AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“This is all too much, Ast—” I began, but she interrupted.
“Listen. In here, you are Lina, and that’s great. We always want you to be yourself. But you are also Ixia… the famed lost princess, and there is nothing wrong with looking the part.” She exaggerated the wordfamed, and I rolled my eyes.
I looked at myself in the mirror again. Trying to reconcile the things she said with everything I had learned over the past few days. With the memories Uncle had shared with me. With the life I knew on the farm. With the person I was at the tavern with my friends. And with the reflection staring back at me.
How is it possible to be both a princess and a girl from a simple village from the middle of nowhere?
As my thoughts swirled, the one image that kept coming back to mind, that kept interrupting every thought I had, that insisted on plaguing me even when I tried to push him away.
Edrich’s face as he slept next to me.
The way his eyes closed as he leaned in to kiss me for the first time. My empty bed this morning. The way he was nowhere to be found, all day.
I wondered if the problem was that he didn’t want to feel torn between lives. Could I go back with him? Even if that meant that he would take the tonic and return to his normal size. I’d meant it when I’d told him I would’ve chosen a life with him, even if it was only half a life.Even if we can never really be together, my heart belongs to him and has since we were younger.
Aster sighed next to me, and I looked up to see her brows furrow while she looked at me, as if she were reading my mind.
“Your colors give you away every time. You know that?” Then, she wrapped her arms around me and placed a kiss on my cheek. “I may not know every thought that was just flitting through your head just now, but I will tell you this. No matter what you choose tonight, I’ve claimed you as my sister, and don’t plan to take that back.”
I squeezed her tighter to me, and realized it would break something inside of me to walk away from all of them, from hugs like this and sisters like her.
“Thank you.”
She let go and smoothed out her dress.
“I suppose we’ve made them all wait long enough,” she added, with a wicked grin. “I’ll meet you in the ballroom in five minutes. It’s time to go break some hearts.”
I wasn’t sure who she was referring to, but I was pretty sure there would be plenty of broken hearts to go around.
52
Edrich
Flying with Pepper had calmed me down just enough to know what I had to do. Say goodbye to Lina. Find a way to move on with my life.
Aster came to get me herself when it was time to head to the ball.
“Quite the gentleman,” I joked.
“It doesn’t hurt for you to make a pointed entrance.” She shrugged.
I didn’t have to wonder long what she was talking about, as heads turned to follow us down the hall. To follow me, or more accurately, to note my lack of wings in muttered, disdainful tones.
Then, Aster would shoot them a venom-coated smile, and they would quickly find themselves occupied with a different topic of conversation.
“I’m sorry,” she said under her breath. “There’s no excuse for their ignorance.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I assured her. “It won’t matter after today, anyway.”
She stopped, then, just outside of the ballroom, and turned to look at me.
“I hope you don’t mean that,” she said, the sincerity in her tone taking me off guard.
“Why would you want me to stay, when—” I couldn’t quite finish my thought, but she smiled anyway.
“I’m so grateful Lina was brought into our lives, but I’m not selfish enough to want to keep her here if it makes her miserable.”
“She doesn’t seem too miserable to me,” I said. Though, even as I said it, I remembered the way she had stood defeated in her bedroom before I let her know I was there. I never had gotten to ask her about that.
