Page 114 of Golden Queen (Idrigard #1)

Franca

Franca had been running for months.

First, she had run on foot, racing through the godsgrass with her mother's blood splattered across her face.

But then she fell, rolling into a little depression, drawing her knees up to her chest, holding her hands over her head, waiting.

The sound of the horses’ hooves had been so close. She knew she would never outrun them, so Franca had curled herself tighter into a ball.

She prayed to the Morrigan that the riders would not trample her to death as they passed.

The Royal Guard reached her, the ground rumbling as the horses tore through the godsgrass.

She screwed up her face, waiting for the strike that would do to her what that boot had done to Talia.

Her prayers to Danu were answered. The strike never came. Their shouts and cries of blood lust fell away as they raced across the plains believing they were still in pursuit of her.

The guards should have been her salvation. They should have represented safety.

They had caught up to their caravan just a few days south of Albiyn.

Franca's father received a bird from the Duke of Lithaway with new instructions for where they were to go to wait.

Her tall, always stoic papa had read the note with slightly trembling hands, keeping one eye to the sky.

He had not wanted them to know how terrified he was of the wyvern legions that were so close to Windemere.

But Franca overheard her parents whispering to each other in their little pallet as they camped that first night in the godsgrass.

“If they are sighted, you must take the children into the grass,” her father said, his wife cradled in one of his big arms. “Get as low as you can and do not make a sound.”

They thought Franca was asleep. They had just been doing their usual kissing and cuddling before they turned to talk of Penjan.

“Nanny will take the children,” her mother said stubbornly. “I will stand with you, Bryce. I will always stand with you.”

“Hush, darling. I will not hear of it. The girls need their mother. Talia is just a babe, and even if she does not know it, Franca is still a child. You will do as I say.”

“Have you not learned, Bryce, that I do not do well when given an order?”

Her father laughed. It was a running joke in their family that mother would bristle at even the slightest suggestion of a command.

Franca was prone to bristling herself, especially when her father treated her like a child, as he so often did. She was seventeen, for the gods’ sake. Old enough to marry in most parts of Windemere, well past the age in Castering where her prince was waiting for her.

Franca didn’t bristle at her father calling her a child that night, though.

She was too distracted by the fear in his voice—and the terrible thought that he might die.

She could not bear the thought of something happening to her papa.

He was too big, too infallible to imagine him being taken out by something so mundane as a wyvern.

Nothing short of the destruction of the entire world should have been able to bring down the Lord of Mandel.

Franca carried that fear with her as they continued down the Godsway. She could see it clearly in her father’s eyes, the set of his shoulders, the way his eyes tracked across the sky until the sun set each night.

Arkadian’s note had sent some measure of relief through Papa, though, to learn that the Lithaway Fyrd was not far away across the godsgrass. They would meet up with them before they reached the border, if papa’s assessment was correct.

The Lord of Mandel had climbed atop Aelia's big Artaxian horse to lead the caravan just a bit more quickly down the Godsway after that.

They would all be waiting in Athelen when they arrived—the entire Windemerian Fyrd assembled in the fields around the Athelen High Chamberlain's estates, waiting for Aelia to return with her husband's army. Then, the men would take back the kingdom from the Shadowlands, and they could all go home.

A few days later, when a shout came from their guards that another group of Royal Guardsmen were coming down the road from the north, Franca's father probably climbed out of his carriage to greet them eagerly. He would have been hoping for news of the Nightfall Army.

Papa was the newly appointed Chancellor of Windemere, the second most powerful position in the kingdom. It was a duty Franca knew both honored and terrified him since they were facing the greatest war in living memory.

She knew he would have been excited for the soldiers to bring him news of the capital or word of the queen who was on her way to Nightfall to bring them help.

Franca had not seen him, though. She had been half drowsing with her head leaned against the carriage window.

She heard her mother's scream. It ripped through the air, lancing straight through her middle with alien terror. She had never imagined such a sound could come from her gentle lady mother.

Gierta grabbed her arm and tried to hold her inside the carriage, but she jerked away and leaped down to the Godsway. She saw her father's head, still in motion rolling across the cobbles of the road.

His sightless eyes and open mouth, the way the severed flesh at the end of his neck looked so horribly wrong, the color dreadful and world-endingly final.

The memory of that red blood streaming, twirling out around his head in a graceful arc…

and the raw, fragile pink showing against his lovely brown skin would haunt her dreams for the rest of her life.

But the images that followed would haunt her every waking moment as the guards turned their blades on the Mandelians, one by one. They exterminated her family, even her tiny baby sister, who was ripped violently from her mother's shrieking arms and thrown onto the ground.

Franca did not see her mother die except to note her body falling lifelessly to the road; the pale blue linen of her traveling dress crumpling at the corner of her vision.

She did not even catch a glimpse of her grandmother who had been clawing across the road, her spine severed by the guard who was laughing as he watched the old woman pull herself to her daughter on fingertips mangled by the sharp edges of the road.

Somewhere in Franca's mind, she heard that laughter, registered the desperation of her grandmother, the finality of her mother's slack expression, and the blood that was absolutely everywhere.

But Franca had been watching Talia. She had been raging, screaming, her voice the only weapon she had to wield as they held her arms behind her and kept her away from her sister.

Anger was Franca's only emotion—the only one she had left in her shattered heart.

She thought it would consume her as she saw the guard's big boot rising above her baby sister's fragile head.

Her sweet cherub's face set in a scream of terror, little round mouth open, showing the single white tooth that had erupted from her pink gums the day before.

Franca screamed, “No! No! No! Please dear gods, no!”

She fought the hands holding her, dug her fingernails into flesh until she felt them break.

She threw her head back, trying to hit the guard with it. She threw it back so hard she expected her skull to crack on the man's helm—fully willing to beat him to death with her own head if that was what it took.

But the guard leaned back and laughed at her. Laughed while she fought and cried and raged.

The boot had come down, and Franca could only be glad that her mother's eyes had already gone vacant and empty before the sound of that boot striking Talia's head echoed through the godsgrass.

It was followed by a deafening roar and a pressure inside her head that made her think her bones would splinter.

Franca closed her eyes and remembered the way Talia's head had smelled so sweet and how her dark curls tickled her nose as she held her squirming little sister on her lap.

She wanted that memory in her mind when her own turn came. So she closed her eyes and waited.

But the sword did not come. The boot did not come.

Instead, she was roughly pushed aside while the soldiers argued.

She fell, striking her chin on the road as they debated whether the regent would care about her honor or whether he just wanted her back in the capital as window dressing for the Penjani king.

She did not even register until later that their argument had been about whether they might be allowed to rape her.

In that moment, all Franca knew was anger. Her fingers dug into the Godsway, rocks and dirt embedding themselves into the raw flesh at the end of her fingers where her perfectly manicured, pale-pink lacquered fingernails had been just a few moments ago.

She would die killing as many of them as she could. She pulled herself along, thinking of getting to her father’s sword, tucked away beneath the carriage seat.

The thought of her father brought her to a stop. She remembered the worry he’d felt for his family. What he'd wanted them to do; to hide. She imagined him across the veil, looking down at her, the only one of them left.

The rage bled away to steely resolve.

They were not even looking at her, so Franca climbed to her feet and ran. Two long strides had her off the Godsway and into the grass, the pale golden stalks bending and swishing past her as she cut through the field.

Franca was fast. She had always been fast. Much faster than all the boys in Mandel. Even when she was much too old to still be racing them across the yard of her family's estate, she loved to see the looks on their faces when she left them in her dust.

She saw her maid as she passed the carriage. The pale face and wide, startled eyes peering from the window where Gierta was still cowering.