Blood of my Brother

A Test of Wills

That... that had hurt her, pierced her to her very soul, torn her heart in two and trodden it underfoot. It still hurt all these months later, just that one glimpse of him.

No, more than that glimpse. Her pain flared when she thought that all of this might have been caused by the very man she'd fallen so completely in love with, that the king who promised peace and justice had delivered neither to an orphan child. That, worse, he had let vengeance cloud his judgement and taken out his anger on Varian.

And perhaps it wasn't just him.

She ran her finger over one of the other names listed on the current page. Lady Caine. The thought of the woman invading the palace and trying to get revenge for her father still burned in Arianna's memory. She had been wrong, of course, but she had attributed her actions to anger at losing her father to the unjust dealings of the king. Arianna hadn't wanted to believe it was true, of course. So she'd put it from her mind. But now, in light of what had happened with Varian, her name had arisen once more and found its way onto Arianna's page. She didn't know if they were connected. But two cases of a lost or deceased father, a young criminal bent on forcing the deeds done in shadows into the light, an arrest that led to nothing but silence afterwards... It was strangely coincidental.

The wheels of the carriage jolted as they left the rutted dirt paths that comprised the roads to and from the villages and rolled onto the smoothed cobblestone of the capital city. How long had the infrastructure in the lands surrounding the capital been that bad? And why had she failed to notice?

Golden and purple flags flew by her windows as they traveled on. People stopped on the streets to wave and cheer. A darling blue-eyed child caught her attention, hyper and gap-toothed with patches in his shirt. A pang shot through her heart again as she watched him jump in a puddle. He grinned as the carriage passed close to where he was, slowing to turn the corner; and for a moment that stretched into an eternity, his eyes met hers, and she saw not him but another blue-eyed boy who traveled far from Corona and yet dug his nails into her mind and held on tight.

Where was he now? Had he even survived after his escape? He'd looked mere seconds from death, laying in the arms of that stranger. Perhaps it was dangerous to allow a child—one of her subjects—to go off with a man who wasn't even from their country, a man who looked more than capable of snapping the boy in two with barely a bit of effort. A man who held a frightening gleam in his eyes, something dangerous and wild and unpredictable. But she couldn't imagine it being any less dangerous for him to stay here, where taking him to the infirmary meant he would be sent right back to where he started—and that was if he made it out if the room alive. There were still plenty of guards who wouldn't see a problem with making sure he didn't, she believed.

And if Fred found out...

She shuddered. Never before had she feared that her husband would hurt someone willingly, excluding things like war, but Varian was a child. Had he ever put his hands on him personally, or had he ordered his guards to do it? Had the Fred she'd wondered at but stayed silent about as he confined their freespirited daughter to the walls of Corona and then to her own room... had that been only a glimpse of the true him? Had he been this way the entire time?

Had she ever really known her husband at all?

Speaking of...

There he stood, his smile wide and eyes bright as he waited in the courtyard to meet her. He did this whenever she traveled; he always made sure to be the first face she saw upon returning. Normally the sight sent a thrill through her; her wonderful husband, the holder of her heart, the sign that she had truly returned home. It was home as soon as she saw his face.