“Who, my Prince?” Her feigned confusion was thin.
The one I will always fucking worship.
“You know exactly who.”
The maid shook her head, wide-eyed. “I don’t…my Lord, please! You’re hurting me!”
Seizing her throat, I compressed her windpipe and her cheeks turned bright red. You lying bitch.
“Where the fuck is she?”
The maid gasped for air, trying to shake her head against my grip. She dragged her fingernails down my forearms, making long angry scratches.
I got in up close to her face. “Start talking or I’ll kill you, right here. Right now.”
Tears filled her eyes. When they spilled over her lashes, I had the signal I needed—she was scared enough to talk. I loosened my grip just enough to keep her alive. For now.
“There was blood!” She whisper-gasped, clawing at my hands. “I was called to clean up some blood and I saw them taking away a body. It was a girl,” she said, trying desperately to suck in a breath. “A blonde. Dressed like a servant girl. She was dead. I’m so sorry…”
Chapter 15
Randal
The punishment for queen-killing was death by a thousand arrows and I didn’t give a fuck. I was going to kill Queen Patara, and fucking revel, fucking rejoice in every last bloody second of it.
My grief rang in my ears, it made me taste metal, it made my scars scream with pain like I was burning alive all over again. Iris had been my hope, my joy, every good fucking thing that I had in the world. And now she was fucking gone. And I was left with nothing but agony.
Agony and rage.
With my sword drawn, I made my way to the queen’s private chambers. Her guards tried to stop me, so many that I lost count of the fatal stabs I’d inflicted. Soon my hands were so bloody that the hilt of my sword was slippery in my palm. But I didn’t give a shit. I’d have fought bare handed, ripping their eyeballs out with my thumbs, if that’s what it took to avenge the death of the only good thing I had ever known. Murder. It was the only motherfucking answer to this pain.
There was one doorway between me and redemption, one threshold between me and a dead queen. It was her bed chamber and she’d barricaded herself inside. I kicked it hard and the lock shivered but didn’t give way.
“You fucking cunt,” I roared, kicking it again and again. “I’m coming for you, you bitch. Get ready to meet your motherfucking maker.”
“Get away from me, you beast!” She screamed back at me. “Go drown yourself in the sea and leave me the fuck alone! Save the people the terror of seeing your face in an open casket!”
The third kick shattered one of the inset wooden panels of the door. Fuck yes. I yanked my boot free from the gap in the slats and plunged my sword through the opening, hacking it wider and wider to get inside.
I was close, so fucking close, but just as I reached through the gap to unlock the door, I heard a single word.
“Stop.”
It wasn’t uttered in anger. It wasn’t said in fear. It was clear, calm, and soft. I turned over my shoulder to see my father, supported by his nurse.
“Stop, Randal. Stop.”
Not a fucking chance. “She killed the love of my life,” I said, seizing the lock blindly on the other side of the door. “And she’s going to fucking pay for it. She has to pay for it.”
Using a cane, my father hobbled towards me, shaking his head. Seeing him so weak and frail threatened to drain the fight right out of me.
“Randal, listen to me. Your life is not your own. Vendettas, personal desires?” He furrowed his eyebrows and placed his hand on my shoulder. “That is not the duty of a king. You must lead. You must sacrifice.”
As I looked at my father, it was as if a dam of grief broke inside me. The harsh sting of tears filled my eyes for the first time in as long as I could remember. I yanked my hand back from the gap in the door, pinching my temples with my bloody fingers.
“She killed the woman I love. She has to fucking pay for it. You know she does.”
His blue-green eyes, dimmer and grayer now, shimmered with a sheen of tears as he looked up at me. He pulled me close to him, hooking his arm around the back of my neck to bring my face to his.
“Rumors. According to rumor, she killed the woman I love, too, son. Don’t forget that.”
My mother. He meant my mother.
Christ almighty, to hell with this horrible fucking existence; so much pain for so little happiness. I let the grief grab hold of me like the enemy that it was. I pulled my father close and let my tears fall onto his shoulder. My heart burned in my chest, fucking aching with loss—for Iris, for my mother, for fucking everything.
“I don’t know how you live with it.”
My father sighed, gripping my shoulder tight. “You just…you fucking have to. It’s that simple. Ignore the rumors, no matter how much you want to believe them. That’s our fate. Our duty. Marriage is not for love my son. It is for survival. It is a duty to the kingdom. When we married, it secured our border where we were weak. With her came trunks of gold and riches when the droughts and war left our coffers nearly empty. She was necessary.” He led me away from the door slowly, each step punctuated by the sound of his cane on the floor. “If you must, banish her back to her homeland the instant you take the throne. Take it from me—she’ll be miserable in the hellhole from whence she came.” He smiled a little, looking smug and amused. “She comes from a family of power-hungry traitors. Most of them have skittered off into exile over the years. They’ll lock her up as soon as she arrives.”
No better than she fucking deserves. I liked the idea, but it didn’t fix a goddamned thing. My blood was still up, my body was tense, and I had murder in my veins. It took all my strength not to turn around and kill her, consequences be fucking damned. She’d look the best she ever had with her head on a stake, the crows pecking at her cheeks.
And yet, damn it, I knew my father was right. He was always right. He was a good king, a reasonable king. And an honest man. I knew he always did right by me, even if it fucking hurt.
Still though. Fucking still. My Iris was dead and I was alive, and that was not fucking acceptable. Seizing my sword like an axe, I landed a long arching chop against the Queen’s door, unleashing all my fucking rage at the battered, splintered oak.
Iris had shown me love, Iris had shown me happiness, and nothing but blackness was left in her place inside me. Again and again I attacked the door with ferocious whacks and chops. Sparks flew off the blade as I connected once and again with the old iron knob.
“I’m coming for you, you fucking whore,” I roared as I battered down the door. And damn, did it do me good to hear her scream in terror, thinking I was going to kill her after all.
But I knew, deep down, that I wouldn’t.
Nor would I ever love again. Fuck no, never. Not as long as I lived.
Chapter 16
Iris
There were 27 of us packed into the prison beneath the castle. It was one cramped room, hardly bigger than a hog pen. A single torch outside the bars cast a dim light through the prison. It was dark, moldy, and filthy, and I was sure it was where they put people they wanted to forget all about. The buckets of human waste were overflowing. The stone walls oozed with decades of foul water, slippery and glistening.
Once my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that we were a strange mix of high- and low-born, all thrown together by circumstance and luck. Or lack of luck. From what I overheard, it seemed that all of us had wronged the queen, or were collateral payment for a debt owed to her, or an imagined debt.
The other prisoners said the king was sick and Randal was to take his place, which meant Queen Patara would not rise to rule. She was angry and vengeful; she didn’t intend to go down without a fight.
That day, I had seen her for the first time with my own eyes, and I now understood just how awful that fight would be. Though I understood little of court politics, I did understand that the queen’s power and sta
nding were threatened by Randal. If she wanted to secure the crown, all those who posed a risk to her had to be stopped. I was part of her final purge. To hurt Randal was to hurt the biggest threat to her power. And so there I was.
The queen’s men were brutal, and there were many injuries. I did what I could to help my fellow prisoners. Broken bones and lacerations, shattered cheeks and head wounds. I knew little of human medicine, but I was happy that much of what I had learned from animals seemed to apply to people, too. So much of healing was in the mind as much as the body, and again and again I said the words, Everything will be okay.
And each time I said them, I tried to believe it myself.
When I first arrived, the room was abuzz with life and worry. But as everybody became more and more accustomed to their surroundings, idle conversation became the way to pass the time. Strangers struck up conversations with those that surrounded them, trying to make best of a terrible and terrifying reality.
All the gossip was about Randal. I listened but added nothing. An old man next to me, who had the fish-shaped tattoo of a smuggler on his hair-covered wrist, asked, “What do you think about it all, lass?”
I looked up at him. One of his eyes was clouded over like a hazy blue sky.
“I… I’m just a milkmaid. I know nothing of princes.” A lump in my throat stopped me from saying more.
Wherever Randal was, I hoped he was safe. And if he was safe, I prayed he was coming to help me—to help all of us.
“And I’m just an old man. Doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion or a story of my own,” he said, blinking his old eyes patiently, and rubbing his arthritic fingers. “Tell me, how did you end up here? Hard to imagine what a milkmaid did to wrong the queen.”
It was as if the close, heavy air of the dungeon had slowed my thoughts. It had taken hours for me to stop trembling, and now it felt as though talking itself required more strength than I had.
“My father,” I said. “The queen’s men killed my father.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” he said, with a grandfatherly pat on the back of my hand.
It was enough to stop the conversation, and I was thankful. I turned my attention again to those who surrounded us, but conversation went again and again to the bastard son. Everyone knew something about him. Or thought they did. Many of the prisoners expressed the very fears that I had long heard, that the prince was a monster, a horror.
But a servant woman who had been at the banquet said she had been there for the unveiling of the masked prince. He looked a lot like the carpenter who had helped during the floods, she said. Was it the same man, everybody wondered? Could it be? Could that monster that everybody feared actually be a kindly man who they all knew so well already?
It’s true, I said to myself, willing the rest of them to come to the same realization. But the old, cruel rumors were stronger than this new hope. It couldn’t be, they said.
“The bastard prince’s hands are so disfigured, he can’t even feed himself,” said a lady with dark kohl eyes and henna-red hair. A prostitute, I guessed. She was pretty, but it seemed to me she’d once been even prettier. She was haunted by it, soured by it. I could tell from the ripple of wrinkles above her upper lip.
Others in the dungeon agreed. More monstrous rumors flew around. It was clear to me how it had happened, how he’d become this prince of demons. People loved to feel the zinging quiver of fear. As I now knew better than I ever had before.
I couldn’t stand the rumors any longer. I had to speak. I had to put things right.
“It’s him,” I said, my voice creaky because it had been so long since I’d spoken aloud, and shaky with emotion. “He helped at my family farm once. I saw him today in the hall. It’s the same man. He is to be our king.”
Joy peeked through the misery then. But only for an instant. Even if it were true, they all agreed, it wouldn’t help our situation down here. The queen, they said, would stop at nothing to prevent Randal from taking the crown.
“It’s true enough,” muttered the old man next to me. “Just think of what she did to him as a child.”
I looked up at him once again.
He stared down at his lap, shaking his head. “Imagine burning a baby boy. It’s the work of the Devil come to life.”
“What?”
The old man was close to tears. “Aye, burned him alive, just weeks after his poor mother was put in the ground.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The scars Randal bore on his body...they had been there since he was a baby? And the suggestion that the queen herself had ordered such a horrific end for her stepson, bastard or not...
“How do you know?” I asked.
He took a deep breath, blowing it out heavily through his nose. “Lass, I’ve carried that secret with me since the day it happened.”
I had to know. I simply had to. I pressed my hand to his arm. “Please. I need to know.”
Nodding slowly, he blinked a few times. “Suppose it doesn’t much matter now, seeing where I’ve ended up and how unlikely it is that we’ll ever see outside this prison cell again.” His eyes were damp. “I’m a smuggler as you can see,” he rolled his wrist over to show the tattoo that I had already noticed. It was old, fuzzy around the edges, hidden among salt and pepper hairs. He traced the back fin with his fingertip. “Never much cared who was paying me or what they were paying me for, to tell you the truth. Smuggling, sure, piracy if needs be. Theft, robbery…” He hesitated, then cleared his throat. “Murder, once or twice, but only those whose hearts were as black as my own, mind you. When a messenger from the castle sought out people like me for a job that was going to pay handsomely, I was interested and made it known.” He gritted his teeth, growling under his breath. “But when I found out what the task was? I’d never hurt a child, lass, of that I can promise you, but clearly someone had fewer scruples. I have no doubt that the messenger I spoke to was sent from her majesty, and I have no doubt that I was lucky to find passage on a ship heading to the south seas that very night, or I would have been found in my quarters with my throat slit.”
A wave of powerful sadness rolled through me and I pressed my palm to my mouth. Randal was a wonderful man. My heart hurt at the thought of him in such pain. I loved him so much. But with each passing minute, my hope at ever seeing him again began to fade away. I fought the tears as hard as I could. But I couldn’t stop them.
That first day and night, we shared what little sustenance the guards gave us—handfuls of rancid rice and a leaky bucket of tepid, dirty water. But as the hours slid past, the life drained out of the room. We were like tadpoles in a shrinking puddle, huddling closer and closer for less and less, moving slower and more desperately as the life disappeared from among us. Tempers flared. Despair overtook us all.
Everything will be okay, I told myself, again and again. I repeated it so often, I heard it in my dreams.
I hung onto that—my belief. I clutched at it like it was the only thing in the world. In my heart, I believed that Randal loved me. I believed he would come for me. I believed he would save me. Somehow, someway, I believed that he would find his way to me and pluck me out of this terrifying wretchedness.
I clung onto my belief in him as the hours dragged on. And on. Into miserable, endless days of starvation and thirst.
The morning of the fourth day. Or the fifth. I didn’t know which. Curled in a ball in the corner of the prison, I watched two women fight almost to the death over a maggot-infested potato.
This must be a nightmare. Wake up. Just wake up.
But the harder I willed myself into consciousness, the more awful reality became. I was so weak and exhausted that I could barely keep my eyes open. I surrendered to that exhaustion, drifting in and out of sleep.
In the afternoon, the guards said there would be no more water. Nobody was strong enough to protest. The old smuggler next to me groaned with hunger pains, until finally going quiet. He was alive still. But only barely. All of us were only barely a
live. The queen had left us to rot there, I knew it. And when I closed my eyes the next time, I imagined a cave full of bones.
What I believed about Randal wouldn’t sustain me anymore. I let go of my hopes and beliefs like a shipwrecked woman letting go of her life raft. Letting go was easy. So much easier to let go than hold on.
If Randal knew I was alive, he had forsaken me.
And if he thought I was dead?
God help me.
I would be soon enough.
Chapter 17
Randal
In the days after Iris was murdered, vengeance alone fueled me. At night, alone in my quarters, I drank until I passed out. I punched the walls until my knuckles bled. I raged against the loss of the one good thing I’d ever known. And I fucking raged against myself for loving her.
It was my fault that she was dead. That guilt, that burden, would always be mine, as if I had slaughtered her with my own hands.
At first, I refused to believe it. Nobody could produce a body, nobody could tell me in any certain terms what had happened. I had seen the dungeon with my own eyes, seen her clothes gone, and I’d seen Erik’s bloody corpse. Whoever had killed him, they were brutal, it was hard to believe that Iris had been taken gently by such a man.
I had my own guards search for her, for any sign of her. They asked questions in taverns, they interrogated merchants and travelers, but there was nothing.
Then, on the morning of the third day, the worst news was confirmed.
The body of a young woman washed up on the banks of the Aramoor River, so badly beaten by the rocks on the riverbed that it was barely recognizable as human. A few strands of blonde hair clung to her battered skull. Nobody came forward to claim a lost daughter, wife or mother, and though rage consumed me I came in the end to accept that it was her.
Masked Prince (Fated Royals Book 2) Page 12
