Chapter 5 #2
I said a quiet prayer to the Fallen to spare his life, probably the millionth one I’d made on his behalf since he’d been taken away.
I could barely sleep thinking about it. He had been my constant watcher, a good and loyal servant to me and my father.
And now my face was the reason he would lose his life.
It was unbearable. But what could I do? I had no more power than an animal awaiting slaughter between these walls, and sometimes I felt as though that fate would have been preferable to the real one that awaited me as some brute’s wife .
Oh Cassius, I’m so sorry.
I was led to the veranda where a table lay at the heart of it, already prepared for our meal.
Songbirds were singing their nightly chorus as dusk drew in and set the sky alight in tones of gold and orange, the gardens stretching out below the balcony and the scent of flowers filling the air.
It was the perfect evening, but I was tired of perfect.
I wanted chaos, not routine. I swear every time I lived out the same day again, a little bit more of my soul chipped off and died.
How long did I have left before I became nothing more than a pretty little husk with nothing inside her besides the echoes of long-lost dreams?
A guard drew my seat out for me and I dropped down, eyeing the empty chair opposite mine with a scowl.
Typical Magdor to make me wait for her. She always did like to act as if she was above me, and with the way my father bowed to her whims, maybe she was.
I knew he loved her, and I’d tried to respect that once, but Magdor had never found her way to my heart like she had his.
She hadn’t tried to either, she let me see her cruel side, treating me like a demon-possessed child who needed exorcising.
Once, she’d locked me in the attic of the north tower without a scrap of light and commanded me to pick up the shards of a broken mirror on the floor.
At first, I’d refused, but she’d sworn to never let me out until I gathered every jagged piece and laid it by the door.
So I did, and inevitably sliced my fingers open badly.
I could still scent the blood in that room when I thought on it, still feel the darkness pressing against my eyes and the way my knees had dragged across the rough floorboards.
When she had finally released me, she’d coated my hands in some strong-smelling balm which had stopped scars from forming, but when I looked at my palms to this day all I saw was the hot, wet blood and a vivid memory of the heat within that attic which made me shudder.
I’d almost let her break me that day, but instead I’d found a stubborn, resilient piece of myself to hold onto.
After she was done applying the balm to my cuts, I’d walked away with my head held high and not a single flicker of weakness in my expression, ignoring the blood dripping from my shredded fingers and colouring my pink dress red.
Despite all she put me through, now that I was older, knowing I might have to marry her son was the worst kind of punishment she had ever bestowed on me.
“Princess,” a deep, male voice stripped the air from my lungs and I turned sharply, my heart thundering in my ears as my eyes fell on Kahn.
He was impossibly tall, with nearly twice the bulk of any average man and his face was like an oddly shaped potato with cauliflowers stuck on for ears.
My skin prickled and anger rolled through me in waves.
I didn't really care that he was ugly, but his personality validated my ridicule of him.
It was the only small power I could gain over him after all, though the jokes I shared with my attendants had lightened my heart in the moment, seeing him now only reminded me of the fear my laughter had been hiding.
He clearly thought we were engaged already. Something he was proving right now by showing up here without so much as a formal invite.
Fuck you, Magdor. How could you do this?
Though maybe I should have guessed; she'd proposed this exact thing recently and now here he was, thinking I'd actually summoned him.
“How nice your gown is,” he said as he stepped closer, his small eyes roaming over the swell of my breasts as my veil rested against them, making my fingers itch for a blade. “Is that...cotton?”
My shoulders grew rigid as I held off on answering, vaguely hoping Magdor might show up and usher him back to the pigsty he'd escaped from.
When I realised that wasn't going to happen, I came up with a way to spin this situation into an opportunity.
If I could turn Kahn off of me, maybe he wouldn't pledge himself as a suitor at all. It had to be worth a try.
I smiled beneath my veil, resting my hands on the table. “It's crinnask,” I said and his brow creased, proving he didn't know the word. Which he wouldn't have, seeing as I'd made it up.
Although Kahn didn’t have enough brainpower to prove himself as a worthy adversary, his scheming mother sure did. And since he’d started ogling me like a prize already won, I was happy to lump him into the same category that Magdor had earned from me. My enemy.
“Oh...of course,” he said with perfect confidence as he moved to take the seat opposite me, waving off the guard who tried to pull it out for him.
He dropped down and I swear the legs bent a little beneath his huge weight as he spread his thighs.
His tight white trousers clung to his crotch and a gasp got stuck in my throat at the sight of his outlined cock, the monstrous thing resembling a python laying in there, like a literal python, but it also seemed to be skewed at a strange angle at the top and bulged in places that didn’t seem right at all.
By the Fallen, that thing is not going anywhere near me. Ever.
He chuckled as he noticed where my attention had fallen then slapped his hard stomach. “Do you like what you see, Princess? I've been eating double my weight for the past week to help pile on muscles for the pag-ant.”
“Pageant,” I corrected him then pursed my lips. “And I don't think that's how muscle growth works.”
He ignored my comment, barrelling on. “I ate a horse last week. A whole horse. It dropped dead outside the Four Bears Tavern and the locals dared me to do it.” He interlinked his hands behind the back of his neck, looking smug as hell with himself.
I physically recoiled from him in disgust. Ergh, was he serious? “You ate a whole dead horse because some people you don’t even know dared you to?”
“Yes.” He grinned as if it was a great accomplishment, then his meaty paw slithered across the table towards me.
“I'd eat ten horses to impress you, sweet Austyn. I’d cut them up and chomp them down, bite by bite.” His purplish tongue whipped out, sliding back and forth across his lips as his attention fell to my body again and every piece of my flesh screamed.
My upper lip curled back as I retreated further into my seat.
“That is literally the last thing in Osaria that would impress me, Kahn.” My stomach churned as the image of this brute swallowing down lumps of some dead horse in the street filled my head.
Why couldn’t he have gotten food poisoning and died?
His mouth parted and his eyes dimmed with sadness. “Oh. Shame it was a dead horse then.”
“ What? ” I hissed. Did Magdor fuck a boulder to produce this halfwit?
“Well, if it was living, I wouldn't have been able to catch it,” he said with a shrug.
I shook my head, trying to figure out how this man's mind worked. Probably by rubbing together the two brain cells he had until something popped out.
“You look very appetising today, Princess,” he changed the subject, gazing over my veil like he was trying to peer beneath it, and I swear that beastly thing in his trousers moved.
How could I look appetising when he couldn't even see me?
It made me fear how lively that thing might get if he saw me without layers covering my flesh. Help me, Fallen .
“I like blue,” he added. “It brings out your…veil.”
Great. This dress has backfired hard.
“I like green too. And yellow. Aren’t colours great?” he mused as if he was saying something poetic. “So are you excited about the pag-ent?”
“ Pageant. ” An idea struck me, and a grin gripped my lips as I prepared to make this hulking gargoyle squirm. “I'm a little nervous actually.”
“Nervous?” he asked, one thick eyebrow lifting.
“Well my husband will see my body for the first time and...I get these rashes. I need a special cream for them. And then there's the ointment for the boils...”
He stared at me for a long moment, and I swear I saw a vacancy sign in the window of his eyes. After his two brain cells had processed what I’d said, he slapped his thigh and boomed a laugh. “You have no boils or rashes, my mother has told me of your beauty. You are perfect.”
He gave me a toothy, hungry smile that said I might just be the next dead animal he’d like to eat, and I truly began to fear being owned by this man.
The ways I’d imagined I might get out of this fate were illusions, mirages in the desert cast there to drive me insane.
But the pageant was approaching fast and this man, this brutish, vile, horse-eating creep was the front runner.
“I can't wait until our wedding night, Austyn, when you are all mine.” He lowered his hand to squeeze the head of the snake housed in his britches and I leapt up from my seat, horrified at how brashly he was behaving.
“How dare you speak to me that way?” I growled, looking to the guards at the edge of the veranda, but they made no move to approach.