AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Over the next two weeks, I watched my sweet, cheerful mate deteriorate at a much more rapid pace than I had ever expected.
Fear was my constant companion, despite her continued smiles and hopeful murmurs.
We shouldn’t have stayed in my castle so long—I should’ve thrown her on a boat a week earlier. But she had seemed so… healthy.
It was the loss of the throne’s magic that truly left her in so damned much pain, much to my fury.
If there had been a way to hold on to it long enough to get her back to her land, I would’ve done it in a heartbeat.
But there wasn’t.
And now, all I could do was hold her, and continue making sure she got as much food and water as she could handle.
Chapter15
Vena
My gaze was lockedon the land that had appeared on the horizon early that morning. The sun beat down on my skin, but Laith insisted on rubbing in the damned cream one of the sailors had provided every few hours, so it hadn’t burned me.
I hadn’t budged from where I stood since I saw the land, and the closer we got, the more my eyes stung.
The trees—I could see the trees.
“Ready the anchors,” one of the sailors yelled. It was a small crew of only two men and one woman, but they were kind, and after their initial reluctance had admitted that they were excited to be back to the elemental lands after so long without traveling there. They’d brought an assload of spices, fabric that my people couldn’t make on their own, and a few other things that they said they used to bring regularly, before everything had happened with our kings.
“We’ll part ways as soon as we land,” Laith told the sailors. I couldn’t see him, since he was pretty much holding me up with his chest to my back as I leaned against the railing. “If you can wait, I’ll pay triple.”
“We won’t go anywhere, unless we get news that the wind king is coming. If so, we’ll wait out in the distance and return in a few weeks,” the lead sailor assured him.
They’d had this conversation multiple times, but Laith had a hard time trusting people. He didn’t really believe that they wouldn’t abandon us, and I didn’t blame him for that. He hadn’t exactly been trained to trust people through his childhood full of abuse, and I hadn’t either.
But the sailors seemed kind and trustworthy to me, so I was trying.
“Thank you.” The gratitude in my mate’s voice was heavy, even if he was struggling to believe them.
“Not all of us saw you as evil, you know,” one of the sailors reminded him. “Dark magic is the hardest to control, and you did what you could with it.”
Laith didn’t reply to that, not that I expected him to.
“Thank you,” I murmured for him, though I didn’t take my eyes off the landscape. There was this… excitement in my chest, that I could hardly contain.
The land had been calling me for so long, and I was back.
I washome.
Laith swept me up off my feet and cradled me to his chest as we landed. He already had our bags ready to go, and both were loaded up on his back, yet he carried me effortlessly. He hadn’t said as much, but I knew he had recovered from losing the throne’s magic during our journey. And he was terrified for me—but he was determined that the end coming for us wasn’t going to catch us.
I didn’t argue with his determination, because it was nice just tobewith him. He was fun to talk to, and never tried to force me to hide out in our cabin when he knew all I wanted to do was watch the world go by.
The sailors had given us a map of the elemental lands shortly after we set off; none of the locations were secret, and the sailors had good friends there. So, we already knew which direction we needed to go to find the center of the wind lands, which was the sacred place we needed to reach for me to receive my magic.
The city we landed in wasn’t one I was familiar with, but as soon as the boat was secure, I was calling out my goodbyes to the crew as Laith hauled us and our stuff up onto the dock. We were storming through the city soon after that, and the only people who looked twice at us were the fae we walked close enough to that they could feel Laith’s dark and lunar magic rolling off our skin.
He wasn’t projecting an illusion this time—I knew he wanted to keep as much of his magic focused on me as he could, because he hoped it would buy us time.
We got a few surprised stares at the mate marks on our necks, but no one tried to stop us. And soon enough, we were out of the city and making our way through the forest.
My eyes were locked on the trees, and Laith was silent as he jogged down the well-worn road that would take us to the center of the land. His grip on me was firm, though, and I didn’t worry that he might drop me. I didn’t want him to tire himself out, but I knew arguing that would be pointless. The man was too paranoid about me, and my illness, to slow down.
