AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I wait for Daein to come. I wait … and the tea puts me to sleep.
At some point, I stir, feeling his hand on my cheek, smelling his perfume, the musky true scent beneath the fragrance, feeling his mouth ghost over mine. Yet each time I open my eyes, he’s gone but I can stillfeelhim with me.
I remember words …
“I will resent you always, my troublesome kinta. You are my evate. My one. And I have made it clear that I will never let you go.”
But each time I wake, I’m given the tea and it knocks me out cold. I don’t see Daein for a long time. I only sense him. And it feels like many Quiets before I wake from this heavy, trance-like sleep again…
This time, I wake in the comfort of Daein’s bed in his castle.
I wake up at home, cradled in his arms.
And I weep, snuggling up into his tightening embrace.
EPILOGUE
I wanted to name her Flower, because she’s the light of my life and the only flower that dares grow in my darkness, but Daein insisted on a royal name. Tradition, apparently. So our compromise is that I call her by her nickname Flower, but the rest of the realm knows the Halfling royal child as Ensley.
I don’t like it. But as a wife to an ex-prince, I have little say in much.
I watch her now. And even as she swings a sword that’s longer than her fast-growing body, I see the gentleness that I know within her—I see her as Flower.
She trains with the fierce royal warrior—Cliff—to learn swordship, the art of daggers and combat. Not that she’ll be doing much with those skills, if I have anything to say about it. I’ll be ignored when she grows to adulthood and wants to join the army, but still, I’ll make my voice heard loud.
She’s all I have.
I can’t lose her.
She’s my light.
Literally, since I birthed her, since I was dead and brought back to life by Daein and ancient magick, Flower has healed me in other ways. Daein’s power keeps me strong and fights off my sickness (it hasn’t returned). But it’s Flower who brought my heart and soul back to life.
She’s the one who really saved me.
And yet there she is, cutting the gleaming sword through the dusty air of the combat room, a bloodlust in her pointed face, as though she’s aching for the day to shed real, red, hot blood, to decapitate heads and sever limbs.
An uneasy squirm writhes in my stomach.
Can’t she be my innocent child forever? Is that too much to ask?
Well, ‘innocent’ is a stretch, really. She’s never been that way. Not since she could first pull hair or scratch eyes or bite or corner the wild cats just to spook them. She’s more dokkalf than I would prefer.
She holds contempt for humans, too. I once caught her force-feeding a golden pear to another (very human) child at the Royal Court. The child was belonging to a litalf family, guests of the Court, and there she was just ramming the fruit into his mouth, the pink blood and juice rolling down his twisted face.
And maybe that’s got something to do with the litalf blood in me…?
It’s the litalves who take most pleasure in taunting the humans… torturing them.
I don’t know what it is. All I know is that there is an evilness inside of her, a cruelty I wish I could wipe away with a mother’s touch. But the only kindness within her is reserved for me.
At the very least, I hope that lasts.
It would break my heart otherwise.
Never once has she backlashed for my being a kinta. And she’s old enough now to know what that means—what her father had to sacrifice to make me his wife and keep me alive. Never once in her twelve years has she made me feel as though I have failed her in being what I am.
Twelve years…
