Page 21 of Enchanted Crown
I couldn’t say I was looking forward to healing him; he wasn’t on my short list.
“Any words of wisdom?” I asked Esta as she shifted back to her human form.
She gave me a shrug. “Don’t mess it up? At least she is stuck in her human form. She has the most beautiful turquoise tint in her dragon form, and she was absolutely ruthless.”
The door before us creaked open and there stood a woman with gray hair in a long braid resting her weight on her cane. She moved and smacked said cane on the doorframe. “I can hear you, you know.”
Esta bowed her head quickly. “Sorry, Nana.”
“Child,” her grandmother said, taking her in. “The rumors are true. Come here.”
Esta walked to her grandmother while the latter took her in, head to toe, toe to head. “You are as lovely as ever. As fierce as ever, I see.”
Without warning, the cane came down on Esta’s toe.
Esta grunted her pain.
My magic flared, wondering what in the hell was going on. Was her Nana a threat? Should we consider this old woman a suspect?
“You should have come sooner,” the old bird croaked.
Esta looked back to me briefly before looking to her grandmother, a queen I could already tell Esta fashioned her own rule after. “A lot has been happening at Halikaara. I am sorry.”
“Well let’s have tea and biscuits, they always make things makesense.” She did not move to hug Esta, but somehow that offer had the same effect on the tension in Esta’s shoulders.
Before the rest of us could move far, that cane flew out of the old woman’s hands faster than possible to smack into Reyald’s shoulder.
“Mother?” he asked, clearly annoyed.
“Trying to force people into marriages? Not the way you were raised, son. You are so lucky I cannot shift.”
“I—” Reyald stalled. “There were other motivations at play.”
As Reyald entered the doorway to the cottage, she stared him down. “Oh, of that I am sure, but you still know better.”
Finally, the old woman’s brown eyes landed on me.
“Going to use that on me too?” I asked.
Her lips turned up in the slightest. “Going to give me a reason to?”
“No, ma’am.”
She gestured with her head, “Come on in then.”
As the door shut and I took in the airy little cottage, my eyes snagged on an easel with paints, a gorgeous painting of a sunset more than halfway done near the largest window. I felt a pang of yearning in thinking of my own mother who had loved to paint with watercolors. If she could have had a cottage like this and lived life away from the castle after all my father put her through, she likely would have loved it.
“Do you not like art?” Isolde barked. “Too blasé for a prince of Wylan?”
I gave my head a shake as I moved to look her in the eyes. “On the contrary, your artwork only reminds me of my mother.”
“Is she well?” Isolde asked.
“Nana,” Esta scolded from the seat she took at the circular dining room table which took up a fair portion of the cottage.
“She is dead,” I stated. “My father made her siphon so much ofher magic into a sword that she slowly faded away. A sword we later used to remove him from Wylan’s throne.”
“And there he is,” Isolde said with a slight smile. “The Wylan prince who wages war on us all. Challenging us to constantly consider who the real enemy is.”
