Chapter 2 #2
She sighed and picked up a rag from the sink, half-heartedly wiping up the crumbs, pushing around dirty coffee mugs and bottles of water, crumpled napkins and plastic-ware, containers of muffins and donuts, a bag of oranges.
“He found me, actually,” she said, corralling the crumbs into her hand and then dumping them and the rag into the sink.
“There was a Prince in this world?”
She nodded, snagged the muffin container, and carried it the five feet from the kitchen to Damion. Popping open the lid, she held it out to him.
“Blueberry,” she said.
His nostrils flared a bit. His lip curled.
“You’ll get used to human food,” she said, taking one of the cakey muffins for herself and plunking the container down on top of the pizza box.
“Who is he?” Damion asked.
She sank into the burnt-orange, molded chair that had been given to Riker by one of his “girlfriends.” They were always giving him things—before their boyfriends came prowling around, looking for bikes to destroy.
“His mother was one of the western Raes,” she said. “Her sister took the family and left it to their father to kill her. Drowning is how they do it in the Lakelands.”
“Swamp-scum,” he said with a sneer.
“But he couldn’t do it.” She tucked one leg under her and slung the other over the arm of the chair, balancing the muffin on her knee as she picked at it. “He helped her escape instead. After she arrived, she met a warrior, a defector. And they produced a Prince.”
Damion nodded, the polished gray surface of his eyes turning distant. “If we could stop these inheritance killings, we might not have such a shortage of Princes to begin with.”
“But then we would have even more Raes,” she said softly.
“If they didn’t kill each other vying to become Radiant, they’d just end up dead fighting for the Crown during the Ascension.
” She cleared her throat, the dark clouds piling up in her head.
“Not that it matters to us,” she said, setting her half-eaten muffin on the coffee table.
“What happens in the Lands isn’t our concern. Welcome to exile.”
His glum expression was made gloomier by the scars.
They marred both his cheeks, the left worse than the right, where the wounded flesh had healed into a knotted web.
They sliced across his nose and even his lips.
His forehead remained mostly unscathed. It looked as though Lavana had tried to slice him into ribbons, like she’d toyed with him rather than simply killing him, which would’ve been more honorable.
“You have a Prince,” he said. “And you have the right to challenge Lavana to become our family’s Radiant. It has been ten months since my mistress took the High Road, there are only three months left for you to put yourself forward before the end of the year.”
The urgency was apparent in his eyes, as well as his voice. A year—thirteen months in the Lands—from the day the last Radiant died was all a claimant had to put herself forward.
She wiped the crumbs from her jeans onto the scuffed, fake wood floors. “I’m exiled, Damion. We’re exiled.”
“You were exiled by the Radiant. But my mistress is gone now. You have a Prince. Lavana doesn’t. That alone—”
“Riker has never even set foot in the Lands. He has no idea what it means to be a Prince. He really doesn’t even understand why he feels compelled to stay with me.”
“So, what are you saying? You don’t love him? What Radiant has ever loved her Prince? That’s not important. So long as you have one, that is all that matters, and you know it.”
He pushed aside the pizza box and sat on the coffee table—which groaned in protest—and looked her in the eye.
“You can go home, Magdalena. You can vie again.”
She gazed steadily back at him. “Is that why you came here? To convince me to return?”
“Why are you reluctant? Are you afraid?”
She stiffened. “I’m not afraid.”
“It’s been a long time,” he said. “Perhaps you have not kept fit—”
“That’s not it,” she said, though she hadn’t touched her finger-knives since she’d been exiled, let alone trained. She sat forward. “I am not a part of that world any longer, Damion. And I have no desire to be.”
Marred as his face was, it was easy to read. At the moment, it was disbelieving.
“We are safe here,” she said. “At least, safer than we were back home. We live in peace. All the races that have fled, Pixies, dwarfs, even some Elves—”
He recoiled. “Elves?”
“I haven’t seen any, but I’ve heard there are a few.
” She pushed up from the chair, sighing.
“That’s not the point. The Lands . . . all the fighting, vying for the family, the lust for the Crown .
. . What has it gotten any of us? I know how this world seems at first, but .
. . it’s better here. I have no desire to be the Radiant or to vie for the Crown or even to return there. This is my home now.”
Damion leaned back, looking thoroughly disgruntled, which to a human, she could imagine, would’ve been quite intimidating.
The scars were off-putting. People would stare and that was not the kind of attention any of them wanted to bring in this world.
Word might spread back to the Lands, and then mercenaries might come hunting.
“And what about the Elf King?” he said. “He has dragons, did you know that? They do his bidding.”
“The dragons are gone—”
He pressed on. “His torment of the small folk is ceaseless. The tides of refugees, endless. Now, we hear he is threatening the strongholds of the dwarfs. You know what comes after that,” Damion said. “We need a strong Radiant to protect our coasts and the peninsula.”
“And what has the Crown done?”
He rose to his feet, holding her gaze. “Rumors are the Crown is dying.”
A strange knot twisted in her chest. One she did not want to acknowledge.
One she thought she had untied many years ago.
She had no desire for the Crown, and yet .
. . it was in her blood. As much as she’d left it all behind, she was a Rae, inheritor to one of the seven noble families, descendant of the first Crown, who was mother to them all.
The Crown’s seven daughters had brought order and peace to the Lands, but then, after the Crown’s death, they had killed each other off until only one had remained—the first Ascension.
“Then may she travel the High Road to the Godlands,” she said, after choking back the sudden resurgence of her old ambition.
“Magdalena—”
“No,” she said. “I am done with that life, Damion. If you wish to return, that’s your choice. But I won’t. I’m happy here.”
He looked around, sneering openly. “Are you?”
The knot in her chest cinched tighter. She scowled, crossing her arms, annoyed, both at him and at herself.
After all these years in relative peace and safety and happiness, all it had taken to revive that restless energy, those old merciless aspirations, was word that the family and the province were up for the taking. That she could be Radiant . . .
But no, she was better off here. She didn’t want to go back.
And she wouldn’t. For what? To deal daily with her petty, scheming, backstabbing family?
To subject herself to the tedium of governance over the Eastern Cliffs and all its thousands of inhabitants?
To fight and bleed over and over, always sleeping with one eye open?
Who in their right mind would wish for any of that?
Let alone risk their life to take it on?
Not her.
Not again.
Never again.
“Where is your Prince anyway?” Damion asked.