“My king…” My voice is quiet, pleading. A last-ditch effort to speak to the core of him, instead of this staunch monarch who’d do anything to strengthen his rule.
Midas’s brown eyes hold no warmth. Just cold bark of a log forcibly cut from its roots. “I didn’t say you could stop playing.”
I blink at his words, my lips parting in pain as I drop my hands from the bars. He’s doing this. He’s truly doing this.
“Now sit pretty on your stool and play your silly music. Leave the men to speak, Auren.”
I flinch at his words as if he’d come forward and slapped me. My ribbons shudder on either side of my spine, as if they want to hide from his view. Slowly, I turn and walk back to the stool. My legs shake as I sit down, like a rock settling at the bottom of a pond, sediment billowing up, the depth of water keeping me oppressed from the sun.
I feel detached from my body as I see my bloodied hands lift up to the harp once more. The skin over the vein in my temple twitches, and my back goes ramrod straight, as if the hard lines of my shoulders can be a shield from piercing eyes.
The song “Shudder Serendipity” falls from the notes unbidden.
Each pluck of string is another incision that slices into more than just my skin, but into my heart. Every note is a lament, every movement a misery, every cadence a reverberating pang. Tiny drops of blood drip down the chords in sweet sacrifice.
I play it for my king. My protector. My savior. For the man I’ve loved since I was just a fifteen-year-old girl. I play it, remembering the first time I learned it, when he so sweetly sang along to the pretty rhymes, his voice an accompaniment to the campfire and crickets.
In time between times
In dawnlight we danced
Sipping from shine
Your lips like romance
Another tear falls from my eye, the haunting sound of his voice a long ago memory so far away.
The man who promised to always keep me safe is giving me to another, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Chapter Five
King Fulke doesn’t leave as originally planned. Not now that he mobilized his army and agreed to help Midas on a secret attack on Fourth Kingdom. Not now that he has a night with Midas’s favored to look forward to.
Every day that his soldiers march closer to meet up with Midas’s army, it feels like an attack is closer to being launched on me.
My hands curl over the book I have in my lap. Even though my eyes are on the page, I’m not reading any of the words. I’m too busy eavesdropping.
I’m acting as a pretty centerpiece where I’m sitting in the center of my cage inside the library. Back straight, ribbons draped across the chaise, I listen to everything that’s being said with rapt attention.
King Midas and King Fulke have been meeting with their advisors for the past six days in here, poring over maps and strategizing the attack and the following victory.
Apparently, Fulke’s men should be getting to Midas’s army tomorrow morning. They’ll breach Fourth Kingdom’s borders together, essentially destroying the peace pact of the six kingdoms of Orea.
Now sit pretty on your stool and play your silly music. Leave the men to speak, Auren.
Maybe Midas didn’t expect me to take his advice so thoroughly. He’d said it to put me in my place, but all week, I’ve sat and I’ve played while the men have talked.
They’ve talked, but I’ve listened. Watched. Pieced together their plans against Fourth. It’s almost funny how much people will say in front of a woman they only view as a possession.
Since Midas decided to have their war meetings in the top floor library for more privacy, that means that I’ve been able to hear everything. It’s been enlightening, to say the least.
It became very clear very quickly that Midas had been planning this breach on Fourth’s borders for weeks, if not months. And with his ready answer to Fulke’s bargain concerning me? It makes me think that Midas planned ahead for that too.
Which means...he had me come to that breakfast for the purpose of a lure. I was the shiny coin that Midas placed on the ground at Fulke’s feet. King Fulke couldn’t resist picking me up and slipping me into his pocket, not when he’d been coveting me for so long.
In his eyes, Fulke not only gets me, but gets the chance at owning half of Fourth’s lands and wealth. I admit, I don’t know a lot about the inner workings of a king’s mind. I don’t know how their advisors advise them. But I do know this: All men, whether they’re a king or a peasant, covet what they do not have. And these two men covet Fourth Kingdom.
“You’re sure?” King Fulke asks as they sit around the map of Orea carved into the table, gold-touched so that it gleams on every mountain range and river ridge. “Because it must be made clear that Fourth Kingdom was the one in breach. The last thing we want is for the other kingdoms to declare war on us.”
“It won’t happen,” Midas replies, confident and precise. “They want to be rid of King Rot just as much as the rest of us. The only difference is they’re too timid. They fear him.”
“Shouldn’t they?” Fulke counters. “You’ve seen his power, as I have. King Rot,” he repeats with a grumble. “The moniker is a true one. My border soldiers speak of the smell that wafts in. They plug their noses with leather stubs soaked in oils. And even so, they say their eyes burn from the smell of decay.”
A shudder taps up my spine like a chilled fingertip, making my ribbons twitch ever so slightly. King Rot’s reputation precedes him. Tales of how he rots the land to keep his people in line, how he’s vile and cruel. They say he doesn’t act with honor even on a battlefield—that he uses his power to make people fester and decompose, leaving their bodies in his fields for the flies to hatch maggots in.
“He’s purposely instilled fear to become untouchable,” Midas argues, my head turning ever so slightly to point my ear in his direction. “But he’s not. We’re going to prove that and take back the land he’s edged into.”
Fulke’s eyes dart up at him from across the table, a meaty hand skimming over burnished summits. “And the Blackroot Mines?”
And there it is.
After the shock at the breakfast when I heard Midas declare that he was launching an attack on Fourth, I’d been flabbergasted. Completely confused as to why anyone would want to take the risk of attacking Fourth. I knew it wasn’t just about the fact that Fourth was slowly edging past his boundaries. It couldn’t be. It just didn’t feel right.
So I did a little sleuthing of my own at night, sneaking into the library and climbing the rungs of my cage, reaching as far as I could to some of the shelves to snatch books in the history and geography section. I couldn’t reach many, but I did luck out and find one with a resources map of Orea on a front page spread.
And that’s when I spotted the mines. Right smack in the middle of Fourth Kingdom.
Midas smiles slyly. “The mines will be ours.”
Even from all the way over at the back of the room, I can see the glint in their eyes. The excited straightening of their shoulders. I don’t know what’s in those mines, but whatever it is, they want it. Badly.
Fulke nods, appeased, while his advisors look on with matching expressions, like they’re already anticipating the royal coffers growing, rather than the lives and deaths they’re directing. But then, it must be easier to sit in a castle and move cavalry pieces on a map, rather than facing a sword on the battlefield.