Chapter 23
Emmerick
Caym couldn’t reach me in the peaceful sway of the orchard trees. The young Princess and her mysterious accomplice were to thank for my freedom from Death. I shuddered to think about what may have happened to me had they not intervened.
I needed no food, no water, no sleep.
No one could speak to me in the mirror any longer. With my connection to the world broken, fragments of an ungraspable life passed by me.
While free to walk where I pleased, I always ended up at Lamoreaux and never wandered far—Elsedora’s routine had become my gauge of time.
Five long years had passed since my suffering had ended.
Each day, I watched her step out onto the lawn and spread seed for the birds on the frost-covered ground.
El, clad in clean riding leathers, often rode her Griffith away from the estate; the way the chaps hugged her bottom half made something stir low in my gut.
She’d return from her missions with her clothes sullied, tattered and sodden, and her skin bruised. I longed to run her a hot bath.
My adoration kindled into obsession. She’d become the only thing that ground me to the reality lived outside of my curse.
It was a terrible idea to imagine that if I woke, she might be mine.
Yet I needed something to long for. I made her my hope.
Even while at the estate, Elsedora never rested—as though she avoided having any idle time left to think.
She practiced archery and throwing daggers with Lark.
Or entertained Cassidee and Wyeth for a drink on the front veranda.
She teased her groundskeeper, the familiar boy who’d helped Lark unbind me, about the hedges being uneven.
I watched Dritan closely, always wondering what he’d meant by his mother sending him after me.
Like clockwork, El hosted my parents for dinner every other week. If my Mama and Papa showed at Lamoreaux, then I knew they were well.
Each time Elsedora embraced them at the door, it seemed her worries melted away and her smile beamed with genuine affection.
Maybe it made me a fool to put all of my dreams into a woman who couldn’t see or hear me.
She grew more beautiful the longer I observed her. Did she realize how absolutely breathtaking she was? How worthy of love she was? I longed to tell her that enough times that she would believe it.
If ever released from this curse, I’d never leave her side.