did too. I’d get the life beaten out of me if I did something as heinous as breaking eye contact during a handshake, placing my cup down with the handle at any angle other than three o’clock, or the ultimate sin; continue eating after the king has finished. Lynna and I both spent a part of our childhood being caned by our etiquette trainers for every step out of line.
"Soft," I repeat, testing the word. It doesn't sound right leaving my mouth, let alone being used to describe me. I flex my wrists, cracking my bruised knuckles. Every fibre of my body aches, which I imagine is the result of the hours I spent weight training in the courtyard with Frian yesterday. It’s pointless, really, given that my bloodline would allow me to never train again and still maintain my size. But I’d do anything to take my mind off the pain.
She wanders over to one of the glass windows in my room, peering out at the expansive gardens below, cloaked in darkness still. It is four in the morning; we're both early risers. "I'm busy all of next week."
“I’ll see you next week then,” I grumble, tossing the knife up and catching it in bed, watching her pick up her bag. "Tell Ellia I'll see her this week."
