Page 45 of The Prince's Mage

As soon as he did, Aimilia rolled her eyes and took off toward the stairs dividing the entry hall in two. “I told you I’d be coming back to this. Given the circumstances, don’t you think you should stop coddling her and teach her our language properly?”

Gavril did not dignify that with a translation for Marcella or a response. He started up the stairs after her with Marcella and said, “I always appreciated our time at the academy. If it had been up to me, I wouldn’t have left.”

“If you weren’t royal, you would have taken the academic track and condemned yourself to a life of dusty books, squabbling brats, and the dreary monotony of rune work.” Aimilia scoffed, sweeping through the hallways. A few students—squabbling brats as Aimilia called them—were passing through and they eyed her commander’s cloak with wide-eyed awe until they spotted Gavril and Marcella. First, they eyed Gavril and his cloak with more awe, and then Marcella with shock—but surprisingly not disgust.

He heard one of them whisper the word ‘Sordes.’ One of them looked closer at Marcella’s neck, the only spot the scars marking her vitae path could be seen. Gavril pulled her closer when she reached up and tried to nonchalantly shift her hair so it covered the scars on her neck.

Aimilia shot them a look and said, “Don’t you three need to be getting to class?”

“Sorry, Commander, we’ve never seen a real Sordes before. I never expected they’d look so…” The boy in the front, none of them older than thirteen based on the trimming of their chitons, trailed off. He shrugged. “Normal? Like us? ‘cept for the hair of course.”

Oh… had they been looking at her curls and not her scars?

The girl in the trio peered around the boy in the front and asked, “Forgive me, Commander, Your Highness, we hear so little while we’re here. Is it true? She’s your wife?”

Could he not go anywhere without someone disrespecting his wife to his face?

Gavril lifted their joined hands, one of them his left, so they could see the lines running across his skin and the leather strip and metal band. He gestured to the etching. “It’s her name written in our runes. So, yes, she is my wife.”

Gavril was extremely grateful Marcella had no possible way of knowing what the word ‘wife’ meant in his language.

“Alright. Stop gawking.” Aimilia snapped, pointing down the hallway. “Get to class before I find whoever is in charge of you brats and demand to know why the three of you are wandering around.”

The three of them hurried away, but the girl looked over her shoulder and called out, “Your Highness, I like your hair!”

Gavril blinked for a moment before it hit him that the honorific hadn’t been for him. The girl had been talking to Marcella.

Marcella, however, was just looking at him and Aimilia with an expectant expression that they continue on now that the children were gone. Aimilia was frozen in place, looking between where the girl and her friends had been and Marcella.

Marcella looked between the two of them and said, “What?”

Aimilia blinked and shook off her stupor, speaking in their tongue, “Don’t tell her. That girl must have said it sarcastically. They were making fun of her.”

That would be the most logical explanation. But…

“But they didn’t call her a…” Gavril couldn’t even bring himself to say it, he hated the term so much.

“But the girl complimented her hair. It had to be fake. I mean, look at her hair! Pretend you’re not completely and disgustingly besotted with her and think like a Runai. In what world does any Runai compliment hair like that?” Aimilia said, gesturing to Marcella’s thick curls.

Marcella reached up and touched them, her brow furrowed at their words. She was clearly picking up some of their conversation or at least putting the clues together.

Gavril pulled her closer into his side and said, “Just because you were a brat at the academy with more cruelty than you knew what to do with doesn’t mean every girl is. I also like her hair.”

Aimilia threw her hands up and started down the hallway again. “Fine. She’s your wife. Do what you want.”

Marcella said again in her language, “What?”

He pulled her along with him as he started after Aimilia toward the library and said in her language, “The girl… she liked your hair.”

Marcella’s eyes doubled in size and she startled before catching her feet under her and keeping up with him. She reached up and fiddled with the ends of her hair again. “She was serious?”

“I don’t know,” Gavril said.

Part of him wanted to believe she had been. He was desperate for any sign that maybe one day his people could see Marcella the way he did, but his idealism and naïveté had killed her before.

Even if she did make a miraculous full recovery, she was always going to have the scars.

So he couldn’t let himself believe it. Not yet.

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