Page 113 of Bound to the Shadow Prince

Is it? “I’m just anxious.” I gesture at the coast. “Castle Lios is a few days on horseback to the north. I suppose we can start in that direction.”

“Are you all right?”

“No,” I admit. “But neither are you. We’re out of choices.”

“Are you tired? It has been a long time since either one of us were outside. This is a lot.” His voice is gentle. “If you need a moment, I understand.”

I do need a moment. I also need five more years of food supplies and to have not left the tower. I need to not have a blood curse. I need to not be pregnant with a Fellian’s baby. But these are not choices I have, so I shake them off. “No, I can walk. Let’s go, shall we?”

I’m a terrible traveling companion.I know I am. Before we walk very far at all, my feet are hurting, my shoes useless. My legs ache with fatigue. I’m hot and sweaty and I dislike being hot and sweaty. Nemeth makes excuses for me because he loves me. I’m fatigued due to my illness. I’m fatigued due to years in the tower. I point out to him that I’m also a princess, and a princess never walks farther than across a ballroom. That, I think, startles him. As a Fellian prince, he has been trained in all kinds of combat, even from his days in the Alabaster Citadel. He has traveled to his homeland and back again.

But he is also a man, and not one with cursed blood. I have been sheltered all my life, and even in the tower, it was a sort of shelter once more.

So traveling? Not my favorite. It’s difficult and unpleasant and I want to scream when we finally find a rutted dirt road that’s more rock and mud than actual road and it stretches across the endless horizon without a single town or village in sight. I know I should be glad that we can travel without a Fellian being noticed, but when I pull the sixteenth rock out of my flimsy, useless shoe, I would give my smallest toe for a run-down inn with a free bed. Any kind of bed, no matter how filthy. Just a bed.

No, a chair, I decide. I would give two small toes for a chair.

I want to ask if Nemeth isn’t flying because I’m with him, or if he’s afraid of his injured wing. He hasn’t even attempted flight, despite spreading his wings a few times. Maybe we’re both on edge and doubting ourselves. Certainly our communication skills have been strained. Normally in the tower we can’t stop talking to one another, but ever since we’ve crossed the threshold, we’ve been more or less silent. It worries me.

Then again, all of this is worrying.

Like the shrines we passed as we looked for a road. Small roadside shrines to the gods are common, as travelers make offerings so they will be protected in their journeys. The shrines we’ve passed aren’t filling me with reassurance, though. They’re covered in leaves and detritus, the offerings left behind withered and ancient. The flowering bushes near each stone effigy that are tended to by travelers out of courtesy are overgrown and abandoned, and even the earthenware offering bowls on the altars themselves are cracked and look as if they’ve seen better days.

With how abandoned things are, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear we’d been in that tower for a hundred years and not just two.

“Not exactly a reassuring sight,” I tell Nemeth as we pause in front of the latest set of altars. Whatever has been left in the offering bowl of the Gray God rotted into a pile of goo long ago. I wrinkle my nose. “Surely the gods can’t be pleased with this.”

“I imagine whoever was here last did the best they could,” Nemeth says at my side. “Do you want to stop for a time and tend to it? Do our duty?”

I don’t. I really don’t. I’m tired and cranky and I just want to sit somewhere and rest. But we’re not exactly the favorites of the gods right now as it is, so I suppose it couldn’t hurt to kiss up a little. “Why not.”

We pause by the shrines for a time, tidying up. I brush the three altars—one for each of the gods—tidy of debris and clean the offering bowls, rinsing them out with water. Nemeth uses a knife to tend to the overgrown plants, trimming vines and cutting down overgrown branches from the flowering bushes. When we’re done, the altars look less forlorn. Even though we don’t have much food left, we offer a few withered vegetables from our depleted store. Part of me hates to leave those behind. We need them more than the gods—or whatever birds will pick them off because the gods won’t notice or care.

But Nemeth is more pious than me. He seems happy with our contribution, smiling at me. “If the gods have noticed us at all, perhaps they’ll notice our efforts, too.”

Noticed us? I don’t see how they couldn’t, given that we abandoned their tower. But I don’t say that aloud. You never say the bad things aloud.

Chapter

Fifty-Nine

Ashort time later, when the sun is setting on the horizon, we come across the first structure we’ve seen since leaving the tower, and it makes me wonder if the gods are looking out for us after all.

Granted, it’s not an inn. It’s a crumbling shed that probably once housed livestock. There’s no house nearby, though a large burnt spot a short distance away tells us what probably happened to it. There are no cattle, no horses, and the hay in the shed looks to be older than I am. But there’s most of a roof and at least three walls, and that’s better than sleeping out in the open.

Nemeth is pleased at the sight of it. “We’ll stop here tonight. Do you need me to clean it out for you? Make a bed?”

I shake my head, tossing down my much-lighter pack and using it as a seat as I rest in the old, moldy hay. “Just lay down a cloak. I don’t care. I’m too tired to care.”

He sets down his pack and crouches near me, a worried expression on his face. “Do you feel well?”

“My feet hurt,” I admit with frustration, even though I know it makes me sound like a whiny child. “They hurt and my shoes are dreadful. Ugly and dreadful. And my face feels hot. And my scalp does, too. And I’m tired and hungry and miserable andpart of me wants to go back to the tower and just lay there andstarvebecause it’s easier.”

Nemeth chuckles at my crabby response. “There’s no going back.”

“I know there’s not.” I sigh. “I wouldn’t go back even if we could. I’m just tired and not used to this. And why is my scalp hot?” I touch the top of my head, wincing when it feels scorching.

“You’re red,” Nemeth says, touching a finger gently under my chin and tipping my face toward his. “Your face is bright red and so is your scalp where your hair is parted. Why is this?”

---