Page 58 of King Elijah (The Zemiran Chronicles 2)

Twenty-Three

THE DAY FLITTEDby; the innkeeper still bound to the chair Elijah had put him in that morning.

“I’m not opposed to tying someone up but is this necessary, Elijah? He’s an old man,” Janelle said, glaring at him. Elijah had not only tied and gagged the innkeeper, but he placed him facing a wall in a darkened room all day with the shades pulled shut.

Elijah pinched the bridge of his nose. “When will you ever address me as king?” he said.

Agitation ran through her veins. “When you stop standing around expecting it instead of doing something to earn that title,” she bit back. “Elijah, you’re not the first royal asshole I’ve encountered. Just because you wear a crown does not make you better than the people who wash your sheets.”

She folded her arms and lifted her chin. “So, no. You’re not my king. I’m not Zemiran. I was raised by a single mother until I was four. Then I spent the next years learning how to fight the very man who threw out my family from your blasted kingdom—your father.” She took a breath as she watched Elijah’s expression fall. “And you didn’t answer my question.” She gestured to the man who had stopped struggling hours ago. The way he had tied those knots was already pressing into the man’s skin, turning the flesh red. “Have you no respect for him as a living, breathing human?”

He let out a sigh and tipped forward to stare at the old man. The man’s eyes grew wider as Elijah moved closer to him. “I will remove your bonds, but if you leave this place, I will hunt you down,” Elijah said imperiously.

“Not helping,” Janelle said, pushing Elijah out of the way. She knelt in front of the shaking man. “Please don’t flee, sir. I promise we’re not going to hurt you.”

“That’s it,” Elijah mocked. “Because kindness has always helped you during this rough life of yours, hasn’t it?”

She gritted her teeth and flashed a snarl. Her irritation climbed to the surface, her cheeks turning bright red with hot rage. “I had planned to leave your unconscious ass in that tent and return alone. You ruined everything by following me.”

“Return to a man who plans to take you like property? Force you to lay with him. An evil man who you don’t love and will make you bear countless children you never wanted. Is that it? That’s the life you’re rushing to go back to?”

Janelle’s stomach twisted. Yes, that would be the life she would go back to, but she had nowhere else to go. No other home, and if returning to Kieran meant keeping her brother safe, then she would do it.

“Well, then. Let me cut off your head so my doomed future with a demented sorcerer can all go away . . .” her voice trailed, then she stifled a laugh at her joke. She then sat slowly on the bed in the room and looked at the old man. There was a level of exhaustion sitting deep in her bones, making every movement a little bit more difficult, but she did her best to ignore it. The world was still at risk, regardless of how tired she was. “What about a spell, Elijah?” she suggested. “Maybe you can make him forget us?”

Elijah looked over to the man and tilted his head. Janelle wondered if there was kindness in the Zemiran king’s heart and how willing he would be to find compassion where there may not have been any.

“I can try,” he said optimistically, lowering his voice to almost a mere whisper. He walked around the old man and knelt, removing the gag.

The old man let out a hard sob, but he didn’t speak or lash out. The man stared only at Janelle, pleading with his eyes for mercy.

“Are you okay?” he asked. The old man turned his eyes to him and nodded. “What’s your name?”

“Uh, please don’t kill me,” the old man said quickly. “Please don’t—”

“Shh, I’m not going to kill you. What is your name?”

“Br . . . Bran,” he said. “Bran Ophelia.”

Elijah gave him a gentle smile and then placed his hand on his cheek. “I’m a sorcerer, Bran. I want to be civil and kind, but I sometimes have difficulty controlling my magic and seeing my victims’ pain and suffering because of it.”

Before Janelle had ever met Elijah in the flesh, she had been educated on the details of his upbringing. She knew he wasn’t born into a family with magic, but rather, taken from one and denied the chance to learn how to control his powers or use them for good. She also knew that his father hated Elijah, ordered the death of his oldest son, and murdered the two women he called “mother.”

She had never seen these facts with an empathetic eye before. Her focus had always been on her own mission. But now that she had met him, the situation didn’t seem so black and white any longer. Elijah had to rule a country that didn’t trust him and still find the time, energy, and self-discipline to teach himself how to wield his own power.

The more Janelle pondered, she realized that he had no teachers to guide his way with magic. Every step must have been taken in the shadow of his father’s contempt for it and exploited for purely cruel motives. No wonder he suppressed its potential for as long as he did. Janelle didn’t understand how Elijah’s magic worked. She had never seen how his father treated him before he died, but she knew a thing or two about learning to make it on her own from a young age.

Elijah’s weaknesses were not his fault, necessarily. It was her shortsightedness that stopped her from taking that into account when she made the plan to kill him. Janelle just asked Elijah, a man who had fought for every ounce of control he had over his magic against terrible odds, to create a spell out of thin air. There was no way to predict how it would play out. She was inadvertently asking Elijah to put his own mind at risk, as well as the old man’s.

“Wait,” she said, walking over to him.

She looked into the eyes of the old man, who stared back at her intently. Then she removed her head wrap, revealing her ears. The man’s jaw dropped, and his breath hitched.

“You’re a—”

“Yes,” she said softly. “My name is Janelle, and I’m an elf. I work for Kieran of the Newick coven. Several weeks ago, I was ordered to kill this man standing right here. King Elijah of Zemira.”

She searched Bran’s expression for a reaction, trying to gauge where they stood.

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