Bound to the Hybrid King

Chapter 5: Waiting

Theia took a deep breath and forced herself back into the present, her head was spinning with too much information. She didn’t want to be distracted by it right now. Instead, she focused her mind on the here and now. To Isme and Mikka.

She found them already waiting for her, and she smiled as Isme ran and greeted her with the same massive, forced smile she had for the past week. Theia’s heart broke a little more each time. Mikka's quiet had turned into brooding, if almost five-year-olds could brood.

Theia had to be careful not to bend so neither of them could wrap their arms around her ribs. Instead, she let them wrap their little arms about her legs and held their heads gently to her hips. They stayed like that for a few precious, quiet minutes. She soaked it in. This is what she would miss the most. The quiet surety that they were safe in her arms. Eventually, Theia softly encouraged them to go play in the garden.

After a while, the twins settled on the grass. Theia had snuck some chocolate from the kitchen which both Isme and Mikka were delighted to devour. Theia managed to perch on a wooden bench by the white rose bush with just a small wince as her ribs protested.

'Will you still visit us when you're a queen?' Isme asked in her sing-song voice, now seated cross-legged with chocolate covering her mouth and a fistful of clover she was determinedly weaving into something that resembled, very loosely, a bracelet.

Mikka still sat with his wooden sword on his lap, staring at it quietly. His chocolate was only half-eaten. She wished she could read what was going on in the little mind of his. Her quiet little prince.

'I don't know,' Theia said, because she had promised herself she would not lie to them, not about this, whatever else she softened for their sake. 'It will be very far away.'

Isme's face fell, and Theia reached out slowly and tucked a curl behind her ear before the sadness could take proper root. 'But I will think of you every single day, my sweetling, always. That I promise you, and I never break my promises to you, do I?'

'No,' Isme admitted, brightening slightly. 'Never.'

Mikka had now abandoned looking at his wooden sword in favour of interrogation. 'Is it true he's a vampire? Bartholomew in the kitchens says,' vampires drink blood right out of your neck while you sleep.' His voice was not awe-struck, but rather it carried a deep sense of concern, far too heavy for one so young.

'Bartholomew in the kitchens,' Theia said carefully, 'talks a great deal of nonsense, I should think.'

'But is it true?' He pressed, his brows pinched.

'He is part vampire, yes, and part wolf.' She kept her voice light, the way she had learned to keep her voice light around things that frightened her, because a frightened voice only ever taught small children to be frightened too, and she would not do that to them, not with the little time she had left. 'I expect he is simply a male, underneath all the rumour. Men are always more ordinary than the stories about them.'

She did not, in that moment, believe her own words. But Mikka nodded, satisfied, at least for now, and returned to his sword.

She held onto these moments, locked them into her heart, so she could use them to survive the coming storm. As she did, she began to notice the gold of the late afternoon light on Isme's hair, the gap-toothed shape of Mikka's grin, the precious little things that were so easy to miss but now seemed too important to Theia.

All too soon, the supper bell summoned them away. Theia stayed a while longer, letting her tears fall for once. She didn’t wipe them away.

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Somehow, over a week had past and Theia now only had five days until the king and his envoy would arrive when she witnessed the argument, though 'witnessed' was perhaps too generous a word for what amounted to standing, frozen, in a servants' passage with her heart hammering, catching only broken pieces of a conversation she was never meant to hear.

She had gone looking for her father's steward, again, hoping to settle some small matter about which of her books she might be permitted to bring with her, and had rounded the corner near the privy council chamber only to hear her father's voice, low and hard, through the door unusually and carelessly left ajar.

'You forget yourself, General.' Her father's tone was sharp, impatient.

'I forget nothing, Your Majesty.' Callan's voice, and something in its tone made the hairs along Theia's arms lift, an unfamiliar heat beneath his usual careful control. 'I have served this crown since before that girl could walk. I have earned some say in what becomes of her.'

'You have earned my gratitude and a general's rank. You have not earned a voice in matters of my daughter’s hand.'

'She should not go alone. Send me with their envoy. I will see her safely delivered and safely settled, and you may trust that I will look after what is yours.'

'What is mine?' The king's voice carried something Theia had rarely heard in it where she was concerned, a flicker of genuine heat, almost protectiveness, though whether it was for her or merely for the treaty she could not say. 'She is not a horse to be delivered, Callan. She is the alliance itself. I will not have my general escort her into a foreign court as though he has some personal claim upon her comfort. What would that suggest to the hybrid king, do you imagine, if my most decorated general insists upon accompanying my daughter like a jealous suitor?'

A silence followed that Theia did not like at all, thick with something unsaid.

'I have looked after her for years,' Callen said, quieter now, and something in the particular phrasing of it, looked after, made Theia's stomach turn to ice, though she could not have named why beyond some deep animal instinct that recognised danger before the mind caught up to it. 'I only wish to see the transition handled with care.'

'The transition will be handled by the hybrid king's envoy and my priest, as befits a wedding. You will remain here, General, where your talents are of some actual use to this kingdom.' A pause, and then, in a tone that closed the matter entirely. 'That is my final word on it. You will not speak of this again.’

Theia did not wait to hear whether Callan argued further. She turned and walked quickly back the way she had come, her heart beating a strange, uneven rhythm she could not name, torn between a confusion she did not yet have the language to untangle and a dread that sat, wordless and certain, low in her belly.

She did not understand, not fully, what she had overheard. She understood only that Callan had wanted something from her father regarding her, and had been denied it, and that a man such as him, who was denied things did not, in her long experience, take the denial gracefully.

She spent the rest of that day in a state of low, humming unease, unable to settle into her books, unable to enjoy even the twins' company when Isme came skipping to find her in the late afternoon. That night, lying awake and listening to the old palace settle around her, she found herself waiting for a knock she knew, with grim certainty, was still to come.

It came four nights later.