At the far end of the circle, one of the guards took charge. He pulled his sword back behind his shoulder and yelled, charging toward my father. My stomach clenched, bile burning its way up my throat. He wasn’t just some monster to slay. Somewhere in there was my father.
“Stop!” I shouted as I lurched forward past the line of guards, but my warning came too late.
The guard swung the sword at my father. He dodged, the blade barely missing his torso. The guard swung again. Missed. But my father didn’t. He grabbed the guard’s arm in his clawed hand and dragged him off the ground, his feet kicking wildly as he screamed in fear. My father growled again and flashed his teeth, then tossed the guard across the square like a toy that no longer pleased him. People ducked as the guard’s body smashed into a fruit cart. Crates splintered with a crack. Melons and dragon fruits splattered across the cobblestones.
The next guard in line took his turn, running at my father screaming his battle cry. His body landed two stalls away, spilling bolts of fabric into the street.
“Attack!”
The guards inched closer around my father tightening the circle. He spun around, the fur along his back rippling as his shoulders hunched preparing for a fight. They charged. All at once and from every angle.
“Stop,” I screamed again but no one heard me over the noise of the battle. My knees weakened. All the strength in my body drained as I watched the havoc. Helpless to stop the battle that had already begun.
Swords clanged as they clattered to the ground. More bodies flew, blood poisoning the fountains and staining the square. My father yelped as the guards clambered over him, dragging him down. His massive arms swung out, swatting at them like bees. Guards fell, one after the other, none strong enough to take down the beast.
My insides twisted beneath my skin. Each blow hitting me hard, but also providing relief that this nightmare might end soon. The image Veda’s father painted in my mind of the ferocious malevolent beast took form in front of me, but he didn’t know him like I did. His kindness. His strength. His ability to care about his people. This was not the ending for a king, no matter what his form.
I pushed my way through the onlookers onto the battlefield. Pieces of armor lay sprinkled between the aching guards, writhing on the hot stony ground. I picked up a sword, the weight of it heavier than I expected, or maybe the responsibility of it simply weighed more than the iron to make it?
My father jabbed his elbow out sending the last of the guards crashing into the crowd, then howled loud at the sun. I gripped the sword with both hands, bringing the blade up in front of me, and took a cautious step forward.
“King Ezra,” I shouted, as I eased another step closer. “Look at me.”
The beast ignored my plea, stomping around and scratching the claws on his feet across the ground.
“Ezra Balthazar Aldric. Look at me.” No response. It’d worked for my mother, but maybe he was too far gone to recognize himself anymore. Maybe he was now more beast than man. Which meant that only one thing left for me to do.
I tightened my grip on the hilt of the sword. All those lessons in fencing and combat better not fail me now. Lessons the man I poised to kill, had paid for. Lessons he’d invested time in helping me perfect, spending hours going over the ideal form and stance. Lessons I’d never be able to thank him for.
A thickness built in my throat as the world blended into a watery haze. I swallowed, nearly choking on my own guilt as tears spilled to the bloody ground. I mumbled a prayer under my breath as I inched closer.
“Don’t make me do this, Dad.”
The beast cocked his head my direction and stilled, his stare moving from me to the sword and back again. He let out a pained roar, stumbling back a few feet.
“Dad, can you hear me in there?”
I lowered the weapon to my side, his eyes following my every movement. He grabbed the sides of his head and moaned, surveying the carnage throughout the square.
“It’s okay. It’s going to be okay, Dad. Just come back to the castle. We’ll figure out a way to break the curse and everything will be okay again. I promise.” I held out my hand, my arm shaking.
He hung his head, a sad whimper emitted from deep in his throat. He looked at me, his eyes soft. Deepest brown, warm and familiar, his eyes, my father’s, not the beast’s. He took a lumbering step toward me. Voices gasped in my periphery, but I forced myself to stand tall and tried to steady my hand.
“That’s it. You can do this. Let’s go home.”
Argh! Metal glinted in the sun, the flash hitting me before my ears registered the scream. The heel of a fist slammed into my chest pushing me down onto my back, my head nearly smacking against the cobblestones. A guard, already bloodied from the first round of the fight, rose up and slashed at my father. An agonizing yelp rang out as the blade sliced my father near his shoulder. The fur darkened and he howled louder, throwing his paw over the wound. The guard struck again, cutting across my father’s thigh, the silver sword marked by my father’s red blood.
I pushed to my feet and reached for my fallen sword, but my father struck first, digging his claws into the guard’s shoulder and lifting him off the ground. The guard screamed. I froze.
“Dad, stop! Don’t!”
My father shook him like a doll and threw him down. The hollow sound of bones cracking as they shattered pulsed through me, moving through the crowd, everyone around taking a fraction of the guard’s pain. His eyes closed, the light in them already gone.
I buckled over, gripping my knees, as I retched, the devastating terror too much to contain any longer. I wiped the back of my sleeve over my mouth and stood shaky on my feet, my father’s cries calling to me.
He’d stumbled across the square and fallen into a heap on my mother’s chessboard, the pieces scattered like the wrecked guards around him. Thick pools of blood gathered near his leg and his shoulder painting the white squares of the board a sickening shade of death.
I rushed to his side and fell to my knees, laying my hands on his leg wound. The sword had cut deep, strips of fur completely gone where the skin beneath lay sliced open. He winced beneath my touch, but let me apply pressure to try and slow the bleeding.
“I need guards,” I yelled to anyone who dared to move. My voice cracked. “We need to bring the king back to the castle.”
He rolled away from me and sat up, pulling his legs into his chest.
“You need to stop moving. Lay still until we can get you stitched up.”
He shook his head and started to rock back and forth on his toes. Tears poured from my eyes. The broken beast before me splintering my heart into pieces with his mammoth paws.
“Please, Dad. I can’t lose you. I need you.”
I put my hand on his shoulder, but he jerked away, his stiff fur passing through my fingers.
“Please.”
He grabbed the white knight from beside him and smashed it into the ground, shards spraying out in all directions. He grabbed the black queen and pulled it into his lap.
“Enough, Ezra,” a voice called.
He stared past me and I glanced over my shoulder. Mom appeared in the square, with a squadron of guards following close behind. She clamped her hand over her mouth as she inspected the aftermath of the chaos my father had caused. She closed her eyes and clenched fists at her sides.
“It’s time to go home,” she continued, but the fear in her voice shadowed the command.
My father’s body slumped, his massive frame compacting as small as he could make himself, a glaze of shame washing over his face.
I held my hand out to him again. “Let’s go.”
His face hardened, the last whisper of his humanity draining from his expression and replaced with a stare of cold granite. He ripped the queen from his lap and ground it into the chessboard, it’s pieces mixing with the destroyed knight. He rolled his head back, mouth wide open in a growl as his pointed teeth glistened in the sun. I retracted my hand and he pushed me onto my
back, pinning me beneath him. My heart pounded as I searched for any part of him I could hang on to and pull him back, but there was nothing left. He roared again. I covered my face with my arms and waited for the pain the sink in, hoping he’d make death come quick and not make me suffer.
His burning breath brushed across my skin, and I screamed, my vocal cords shredding as the sound ripped up my throat. But the shadow of him faded, as he pushed up on his hind legs. I glanced through my fingers as he gnashed his teeth and stared down at me. I pushed myself up on my arms, but they trembled and I fell back down to the stone.
“Dad,” I whispered.
He roared. My hair blew back from his breath. But then he turned away from me and ran toward the street and up the hill.
Guards tried to block his path but he whipped them out of the way. More casualties. More bodies cast aside. He bounded faster, falling to all fours and picking up speed until no human would be able to catch him.
Mom rushed to my side and helped me up. Her glassy eyes wept, as she shivered and wrapped her arms around me. “I’m so sorry, Fallon. You know it wasn’t him. Don’t you?”
I pulled her closer, the familiar scent of home rolling from her hair, but not giving me the serenity it usually did.
“We’ve lost him, Your Majesty.” The decorated guard who’d greeted me with Alizeh marched up beside us, his jaw tighter and more dire than he’d been in the hopeful glow of morning. “He disappeared into the forest and headed up towards the mountains. I’ve sent men in after him, but it will be difficult to find him in that terrain.”
Mom’s body collapsed in my arms. “Keep looking. Don’t stop until you find him.”
I rubbed my knuckles along her spine as her tears bled through my shirt, soaking my skin. “They’ll find him.”
“Maybe.” She looked up at me, completely shattered, her heart broken. “But what will happen if they do?”
She wiped her hands over her face and pulled away from me, then slipped off to address the remaining guards. Always the strong one.
I gazed out over the mess in the square. The broken market stalls. Banners tattered, benches splintered, and the mass of injured bodies barely moving on the ground. The chessboard splashed with my father’s blood already drying and seeping into the concrete. Every emotion hit me at once. Rage. Despair. Hopelessness. Until they burned so hot in my veins I boiled over into numbness. I kicked the black king still standing on its stained square. A jolt of pain shot up my leg as it tumbled over and lay among the other casualties.
Behind me someone clapped, slow and mocking. I whirled around, Harding and Kalmin stood with Dormand and the others from Takka’s, their faces haunted and stark.
Dormand stopped clapping and stepped out from the rest of the group.
“Are you going to try and tell us there’s no beast now, prince?”
Continue the adventure in Heir of Beauty
Heir of Beauty
1
27th May
Dusky moonlight filtered through the high library window painting lines across the shelves of books. When did night fall? I rubbed my hands over my face and blinked my tired eyes as the words in the open book across my lap began to blur. I slammed it shut then chucked it onto the pile of ones I'd already read and lay back on the floor. Another dead end. Another waste of time.
My father still hadn’t come home and no one seemed to have any idea where to look. No rumors had surfaced from the neighboring kingdoms. No news or gossip on where he’d gone in the morning paper. Just embellished recounts of the ‘market massacre’ accompanied by a blurry image of him splashed across the front page, his teeth bared and stained with blood. The guards took turns in an endless loop of search parties, each one returning empty-handed, my mother's heart breaking piece by tiny piece with every failed attempt.
The last few days played over in my mind. Every time I wasn’t concentrating on something else, the memories crept in. Like insects that buzzed around my head and nipped at my skin when I least expected it. Tiny pinpricks to keep me from forgetting. The stench of blood and sweat on my clothes. The sharp grit of rocks cutting into my back as I begged for my life. The hollow, cracking sound of the guard’s bones snapping so easily, like brittle twigs in the forest. Each image haunted my thoughts and poisoned my dreams until sleep wouldn’t come at all. Every time I closed my eyes I relived the horror again and again.
I grabbed another book from the never-ending pile and cracked it open. If only I'd taken the time to read most of these when I been assigned them by my tutors, instead of skipping out to find something more fun to do, I might not be stuck scouring over them now. Searching for answers to questions I hadn’t even figured out to ask yet.
I thought of Veda. Her charming crooked smile, and the way she bit down on her thumb when she concentrated hard on something. The way her amazing brain spun faster than I could ever expect to catch up to. She would be great at this research. She read fast and everything always seems to make more sense with her around. I'd asked her to look for me at the castle when her father finally let her go, but she still hadn’t arrived. Or maybe she'd heard about the chaos in the marketplace and stayed as far away from me as she could get. Whatever the reason, I wished I had a chance to explain. Maybe then I could focus instead of trying to think about what I’d done wrong.
The door creaked and a sliver of light from the hall grew larger as Mom entered the library. Her stare narrowed at the burning lantern on her desk then popped wide again as she spied me sitting amongst piles of books on the floor.
"Fallon, here you are. No one has seen you for hours, but I just assumed you'd gone out for a while. I never expected to find you in here."
She clicked the door closed behind her, then rested against the wooden frame. Her normally glowing face seemed dull, even in the flickering firelight. The toll of my father's condition slowly sucking the life out of her beautiful looks.
"I can leave if you wanted some time alone." I brushed the dust off my knees and grabbed a few more books from the pile, clutching them tightly in my arm, then stood next to the desk.
"Of course not, stay as long as you like. I just needed to get something quick anyway."
The stiffness in my back and shoulders ached now that I'd stood upright again. I stretched my arms over my head, a relieved squeal escaping my lips.
“Been a long time since I've seen you reading in here,” Mom said as she cast her glassy eyes to the ceiling. “I remember when you were small, you used to hide in the corner every evening and wait for me to come look for you. I’d sit in my chair, then you would climb up on my lap and we would read stories together for hours. Just you and me and all the magic in the world."
She gave a quick nostalgic smile, then scurried from the door and pulled open a long thin drawer on the desk. She rummaged through the pens and papers until she found a small blue envelope and tucked it into her palm.
She closed the drawer and tapped her fingertips on the desktop. “It would be nice to have some of that magic right now, don’t you think?”
I sighed. “Yeah, it sure would.”
“But I guess those days are long past now. I’ll let you back to your reading.”
"Mom—" I reached my hand out toward her then grabbed the air and let it drop to my side. Another opportunity to ask her about Edwin Macario's journal and the lies he claimed my parents had told me. But I couldn't do it now. My father’s disappearance already forced her to endure so much pain, I couldn’t add to her struggle. Once they found my father I could try again.
"What is it, dear?"
"Never mind." I grabbed the back of my head and stretched my neck toward the skylight. Maybe I should just take a chance and ask her.
“Okay.” She looked me over as if waiting for me to continue, then her questioning stare hardened and pierced through my skull. “There is something I need to tell you though."
I pulled my head right again as she crossed her hands politely in front of her, the true queen comm
anding my attention.
"The Council has asked to see you. With your father's disappearance, the kingdom is vulnerable and we need you to step up and take a more active role in the day to day operations."
An ache burned in the bottom of my stomach and I winced forward. “Shouldn't we wait a bit longer? He’s only been gone a few days.”
"The kingdom needs stability now. He's been battling the curse for a while and even if we did find him soon… I mean…when we find him soon, no one knows how long it will be before he is himself again. Or how long it will take to reclaim the trust of the Aborians.”
I huffed, the low sound of my breath echoing through the tall room.
"Fine. If that's what I need to do.” The ache twisted. Deeper. Sharper. The red splatter of pomegranates on my white gloves flashed in my brain. “But I don’t think it’s a good idea. I mean, I doubt anyone is going to listen to me. I might just make things worse.”
Mom crossed the room and sandwiched my face in her delicate hands. “You’ll do just fine. And I’ll be there to help. I know this isn't how you might have envisioned taking over the throne, but I really need you to step up and take on the challenge. Not only me, but Aboria desperately needs a leader right now. The kingdom needs you.”
I tugged her hands from my face and clasped them tight in my own. “The kingdom needs you too, Mom."
She sighed and turned away. "I am afraid the demands of your father's search are taking up more of my time and energy then I expected. Besides, deep down I am just a village girl, when times get rough, the kingdom is quick to remind me of that fact."
"Well, just tell them all to take a flying leap off a cliff. You’re one of the strongest, smartest women in all the kingdom, probably even further than that. Anyone who doesn't see that is blind."
Fallon: Son of Beauty and the Beast (Kingdom of Fairytales Boxset Book 6) Page 9
