Page 101 of The Wild Prince's Favorite
Lorey only replied with an infuriating smile and kept walking. Why wasn’t she at least trying to tell her?
But Lorey kept quiet, and when Alezya tried glancing back again, her view was blocked by the two dragons that had gotten up and were following them. This time, Kiki seemed a bit more inclined to humor Kein, and the two dragons were playing around in the snow, snapping at each other and chasing after one another’s tails like snow kittens.
At least with those two and Lorey, Alezya didn’t feel too bad being away from Kassein and felt relatively safe. Still, she couldn’t help but worry. Was she going to be Kassein’s downfall within his clan? What if he broke some of their principles for her and lost all respect? At the very least, it seemed neither Lorey nor Kiera were too worried about it... and his sister had gone with him. That had to mean it was alright, wasn’t it?
Helpless with all her questions, Alezya followed Lorey, surprised to be taken to a different habitation. It was another one, as big as Kassein’s, but upon entering, she realized this place was vastly different.
Instead of weapons and furs everywhere, this habitation had more colorful fabrics hanging all around, more clothing hung up, and different weapons. All the furniture looked new too, not damaged and a bit dusty like the ones in Kassein’s room.
Most significantly, it had a large polished surface that reflected like still water, surrounded by an array of small items.. It made Alezya think of her cousin’s home, and she immediately understood this was most likely where Kiera and Lorey resided. There was even some silver and gold ornaments in a box, just like the ones Lorey wore, and a few weapons on the side, which could have been the right size for Kiera. So those two women lived here together... Had this habitation been put up recently? They had managed to make it so cozy in such a short time...
It felt a bit strange for Alezya to be in a womanly space all of a sudden. She had grown up with a lot of older sisters and was expected to act a certain way with other women, but since Lumie’s birth, she had been shunned by all... No, even before that, since she had been married, she had felt the lack of a safe space to return to. It was the rule of her clan that she belonged to her husband since her wedding, but with her sisters all married to different clans, she had no female circle to go to, to confide in. The Exkiu Clan was even stricter when it came to what they expected from women, and although she’d benefited from the respect due to her husband for a few months, she had still felt like a stranger in a foreign clan. Her months married to him had been amongst the loneliest of her life...
She couldn’t help but glance around, feeling strange standing amongst colorful fabrics, beauty products, nice scents, and ornaments again. When her eyes stopped on Lorey, she realized the young woman had let her tour around with an amused eye without saying anything. Alezya felt a bit embarrassed to be caught acting like this. Was Lorey thinking she was strange, or some uneducated kind of woman? But Lorey just kept that enigmatic smile on, and pushed one of the colored cushions in front of the polished surface, gesturing for Alezya to sit there.
Alezya nodded and sat facing the reflective stone. Only then did she get a glimpse of her appearance... and she was a bit stunned.
She had changed. Perhaps it was the fresh air from her morning walk or being able to bask in the sun for the last couple of days, but she found her complexion better than it had been in a while. Her dark circles were gone too, and all her injuries had been healing faster than she’d thought, leaving neat or no scars behind.
She even thought she looked a bit younger, all of a sudden.
She hadn’t given a damn about her appearance since Lumie’s birth, but with a few baths, some combing of her hair, and being able to sleep deeply and safely, she had already changed so much... That, and the generous amounts of meat had refilled her cheeks a bit too. The taste of her breakfast still lingered on her lips, and she was getting dangerously used to having a full stomach.
As always, she couldn’t deny the pang of guilt that overtook her when she thought of all the luxuries she was enjoying while away from Lumie and with no way to check how her baby was. She could only hope, once again, that her cousin was acting like a decent human being in taking care of her baby. She knew Suolk was a decent hunter, more than capable of providing for his family, so she knew they wouldn’t run out of food just because they had one more mouth to feed.
Her father also didn’t care enough about Lumie to check on her or anything like that, so hopefully, they would be unbothered by him as long as Alezya seemed to keep going with the plan.
Her fingers naturally went to the bandages on her forearms.
The herbs. She just had to take the herbs for a few more days, and then, her plan could work. She could go back by the next full moon and, hopefully, fool her father and the Healer long enough to get Lumie out of there, one way or another. It didn’t matter how fast her relationship with Kassein progressed so long as she gave her clan the illusion she was acting as expected. All they would see was that she slept in his habitation and stayed close to him. If her plan worked, she would return after a couple of weeks... and without her period. She had never tested that combination of herbs for herself, but she knew the effects they were supposed to have.
She hoped it would be enough to fool the Healer, at least for a couple of weeks. All she needed was to get Lumie out of there;Alezya didn’t care what happened to her after that... but she knew who she wanted to entrust her baby to.
“Alezya?”
Lorey called her attention gently, and sat behind her with a comb. She showed her the object in her hands.
“Mushti.”
“Mushti,” Alezya repeated with a nod.
Then, Lorey began gently combing her hair, and while she did so, both women sat facing each other through the reflection in the polished stone surface, going through all the words Alezya had learned the previous day, plus a few more as Lorey showed her objects from her dwelling to add to her vocabulary.
It was hard. Alezya was getting frustrated each time she forgot a word, and the pronunciation was also complicating everything. She felt like every time Lorey uttered a full sentence, she was thrown on the side of a mountain to hang on to a cliff with one hand... and trying to grab the words she knew to make some sense and pull herself out of her ignorance.
Lorey was showing incredible patience, sometimes repeating words four or five times until Alezya got the pronunciation right, and repeating the same words over and over as Alezya went back to dig out what she’d supposedly learned the previous day.
If her teacher was patient, Alezya wasn’t. She wanted to learn, and fast, and she was getting frustrated at her own memory for being so lacking at times. But slowly, she was learning. It wasn’t a matter of days, but she trusted herself enough to learn the vocabulary that mattered fast enough.
She wasn’t interested in how to say a ring, a necklace, or a comb, but she wanted to know how to say a sword, a mountain, or running. She already knew how to say “baby” and their word for snow. She could translate Lumie’s name in Kassein’s language, and it meant a lot.
“Lorey,” she called her friend, remembering something from earlier. “Aqayir?”
Tievin had called Kassein that, but it wasn’t his name. Was that his title here? Was that their word for a clan chief?
“Kassein Aqayir,” Lorey nodded.
“...Kiera Aqayir?”
