AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Just make sure you don’t trip over a parapet and plunge into the sea!” Ami called after her.
Striding off and furiously dashing away the tears that leaked out, Stella considered retorting that she could shapeshift into a bird. She’d considered that solution any number of times. After all, she’d flown through far worse wintry weather in the northern climes they’d journeyed through. But, just as reaching out with mind-speak, she always got stuck at the part where she confronted Jak.
What could she do—beg him to give her another chance? Every scenario she ran in her mind played out disastrously. To herself, she could admit how much she’d relied on Jak’s relentless pursuit of her. It had been a safe place to be, refusing him, savoring the excitement of him wanting her so much, gradually allowing him to know her, to touch her. Even the one time she’d had to unbend her pride and go to him, to apologize for being afraid and rejecting him so thoroughly back at Castle Marcellum, she’d known he’d take her back. It shamed her a bit, how certain she’d been of his devotion to her, so confident in the feelings of love and passion Jak offered her so freely. Their relationship had only ever faltered around her reluctance, never his.
Now Jak seemed to have left her forever.
Worst of all, she didn’t have her friends around her this time. No Astar to protect her. No Rhy to give her tough love and tell her to face up to her fears. No Gen, Zeph, or Lena to listen sympathetically and offer advice. All she had was herself and her misery.
Even the sight of the Feast of Moranu decorations going up all around the castle only increased her unhappiness, rather than cheering her. The glistening lights and shining ornaments seemed to mock her dark and brooding mood. Every evergreen garland hung—and they were soon cascading over every surface—reminded her pointedly of the winter in her heart.The boughs might be evergreen, but love certainly isn’t,she caught herself thinking bitterly.
Still, even being aware that she was being relentlessly moody—and it didn’t help to have Jak’s accusations to that effect rattling around in her head—she just couldn’t shake her gloom. She felt as if Jakhaddied and she was in mourning for him, grieving the loss of him and the possibilities he’d opened up in her life. Unlike a death, however, no one else grieved with her.
Instead they were celebrating, cementing white candles to every surface, adding glitz to every cranny. Stella watched in utter amazement as servants diligently applied tiny, glittering crystals to the stone walls themselves. Built of the same volcanic rock as the mountain the castle sat upon, the walls were dark gray and pitted, creating uneven shadows over the ancient surfaces. Filling in those crevices with sparkling stones struck Stella as a travesty. Her mother’s relentless drive to make absolutely everything in Windroven shine for the Feast of Moranu might as well culminate in her gluing glitter onto Stella’s dark and broody heart.
Probably Ami would do it if she could—spruce up her moody, difficult daughter so that she sparkled like the social butterfly her mother would prefer, like her gregarious and charming siblings. Stella paused by a strand of glass globes, glistening iridescently from a white ribbon. Touching one, she made it spin. So pretty and so fragile. Spinning it again, she willed herself to enjoy it, to take pleasure in its frivolous beauty. Turn and turn, like the days slipping away.
The thread attaching the globe to the ribbon snapped. The delicate glass ornament plummeted to the stone floor and shattered. The sight ridiculously made Stella want to burst into tears. She bent to sweep up the shards, but a young servant girlappeared, gently inserting herself between Stella and the broken glass.
“Oh, no, Your Highness,” the girl protested with muted courtesy, “you mustn’t risk cutting yourself.”
“I’m the one who broke it,” Stella replied, feeling the weight of everything she’d carelessly destroyed.
“These things break all the time, Princess,” the girl assured her. “I’m forever cleaning up the pieces and know just how to do it.”
Stella only wished she had that expertise. Hearing her mother approaching, talking voluminously about ideas for further decorations, Stella fled to her workroom, determined to find something to occupy her mind beyond dreary contemplation of a hopelessly broken future.
When the dragonarrived, it caused quite a stir. Not that dragons don’t always cause excitement—with their enormous size and awe-inspiring ferocity that made vulnerable humans gut-wateringly nervous around even dragon-friends—but ever since the slumbering dragon had vacated the bowels of the quiescent volcano beneath the castle, dragons had been scarce around Windroven. The plain truth was that the bulk of people in the original twelve kingdoms still remembered the Great War and the ravages of the Tala, adding to the tales over time with dramatic embroidering, until those magical exploits attained near-mythological status.
In the environs of Castle Windroven, the phenomenon was even worse, as many people vividly remembered Rayfe’s siege of the castle and the surrounding countryside. Within the royalfamily, bygones were—mostly—bygones over that tumultuous time, but everyone in the region had lost a warrior in those pitched battles. Those glimpses of shapeshifters and collisions with unsettling magic had only added to the previous mythology from the Great War, and lingered to that day.
People generally preferred not to be reminded that Stella was both a shapeshifter and a sorceress, bearing the stamp and the mark of the Tala, so she kept her shapeshifting private, as did her siblings with the ability. It occurred to her that this hiding of her true self had only added to her feelings of being oppressed during her stay.
She ran up the stairs to the ramparts to greet their dragon guest, and prevent any trouble. When it had been spotted, the massive creature had been only a silhouette against the winter sky—identifiable as dragon, but not which color. Her empathy didn’t reach quite far enough, either, at least not enough to differentiate a specific dragon from another.
It could be Kiraka, bringing someone from Nahanau, or Zynda winging over from Annfwn. Privately, Stella hoped for a miracle, that it would be Gen in dragon form, flying all the way from her new home in the Isles of Remus—even though Gen had written that she and King Isyn would be unlikely to attend the wedding, as it would be too difficult to get away again so early in Isyn’s rule.
Stella reached the heights, heart bursting from a near-lethal combination of hope, dread, and anticipation, not to mention running up so many stairs. Perched as it was on the quiescent volcano, with the castle forming essentially the entire top of the craggy peak, there was no place else for the dragon to land but the roof—other than the snowy fields inconveniently far below. She made it up there before the dragon came within firing distance of the ballistae. The guards had been ordered not toshoot, but some were veterans of the bad old days and had touchy trigger fingers when it came to enormous monsters.
Ascertaining that all was well and none of the guards seemed inclined to disobey the stand-down order, Stella shaded her eyes, discerning the deeper sapphire blue of the dragon against the paler winter sky—at the same moment that Zynda spoke in her mind.
“Greetings, Princess Stella. Permission to land?”
“Of course. Be welcome!”Stella mentally replied, making an effort to infuse her mind-voice with enthusiasm rather than disappointment. Another, very silly part of her had hoped that Lena had hitched a ride on Kiraka, even though Stella knew full well that Lena was in Aerron with her weather studies.
Unfortunately, Zynda was far too discerning and sensitive to mind-speak nuance to be easily fooled.“I’ve brought you something you’ll like, sweet Nilly,”she said soothingly, tipping her wings as she spiraled in, revealing two human forms perched near her shoulders.“A good thing Marskal wanted to visit a while with Ash before the wedding, or I’d be peeved about being enlisted as a carriage service.”
Stella didn’t dare hope. Moranu take her: she didn’t darebreathe. Then she sensed him, a presence searingly familiar and as brutally alien as if she’d never known him, never had him inside her. They hadn’t been parted for this long since they’d come together and Stella reeled from the shock of having known someone so intimately and then discovering the changes weeks of physical and emotional distance create.
Jak.
~ 6 ~
Jak had comeback—but as a stranger.
And Stella, as ever, was a coward, terrified of reading his mind or mood, cringing from what she might find there. After all these weeks, it turned out she’d harbored a desperate hope that she hadn’t ruined everything between them. Now her heart felt as fragile as one of the easily shattered ornaments. She couldn’t bear to have it touched, lest her own thread break.
She’d been in such a hurry to reach the ramparts that she hadn’t put on a cloak, and now she shivered so wrenchingly hard that it hurt, the magic she should be able to use to warm herself far out of reach. The moment Zynda backwinged to a landing, Jak shimmied down the harness webbed around the dragon’s great shoulders, leapt the last bit to land in an elastic crouch, and straightened. His dark eyes fastened on Stella’s, expression inscrutable, as he strode toward her, fur-lined cloak catching the offshore wind and billowing. He had a resolute look to him, the keen-edged, lethal determination he got when approaching an enemy he planned to dispatch.
