Bound to the Hybrid King

Chapter 1: The Quiet Wing

The Royal Palace of Iskeld had a hundred rooms built for luxury and life but to Theia it was a cold and miserable place.

She resided in the East Wing, separated from the main residential West Wing. In Theia’s wing, the gleaming palace hallways narrowed, and the stone walls became worn and damp. Still beautiful because everything in her father's house had to be beautiful, that was its curse, because the beauty of the place was just another thing that stung her heart. She was always just on the outskirts of it.

Ivy crept along the outer walls in a slow, creeping green conquest. Frost etched the windows each winter in patterns that no one other than Theia seemed to admire. She had learned to love the East Wing the way one learns to love a scar. Not by choice, but because it was hers, and little else that was.

She rose before the sun most mornings and stood at her window watching the light climb over the eastern hills. It was, she thought, the only part of the day that belonged entirely to her. After that came the slow unfolding of a life built around being unseen. Quiet. Wraith like. She lived not as a princess but a constant inconvenience. She’d learned long ago to be invisible. To be silent. To not question. To appear only when summoned.

So, she read from her small collection of books rescued from a forgotten library shelf, and she took long walks in the late evenings when everyone was busy with dinner peps and court obligations, along the old overgrown garden paths. They had been abandoned for a larger and newer, pristine garden on the other side of the West Wing. In the old garden, the roses had gone wild, and no gardener came to tame them. Theia always felt like she could relate.

She kept to her habits like she was clinging to a life raft. If she stopped moving, she was not entirely sure what would happen. She often suspected the answer was nothing. That might have been what troubled her most.

She was seen officially in her unavoidable Princess duties once a week and never by her father unless she was summoned. Something she often prayed to the Goddess wouldn’t happen. It was only when her father could not justify her absence that her presence was required. A dinner with visiting lords and nobles, a lesson a tutor insisted a princess ought to have, even though she never graced daily court. A ball to pretend that she mattered, while potential suitors were paraded around, unaware she was a princess in name only. Through all of it she smiled, the smile of a dutiful daughter, a loyal prince and a lonely girl. A smile that never reached her eye, but no one ever stopped and looked long enough to notice anyway.

Theia rubbed her chest. Sometimes the pain she felt was a tangible thing. Maybe it couldn’t kill her, but it still felt like it was rotting her insides. Eating away at healthy flesh. Sometimes she wasn’t sure how long she would survive it, but she always pushed those thoughts away quickly. Never giving them time to truly root.

Her father, King Aldric, ruled the human lands of Iskalia from his great throne room. Theia had learned, long before she had words for it, that her father was not a kind man. His distaste toward her was not always cruelty or rage. Sometimes it was just indifference, the absence of any true feelings for her. Which, as she grew, she had come to understand was its own particular type of violence, quiet and slow burning. Until it hollows a person out.

She did not resent him for it. She no longer had many feelings towards her father. Not even anger. Not even hate. She had lost her mother at five years old, and it was said he had lost the love of his life. He remarried a few years later, a kind woman who became Queen Sorin, who then died two years later from a viscous winter flu. For those two years though, Theia had known a quiet sort of kindness that dulled the edges of her stark life.

His kingdom watched her father for signs of weakening. He refused to show any. Grief did strange things to men who could not afford to be seen grieving. She had for many years built him excuses the way other girls built dolls' houses. She had learned not to do that anymore.

Theia sat at her shabby dressing table staring and the looking glass and took a deep breath to steady her aching heart. She hadn’t eaten in two days. She blamed it on the nipping melancholy and pushed away the tender thoughts.

Instead, she forced herself to focus, as she often didn’t in the long nights of drowning sadness, on two small little humans in this cold palace who did see her. Who ran to her on small, quick legs and called her name as if it were a treasure rather than a nuisance. For them Theia would have endured a hundred more cruel and indifferent fathers…for them, she ensured the cold and violent hands of another man too.

She shook herself and flattened the non-existent creases of her shirt and fitted pants. No one cared that she didn’t wear dresses, as long as she wasn’t due to attend an official royal function. A small benefit of being invisible. Theia took one last steady breath and then forced her steps forward. She would not lose time with her two little menaces. She would not let her sadness erode away at that too.

Mikka and Isme were only four, twins her father had claimed as his own, children that appeared a few days before the gentle Queen Sorin died.

She found them, as she always did, in the walled garden behind the nursery, where the hedges grew high enough to hide a woman of twenty and two small children from anyone who might disapprove of their time together.

'Theia!' Isme's voice rang out, delighted, as though Theia's arrival was the most wonderful thing in the world rather than a small stolen piece of time. Isme came barreling across the grass with her skirts already grass-stained and her dark curls escaping their careful plaits.

‘You'll ruin your dress,’ Theia softly rebuked, crouching to catch her, though she was smiling before she even finished the words. She only ever hugged Isme and Mikka.

‘Nanny says that every day,’ Isme was entirely unbothered, wrapping her arms around Theia's neck with the fierce, uncomplicated love of a child who did not yet know that love could be conditional. That it could be earned and lost, that it could be withheld as punishment or dangled out of reach as a reward.

Theia breathed her in, soap and grass and the particular warm smell of a small body that had been running in the sun. She let herself, just for a moment, believe she was allowed this. That it was OK to be loved this way, that it wouldn’t one day break her heart to be separated from them.

Mikka approached Theia more slowly, dignified in the way four-year-old boys sometimes decide to be, clutching a wooden sword nearly as tall as he was.

‘I'm going to be a knight,’ he announced, as if this were news, as if he had not announced it every day for a month. ‘Better than General Callan.’

Something in Theia went very still, a fear that tried to stop her heart, like water stilling before the stone breaks its surface, but she managed to keep her face calm.

‘Better than the General? That's a tall claim.’ Somehow her voice found its natural cadence.

‘I'll practice every day,’ Mikka exclaimed as he swung the wooden sword with a seriousness that nearly overbalanced him. Theia caught his elbow before he could tumble into the rosebushes.

‘Mind the thorns, little knight.’ And she hoped one day he’d understand the real meaning in her warning.

He grinned up at her, gap-toothed, thankfully still utterly unaware of what his idle boast had cost her to hear. She let the moment pass because it was not his burden. She would never allow it to be either of theirs.

Isme watched her closely with all too knowing eyes for a four-year-old. She frowned slightly and then looked past Theia’s shoulder.

Theia's body reacted. The hair on the back of her neck rose, and it took her all her many years of practice not to flinch, and General Callan's footsteps grew near, and he placed a not so casual hand on her lower back.

He smiled brightly at the twins and then bowed. The twin quietens a little, becoming a bit more subdued in his presence as they so often did. Even their tiny minds were aware of his changing moods, and she hated that it was something they lived with even if they couldn’t quite understand it.

Callan was a broad, tall man, built like the soldier he was. The kind of handsome, weathered face and just shaggy enough light brown hair that made older women sigh and younger one’s blush. He shifted closer to Theia, taking advantage of the secluded garden with no onlookers, except for the two little children too innocent to understand.

‘That would be a tall order indeed, little prince. But I’m sure you are up to the challenge.’ Called chuckled indulgently.

Mikka smiled at him shyly but then drew his wooden sword to swipe at the general's legs. Theia tensed, unsure how the General would react, but to Callan’s credit, he played a long, his smile easy, it almost made Theia believe it was real.

Almost.