Page 118 of Golden Queen (Idrigard #1)

“I must decline your offer, Father,” Refaedon said, giving me another look of distaste.

I wished I could shrink away somehow under the scrutiny of his dark eyes.

They reminded me eerily of the eyes of Aelia’s dragon rider.

But Amon Aldur’s face had been open and expressive.

This haughty prince with his sharp canines and pointed ears, only looked cruel and contemptuous.

“I have no need of a wife. Give her to Preahjiin,” he added with a smirk.

There was nervous laughter around the room as many of the assembled faces turned to a tall elf standing at the foot of the dais with her arms slung around the shoulders of two scantily clad women.

She was massive, with big arms and a thick neck under an almost identical face to the prince. Her dark hair was cut short, nearly to her scalp.

Princess Preahjiin looked at me, smiling viciously as she slid her hand down to the breasts of the women. She held my gaze as she squeezed and kneaded the flesh, her eyes taking on a hungry quality that sent an icy jolt of fear through me.

I almost missed Refaedon’s cold look directed at her, but Preahjiin did not. She gave him one back, but then she let her hands drop away and did not look at me again.

The king turned me with the hand still at my back and gave me a little shove away from the dais. I was dismissed, apparently.

I returned to Essin, and we made our way through the Great Hall as the king and the prince continued to argue.

"If your sister had a cock, I would already have half a hundred heirs!" Magnus shouted.

"If Preahjiin had a cock, she'd probably have had it bitten off by now," the prince drawled.

The princess' laughter echoed through the room as we exited the tall double doors out into the hallway.

When we were clear of the assembly, Essin’s face split into a wide grin.

“What?” I demanded. “Why are you smiling?”

“Because he hated you,” she said gleefully.

“Why does that make you so happy?” I asked, suspiciously.

“Because you are so far beneath him you might as well be a flea. I am simply glad that he recognized that.” She was nearly bouncing down the hall, her short, dark bob swinging around her head.

I didn’t respond. I was relieved he didn’t want me as well. I would not be wed to a Penjani elf, no matter what I had to do to prevent it.

I still didn’t have a way to get out of the castle, though, not with Essin dogging my every step when I wasn’t locked in my chambers. And I couldn’t go the way of Carisal, who cut her wrists a few days after she had been handed over to the soldiers.

That wasn’t an option for me when my brother was still somewhere out there with little Mattias, trying to get to Aelia.

Not for the first time, regret pulsed through me that I had sent the boys north in the middle of an invasion, armed only with a letter for Aelia, and a few pieces of jewelry.

I had little choice. The city, filled with elves and stone-teeth cannibals, was more dangerous for a couple of little boys than the open Windemerian plains could ever be.

But that didn’t stop me from wishing I could see Set’s face on the other side of those barred doors again—or from turning the decision over and over in my head, trying to determine if there had been any other way to keep him safe.

He and Mattias had run off into the godsgrass before the soldiers who’d overtaken us on the road had even noticed their presence.

The Royal Guard had been busy slaughtering the loyal Gold Guard, and they did not notice too little boys darting off into the tall grass.

Set and Mattias followed us back to the capital, keeping pace with us for as long as they could.

It had only taken my capable little brother four days to appear, smiling broadly, outside those terrace doors.

I had protected my brother since the day we were snatched from the little market stall in Finharrow. I was purchasing sweet cakes, and I had not been paying enough attention. I didn’t notice the rough-looking men who’d followed us down the alleyway.

I failed Set on that day, but every move I made in the ensuing years had been to keep him safe—and out of the clutches of the people in Windemere who would have tried to capitalize on our blood—to use us as a means to infiltrate Elysium.

For the first time in my life, I could do nothing to help my brother, and it was hard to bear. The misery of not knowing where he was, not knowing if he was even safe, far surpassed anything Essin or the king could do to me.

I wasn’t called upon by Magnus for three full days. I stayed in my chambers during most of that time, which suited me perfectly. The halls of Albiyn castle were not a friendly place to wander in those days.

Elves roamed every inch of the place, many of them armed with weapons and looking for a fight around every corner. I had watched more than one Penjani die at the end of another Penjani’s sword in the days since I had returned to the city.

Not to mention the number of times Essin and I had stumbled upon a couple, or once, an entire group of them naked and writhing in an alcove. The Shadowlands apparently bred impropriety and excess abundantly, as there seemed to be no shortage of lascivious or violent behavior among them.

The one time I did venture from the castle in the days following the prince’s return, I was called to attend a feast to celebrate the Black Fleet Skylleken’s arrival in the city.

I arrived well after most of the others had been seated, making my way to the place Essin directed me to. I sat only three seats removed from the king, across the table from the tall, willowy Admiral Nadjin Skyllek.

It shocked me to find that the leader of the infamous Black Fleet was a human woman.

She had a rough kind of beauty with an angular face and pale blonde hair running back from a face covered by metal piercings.

Her chin was inked with straight lines running down from her lips, over her neck, and disappearing into the collar of her shirt.

I kept my eyes down, aware of the pirate’s reputation. She was blood-thirsty and cruel. Stories of the Skylleken crew’s depravity found their way to Windemere often.

I sat, pushing around the unappetizing food on my plate as the Penjani told raucous tales of their journey across the Thyella.

“I spit on his corpse!” the Admiral shouted in thickly accented Alterran.

I flinched as she slapped her hands on the table, rattling the fine cutlery that seemed so out of place in front of such barbarous people.

“The little worm jumped ship first, leaving his wife on the Karasuni. When he paddled over to the Skullsbeard, I let my archers send him to the bottom of the sea!”

Cheers erupted at her words.

“Serves him right for abandoning his wife to the kraken!” someone shouted from the end of the table.

“Did his wife go down with the ship?” someone else asked.

“She jumped right before the kraken began splintering her hull,” Admiral Nadjin said. “The prince picked her out of the water, and I believe she spent the rest of the trip with her head in his lap in appreciation.”

Laughter ran down the table, and I couldn’t stop myself from glancing up at the prince just a few seats down, to the right of the king who was seated at the head.

I met his strange dark eyes and quickly looked down again, heart racing to have found him looking at me.

The Admiral went on, explaining how the massive sea monster had eventually taken the Karasuni down to the bottom of the sea with her captain.

“Kraken do not move quickly, it’s true,” she said.

“Their six largest arms move as slow as a snail, but they have hundreds of smaller tentacles that are lightning quick.

Every time someone jumped, those arms would have ‘em wrapped up, crushed to little more than bloody pulp before they took more than a few strokes away from the ship. We were lucky we got the dozen or so we did.”

“We were lucky we got any of our ships past it,” Prince Refaedon put in. “We can only be glad Vulcan did not send more of the beasts against us.”

I had to fight against the urge to look up, to see whether he was still staring at me. His gaze had absolutely terrified me because I thought I recognized something there—something I did not want to see; hunger.

With my heart racing and sweat running down my chest, I sat through the rest of the meal with my eyes on my plate.

The fear did not leave, even when I had returned to my chambers.

I watched the door for hours, petrified that he would come, trying to plan what I would do if he did.

I slept in my old cot in Aelia’s wardrobe, with a chair wedged under the handle of the bedchamber door. The old, familiar insomnia plagued me all that night, and I did not sleep until the sun had risen, and I found that he had not come.

When King Magnus finally summoned me to his chambers, Essin delivered me to Aelia’s tower.

The formerly pristine rooms were covered in garish blood-red rugs and dark tapestries depicting violent battles and unfamiliar creatures.

The fine upholstered furniture had been replaced by ancient-looking velvet chairs and settees in colors and styles that reminded me of something that would accompany a funeral procession.

The king sat in the center of the chamber in one of his tall-backed thrones, wearing an onyx dressing gown with his heavy-looking crown cocked to the side on his head.

Magnus had a throne in nearly every room he occupied, as though he needed it just to be a ruler—as though the chair gave him some power. I wondered if he had traveled across the sea with the chairs stacked in the hold of his ship.

It wasn’t hard to imagine that the Elven King was in need of that power when he sat next to the large, brooding Penjani soldiers who guarded him.

Compared to them, he was frail and insignificant, as though someone had taken the skin from a larger man and placed it on his bones like an ill-fitting garment.