4. Chapter Four
~Evalina~
Gasping, I stumbled against the heavy kitchen counter, gripping it tight as if I needed the support. “What’s wrong, Lina?” Keerla asked, right on cue.
With the food all prepared, we’d agreed I would feign dizziness as an excuse to leave the kitchen and account for my absence among the other staff.
“I don’t know.” My hands rubbed at my temples. “I’m sure it’s nothing, I just…”
Stumbling again, I nearly hit the floor, but Keerla caught me just in time. “You need to lie down,” she instructed firmly. “We can handle the serving without you, can’t we?”
She nudged the nearest server, a lanky young man named Pavla who blushed every time she looked his way, and he readily agreed. “Of course, Keerla. We’ll manage, won’t we?”
The other servers all mumbled their agreement, more focused on getting through the meal without earning any criticism from the royal family than concerned about my well-being. The kitchen’s clatter faded as Keerla helped me to the door. Once we were out of sight, I straightened up and she gave me an encouraging pat on the back. “You’ll have at least half an hour before they’re done eating. Make the most of it.”
Whispering my thanks, I darted down the hall and to the narrow servant’s stairs that led up to the royal family’s bedrooms on the top floor.
As befitting one of the smaller fae kingdoms, Etta’s royal residence was modest compared to the grand palaces I’d seen in books, with only two floors and a basement. The kitchen sat in the below-ground level, the dining room on the main floor, and the bedrooms above. The main stairs would be guarded by the security team but the servant’s stairs were empty, allowing me to slip into Tarron’s room without anyone seeing me.
Being a creature of habit, Tarron had always kept his most valuable possessions in a locked box beneath his bed which I discovered by chance while cleaning his room one day as a girl of eight or nine years. My mother ran the royal kitchen and I acted as her little shadow, pitching in where I could. Normally, my mother tolerated my efforts with good humour, even though they usually hindered her more than helped, but on that day, important guests were expected and she needed to give the meal her full concentration.
Wanting to spare my feelings and still make me feel useful, she suggested I tag along with the servants who cleaned the royal bedrooms instead. Never having been on the top floor of the residence before, I readily agreed.
“Don’t touch anything unless we tell you to,” the other women warned me, and for a while, I obeyed. I watched in awe as one of them used her magic to eviscerate all the dust in the room. Even I felt cleaner after the wave of her hands.
Not all fairies possessed magic, and not all magic was the same. My mother’s gift added a little extra flavour to her food, making everything she made taste better. The kitchen had been a natural fit for her. I didn’t share that talent, but I had a little magic of my own, a talent I never told anyone about.
That day, in the royal family’s bedrooms, I used it.
Growing bored of the drawn-out process of cleaning the king and queen’s rooms, I wandered off on my own, poking in the other doors until I found the high prince’s bedroom.
Four years older than me, Tarron never paid me any attention when he passed me in the halls in the servant’s areas, and I never spared more than a passing glance for him either. With his pretty clothes, delicate features and lavender eyes, he seemed not quite real to me, an ethereal spirit drifting among the more down-to-earth servants.
If I thought he seemed otherworldly, nothing could have prepared me for his bedroom.
My mouth hung open as I stepped into the space. The high ceiling towering above me was the same as in the king and queen’s rooms, but descending from it, on pieces of willowy strings, dangled shiny stones glimmering in the sunlight that streamed through the windows. Blues and yellows and reds sparkled, the light dancing around the space until I began to feel I was floating along with them. It felt like being beneath the night sky in the middle of the day, and when my neck got tired of craning up to look, I lay down on the floor to stare up at them without having to strain my head.
I had no idea how long I stayed there, watching the stones twist and twirl above my head, but eventually, I rolled my head to the side and saw the box beneath Tarron’s bed. Dark and mysterious-looking, it piqued my curiosity even more than the dancing stones did.
Rolling over, I rested on my stomach on the floor and pulled the box out. The material forming the box was unfamiliar to me, making it look even more important than if it had been made of simple wood. Curiosity overwhelmed me, and I tugged on the lid only to find it locked. That would have stopped most people, but my gift allowed me to go further. Waving my small hand over the lock, it clicked open, and I eagerly pulled the lid up, excited to see what treasures I would find there.
At first glance, I felt only disappointment. The contents seemed to be pieces of paper and a few dried flowers that I didn’t recognize. I almost shoved it back under the bed without a closer look until something caught my eye.
A scribbled word, half-covered by another piece of paper, that ended with ‘wolf’. Not familiar with the word, I could have ignored it but something urged me on, telling me it could be important. Why I thought that, I had no idea, but I gave in to the feeling, lifting the paper out of the box.
On it, two drawings stood side-by-side, one of a man unlike any I’d seen before. Men in Etta were tall, slender and narrow, like the Etta trees that grew straight to the sky, but this man had broad shoulders, an unusually bulky chest, and bulges in his legs. Next to him was a large animal of some kind, and underneath them both, the cut-off word I had seen earlier: ‘werewolf’.
What did it mean? I’d never seen anything like it before, but I stared in fascination, trying to understand it.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Dropping the paper as I jumped in surprise, my head jerked up to find Tarron at the door, his lavender eyes fixed on me in narrowed slits.
“I… um, I… nothing,” I stammered, slamming the box shut, waving my hand over the lock to relock it and shoving it back under the bed, as if that would somehow convince him that he hadn’t seen what he clearly saw.
Heavy footsteps thundered towards me as he stomped over, pushed me roughly out of the way and pulled the box back out. Tugging on the lid, he found it locked, and he turned to me with anger burning in his eyes and confusion written into the lines of his brow. “How did you open this? Did you take anything?”
“No, I… I didn’t open it,” I lied weakly. I’d never been a good liar, and under pressure, I choked.
“You little thief,” he sneered down at me. “Give it to me. Whatever you took, give it back.”
“I didn’t take anything!”
In a panic, I tried to race from the room, but with his longer legs, Tarron caught me easily. Hooking my ankle with his foot, he pulled me down and I hit the ground hard, all the breath in my body forced out in one large whoosh. His angry hands patted me down, looking in every crevice of my dress for anything I might have concealed while I tried to curl into a ball to protect myself.
Finally satisfied that I hadn’t taken anything, he stepped back, his eyes still dangerously narrow. “Stay out of things that don’t concern you,” he said, spitting on me once for good measure.
My cheeks burned in humiliation as I ran back down the stairs and out of the residence, through the woods to the small cottage where I lived with my parents. My mother found me there hours later, still hiding beneath my own bed, terrified that I would be punished for my snooping or, worse, that she would be.
Tarron never told anyone about that day, as far as I knew, but for years after that, he went out of his way to make my life difficult. When I served him, he always found fault with it. When he broke something around the house, I got blamed.
The years of torment only ended when I came of age and his interest in me shifted. Now, he made my life difficult in different ways with his demands for my devotion to him. Those demands were what drove me back to his room and back to the box beneath his bed. If I could find out what he knew about my mother’s condition without giving in to him, I had to take the chance.
I’d seen the box there several times since that first day, whenever I helped to clean his room. The servants never cleaned it, and I certainly never touched it again, but it often moved, suggesting that Tarron himself must still be using it.
That night, I planned to open it again.
The hanging stones from the ceiling disappeared years ago, as Tarron grew older, but his fascination with different materials never diminished. More recently, he kept them in display cabinets around the room, labelled and categorized.
Those didn’t interest me, though; the box was my goal.
Pulling it out from beneath the bed as I sat on the floor, I waved my hand over the lock, feeling the familiar tingle through my fingers as my magic worked like a skeleton key to open the mechanism keeping the box sealed. When it clicked, I lifted the lid, holding my breath and praying that I was right. If I were Tarron and had a secret, I would have put it in there. Hopefully, I understood him as well as I thought I did.
Papers still filled the box, but they had been organized into neat files while smaller containers lined the bottom of the box. Flipping through the files, I looked for any mention of illness, medicine or cures. Towards the end of the stack, a singular word caught my eye.
Antidote.
My heart began to pound as I scanned the paper. Most of it was indecipherable ramblings about the effects of terrestrial elements on fae, but one condition sounded eerily like my mother’s illness. In the margin of that section, scrawled in uneven handwriting, it read: ‘Antidote: silver.’
What the hell was silver?
Setting that page aside, I flipped through the rest of the notes but nothing else seemed to relate to my current predicament. Frowning, I put the papers to one side and began to look through the small containers at the bottom of the box instead. Each one had a small piece of some unfamiliar material in it, with a label describing it. Mint. Rose. Saffron. The words meant as little to me as the material itself.
However, when I opened the second-to-last container, my breath hitched. Silver , the label said, nestled beneath a small piece of metal, almost cylindrical in shape, rounded at one end.
It might not be what I needed, but I had no better ideas at that moment, so I grabbed the container and the piece of paper, returning everything else to the box and relocking it before shoving it back beneath the bed.
No sooner had I scrambled to my feet than I heard voices outside the door and I froze, terror sending ice through my veins. If someone found me there, I would be in more trouble than I could imagine. In desperation, I searched the room for a hiding place, and when the door to Tarron’s room began to open, I dashed for the only spot I could think of: under the bed, right next to the box.
A woman’s giggle filled the air as the door closed. “You don’t waste any time, Your Highness.”
“Why should I?” Tarron’s arrogant drawl responded. “If you’re to be my wife, we need to make sure we’re compatible.”
The bed creaked and I covered my mouth with my hand, trying to stop any stray noise from escaping as I realized what they were about to do. Though I’d never had sex myself, my mother made sure I understood the basics of it, and my suspicions were soon confirmed as pieces of clothing began to fall on the floor on either side of the bed. My heart thundered in my chest as I pressed myself into the shadows beneath the bed, every creak of the bed frame above me sending a jolt of fear through my body.
“Oh,” the woman breathed, right on top of me. “You’re so hard.”
“I have been for hours,” Tarron muttered before I heard her gasp and him groan.
The bed above me began to bounce in a steady rhythm as I tried not to listen, or even breathe. The noises emanating from above me sounded unnatural and unpleasant, grunts and the sound of flesh hitting flesh. Closing my eyes, I tried to pretend I was anywhere else, internally reciting the ingredients to some of my mother’s favourite recipes to keep my mind occupied.
After a couple of minutes of exertion, the movement above me stilled. Tarron groaned again, loudly, and called out a name.
“Evalina.”
My entire body stiffened. Horror roared in my ears, drowning out everything else. Any second, I expected a firm hand to seize me and pull me from my hiding place.
No one touched me, though, and above me, the woman stuttered out a confused, choked whimper. “Th-that’s n-not my name, Your Highness.”
“What?” he demanded, his feet appearing on the floor next to me as he bent down to pick up his discarded clothes. One stray glance would have given me away, but luck was on my side. He seemed to be in a hurry.
“You… you called me Evalina,” she said, her slender feet also appearing from the bed above. “That’s not my name. And I don’t think we’re finished yet. I didn’t come.”
“Oh.” He sounded genuinely surprised for a second before letting out a soft huff. “I guess we’re not compatible then.”
His feet disappeared, heading back towards the door, while the woman’s hands appeared in my line of vision, snatching her dress from the floor. “Selfish Etta bastard,” she muttered as she slipped her shoes back on and followed him out the door.
I lay there another couple of minutes, making sure they had truly gone and wouldn’t be back for something they forgot before sliding out from under the bed with my hard-won prizes. I couldn’t be sure if they would save my mother, but one thing had become even clearer than before: indebting myself to Tarron was a risk I couldn’t afford to take.