War of Her Heart (War of Her Heart #1)

1. Chapter 1

1

Chapter 1

Violet

The rustling of the fabric of his pants being rubbed together while the servants folded them. The click of the clasp on his leather bag as the servants filled it with his clothes. The most wretched sounds I had ever heard.

I should have been the one doing those things. I should have packed his clothes and helped him ready for his trip. But I couldn’t. Every task the servants accomplished—every fucking thing they packed—brought us one step closer to his inevitable departure, where he would leave to begin his engagement to another.

I didn’t know what I did to the gods to deserve to have to watch the love of my life walk out the door to spend the next six months getting to know his future wife.

Actually, I did.

That was what happened when you fell in love with someone so far out of your reach that you shouldn’t have had him to begin with.

Calum Evers. The Sovereign of the Mountain Realm. He was always destined to marry the daughter of another Sovereign, but I didn’t know it would happen so fast.

We lived in the kingdom of Alentara. Thousands of years ago, before there was any order every type of faerie and creature lived together under pure chaos. They fought each other to survive. Fae—the most humanlike of the faeries—were among the easiest prey because they had no powers to protect themselves. They stayed hidden, constantly looking over their shoulders.

Then, a powerful witch named Evidannan came along. She summoned every fae to the center of the land. She told them of her plan to magically split the land into realms where everyone and everything was placed in the realm that they could live the most peacefully in. She painted a picture of order where instead of being hunted by creatures, fae would be given power and protection in their realms. All that the witch asked was that the center of Alentara, where she was to complete the spell, becomes her home. Eager for a place of safety, the fae were willing to do whatever it took to help her make it happen.

Of course, each realm needed someone to rule and keep order in the realm, so she held a series of games where any fae could participate. The games basically turned into a fight to the death where only the smartest and strongest survived. She then assigned each of the winners a realm and gave them a gift to help rule their realm. All that was left was to have the Sovereigns give her a vial of blood so she could complete her spell. When she spoke the spell, the earth shifted and magical borders split the land into seven realms, each with a distinct climate and landscape to meet the needs of the faeries and creatures she placed there. The seven realms became the Mountain, Ice, Night, Forest, Flower, Ocean, and Sun Realms. While fae could move between the realms freely, other faeries and creatures became trapped in the realm Evidannan chose for them.

What the seven Sovereigns didn’t know at the time was that the blood they gave for the spell linked them to Evidannan, which gave her control over them. Control of the gifts she blessed them with. She gave them their power, and she could easily take it away if she wanted to.

She became known as Queen Mother, ruling Alentara from the center of the land. The Sovereigns feared losing their gifts and their realms, so they did everything Queen Mother told them to do, without question. Whatever she wanted became law.

Queen Mother told the Sovereigns they must marry from the royal bloodlines of the seven realms in order to keep their blood pure, which is why many ended up in arranged marriages.

I thought Calum and I would have a few hundred years before we had to face this, but after everything that happened the last few years, everything changed.

When I was still a small faeling, my father became the Commander of the Mountain Realm’s Guard and he moved us into the castle. It was customary for the Commander to live in the castle to ensure that the Sovereign was always protected. Commanders were raised in the Guard where they knew if they wanted the chance to become Commander, the highest title in the Guard of each realm, they must focus their entire lives on that, meaning no wife, no children. Obviously, my father never planned on having a child.

He also never planned on meeting my mother and falling in love.

She ended up pregnant, and he dropped his dream of becoming Commander and married my mother. She died during childbirth, something unheard of among fae, which left my father alone with a baby that he had no idea how to take care of.

He realized almost immediately that something wasn’t right with me. I guess that came with whatever curse that killed my mother. He could feel my heart stop, as if I died for a second, and then start back. He traveled to the Land of the Healers with me looking for answers. I was the only thing he had left of my mother, and he couldn’t let anything happen to me. He needed to protect the only piece he had left of her at all costs.

No one knew how to cure what I had because they had never seen a faerie that had something wrong with their heart. He spent years traveling within the Land of the Healers with me, going door to door, begging for help. He finally came across a healer that came up with a solution. He developed a medicine that I had to take at the same time every day, and it pretty much cured my condition. I just couldn’t ever miss a dosage because he feared that one day my heart would stop, and it wouldn’t start back.

After our travels, we came back to the Mountain Realm, and my father worked as a border guard. He hired a nursemaid to take care of me since he was busy with work. Astrid took care of my every need, and when I was old enough, she began to teach me. I learned everything from basic skills a lady should know to how to communicate with any faerie I may come across—which seemed impossible given I was never allowed to leave our home.

One day while my father was working, a creature attacked Calum’s father and his Commander, and my father was the first one to arrive to help. Because he had trained his entire life to be a Commander, he was able to save both of their lives. The Commander lost his arm before my father got there, and Calum’s father knew he had to get a new Commander.

He was so impressed with my father that he asked him to become the new Commander of the Mountain Realm. My father told him about me and that he couldn’t leave me, and Calum’s father didn’t care. He told my father to bring me to the castle with him.

My father and the Sovereign, Calum’s father, became very close so we spent a lot of our time with him and his family. Calum and I were in the same stage of life so we played together very well. At first, it was an innocent friendship. I mean we were only faelings. It was nothing but chasing each other around the gardens, playing hide-and-seek in the castle, and sleepovers where Calum would tell me scary stories about the Night Realm, which is the worst and most evil realm in the kingdom.

After we reached our teenage years, Calum started avoiding me and anytime we were around each other, he would ignore me and act like he couldn’t stand to be around me. It hurt because he was my best friend. My only friend. Being a lady in the Mountain Realm wasn’t easy. We were meant to be seen but not heard, simply pretty things to serve the men. But it was different with Calum. Since we were so close, no one dared to say anything to me when I was with the son of the Sovereign, and Calum never treated me as less than him. One day, I finally got tired of being ignored so I went to his room to confront him.

I’ll never forget how he looked me up and down and said, “Fuck it” before he pushed me against the wall and kissed me.

He wasn’t avoiding me because he didn’t like me; he was avoiding me because he had feelings for me. I had always had a crush on him, and when he kissed me it opened the floodgates of feelings.

We knew it was doomed from the beginning because he had to marry someone else chosen for him before he was even born. We would sneak around because we knew if his parents found out, they would put an end to it. He told me he loved me within a fortnight of our first kiss, and I cried because I knew that it didn’t matter in the long run. He told me he could never love someone the way he loved me so I ran out of his room and avoided him for a week.

I couldn’t get any deeper into the mess we made because we both knew how it would end: me, brokenhearted and married to someone my father deemed suitable, and Calum, ruling the realm with I can only imagine to be a goddess-like wife.

When it was time for our family’s weekly dinner with the Sovereign and his family that week, I tried to fake a headache, but my father didn’t believe me and made me go anyway. I couldn’t bear the thought of looking at Calum after what had happened, but I didn’t have a choice.

Of course, I had to sit in my usual seat right next to him, but I avoided looking in his direction until he said something I couldn’t ignore. “Father, do you think the arranged marriage thing is something that I really have to do?”

I choked on my drink at his words. I gasped for air while everyone at the table gave me a mix of concerned and disgusted looks, then I quickly quieted myself and brought my attention to the napkin in my lap.

“Son, we’ve talked about this,” his father said, sounding almost remorseful. “It’s a tradition that must be followed. Something like that is not up for discussion. I wasn’t given a choice. I had to marry your mother.”

“Wow, thanks for that,” Celine said with a bite to her words.

“Oh, Celine. You know that I fell in love with you.” Thank the gods I was looking down so they didn’t see my eyes nearly roll in the back of my head at his response.

“But Father, what if I’m already in love?”

Fuck me , I thought. Here it goes.

“Calum, what are you talking about? The only person you’re ever around is Vi—” He stopped mid-sentence when he looked down to see that Calum grabbed my hand and set it on the table with his covering it.

“You little bitch!” Celine screamed at me as she jumped out of her chair.

“Celine! Sit down and shut up,” the Sovereign commanded his wife. He had always been a very calm and collected man, but I had never seen him look so angry.

I turned to my father to see the fear in his eyes. Fear of what would happen to me for putting myself in this position.

My father had always thought he had to protect me because of my heart condition. He called me his little bird. He’d always done everything in his power to ensure I was safe, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to protect me from this.

He couldn’t protect me from Celine.

She was the worst type of creature you could ever imagine. Beauty that acted as a mask for the evil that was inside of her. Her beauty was exotic in the realm filled with brown haired, brown eyed fae. She had porcelain skin with crystal-blue eyes and long hair as white as the snow that fell on the mountaintops during winter. But what made her horrible was how her insides contradicted her outsides. She was hateful, vengeful, and power hungry. She would put on a show for the Sovereign, though. If he was around, she would act like a helpless deer and always made sure she was never at fault for anything that happened.

She didn’t care about her son’s happiness. He was just a pawn that she could control and use to her advantage.

She had been planning his arranged marriage since the day he was born. She wanted to make sure his future wife came from whichever realm that she could gain the most from.

If I was in the picture, it would ruin everything for her.

“This ends immediately. You two may hate me for this but it’s for your own good. The longer this goes on, the worse it will hurt because no matter how you feel, Calum will be marrying someone else,” Calum’s father said as he got up and left the room.

My father looked at me with such worry in his eyes. I know he wanted to stay—to ensure I was safe from the evil that shot daggers in my direction—but his duty was to our Sovereign, and he had to be with him. My father quickly walked after the Sovereign to catch up with him.

After Celine made sure her husband was out of hearing distance, she got up from her chair and walked straight over to me. She bent over so she was right in my face and said, “How dare you. We let you move in with the Commander as a courtesy and you repay us by doing this? Corrupting my son? I will make you pay for this, you little whore.”

“Mother, stop,” Calum whispered. I looked over to him to see him looking at his plate. He was strong and confident in everything he did except for anything that had to do with his mother.

She was in control. Always.

Celine stood up, smoothed her dress, and walked out of the room. I was hurt that Calum couldn’t take up for me more than he did, but I knew my place.

The Sovereign’s order didn’t stop us from being together. We just continued to sneak around and spend every night together.

After a while, we got less inconspicuous about our relationship. I know that Calum’s father knew we were still together, but he never said anything. He was a good man, and he knew that we were happy. If there had been a way out of an arranged marriage for Calum, he would’ve found it. All he ever wanted was for Calum to be happy—unlike Calum’s mother who never showed her son love.

If I could’ve chosen which one of Calum’s parents would’ve died fighting a Reacher, I would’ve pushed Celine into the Reacher’s den myself.

It’d been three years since Calum’s father died, but it felt like yesterday. His death tore my father to pieces. He was sworn to protect him in duty, and he was also his best friend. He couldn’t have prevented what happened that day, but he still blamed himself. It didn’t help that Calum’s mother blamed my father too.

Calum, on the other hand, hadn’t shown any emotion. Anytime I’d tried to talk to him about it, he changed the subject. It’s like showing emotion would make him weak. He was immediately given the title “Sovereign,” but he wasn’t given the control of the realm. Instead, the Advisors of the realm were given the power to make the decisions, which would have been fine, except that his mother had snaked her way into quietly controlling the Advisors behind closed doors.

The Advisors had been Calum’s father’s Advisors during his entire rule, and they had gotten to know Celine personally. . . Well, the version that she wanted them to know.

The Queen Mother required her Sovereigns to have a group of Advisors that they chose themselves. They helped with taking care of the small tedious things like complaints from faeries in the cities to ensuring certain creatures were staying within their territories. In the event of an untimely death of a Sovereign, the Advisors made every decision for their realm until the Sovereign’s eldest child came of age and was able to take over control of the realm.

One problem with that: Queen Mother never specified an age.

So over the centuries, the realms interpreted this rule differently. .

Some realms picked a specific age, like one hundred, which was right when fae stopped aging physically. It took us one hundred years to look like we were twenty-five in human years.

Some realms chose to interpret it based on the “maturity age,” which to them meant the age they took their wife. Sometimes that happened when the Sovereign was eighty and sometimes, if they were stubborn enough, not until they were hundreds of years old.

Can you guess which interpretation our realm used? Calum would officially become Sovereign and get all of the power that comes with it when he married.

We never expected Calum’s father’s death, so we thought it would be centuries before he became Sovereign. To us, the arranged marriage thing didn’t seem real because it wouldn’t be required until it was time for Calum to become Sovereign.

You would think that his mother would want to drag it out as long as possible so she could keep her power by controlling the Advisors. She could keep pushing out an engagement for hundreds of years, which would give me and Calum a long life together, if she wanted to.

But there were two reasons she wouldn’t do that:

She hated me.

She knew it would be detrimental for the Mountain Realm.

Calum being so young made our realm vulnerable and an easy target for another realm to attack.

It wouldn’t be the first realm to fall from being too weak. That was the Sun Realm. It happened before I was born, but I’d read about it. They were once considered the most powerful realm because of one of the types of creatures that roamed the Sun Realm’s land—phoenixes. They looked like fae, but from what I read, they could shape-shift into bird form, burst into flames, burn down entire cities, and reincarnate if they were killed.

Some of the Sovereigns feared that these creatures were too powerful and that they one day might try to take over the other realms, so they found a way to kill them, permanently. It was a complete genocide. They sent armies into the phoenixes’ village within the Sun Realm and killed them all—even the babies.

The Sovereign of the Sun Realm tried to stop the armies but he wasn’t enough, and they killed him too.

With the death of the Sovereign, who didn’t have an heir, and the death of the Sun Realm’s strongest protectors, the realm fell. The faeries and creatures of the Sun Realm seemed to disappear. It seemed like no one knew what happened to them—or where they may have gone.

Celine had spies in several other realms, and they had heard gossip about “the weak and broken Mountain Realm.” She feared that another realm was going to make a move to destroy our realm.

She decided that the best option would be an alliance with another realm. She knew that it would have to be a strong alliance that the other realms would fear. And she did just that.

She managed to arrange an engagement with the worst realm of all.

The Night Realm.