Page 20 of Till Kingdom Come

“Then he’ll eat the leaves and bark off the trees. Don’t worry about him. We won’t be stopping long. We’re close enough to hear the roar of the sea, and all of us are anxious to get home.”

“The sea?” I cocked my head to listen but didn’t hear a thing but the wind. “Wait. Surely, we’re not going out on a boat? In the dark? In this weather?”

“No boats,” he replied, and I silently thanked God. But I was still shocked at just the idea of sailing in the Great Western Ocean. Or whatever this sea was—it could be any sea for all I knew. But I thought if we were still near England, it must be that one, though I’d never actually seen it. I had heard that the ocean to the west of England—especially the one in the northwest—was really wild with huge waves that could easily swamp a boat. I was no sailor, so I didn’t like the idea of it. Though for some reason, now that he’d mentioned it, I could hear the distant roar of the waves too. It gave me an odd feeling in the pit of my stomach. Not dread exactly, though definitely not a pleasant feeling either. I thought I could smell the tang of it on the wind, but that had to be pure fantasy and my mind playing tricks on me.

“Our castle is on the edge of the water. On a cliff overlooking the sea.”

We got back on our mounts and continued on, even faster than we had traveled before. Perhaps the stags sensed they were close to their warm stalls and proper food. We rode for an hour or so more before the castle appeared on a far hill in the distance. It seemed to loom even from that distance, but maybe it was because I’d been thinking of the dark king and his fearsome reputation. I wondered if the stories about his demonic blood were true.

The castle perched on a craggy cliff, and I could see a long trail—it was much too narrow to be called a road—leading up to it. Its turrets and battlements had a thick layer of salt spray and ice, making it look like it was frosted with sugar from a distance. I could clearly hear the pounding of the waves. The stone shone through in places though, and in those patches, it was a dark, wet, gloomy gray. Above every turret was the king’s emblem, a red circle on a field of black. The flags billowed in the wind, ominous against the bruised-looking clouds threatening overhead.

Distances were deceiving, however, because the sun had set before we reached the trail. Since it was narrow and treacherous looking, the prince and his men stopped to get off their stags and go into the woods to fetch stout branches to act as torches as they traveled up to the castle. The deer were sure-footed, but the ice on the road was slippery. The prince rode back to take the reins right out of my hands.

“You’ll ride with me and let your stag follow us on his own,” he said.

“I’m perfectly capable of riding this stag up that trail.”

“No,” he said and made a little hurry-up motion for me to dismount. One look at his face told me not to argue, so I got off and stomped over to his mount to wait for him. He leaped on the back of the stag and reached down to haul me up effortlessly and set me in front of him. It jogged a memory that I thought I had buried—and suddenly it roared back with a vengeance.

It was the memory of a handsome stranger on a horse near the Maling bridge in Kent. He and his companion had been stopped by my friends, my brothers and I, and they had been made to pay a toll. The younger man had taken exception to it, and he was so angry that I had been afraid blood would be shed. We were trying apas d’armes,like we’d seen in the Tournaments, but I thought now it had been ill-advised. It really must have seemed very much like highway robbery, especially to a person who was not a knight, and that was what the younger man had accused us of.

He had pulled me up on his horse just like this, and he’d kissed me until I was almost swooning. He did other things too that were shocking and that I couldn’t think about for a while afterward. I’d never felt that way about a man before, and I still didn’t know what to think about those feelings. If that stranger had really been a man—I thought now that it was Prince Bracca all along, glamoured to look human. I should have known that no mortal could have had that kind of strength. It had been humiliating and awful—yet so exciting and wonderful that I’d dreamed about it for weeks afterward. It had left me craving more, and I thought about that kiss and the other things he’d done for a really long time afterward. I still thought about them even now. It was the answer to how I’d offended him at least. Fairies never forgot, nor did they forgive.

The idea made me blush, and I sat really still on the stag in front of the prince and tried to think of anything else other than the feel of Bracca’s muscular thighs beneath me. And that hard ridge I could feel through his trousers. I knew what that was. He pulled me back against him and thrust the torch into my hand. Light the way for us,a chuisle. It’s starting to snow.”

Chapter Six

The trail wound around and around the steep incline leading up to the king’s castle. Though it widened out a bit in the curves, it was still so narrow that I could look over the edge in most places right down into the snow-covered valley below. I supposed it was to help keep out any armies who might think to attack the castle, though I couldn’t imagine who might be brave enough for that. The trail looked as if it were seldom traveled, though certainly, that couldn’t have been the case. Perhaps it was only enchanted to look so dangerous.

I was still puzzling over what the prince kept calling me. It sounded likea-coosh-la, and I had no idea what that might mean. I decided I was going to ask him as soon as I got a chance, because he’d used the term several times. The stag we were riding had no difficulty at all reaching the top, and he went right into the huge courtyard and up to the palace steps, where a guard came out to take the reins from the prince as he jumped down from the stag’s back. I looked up at the imposing building in front of me and shuddered a little. It had tall crenelated walls with parapets forming part of the defensive boundaries and fanciful gargoyles peering menacingly down at visitors below. The towers had pointed roofs and were topped with those red and black banners flying in the wind. And all of it I could see was crusted with ice and snow. It was truly like an ice castle.

Bracca reached up for me and I slid down into his arms. The rest of our party rode toward what I assumed were the stables nearby. Bracca took my elbow, and we went up the steps, inside the main hall and into the belly of the beast.

The difference between mortals and the Fae had never seemed so vast to me before, as we walked inside the dimly lit palace. It wasn’t just the Fairies’ intricate rules and reasoning that were totally foreign to me, but even the way they lived. Take this palace for example. Maybe the inhabitants of this northern country were just used to the cold, or didn’t feel it as much, but it was freezing in there to me. It seemed to me to be almost as cold inside these halls as it was outside. There were carpets and tapestries hanging on the walls, but I was still shivering hard. Bracca glanced over at me and shook his head.

“I’m going to have to line your clothing with fur, aren’t I?” He said with a sigh as he shrugged off his own coat to wrap it around me. Of course, it was much too large, but I took it gratefully anyway. It was warm from his body and still retained some of his scent, which was enticing. And though I had to hold up the hem of the coat to keep from tripping over it, it was well worth it. We went down one corridor after another until we finally reached a set of tall double doors guarded by two soldiers who looked at me with interest and curiosity. They rushed to hold the doors open and Bracca swept in, holding tightly to my arm.

It wasn’t any kind of throne room, like I thought it must be at first, but a well-appointed bed chamber. It was much warmer than the drafty corridor and the room was dominated by a huge bed that had bed curtains tightly drawn around it. In a huge chair by the fireplace beyond the bed, reading from a sheaf of papers, sat a man I thought must be the monarch, King Larek himself.

I noticed his size right away, which was similar to his son’s, though that ended the similarity. Larek was blond while Bracca’s hair was richly black. He was a handsome man who looked to be around fifty, though according to rumor, he was actually quite a bit older. His eyes were a pale green, and they looked up at us keenly as we came in the room.

“You have the boy, then,” he said without preamble and without a greeting. He looked at me closely. “He looks as if he has Fae blood.”

“I noticed that too. He claims he hasn’t, but no one ever told him, perhaps.”

“I’m standing right here,” I said. A warning was good, lest I heard something unpleasant about myself, though I doubted this man would ever care about my feelings. As if to prove it, the king glanced at me and then turned right back to his son as if I hadn’t spoken at all.

“He has the look of something other than an Elf, though. Taller. And his ears aren’t pointed.”

Bracca looked down at me and shrugged. “Yes, I noticed that.”

From the bed I heard a female-sounding groan followed by a muffled curse. Bracca grinned and took my arm again. He began to pull me toward the door. “We’re interrupting, I think. Or perhaps keeping someone awake. Your companion sounds as if she’s ready for us to go, and we need to get some food and rest anyway. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Be sure to come back and speak to me later. I want to hear about your journey.”

Bracca gave him a short bow. “Of course.”

The king waved a hand at him, and off we went, back out into the drafty hallway. “I’ll take you to my room, now that we’ve spoken to him and get the servants to bring you hot water to bathe.”

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