13. Amelie #2
Kiaran came through the door holding two steaming mugs of tea.
His hair was freshly washed and he smelled like the fresh breeze from the Forest mixed with cinnamon.
He was dressed in a silk, long sleeve sleep shirt and loose pants.
The room immediately swelled with heat, I told myself it was from his body having just been in hot water. But I was lying to myself .
“Ready to admit that veiling my curse a dumb way to spend our time and not worth risking your life over?” he taunted, positioning himself at the foot of the bed and stretching his arm to hand me my tea.
“Nope.” Because tricking him the first time would be the only time. I wouldn’t lie to him again, especially if it meant him coming back to find me unable to wake up. I wasn’t sure he could live with himself for the rest of eternity if that happened because I lied.
“I enjoy spending time with you, Amelie. Meeting the men once was enough to get me through the rest of my time here, as long as that may be.” He warily sipped his tea, peeling his eyes away from mine.
“Can I ask you something? And if you say yes then you have to actually tell me this time.”
He thought on that for a moment, running his hands down his silk pajamas. “Anything.”
“Will you tell me about your curse? Maybe if I understood the magic behind it I could focus harder on what exactly to veil.”
“You don’t tamper with the fates set by the High Priestess,” he answered. If Ethel was right, my magic was elemental. The High Priestess may not know it was being tampered with.
“Fine. But tell me about it anyway, why were you sent here?”
He took a deep breath in and lifted himself to lean back on the wall, legs dangling off the small bed.
“I was a really bad kid. I come from one of the most coveted families in Avonya. My fate was to become a great High Priest and sit with the next High Priestess as my wife. From the day I was born, the Coven knew that. Fundamental school was easy for me, the teachers paid me no mind because of who my parents were, and my peers hated me for it. A few boys who were a little older than me were the only ones that would talk to me. They were the children of those who’d been exiled from the Coven for using Black Magic. ”
I listened intently, appreciating that he started from the beginning. “I’ve read a little about Black Magic, what makes someone choose to use that?” I asked.
“Witches don’t hold equal power. For example, I was one of the most wealthy with it.
My family has had so many advantageous bloodlines cross that our magic is one of the strongest Avonya’s ever seen.
Others have not been so lucky and their magic is weak.
Mostly useless. So, they would conjure Black Magic to have more power.
“Anyway, those boys taught me a lot of what they knew. The Black Magic I’d learned alongside all of my other power was lethal.
Once it was a part of me, it was hard to control.
I was young and stupid and so fucking hungry for the position of power that was promised to me.
My mother warned me over and over again to seek help from the healers to rid my body of the darkness, but I never listened. ”
“And you get on me for not doing as I’m told.” Kiaran shot me a disapproving glance. “Sorry, continue.”
“But my mother fell pregnant again and it was killing her. She exhausted the maternal power she had with us, and another would be her demise. The High Priestess ordered me to use the Black Magic I’d learned to interfere in the delivery, to save them both.
My mother is extremely important to the Coven.
Losing her would be detrimental to the hierarchy. ”
My stomach churned, fear rose in my throat as I wrote the end of this story myself. I pulled my knees to my chest, not knowing if I should go to him.
“I was to be at my mother’s side to deliver the child.
Her labor was agonizing to witness, not only was she in pain, but her power was fading.
But I was too early with my intervention.
I swore I heard the baby girl talking to me, that she said she was okay now.
I know I heard her cry. I executed everything perfectly, but when the healers tended to my mother, I went to check on my baby sister, but she was gone.
Her soul had vanished.” A tear slipped out of the corner of Kiaran’s eye.
He wiped it away quickly as I crawled toward him.
I grabbed his hand, pressing a kiss to his knuckles.
“You didn’t mean to do that. Why would they punish you for something that was entirely accidental?”
I leaned my head on his shoulder, he responded by tilting his on top of mine.
“I didn’t follow through with my orders.
They were so sure I would save them both that they’d placed a fate on my baby sister already.
Because she didn’t get the chance to fulfill that fate, at my hands, I had to stand in front of the High Table for sentencing.
The only way back is to feel the pain and suffering that I’d caused my mother.
She was devastated. She wouldn’t look at me.
I killed my baby sister and lost any grain of respect my mother had left for me.
All in one fell swoop. If I’d listened to her and seen the healer, the High Priestess would’ve never placed those orders upon me. ”
My heart shattered for him. He was just a boy when the pressure to keep his sister and mother alive was set to crush him. I kept my brothers alive, fed and clothed, but their fate had never been so directly in my hands like Kiaran had been subjected to.
“How do you break your curse?”
Kiaran squeezed our now interlocked fingers tighter. “I am to perform a sacrifice every Winter Solstice. I have to give up something that causes me unimaginable pain. If it doesn’t mirror the pain my mother has suffered, I remain here.”
“What will you give up this year?” My throat closed in on itself, thinking of the impending Winter Solstice.
The longest night of the year, and the night my mother birthed me nearly twenty-five years ago.
This year, Solstice fell on my birthday.
I told myself it was a coincidence, but the heat rising in my eyes told me it wasn’t.
Kiaran turned to look at me, his eyes were fierce with defeat. “My curse has not locked in yet, so I’m not sure. Someday, I’ll feel the joy of loving something then have it ripped from me as my sister was from my mother.”
Would he sacrifice me? No, he didn’t love me. It wouldn’t cause him an endless pool of pain to lose me, right?
“No. Please don’t worry about that. The fates cannot cross between celestial and mortal blood.”
The dam broke in my eyes, washing away my thoughts. I breathed in the smell of the room and focused on the cinnamon and leather coming from Kiaran. I closed him out of my mind. How could I tell him what I knew now about my blood?
“That’s not fair.” My already shattered heart doubled in broken pieces.
“It is the fate that was chosen for me. It’s written in the stars. Wicked as it may be, it will happen. Winter Solstice is coming, I will fail another sacrifice and life will go on. If you’re planning on staying here, which I hope you are, at least I will have company in my waiting.”
I nodded, because words were escaping me as I listened to the man in front of me accept a fate that wasn’t just. Fearful now that maybe I was his way home. A Morgenstern. It can’t be a coincidence.
“Can I ask you something now?” he asked, a lighter tone in his voice now.
I nodded again, still keeping my thoughts to myself. Locked deep within where no one but me could find them. Where I kept all of my pain.
“Have you ever been in love?”
The answer was no, I hadn’t. I couldn’t give any insight on the feeling because I’d barely loved myself. I had no simple pleasures to love, and the love for my family was a given. I did not know how it felt to love someone because you wanted to.
“No, but I’ve dreamed of it. All my life, I’ve watched myself fall in love with a Prince who loves me back.”
“Tell me about one of them,” Kiaran asked.
“About what?”
“The dreams, tell me about one of them.”
His arm wrapped around my shoulder and I nestled into his side. Tingles broke out over my skin at the intimate touch and the safety I felt with him.
“Don’t laugh. This is my favorite one, so you can’t make fun of me.”
“I promise I won’t laugh.” He held up a pinky. I wasn’t sure why, so I just looked at it. He must’ve realized I didn’t know what to do with it, so he took my hand and linked my pinky to his.
“It’s a pinky promise, now tell me.”
I felt my cheeks heat and I curled back into his side so he wouldn’t see the effect he had on me.
“Okay, so the first thing I saw was water. An ocean of it, I was standing on the balcony of a Palace that overlooked the massive waves and an empty beach of bright white sand.” I stopped, he needed more background.
“One thing about my dreams is that a lot of them are never ending stories, I’ve never seen the Prince’s face but he’s the same presence in every dream, this one started the night before and he’d rescued me from my room in Holleberg in the dead of night. ”
Kiaran laughed. “Okay, got it. Continue.”
“So, I was watching the waves roll in and slide onto the beach. The balcony was off of a luxurious sitting room. Leather couches, beautiful paintings, large intricately threaded rugs, and an entire wall of ciders and ales. The sea breeze whipped my hair all around, it was a mess.”
“I’m shocked.” Kiaran interrupted with a mocking hand over his chest.
“Ha. Ha. Anyway,” I drawled, “the Prince came up from behind and wrapped his arms around my waist. He kissed each side of my face over and over again, leaving no piece of it untouched by his lips. He told me when we were on our way to the palace the night before that he would need to be in important discussions the whole next day but he would cancel the rest of his schedule for the week after that. It was barely past breakfast, so I turned to face him and asked him why he wasn’t in his meetings.
“He smiled and said that he had more important things to do. Then he picked me up and carried me through the sitting room, down a long hallway with dark stained wood floors and bright white walls. I was folded over his shoulder laughing, and he had nearly taken a sprint to get to where he was taking me. He carefully made it down the stairs and quietly opened a door that led outside. Then, he laid me down on the soft ground in a massive garden. the flowers were in full bloom. He positioned himself between my legs when he picked a water lily off its stem. He handed it to me and pressed a gentle kiss to my lips before making love to me.”
Kiaran’s breath had slowed to nearly nothing, and our bodies had heated in each other’s hold.
I looked up at him through my thick lashes, trying to hide my curiosity at his reaction to me having sex.
I told him I was a virgin when we took that bath together, but I didn’t tell him that I considered myself a virgin only to sex that I wanted.
I knew too well what sex was, but I was sure I’d never felt it with anything other than malice.
I would never reduce myself to believing that what the guards did to me for years was sex.
Kiaran wasn’t letting any emotion show though. His features were steeled.
“Let’s go.”
Then the world around us went dark.