Page 31 of Nightingale (The Broken Kingdoms #1)

C aptain Amir Mikale pulled back on his reins as his mighty horse pranced around them. Red and gold striped cords embellished the massive saddle, fit to accommodate his hulking size. “Princess, we did not expect to see you here, with him of all people.”

She could have hugged the seasoned warrior if she weren’t covered from head to toe in spider blood, and Rian’s. There was sweat in places she didn’t even want to think about, dirt in every crack and crevice. What she wouldn’t give for another river to bathe in.

“Amir, thank the gods you came when you did.” Vrea wiped at her face, trying to regain some semblance of royalty that her mother had strained into her from a young age. “You just about saved us.”

“Just about?” He lifted a black brow. His accent was as she remembered, heavy and thick with the Niroulian lilt that most of her people had. “Any longer and you would have become spider chow.”

She let out a weak chuckle and stood, wiping the mud from her knees. “I guess we’ll never find out.” Her eyes fell to the wounded Prince. “As for my company, he’s the reason I’m here at all. If it weren’t for him, then I would either be locked away in Hawksmoor Keep for all eternity, or my neck would have been separated from my head after my attempted escape.”

Two soldiers removed themselves from their horses, warily glancing down the corridor in preparation for any more Blacklegs that dared to come their way. Four men held themselves up high, bows nocked with arrows that still pointed towards the tunnels, ready for another attack in a moment’s notice.

“Bring him to the healing tent immediately.” She locked eyes with three men, tilting her head in the unconscious Prince’s direction as he lay sprawled on the canyon floor. “He’s been hit with an unknown Blackleg toxin and needs care.”

“Princess,” Amir warned with a cautious tone to his low voice. “We should leave him here, or finish him off if you want to repay the favour of your release. It would be a kindness to make it quick. Far kinder than allowing the spiders to take him, to digest him. Far kinder than bringing him to Vasthold, too. You know what your mother has in store for anyone from Carylim, let alone an heir.”

Vrea stared down at the Prince.

He didn’t stir.

His once rich skin was ghastly white, with a sickening hue that made him appear as though he was carved from freezing ice or hard stone. His eyes fluttered behind the lids, moving rapidly as if he were stuck in a daydream of horror. His joints twitched rapidly, pulsing and jumping like a long-eared sand rabbit.

Her mind was made up.

No one could convince her otherwise.

“Take him to the Greenvass tents. I want healers to tend to him immediately and report back to me with any progress. Good or bad.” She ordered and the two men that dismounted came forward. “No one is to touch him, harm him or send word to the Queen ahead of myself. If I find out that my orders have been disobeyed, rest assured that I won’t hesitate to enact appropriate punishments.”

“My lady,” Amir hoisted himself off the horse, walking to her left. “Not only is he a Prince of Carylim, but if the rumours are true, then he is the Golden Heir. The one primed to take over for the King, his favourite son.”

“You’re telling me this information as if I don’t already know it.” She shot him a look of caution. “I know who he is and what he might do. You would do well to remember that he was the one I was sent to kill. I did all the important research beforehand. My time as their hostage hasn’t allowed me to forget a single bit.”

The guards lifted Rian off the earth, a small puddle of red staining the dirt below him. He moaned quietly and the sound reverberated directly through her heart. She stepped forward once, a small move in his direction.

One that Amir caught, much to her chagrin.

“Then you should kill him. Heed my advice.” The captain placed his hand on his broadsword, ready to sling it out if she gave the command. “I would not dare to accuse you of being a kind soul, but there is a seed of betterment within you that allows you to see good in all, no matter where they come from. Normally I would applaud you for this, but not with his kind. Not with an heir . It does not matter what you feel for him, small or big. It is not a good idea to let him live. It is not good for you, as well as for him. I implore you to reconsider.”

A flare of anger rose up within her from the depths of her very self, the hardened core that her mother and brothers had drilled into her, time and time again. It wasn’t a cruel thing to care for someone, but that’s what the captain implied. Sides were nothing when it came to matters of the heart.

But she was in charge here, not Amir.

“He lives.” Vrea bit out before he could get another word in, positive or negative. “Chain him, bind him if that makes you feel better, but Rian is my charge. Which means that I am the only one that gets to decide what we do with him. I won’t see him hurt, more so than he already is.”

With that tone of finality that left no room for arguments, Vrea turned on her heel, shoved her knives back into her sides and took the horse that a Niroulian offered her. He held the tall mount steady as she placed her foot in the metal stirrup and rose up, settling on the leather seat with comfort and ease.

“As you wish, Princess.” Amir slanted his broad arm over his chest in a diagonal way, lowered his clean-shaven head and half of his figure as he bowed in respect to her. “He will not be touched by those other than the ones that you’ve ordered. Forgive me for my brutal honesty. It is just another way that I serve you and your mother.”

He snapped his fingers and the men carried Rian away, lifting his feet so that he didn’t drag on the ground the entire length of the journey.

Vrea watched with an unsettling feeling that chewed through her gut, unsure of why he had so much of an effect on her. When she saw his red hair disappear into the striped medical tent, she jammed her heel into the flank of the horse and rode off after him.

The tent was precisely as she remembered from the last time she’d been stationed here, a little over five years ago by her mother’s direct order. According to Queen Casta, each of her children had to have fought in the war at least once, in order to fight side by side with the people that they would be ruling over. In order to show their people that they were with them, regardless of station. None of her children would be above getting their hands stained with blood and dirt and sweat.

All except Tessa had.

Now she stood in the same spot, nearing six years older than the last time, eyeing the decorations that had been set up for a visiting royal. It was the largest tent of them all, in the dead center of the field. There were two banners on either side with the garnet backing that dipped into a curved point with a dangling tassel, bearing the Greenvass symbol of a badger with growling fangs. Bronze trimmed the sides, embedded with sapphire blue that reflected the single gem that made up the animal’s eye.

As a child, she hated the symbol.

It looked like nothing fierce, not in comparison to the wide-spread hawk of the Moordians that she admired. It was a clever, cunning, quick-witted creature that had the ability to fly, to swoop out of the sky on its unsuspecting prey with taloned claws and devour them whole with a snap of its vicious beak.

There were a few instances where she’d tried to convince her mother to change the banner to something more wild, untamable, beastly.

A lion would have been regal, she insisted.

A wolf would have been threatening, she said.

A serpent would have been wicked, she tried to convince her mother.

Casta had refused, declaring that a badger was a vengeful animal, one that wasn’t to be overlooked just as they were. Vrea hadn’t been happy but there wasn’t anything she’d been able to do. She made the mistake of turning to Eamin and complaining about it, about how much it bothered her that the badger didn’t seem to have anything special about it.

The wrong brother to confide in.

That night, Eamin had set a rogue badger free in her room, allowing her to learn just what made the animal the creature represented on the banner. It was impossible to tell who was more surprised at the other’s unexpected presence- the badger, or Vrea.

She hadn’t screamed, because that wouldn’t have done anything. There was a high probability that her brother had paid the guards off for the evening to teach her a valuable lesson. One she did learn, whether she wanted to or not.

The creature had hissed and the coat had puffed up to make it look twice its size.

In the end, Vrea emerged.

She’d skinned the beast and dropped the insides on Eamin’s bed, in the middle of the night as he slept soundly. He’d startled awake as she held it up, wriggled the bloody corpse in front of his face, and dropped it directly into his lap. He’d looked horrified, as if he’d thought the badger would win.

It was an image that would never leave her mind.

Vrea no longer hated it as the sigil of their strong house after her fight with it. She’d given the striped fur to her seamstress, asking for it to be made into a fur-lined cape for when the weather grew dismal. The woman obeyed, and two weeks later an azure cloak appeared in her room, a collar of badger fur proudly displayed with a Greenvass sigil pin to latch it.

She wore it whenever she needed an extra boost of strength, tenacity and ferocity. Not that she needed a reminder of the beast’s temper, when it left a jagged scar down her right thigh, from the top of her hipbone to her near knee.

But the shocked look it earned from Eamin whenever she proudly wore it was satisfaction enough that she kept it around. Enough for it to become one of her prized possessions. It rarely grew cold enough in Niroula for her to ever need it, but there were occasional times that she pulled it out of her closet.

As Vrea paced around the room, shuffling through the small chest for a change of clothes, she inhaled the rich scent of sand and river, of her homeland that she’d sorely missed. She’d been away for far too long and the absence of her country had gotten to her after a while. Was she the sort to cry, tears might have pricked the corners of her eyes.

There were six chests lined against the farthest wall of the large tent, one for each of the remaining royals that came to visit. Her mother’s was the biggest, stuffed with her armour and a few regal pieces such as a crowned headpiece that she wore into battle, a greatsword that was heavier than Vrea, and a crossbow that could fire from yards away with deadly precision. A crown marked hers, with ruby indents in a diamond shape.

Alpheus’s came next to it, jade triangles pressed into the leather work that wrapped around it. She was sure that if she snuck a peek into it, she’d find nothing but simple tunics and trousers, loaded with weapons to the brim. Her eldest brother was fond of the tools of death, finding blood-letting to be fun in any form, as long as it was against the Moordians.

She moved past his to find Eamin’s, with a scoff and roll of her eyes in his direction. Undoubtedly, there were poisons within. He shared that trait with the King of Carylim.

Marked with saffron circles, Teminos’s held silks and satins, one that she opened and borrowed from. There was no way that any of her old clothes would fit her in the five years that had flown by since she’d last stepped foot on the war field. Her body had filled out in her chest, her hips, even if not by much.

Vrea grabbed a cerulean top that fluttered with a ruffled collar, one that plunged a little lower than she would have liked, but it was all that she could find for now. The sleeves billowed and tapered in at the wrists, ones that she contemplated cutting off for better access.

She tossed the top on the risen bedroll, far fancier than anything she’d slept on in the last three weeks. A bath was required before she changed clothes, lest she dirty up another ensemble before long. A pair of chestnut trousers landed on the bed next to it, and she ambled over to her mother’s trunk to search for a new pair of boots. There wasn’t anything truly wrong with hers, but they were a bit tight on the toe if a complaint had to be made.

And with another week or so on the road, switching them out for something slightly more accommodating was a preferable idea to keeping her old shoes and letting them pinch. They’d be riding for the majority of it and resting for the evenings.

Vrea found a knee-high set that would do, adding it to her pile of things on the bed and opening her own trunk as she looked for a clean pair of underthings, since the ones she currently wore were no longer white. She wasn’t sure what colour to call them, but she refused to wear them after the grime that coated the cloth.

Vrea slipped out of her current clothes with a more-than-satisfied groan to be rid of them, and tossed them aside to be disposed of. Burned might have been better, considering that amount of muck and blood that would never come free, no matter how many washes one attempted.

There was already a hot, wooden tub waiting for her after a couple of the men carried it in, filling it with steaming buckets of water from the river that they lit over a close campfire, adding enough until the water level would cover her shoulders.

Amir had come in once, to check on her and gain the full story before setting two bottles of soap down for her bath and departing with a bob of his head. He stood outside as she entered the tub, keeping her quiet little moan of delight at the heat to herself. Vrea didn’t trust many, but she would put her life in his hands time and time again.

He’d served her mother faithfully, as he would her whenever she took over. As did his wife, a woman named Imogen who was only a handful of years older than she was. In the absence of a father she never needed, Amir filled that space in a weird way. She’d never call him such a title nor would he ever expect it.

Perhaps uncle would suit his closeness better.

He was simply ‘Amir’, and she wouldn’t want him to be anyone else.

Vrea dunked herself under the warm water and scrubbed at every inch of her filthy skin. Until the dark mahogany that neared Amir’s skin tone was gone, replaced by her soft brown that held an amber hue. She combed through her hair with her fingers, dumping half the bottle of soap overtop it until it was velvet smooth again, without an inch of dirt to be found.

She’d go see Rian soon, after she was presentable. There were rounds that needed to be made with the men as well, to walk around the Niroulian side of the war border and see how things fared. It was part of her duties as an heir to Vasthold. One she didn’t mind, considering that she got to hear all the interesting stories the men passed around to make the time go by faster.

After being away for so long, she was desperate to have some part of her country close, even if it was the familiar company of the men that proudly, bravely defended it. Three years had felt like a millenia when there was no soft sand to lay on, no warm sun to bask in, no oasis to splash in. She missed the way her people spoke, acted, and dressed.

Until she received confirmation that Rian would be able to ride and ride hard, for Niroula, Vrea would visit her people. She would sit with them and listen like a good sovereign should, help them plan for upcoming attacks and study whatever plans had previously been made to her unexpected arrival. She would catch up on the news of her mother and Vasthold, slightly optimistic that Eamin had bit the dust in her absence.

Then, when Rian was well enough to travel on horseback, they would leave for Vasthold.