Page 62 of The Lost Princess

That bastard. That absolute bastard.

“I don’t have a choice,” I insisted, clenching my teeth. “I am what I am. I will not lie or hide it anymore.”

He kept his kind expression, though his lips twisted into an odd grin. “I’m being quite kind in giving you a choice. Your mother certainly never enjoyed such freedom. You’ll excuse me for not having anything cleaned since she … left.”

Cold seeped into my heart, then froze and clenched down. I let go of the bars in shock.

This was my mother’s cage.

I backed away as far as I could from Alfred, eyes darting wildly around me. I noted the gouge marks above my head and the way the floor was worn as if something or someone had paced the same treads over and over again. With horror I cataloged the dark stain in the corner opposite of me.

I didn’t care that Alfred was watching. I took two steps and leaned over it, sniffing cautiously.

Blood. Old. Familiar, and tinged with fear and pain, my inner draken told me. Desperation and longing. Regret. A crumbled past with no hope for tomorrow.

I backed up into the opposite corner in shock.

“I don’t have all day. What will it be?” Alfred bit out impatiently, rapping the bars with the massive rings on his knuckles.

I didn’t hear him. I fell to the floor of the cage, my knees going into my chest. My wings shook. My body trembled. A distress call welled up in my chest and I didn’t fight it.

I screamed.

Alfred dropped to the ground, his hands over his ears as every window shattered, one at a time. The mirror off to the side exploded in his face, and the very air seemed to vibrate with my pain.

Guards rushed in as Alfred gesticulated wildly, his own yells unable to pierce through my shriek. His men surrounded me, poking through the bars with their swords and hands. One grabbed me by my dress and pulled me against the bars, others quickly joining to keep me there, pinned. I was in shock at having so many hands on me, but Alfred already looked victorious. I remembered my voice had power.

I kept screaming.

The hands disappeared as soldiers wheeled away, blood leaking between their fingers as they tried to cover their ears.

One guard stubbornly held on, grabbing my hair and pulling me as hard as he could toward him. My head slammed against the iron bars and I stopped screaming, momentarily stunned. He raised his sword hilt above me, my eyes delayed in tracking his movements. He brought it down heavily on my head.

I dropped to the cage floor, unconscious.

ChapterTwenty

NASI

Iflew. And flew. I pumped my wings high, taking care to rest when needed. I wasn’t going to exhaust myself again. I was on a new mission—to see what lay on the other side of the mountains. Kaida thought my homeland was there somewhere. Perhaps she was right, perhaps she wasn’t.

It didn’t matter.

I simply needed something to fill the void left by her absence. This quest seemed as good as any. The first order of business would be to hunt and use the animal’s skin to make a new water pouch. I assumed once I got to the other side, there would be new farms to plunder. Perhaps even forests I could hunt in. I hadn’t had a good forest hunt in … Well, I wasn’t sure. I had no idea how many years I’d wasted feral, but based on my memories, I assumed I’d been a child or a young teenager when my home was destroyed.

Clearly I am fully grown now.

As I traveled, I pieced together what fragments of memory were left to me. For the first time the darkness was quiet, and my thoughts were my own. That day on my homeland, our volcano erupted, raining lava and ash over the entire island. It was likely that many of my people died instantly. The ones attending the protection ritual lasted longer, being close to the ocean. My mother had changed the ritual at the last second. Something had thrown me far out to sea, and then I knew nothing until Kaida came into my life.

How could one lose decades of memory? It was terrifying. What if it happened again?

I’d do my best to ensure it didn’t. I felt better now in my mind even if my heart felt like an open wound.

Kaida.

The crest of the mountain loomed ahead of me, and I pushed further. The air was cooler up here, but I had to work harder to breathe it. It was too thin, so I’d have to descend soon. My legs brushed the small peaks in front of me, and I landed roughly, intending to rest and look around.

I blinked and took a few breaths, allowing my lungs to regulate. But first, I needed to get a lay of this new landscape before me.

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