Page 30 of Brutal Fae King
I huff.
“I lived my entire life in Thawallow, and I was fine.”
“Eyston is not like your tiny village!” he snaps. “Life is different here.”
“I still don’t see why I cannot see Maribelle!” I clap back.
The false king glares at me for a long moment. He scours my eyes as he glowers at me. I don’t let up on my return gaze.
“Fine!” he says, slapping the armrests and standing up. “Get up.”
I go cold.
“What? Where are we going?”
“Outside,” he says. “If I cannot convince you, then come see for yourself.”
Chapter 10 - Vicmar
She storms by my side, cute little face pouting as I walk us both out to the carriages. She is very much back to herself—which I have to admit, I’m pleased about. The way she barks back at me makes me feel a way I haven’t felt for a while, if ever. I’d never say it out loud, but I’m happy to have her talking back to me again.
There’s a certain smugness to her angry walk, but I know actually seeing the outside world is going to knock the conceitedness right out of that stride.
As we arrive at the carriages, there’s already crashing in the far distance—not close enough for me to worry, but enough for the horses to be tossing their heads, whinnying lightly in fear. The staff hold onto their reins tightly, but it hardly helps.
The lost queen startles next to me. Her green eyes dart around the scene, taking it all in.
“What is that banging?” she asks me eventually.
“It’s outside,” I answer vaguely, then shoot her a wide grin. “Are you sure you want to go out there?”
The grin seems to inspire her; her gaze steels over and she nods. I give her a slow shrug back and bark my orders at the staff. Before long, we’re sitting in the carriage, chugging away, the curtains closed, closing us in.
“It’s too late for us to go out of the castle town,” I say to her. “This is just to demonstrate my point to you.”
She folds a leg over the other and crosses her arms at the same time.
“I grew up in the human ice villages,” she grunts. “There’s no worse in the kingdom, I’m sure.”
I snicker.
“We’ll see.”
“Do you expect to shock me with poverty?” she asks me, eyes as sharp as flint. “Or pestilence? In Thawallow, we had an outbreak of the Weeping Fever every single winter, and it was so cold all year round that we never truly recovered. Most crops were impossible to grow. Every one of us survived by the skin of our teeth—I’m sure nothing a spoiled usurper like yourself could show me would surprise me.”
“Hm,” I grunt lightly.
She was glaring at me during her tirade, but she turns back to staring at the wall as we continue to travel.
“I know you grew up in the castle,” she continues. “You’ve been in the lap of luxury your entire life—I’m sure what you think is shocking is nothing short of mundane to me.”
That’s when I break out into harsh barks of laughter. Her head snaps back over to me:
“Lap of luxury?!” I snap. “You call being groomed to rule a kingdom via a cat o’ nine tails to the back luxurious? You claim that having an entire realm’s worth of lives in your hands is relaxing? Or making the decisions that inevitably end their lives a privilege and not some ongoing horror?”
She rolls her eyes at me.
“At least you had people around you,” she snaps. “Councils and advisors who inevitablytrulymake those decisions! When my sister’s life was in my hands, I had no one to help!”
