Daughters of the King |✓|

Chapter Twenty-Five

Winter in the mountains seemed to last years. Even as the weather grew warmer, the snow still lingered, resilient and thick, as my patience grew thin.

Wolfe had left as he'd promised, almost without warning, and we'd seen so little of him, it was almost like he'd never been here at all. The only change in the house was the way the air suddenly felt less suffocating, like a pressure had been eased on our wind pies.

Gunnar's presence was easier to bear. I saw him sometimes from the windows, looking when I shouldn't have been, and I would hear him through closed doors, but he was like a ghost in this house. An existence to be doubted and questioned.

It wasn't until the weather had improved considerably that the king sent for my mother. She was to return to the City of Roses, she told me. Tending to wife duties. But she would be back very soon, she promised.

I felt a pang of fear strike me through the heart. I still didn't know enough—still hadn't figured out how to put a stop to this train headed steadfastly towards doom.

Now my chance was slipping away.

My gripped me in a tight embrace before she left. I felt every bone in her body through her clothes as she held me in the cage of her arm, squeezing like she meant to strangle the life out of me.

That's how I knew something bad was coming, and that I had failed.

Once she was gone, I never mourned her absence. My mother had put on a good performance while she was here, she had woven a web of carefully suspended plots, but I tended to none of them after she'd left.

I figured it would make no difference now anyway.

In those earliest and sweetest days of spring, Zelle and I did as we pleased. We went walking as often as we could, we didn't cover our faces, and we acted as though Gunnar wasn't even in the house, which distressed Bohdai greatly as his job was to serve the captain.

Gunnar was otherwise successful at evading us, since he occupied different rooms.

On the off chance that we happened to cross his path on the stairs or in the halls, I acted as though he didn't exist. If he'd forgotten me so easily, there was no reason why I shouldn't be able to do the same.

He was my ghost and nothing more. Haunting me always.

Zelle, of course, was uncomfortable with these acts of carelessness and would have many sessions a day. She often had a horrified look about her as she followed along to my acts of rebellion, like she couldn't fathom my boldness, but she also couldn't resist the chance to break out of her stifled existence. It was too easy to forget the laws that were threats to us all, while living so far away from the rest of civilization. Even the staff felt it, the other-worldness of being out here, and they turned a blind eye to our mischief.

With my mother gone, I ruled supreme over the house. With my mother gone, the others were unwilling to defy me.

With my mother gone, I lived.

I wore my cargos and went hunting most mornings, bringing home ducks and pheasants, sticking their feathers into my hair like a savage. I muted the Black Channel and threw a sheet over the screen. I sang songs of the resistance.

I knew the possible consequences of my actions, but I was seized by a strange sort of recklessness—I was indulging my humanity.

I was trying to catch his attention.

...

"You're being completely stupid," Gunnar barked when he found me in the woods.

I was crouched with my rifle in my hands, the nozzle aimed at a fat bird rippling peacefully on the flat surface of the lake.