Page 7 of Ruling the Green

It was his pride.

He simply wanted to win.

He wanted to rule.

He wanted the Light royal family to suffer.

Which, unfortunately, included his daughter. My half-sister. Who had spent her entire life in the human realm, oblivious to the existence of fae until her roommate went missing and she followed her brother through the Veil.

My hand went to my throat, as it always did when I thought of the last time I’d seen her, of how she’d harnessed her pyro skills to burn my neck—at my request.

The pain had been instant and overwhelming and had lasted weeks as I recovered, my burns resistant to every cure from every herbal practitioner my father could find.

Eventually, it had subsided, but I’d been left with raised, pink, angry skin. Evidence of my betrayal to our father in helping her escape his clutches.

As far as I knew, she was now safely nestled in the Light Court, getting to know the family she’d never met, and preparing for war against us. War that they didn’t want either.

I sighed, hearing the horns at the gate.

Guests were arriving.

Someone would be sent to fetch me soon. Someone with knives and swords and shackles, in case I got spicy.

But I wasn’t going to fight it.

I would stand at the altar.

I would agree to the vows.

I would get this charade over with so I could get back to my real mission.

Dragging this out was accomplishing nothing.

I jumped off the roof.

And if I kicked some roof tiles on the heads of some redcaps, so what?

“Your father has been asking for you,” Vishen, my guard, greeted me when I snuck back in through the servant entrance.

Vishen had been with me since he’d first left the military. We’d been roughly the same age at the time but had led very different lives.

Vishen had been found screaming and emaciated in the woods as a baby by a passing military regiment, who took unexpected mercy on him and brought him back to the keep where he was fed and changed by various servants but never loved nor particularly cared for. As soon as he was in his adolescence, he was thrown into the military academy, then right into active service.

Until my father was looking for a guard around my same age who I wouldn’t resent and try to shake the way I did with the older guards.

Enter a sixteen-year-old Vishen.

Tall, muscular, tattooed, and scarred, with long, unusually blond—for our realm—hair and bright green eyes.

He’d been just as frustrating as my older guards at first. Until I hatched up the plan to sneak out after getting him wasted on dreamroot liquor, which causes horribly vivid waking dreams. Unfortunately for my rebellious plans, I hadn’t anticipated that Vishen’s dreams would be horrific enough for me to take pity on him and stay with him through them. Which, inevitably, created a bond between two broken—in very different ways—kids.

It was something we hid from my father, both of us knowing that if the king saw any kind of friendship between us, he would likely not only get rid of Vishen, but have him given the true death in front of me just to remind me that the royal family didn’t have friends.

“And you said?”

“You got drunk on ashroot tea and had your head buried in the privy.”

“Better a drunkard than a rebel, I suppose,” I said, following him down the hall toward my quarters where my formalwear had been hung for me before I even got out of bed that morning. “Have you seen anything of my bride yet?”