Hidden Charm
Page 1
Hidden Charm
A Fates Universe Novel
Kristine Grayson
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part I
Chapter 1
Part II
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part III
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part IV
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Part V
Chapter 33
Part VI
Chapter 34
Untitled
Also by Kristine Grayson
About the Author
Newsletter sign-up
For the fans,
who waited, and waited, and waited…
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Dean for all the encouragement…and for everything you did in 2018.
Part I
Before The Beginning
Chapter 1
Henry, Prince of the Eighth Realm and Husband-Consort to Tiana, the youngest daughter of the king of the Seventh Realm, sat on the edge of the gigantic bed in the birthing room, hands over his face.
Around him, the midwives worked their magic, touching his beloved wife’s face, coaxing her to speak, caressing her stomach, which looked weirdly flat.
The baby’s body had already been removed, per custom. Too young for revival techniques to work, the midwife—whose name Henry maybe had never known—told him. She seemed businesslike, maybe because she still thought her magic could save Tiana.
Candles burned all around, smelling of vanilla, almost masking the scent of the sharp spice that the midwives were using to try to bring his beautiful, beloved, brilliant wife back to life.
The room was cavernous, but it felt small. The tables on the side were covered not only with candles, but with equipment, some of it metal, which looked more like torture devices to him than anything that could help a woman give birth to a baby.
He certainly couldn’t. Nor could Tiana’s maids and helpers. The Queen had fled early on, which angered him more than he wanted to say. He thought women were supposed to know these things, but apparently, she had asked to be unconscious during the births of her six children.
Unconscious, and oblivious.
He had stayed, Tiana clinging to his hand, trusting him to help her, and he knew nothing, nothing at all.
And then the chief midwife, as she arrived, glared at him.
You stayed? No wonder the child died. Men should not be here. Your presence harmed both of them.
She tried to get him to leave so she could revive his wife, but he wasn’t going to—for two reasons: First, he couldn’t bear to leave Tiana’s side—he kept expecting her to open her eyes and smile at him. Just fooling, she would say, because she had such a marvelous, quirky, and slightly vicious sense of humor. But second, oh, second, he had seen what happened when people were revived after being dead for more than an hour, and those people—well, they were never the same. He once contended, back when he could actually do battle, before his own family sacrificed him for his brother’s sake, that those people weren’t the same. That they were something other than human, something that had a weird and dangerous magic all its own.
He knew that he was holding two contradictory thoughts in his head—the idea that Tiana would wake up and the idea that he needed to protect her in death as much as in life—and he didn’t care.
He would protect her. It was the last thing he could do for her.
He stood, wiped his hands on his pants, and said to the bustling midwives, setting up for their spell, “Get out.”
They didn’t stop moving. Seven of them, which, he had to think, was an unlucky number. But the Seventh Kingdom was a lot fonder of the number seven than the Eighth Kingdom had ever been. So maybe seven wasn’t unlucky here.
He raised his voice.
“Get. Out.”
A couple of the midwives stopped moving. They were the younger ones, in training, probably. He hadn’t gotten to know any of them during Tiana’s pregnancy, and he probably should have. No, he actually should have.
He raised his voice again, moving it to a command level he rarely used:
“Get. Out. Now!”
“Highness,” said the head midwife (were they called “head midwife”? He didn’t know. Tiana would have known, and he could ask her…no, he couldn’t. He couldn’t ask her anything ever again). “We need quiet to revive—”
“It’s too late for a proper revival and you know it,” he said. “You’re just afraid of her father. I’ll deal with her father. You will leave. Now.”
He could deal with Tiana’s father, because it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore.
Tiana was gone. Tiana, who had saved Henry, loved him despite the spell that Aite had imprisoned him with. Tiana, who talked with him, and held him, and then helped him return to his human form, breaking the spell forever.
Tiana had saved him, but he couldn’t save her.
The midwives were gathering their things, all except the head midwife, whose eyes had narrowed. She put her hands on her ample hips.
“She’s too young to die,” the midwife said to him, as if he had killed Tiana. And maybe he had. She had been tiny, too tiny for that baby inside her, the baby he had made with her. If he had thought about it—
“I know,” he said, feeling that bit of energy drain from him.
“You would take her from this world forever?” the midwife asked.
Anger engulfed him so fast that it surprised him. Anger and the energy that came with it.
“I’m not the one who let her die,” he said, taking a step toward the midwife. “You’re the one who refused to stay in the castle. You’re the one who didn’t follow protocol. And you’re the one who arrived much too late to help her.”
The midwife leaned back, her dark eyes glinting with an anger of their own.
“I will let her father know that,” Henry said. “She would still be alive if you had been here. Our child would still—”
He couldn’t go on. Not without losing any semblance of control. He closed his hand into a fist, then let it fall to his side.
“Get out,” he said. “Now.”
This time, the midwife and her assistants listened. They swept the last of their supplies into linen bags and hefted the bags over their shoulders. The movement snuffed out most of the vanilla candles, leaving the cavernous room in semi-darkness.
The women scurried out, the oak door slamming behind them.
Leaving him alone with Tiana.
With what remained of Tiana.
He had not expected this. He had thought his life would change when the baby came. But he had thought he would raise his child with love and warmth, unlike his own parents had with him. He and Tiana would have more children, and they would laugh and play and run around the grounds like wild heathens until schooling started.
He had expected joy—a longer, greater, happily ever after than anyone had ever experienced.
He and Tiana used to talk about it, how wonderful their love was for each other, how lu
cky they had been that she had the patience to see him for who he was, and how willing he had been to try to capture her attention.
They had loved each other.
They thought love could conquer everything.
They had been wrong.
Part II
Before The Beginning
Chapter 2
Zel looked out the only window in her tower prison. She had thrown the shutters back to watch the light die across the treetops of the forest below. Beyond, she could see a river snake its way across the land. The way the sun touched the treetops, like the fingers of a lover reluctant to leave, and the way that the sun kissed that far away river, glittering like the diamonds that Aite insisted she wear on festive evenings, gave Zel what little bits of happiness she could find.
The light, the fire in the grate, the harp she played in the early mornings, even the forced lessons on the harpsichord to please Aite, kept her calm.
Zel knew every inch of this tower room, from its high ceilings to the massive fireplace, to the thick rugs, to the soft bed in the corner. She kept books stacked on the tables—books, one of the few diversions Aite allowed her—and through the books, the entire world. Aite was hard to understand, considering Zel her child one moment, and her prisoner the next.
It was the books that made Zel understand that the way she had been raised was abnormal. It was the books that made her realize that the river actually led somewhere, and the fact that she couldn’t go beyond that river did not mean nothing was there.
Sometimes she wondered what the grass below would feel like. Would it feel like the leaves of the flowers the silent attendants brought her with her meals? Or would it feel like the ribbons she plaited her hair with once a week, when she unwound the mass that made her head feel like it weighed as much as the rest of her.
Her hair was abnormally long—or so one of the attendants, now fired—told her. The fact that it grew and grew and grew was part of some magic Zel did not understand.
She thought it was Aite’s magic, but another attendant had told her that it couldn’t be. Aite had dark magic, and the hair, well, it was as much a part of Zel as her arm.
If only you could cut your hair and use it as a ladder, that attendant had said. The attendant had brought scissors with supper one night, explained how to use them. They cut the tips off one of Zel’s plaits—and Aite had appeared out of nowhere.
The scissors vanished. The attendant jumped out the window rather than face Aite’s wrath.
Sometimes Zel still heard the screams, and the horrid, horrid thump.
But the attendant—whose name Zel never learned (to her great sadness)—had left Zel with one single thought, one that hadn’t left in two years:
A ladder. An escape.
But to where, she had no idea. She had never been outside of this tower room.
She leaned against the cold stone sill, longer than her arm, and stared into the distance, her heart beating hard.
He wouldn’t come. She knew he wouldn’t. It would be foolish.
He wasn’t foolish.
But he was determined.
And that scared her.
Sure enough, a dust cloud rose in the distance. She had seen that cloud every other night for nearly a year. The only man she had ever known and his white horse, galloping to her tower.
He had found her early one summer morning, when she had been sitting in her window, watching the pink light from dawn slowly work its way over the tower into the forest below.
He had been sitting in a tree, of all things, and the tree had been dying. She had been watching the brown devour the branches over the past few months, but she hadn’t been looking down that morning.
Until she heard sniffles. Then someone blew their nose. And more sniffles.
Is anyone there? she had asked.
A gasp, and then no answer.
A little later, more sniffles. A sob.
Please, she had said. Is anyone there?
A head popped out of a hole made by the dying branches. A man’s head—beautiful and glorious—with black, black hair that fell in curls around his skull.
He looked around then, looked up and saw her. The girl in the tower, he had breathed. I thought you were a myth.
No such luck, she had replied, and so, a relationship began. One based on conversation and common interests. He told her about the world outside of her tower; she told him about the books she’d read.
They talked about everything, from her dreams to the way his family demanded that he change everything about himself.
They were both trapped, they realized, just in different ways.
And somehow, the discussion had turned to escape.
Plans and plots and ideas. He had discovered a place—called the Greater World—where people like him could live normal lives. If life there could be considered normal, he had said, with a laugh.
Zel hadn’t understood him. She had no idea what this world was like, let alone some Greater World.
But she had listened to him, she had dreamed with him, and she had cherished him, because she knew someday he would leave her here with Aite, and he would continue with his life—a normal life—in a better place. And she would wish him the best.
He was leaving tomorrow.
But I’m not going without you, he had said.
And she had discouraged him. She had watched one would-be rescuer die.
She didn’t need to see another.
Which was why she kept rejecting his ideas for rescuing her. Some she didn’t have to reject: they wouldn’t have worked anyway. Like the ladder. (He couldn’t find one tall enough.) Or finding someone magical to whisk her away. (All of the magical were afraid of Aite.)
Then, one day, he suggested climbing up Zel’s hair—using its abnormal length as a ladder—but she refused to let him, claiming it would break her neck to do so.
Privately, she doubted it would. Her hair weighed so much her neck and shoulders were abnormally strong. But she was afraid to let him touch her hair. Every time someone had, Aite would appear out of thin air. Twice she had punished the offender by sending them away or doing something so frightful to them that just the rumor of it all made that attendant jump to her death.
Better to let him—the man she called Sonny because he brought light to her dark life—better to let him escape to this Greater World without her. Better to know that he was having a good life, in a place that accepted him, than the memory of his death or worse—wondering what Aite had done to him, how she had ruined him too.
But there he was, on his white warhorse, galloping here. She caught glimpses of him through the trees in the very last of the light.
He was coming at night because in her fifteen years of imprisonment here—almost her whole life—she had never seen Aite after dark.
Zel’s heart leapt when she saw him, even as tears coated her eyes. He had come. Stupid foolish man. He had come for her.
And now he would die, because of it.
He emerged from the forest, looking different than she had ever seen him. He wore some kind of skin tight white outfit, and no shoes at all. The warhorse had a simple saddle, unusual for him, but a lot of bags tied over its haunches (or what she thought were haunches. She had no idea what most things were called. Or what horses felt like. Or smelled like. Or actually did).
Sonny wore some kind of contraption on his back, something he had slipped his arms through, like a weight of some kind. As he dismounted, she saw his sword wrapped in that contraption, along with something that looked like pure white armor.
He tied the warhorse to a nearby tree, then looked up. His gaze met hers in the growing darkness.
She shook her head.
“Stop being so negative,” he said, with a grin. The grin did not reassure her. “And pack a few things.”
“There’s nothing here I want,” she said, as if she were going with him, as if he would actually get out of this alive.
“You’ll need some ext
ra clothing,” he said. “It’s more than a day’s ride.”
It being this Greater World he had told her about. This place that was different from the place where he lived, not the place she lived. She figured everything was different from the place she lived.
She threaded her hands together, feeling the cool air of the night start to blow into the tower room.
“Sonny,” she said, “just go. Please. Forget about me, and go.”
“I could never forget about you,” he said. “You saved my life.”
He had said that before, and she had no real idea what he meant. He had tried to explain the despair that had nearly taken him that day he sobbed in the tree branches, where he contemplated—as he said—ending it all.
Like that attendant had. Only without the fear of Aite behind him.
The fact that Zel could survive years alone in a tower room with only books for company had made him realize that he had a lot more than he thought: friends, freedom, choice.
He was making a choice.
But she was afraid he would lose everything.
“Please,” she said. “Go.”
“Nope. I’ve been training for this for six months.” He adjusted the pack on his back, then sprinted across the ground to the base of the tower.