Page 118 of Disillusioned
“I grabbed them thensuggestedthey should go to bed—after I begged them not to call for the guards, that is. It took a couple tries, but they finally heard me.” Piper sniffled again. “If I’d known all I needed to do was convince them to go to their bedchamber, I would have done that in the first place. I was afraid I’d have to strangle them unconscious.”
Lilac felt for the edge of the mattress and plopped onto it. Piper hadentrancedthem to bed. “At least you didn’t eat them,” she offered, swallowing the sudden urge to laugh. How could she possibly find humor in anything tonight after her drive to survive Garin’s madness had changed everything?
Yet, so did her friend’s arrival. She was just happy Piper was back.
The vampire’s bottom lip quivered. She snickered, composed herself with an alarming swiftness and said nothing more, hugging the tops of her knees, hiding behind a cascade of thick copper hair.
Relief cast over Lilac, mingling with her fading adrenaline. She needed rest. To shut her eyes and drown the world out, to find sleep before Garin’s insidious influence gripped her subconscious and body once more. She braced for the crushing paranoia that had come nightly since he’d banished her—but as she slid back the covers and yanked them over herself, she only felt her aching joints sigh into the mattress.
She yanked her feet from the edge, as if he were the monster waiting to drag her into the abyss, and cocooned her body in the duvet. She savored the warmth after the night had drawn much of it from her veins.
Piper had not moved, gazing into the mirror. There were many burning questions that would wait for another day. For now, Lilac didn’t care if they were ever answered. She only hoped Piper would make the right decision, the safest for herself. She might be stronger, faster now, but she too had spent years locked away, even more alienated than Lilac had been.
Lilac had had the luxury of her tower. The help of her household staff and guards, her parents and their court. A means of warmth. Nourishing food and clean water. Piper had none of that, and no one.
“I’m going to have the private quarters on the second floor prepared for you tomorrow. The room shares a wall with the handmaiden’s bedchambers, but it should be fairly quiet since only Isabel and Yanna sleep there.” At the end of the hall, next to the library and past the infirmary, the room was often forgotten. It was fully furnished, the fineries in it protected by thick linens and reserved for the monarch’s lady-in-waiting or valet. “Until then, you are not spending the night in that chair.” Lilac turned to face the tub. “If you can stand the stench.”
She let her gaze drift to the circular patterns on her ceiling, which wove beveled petals through vines and leaves, shadows shifting in the firelight as the chair scraped against wood. There was a reluctant grunt and shifting of fabrics as Piper changed out of her shift and into the garment Lilac had thrown at her.
Behind her, the bed sank, and Lilac rolled onto her back to see Piperpropped against the pillows, arms crossed, gazing out at the clear sky through the ajar balcony doors.
“This position will require me to do many things during the day, and I won’t be able to fulfill your requests as I used to.”
“I’ll only need your company in the evenings. You are free to do as you wish in the day. As for travel, I prefer to do so at night.”
“Surely that cannot be.” Piper gave a doubtful scoff. “Everyone will suspect me sooner or later.”
“My staff would learn to accommodate you, just as you’ve done for me all those years. Plus, some continue to believe I’ve involved myself with vampires, anyway. There was a witch in our Grand Hall just an hour ago, and two more from Garin’s tavern who had accompanied me here earlier in the week.”
How easy it was for her to make these promises and mean them especially when it involved protecting Piper. The public would learn of her involvement with Brocéliande soon enough. It wouldn’t take long, not with the changes that would come with the Accords and the steps toward justice she intended to take for Brocéliande.
Her mind drifted to Garin and Bastion. Myrddin, who should be arriving at the inn any time now after teleporting Herlinde back home. Adelaide and her new alliance with Lorietta, and what horrors Albrecht might be waking up to as they nursed him back to health for tomorrow. Unless he was accustomed to dealing with the Daemons in his own country, they surely had to entrance him; Adelaide might have a mind-altering tonic to put in Lorietta’s soup. They’d at least asked Myrddin remove the memory of Lilac stabbing him.
She thought of Garin, and what he might’ve woken up to. Whom he tried to strangle. He hadn’t marched up to her gate yet, to her knowledge.
As a vampire’s thrall separated from her regnant, Lilac thought she might feel lonely, even distressed returning to her tower. But the worry she’d felt when Myrddin had teleported them outside her gates had been smothered by the shock of Piper, then Artus’s unwelcome presence. The despair she feared and braced herself for—the knotting in her throat and ache in her abdomen—hadn’t yet made itself known.
The room was too silent. Perhaps Piper was already asleep. “I went home,” she said, just as Lilac thought she might close her eyes.
They popped open again. “To your parents’ farm?”
“Yes,” Piper answered dully. “For the first time since I’ve worked for you, yes.”
The day Piper and her parents had arrived in their foyer, Lilac was no older than six. She’d been told the the week prior that a great surprise was on its way. She’d been expecting a horse, or at least a pony, even if her parents had insisted she was too young to learn. Surprised she was, when the guards opened the doors to a plain-looking couple whom Lilac had thought she’d seen before. The woman was the cousin of one of his viscounts from Saint Malo, Henri had explained, as the couple then parted to reveal a girl with striking red hair slicked into a braid coiled neatly at the back of her head.
Piper Krenn, she had introduced herself when her own father had nudged her, as if they’d rehearsed it many times. She then dutifully said she was seven and a half, the daughter of the man behind her, an esteemed sheep farmer—the owner of Krenn Farm, which was sandwiched northeast of their castle, between Brocéliande and Rennes.
“Did they understand what happened to you?”
“Not fully, I don’t think. I had waited for some time to pass. It was close to a week, over three days since I’d last seen you. The red in their eyes—our eyes—fades after that long. I figured that out a while ago, it was how long we’d have between our feedings in the cages. So, I waited.” She pulled the corner of the duvet over herself. “Mother still nearly fainted at the sight of me. Father eventually let me in when I begged.” An unnameable sadness crept into Piper’s expression. “And Ididbeg.”
“What do you mean you begged?” They’d made their own daughter, who’d been missing for years, beg to be welcomed into her own home?
Piper shook her head, still lost in thought. “On second thought, maybe I’d entranced them, too.” A small sob escaped her throat. Her fangs had grown in again. “Oh, I don’t know.”
“What were they thinking? They didn’t rejoice at the sight of you?” Lilac snarled, her voice wavering in incredulous anger. She found herself lividly considering their arrest. “Were they not happy or relieved to see you?” She sat up against the pillows when Piper only sniffled. Lilac had spent so many of the days after her fifteenth birthday moping about her own punishments, she hadn’t paid attention to what had happened toPiper.Selfish, she was so selfish. She recalled being informed the next morning that Piper had been relieved of her duty. “Didn’t my father send you home with a letter of some sort? Anything explaining what had happened?” Lilac’s inquiries were probably not helping, but she needed to know.
Piper closed her eyes and exhaled, long and slow, before answering. “He did. He had John write one for me. I traveled some way east when the vampires found me. It was that one,” she said with a soft snarl, “Bastion, and another male. I dropped my bag of belongings, scattering them on the road—including the letter, hoping someone would find it?—”
