1. Amberstone | ✓

24. Rowan's Knights

The commotion outside the house alarmed Elianna. She pushed herself off the couch, careful not to wake Thunder. Looking out of the window, it seemed like the sun had just risen. 

Elianna turned around and noticed that the bedroom door was left opened and assumed that Rowan had gone out. She stood in front of the mirror and combed those sprung up strands of bed hair down and grabbed her coat from the hanger to check on the commotion outside. 

When she pushed open the main door of the house, she spotted Rowan standing in front of several other men. However, Elianna couldn't really see well with all the sudden brightness as she was hardly awake at this hour. She raised her hands to rub the remains of sleep away from her eyes while stepping out of the house and walked in the direction where he stood. When her eyes slowly readjusted to the brightness, she saw four men staring at her with surprise and curiosity. 

"Sorry, did we wake you up? You were up the whole night and finally got to sleep." Rowan turned around to face her.

She blushed the moment those words left him and the four men looked at her with eyes wider than before. Elianna knew that all of them must've mistaken his words and the flush on her face was not helping with the situation at all. They focused their gaze towards Rowan before turning to stare at her intently. One of them asked, "Lady, who might you be?"

Elianna didn't know where to start introducing herself and was unsure who these men might be to Rowan. She had assumed that they would be his knights but all of them had different physiques and give off unique impressions. Elianna naively assumed that knights would always look tall, broad and strong like Jason. Before she could start to explain herself, Rowan stepped forward with a visible frown in his expression when he knocked on the men's head, hard. He scolded, "Stop everything that you are all thinking. Especially you, Alec." 

"What about me?" Alec groaned in pain as he raised his hand to rub on the spot that Rowan just hit on.

A sudden urge to laugh surfaced and she started giggling. All the men halted their antics and turned to look at her. She quickly stopped and said, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to laugh but—" 

"It's okay, laugh all you want," Alec grinned. "At least the pain felt worth it now." 

"Before you start flirting with a lady, look at who she belongs to first," the man beside Alec warned. 

Elianna tried to explain but she wasn't quite sure what she was trying to say, "Ah, Rowan and I, we're not—"

"Look, she even calls His Highness by his name," another man piped in with a whistle and a happy grin. 

"Stop it, everyone," Rowan exhaled, turning towards her and apologised, "Please pardon their rudeness. My knights don't mean to be disrespectful." 

"I wasn't offended at all," Elianna laughed lightly. Rather, she found the liveliness pleasant and she never had a chance to be surrounded by everyone who seemed to be really interested to hold a conversation with her. It had been many years since she interacted with anyone else other than Thunder. However, she felt his knights looking towards her and staring at her so intensely that she subconsciously raised her hand to wipe the corner of her lips, unsure if it was because she had drool on her face.

The man beside Alec was the one who broke the silence when he asked, "Aren't you Princess Elizabeth?" 

Elianna flinched at the name and her smile was gone in an instant. That was when she realised that she had grown too comfortable around Rowan that she had forgotten to hide her identity. Now, she also wondered why Rowan never asked her about it because as an Iftian prince, he must've seen Elizabeth before and noticed how both of them looked remarkably alike. Checking to see if he also wondered the same question as his knights did, she was surprised when he stated sharply, "She's not."