Chapter 18
Before joining the training camp, Kurt decided to make a stop at the castle. The witch’s words lingered in his mind as he strode toward the fairies’ quarters.
“Elise remains entirely unclaimed by a husband. And just like the employment you mentioned, it would be wise to submit your application before the vacancy closes.”
Unwilling to behave improperly, he had hurried away from the place before better judgment could fail him entirely. Though there was very little judgment involved when it came to the beautiful stranger who had kept him distracted ever since they crossed paths at the entrance gate.
Still, Kurt had never been a man to let his feelings outrank his principles. He cared little for titles themselves, but he cared a great deal for the dignity they demanded.
The Duke of Dornheim belonged to the von Eisenwald family.
Genealogy traced the origins of the house in Bromheim back to the invention of paper itself.
The noble name meant “iron forest,” and for centuries the family had honored it by serving in the king’s armies as knights, usually wrapped in metal armor and usually fighting somewhere among the forests they were apparently named after.
Kurt was the sixth Duke of Dornheim. At well over six feet, he was the tallest of all the von Eisenwald men to hold the title, and if one bothered asking the women of Bromheim, they would almost unanimously agree he was the most handsome as well.
Some might even have claimed he had once been blessed with charm and a romantic heart, though those qualities had suffered a noticeable decline after the terrible deception Josephine de Beaumont had inflicted upon him nearly a lustrum ago.
Josephine had entered his life during that sweet age when one is still young enough to believe in tender love.
She had been beautiful to the point of criminality.
She came from Falaine, from one of the better-regarded families of that country, and Kurt, always a gentleman with a curiosity for female specimens from faraway lands, had found Josephine the most delicate creature imaginable.
Interesting to a fault and carrying just enough danger to captivate any man foolishly inclined toward the hunt.
But Kurt soon discovered that Josephine had been the one doing the hunting all along.
Perfectly aware of her charms, she had wisely chosen not to place her hopes for marriage upon a single candidate, but two.
Kurt later found out he had not even been the largest prize in her sights.
After all, why settle for a duke when one could capture the interest of a king?
After nearly a year of courting, Kurt, a man of his word, had done exactly as Josephine requested with unwavering fervor.
He had kept his affections secret, hoping that by the time she reached eighteen, they might wed without opposition from her family.
Josephine had explained it was a long-standing promise to her mother to wait until her younger sisters were old enough to serve as companions at balls and other social affairs.
She had also requested they stop seeing each other for three months due to the delicate state of her father’s failing kidney.
He had followed all her wishes without much question.
He had trusted her completely. But deceit among their circles rarely went undiscovered.
Kurt eventually learned from his friend—Luke, the Viscount of Rosenwald, a noble in Falaine—that the King of Falaine himself was fond of summoning Josephine to his private quarters without so much as a chaperone in sight.
Kurt already knew Josephine’s mother had paraded her daughter before gentlemen of high standing ever since she had turned sixteen.
Balls and gatherings that served as excuses to present Josephine to any nobleman wealthy or important enough to take an interest in her, which, according to Josephine, had been a rather considerable number of gentlemen.
Wanting to verify what Luke had witnessed, Kurt set out to speak with Josephine in person.
The doors of the manor he had frequented so often, however, now remained firmly closed to him.
It was Josephine’s mother who came to the gate to inform him that her daughter was now to be courted by His Majesty, who had only recently entered widowhood.
Kurt waited for two days in the hope of hearing Josephine’s own account of the matter. He could not bring himself to leave without knowing whether it had truly been Josephine’s wish to pursue another man besides him.
Driven by desperation, he had done the unimaginable. He waited until nightfall, when most of the household would surely be asleep, to climb the gate and knock upon Josephine’s window. It was the closest thing to a criminal act he had committed in his entire life.
But despite the risk and the complete sacrifice of his dignity, his efforts came to nothing. He saw Josephine, yet could get no meaningful explanation from her. Once they were together, she merely lowered her head and repeated what her mother had already told him.
Kurt left not only with a broken heart, but with a complete and rather unpleasant education on love and the many aches attached to it.
Unfortunately for Kurt, that had not been the end of his history with Josephine.
Exactly six months after his romantic burglary, Josephine reached out to him in the form of a four-page letter, informing him she was with child and that he was soon to become a father.
She claimed she had been untouched by any other man and that the love she still felt for him had somehow taken the form of a miracle.
The situation with the king was dismissed in only a few brief lines, explaining that His Majesty had decided to pursue different prospects for his future queen and that Josephine was now free to reconsider Kurt’s proposal of betrothal.
Had Kurt been less proficient in mathematics or biology, he might have leaped at the opportunity to reunite with his beloved Josephine.
Unfortunately, upon noticing that Josephine claimed to be well advanced in her pregnancy and remembering that the last time he had touched her had been far longer than nine months earlier, he found himself unable to accept the rather ambitious claim.
Luke told him Josephine had ended up hidden away in the country house of some distant cousin, where she could give birth to the so-called miracle of love in relative privacy.
Kurt never saw her again, and afterward, he remained entirely uninterested in forming any attachment of that sort. He had mastered the noble art of dodging women’s attention almost as skillfully as he avoided injury on the battlefield. Not one had trespassed beyond his defenses, Adelle included.
It was not until he saw Elise that something in him awakened once more. It was a hunger he had not realized still lived in him, a ravenous urge that was already proving completely impractical.
Elise was beautiful by anyone’s measure.
He had to admit that not even Josephine had been as fair.
There was something about her that made him want to remain near her, to know her better, to claim her for his own.
But it was not only passion she stirred in him.
He couldn’t stop thinking about her smile, the innocence shining in her eyes, the way her hair moved as she spoke.
Everything about her seemed to draw him in.
And beneath it all lingered a dangerous feeling of vulnerability whenever she was close.
Witchcraft, he had to admit, was another matter altogether.
Only one duke had ever given his heart to a witch.
The miserable fellow had ended with half the kingdom against him and most of his coin vanished alongside his beloved.
It was a story that insisted on returning to Kurt’s mind these days.
And yet, despite every warning his memory supplied, one name kept returning to him instead.
Elise.
The thought of her haunted him through every corridor.
He walked through the hallways leading to the magical quarters of the castle. The place was well underground, requiring two flights of stairs to reach it.
Even if nothing came of this, he still felt compelled to help Elise.
After all, she had done nothing to wrong him or the kingdom, and he suspected that if she possessed even a quarter as much talent as she did beauty, she might become one of the most valuable members of the magical staff serving his friend, the King of Bromheim.
He was a man of honor after all, and since he had already extended his hand to her, he might as well do it properly and see the favor through. That was how his father had taught him and how he lived his life. If a thing was worth doing, it was worth doing right.
Kurt walked on, considering his position with Elise until the hallway eventually opened into a vast chamber where countless potion tables, glass vessels, books, herbs, and every instrument required for potion-making had been arranged in impressive disarray.
Around fifty fairies worked frantically, doing their best to devise a remedy for the latest camp disease afflicting the king’s army.
The illness was a wicked thing, said to bring down more men than the plague itself.
Once the sickness claimed one soldier, it seemed determined to collect ten more at once.
The disease was spreading faster than rumors of Falaine’s defeat, and at such a pace only the epidemic itself stood a chance of preventing Bromheim from winning the war.
Things had moved quickly since the King of Falaine declared war.
Kurt’s former romantic opponent had not accounted for all the territories of the kingdom uniting to make the conflict mercifully brief.
Prudent as the people of Bromheim were, the armies had organized themselves in a matter of days and invaded the enemy kingdom with a level of perseverance and rigor Kurt had never witnessed before.
Not only did his grudge against the King of Falaine compel Kurt to participate in the war, but friendship and honor did as well.
The King of Bromheim had long been an acquaintance of his, and after Kurt saved his life during battle, he had earned a place of deep trust with the ruler of his native land.
It was an honor Kurt did not take lightly, though at times it made his duties completely unavoidable.
Kurt walked through the vast chamber that occupied nearly an entire floor beneath the castle.
The few narrow windows admitted little light, revealing thick stone walls forming the lower level of the fortification.
Nearly two feet of solid mountain rock had been carved away five centuries earlier when the kingdom moved its capital from Altenburg to Metz.
He stood there, admiring the impressive architecture. His presence did not go unnoticed for long, and one of the fairies in charge came to greet him with a smile born more of politeness than genuine pleasure.
“Your Grace.” Fabian bowed. “What do we owe the pleasure?”
Kurt knew the fairy was usually buried under the responsibilities of organizing the magic staff, so he tried to be brief.
“I’m here to ask for a favor,” he began.
“There is a person most interested in joining your ranks. She could prove useful in understanding the latest disease coming from Falaine. She should arrive within the next few days, and I promised her she would at least be given an opportunity to demonstrate her talents.”
A faintly condescending glint passed through Fabian’s eyes as his lips tightened.
Unlike witches, the fairies allowed men to serve among them, and Fabian was the oldest still serving in the king’s court.
He had arrived there after being taken on as an apprentice by a fairy.
His protector had found him searching for scraps behind a tavern and, out of compassion, trained him in the craft of potion-making.
It was said Fabian had shown remarkable dedication in learning every corner of the craft, and what he lacked in talent he made up for with an almost heroic refusal to surrender his opportunity to become someone of importance.
His most notorious talent was not in magic, however, but in remaining in the same post for over six years.
It was plain that all those years of authority had carved into him a rather inflated opinion of his own judgment, a condition he appeared to maintain with admirable dedication.
“None of the people here were simply ‘promised’ anything, Your Grace,” Fabian stated wearily. “Besides, why would she be of any use with the illness from Falaine, might I ask?”
Kurt knew the unfortunate detail of Elise being a Falaine citizen could affect the appreciation of her talents, though more often than not people from the enemy territory were employed in all sorts of affairs precisely to better understand the other kingdom.
He hoped this might prove one of those cases.
“She’s from Falaine,” Kurt said. “And she’s a witch.”
“Ah!” Fabian huffed. “A Falaine witch? If she’s from the other side, she had better be good.”
“She is being taken under the ward of a witch from Bromheim,” Kurt replied dryly.
“But she’s from enemy territory!”
“You know there are no witches in Falaine,” Kurt replied, meeting the inquisitive eyes of the fairy. “If she is indeed a witch with any power over magic, she could only have obtained it after becoming the ward of a Bromheim citizen. A witch, yes, but a citizen no less.”
Fabian shook his head as though the mere idea of Elise had already become inconvenient to him. “Let her come. But I do not hand favors to recommended people.”
Kurt had a bad feeling about the entire matter.
However, he refused to invite someone to the castle only for her to be dismissed without a proper opportunity to prove herself.
Knowing how finicky the fairy could be, he decided he would need to make another stop with someone more sensible in matters of strategy and warfare: the Chancellor of Magic, Susanne.
If Kurt managed to catch the old fairy somewhere within the castle, it was almost certain she could be persuaded to use her influence to help Elise when the time came.
“I appreciate it,” Kurt said meekly before taking his leave.
“What’s the name of this witch you seem so determined to help?” Fabian asked, not without suspicion.
“Elise,” Kurt whispered, and a warmth settled beneath his ribs. “Elise de Varenne.”