1st Draft Fridays - A Fistful of Air: Book #5, Chronicles of Marsdenfel

Year 233 of the Bynding - On the Road to Grehafen - after Winter Solstice

My daughter was born in the night of the winter solstice, just before the turn of the elven year. She's smaller and more elfin than I expected, considering my half-human cousin Tully—but then I am half human, as well, and yet far more elfin than she is. Perhaps a side effect of the royal magic of Marsdenfel. Tully is in the lineage for my realm, but she isn't nearly as close to the magic as I am.

Whatever the reason, I am elfin enough to look frail beneath the metal cuffs on my wrists, binding them together by a length of chain long enough that I can still tend my daughter.

The birth had been difficult mostly out of fear, and that fear led me to tie what memory I could in my daughter's magic, since I don't know how much longer I'll live. But the magic I used in doing so...

The queen of Salles discovered my presence, and I have no one to blame but myself for that.

Aldrik offered to hide me from his mother, despite a prophecy promising that such interference would only make things worse for Salles and Marsdenfel both. I refused. Thanked him, but refused.

He's already going to lose his wife and daughter on my account. He doesn't need to lose anything more.

Guards—some the queen's, some King Jarvis's—surround the carriage as they take their lunch along the road back to Grehafen. Never mind that Darnell has no right to demand me. Never mind that I'm a queen in my own right.

Evonalé cries, and I savor the sound. She'll have silence and fear beaten into her, soon enough, and I won't be able to do anything to stop it.

The guards' voices settle outside the carriage, a door opens, and two guards in full plate step up. The one bearing food maneuvers as if female, and she wordlessly hands out water and traveler's bread to both me and the other guard.

"Thank you." I adjust my grip on Evonalé to be able to sip some water and nibble the bread...and I try to hide my pause at a particular nuance in the flavor.

The other guard takes off his helm, revealing a midaged male with the normal dark hair and eyes of what Sallesians considered natives to their realm, ignoring that these lands originally belonged to another people altogether, before the shortlived elven empire drove them west some centuries ago. He tucks into the food and water.

And after not too very long, falls asleep from the dreamweed that felves and montai both are immune to.

I nibble at the bread some more, without looking at the female guard as she removes her helm.

"There's a cliff about a league further down the road. We can split there," says the woman, my cousin Tully.

If I go, my husband won't be the only one who pays for it—assuming he's even survived the punishment for my current escape. Tully could take my daughter...but Evonalé is Darnell's daughter, as well. The blood tie would let him scry for her, and his tie to the Bynd would be another method to track them both.

And then Tully's own father is as bad as as my brother in his own way. She's in no position to be able to hide an infant from him.

I smile sadly, wishing my cousin and I could be two mothers rather than two women trapped by our parents' mistakes. "And all the guards?"

Tully could kill them all and get me away, yes, but she's fought so hard to avoid being her father's assassin. I'm not about to make one of her.

"Endellion—"

"If I don't go back, my people will pay for it." Darnell won't dare kill my son until he's certain his daughter won't need to be able to inherit, but he would torture my son or sell my subjects to slavers. Onlé, elemental that she is, would fetch a high price on the open market.