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The carriage lurched to a stop, tossing me into the paneling. I was alone and it was dark, I must have fallen asleep on the journey. A part of me wondered where Prince Darling was while another part was very relieved not to have him near me. I could hear the heavy footsteps of hard boots on gravel and then three loud bangs against the side of the carriage. The door was pulled open and three soldiers peered in at me, one with a torch held over their heads. The man in front appraised me shrewdly. “Get up.”
I stared back at them and didn’t move. He sighed and lumbered into the carriage, he was much too big for the small space. “I see you’re still trying to make this difficult.” I thought I should apologize but it didn’t seem like he would appreciate it. He grabbed my arms and pulled me from my seat, dragging me across the narrow space and out through the door. The other solder clapped iron manacles on my wrists, the chains tinkling softly. When I was properly imprisoned but still able to walk, they pushed me forward.
Ahead, on a rise of long dead grass was an ancient keep made of dark gray stone. Its square head pierced the night sky in defiance but the trunk was seamlessly smooth. There were thin windows several stories above my head and no door that I could see. My captors broke around me and used the chains as a leash to keep me moving. There was only the four of us and three horses waiting back by the carriage. No sign of the prince, no sign of anyone else. We picked our way through the bristled grass around the base of the tower to a door covered in vines. Two soldiers stood at attention on either side of it.
“What’s your business here?” they asked my captors.
“The Queen’s captive,” the leader answered. He tossed the chains to the soldier nearest him. “She is to be put in the dungeons until she is summoned.”
My relief was so strong I could have wept. So I would not be given to the prince straight away. He wouldn’t be able to touch me so soon. The leader laughed as he looked back at me. “It could be a few weeks until then. She’s all yours.”
I tried not to think as they lead me into the prison and down a roughly carved narrow staircase. It was too much like my soul, inching ever further into darkness, and with nothing to distract me—no dreams or nightmares—I thought of her.
We fit together as two lost pieces of a puzzle might. That’s what she was to me, my puzzle piece. I hadn’t realized I was missing anything until the first time I laid eyes on her, the very first time—when she’d ridden into my life in shining armor on a dirty white steed. My knight, my princess. Glorious and beautiful with the autumn sunlight in her vividly red hair, glinting off her armor; magnificent as she reclined so casually before me; irresistible in all her lovely hardness. It seemed impossible to me that I would become a Cinderella. For a few short months I’d had my Princess and the fairy tale. I saw her face in the wood, when I couldn’t tell her the truth. At midnight, Cinderella fled the Ball for Rapunzel’s Tower.
The iron bars rolled closed with finality and I was happy that I’d managed to hold myself together until those last footfalls faded into silence. I tipped my head back against the gritty stone wall of the dungeon cell as tears fled down my dirty cheeks. My hitching sobs were loud in the quiet but I couldn’t control my weeping. Half my body had been torn away, half my soul and all of my heart.
My chest crackled, splintered. Gone, she was gone from me. Why did I leave her? Why did I think I could do it? Hiding in the Northern Empire with her would have been better than losing her. I squeezed my eyes shut but not even in the darkness of my mind was there escape. The picture of her face during our parting, her coldness would always haunt me. I clung to the stone, trying to melt into it for some measure of comfort against the burning in my chest. The chains of the shackles rattled as I tried in vain to twist out of my body.
As days passed, I marked them by the light shining through the slit that was my window, I slipped deeper into despair. What did my Princess do now that we were separated? Would she defy the Council and refuse a wife? And if they allowed such a thing, would she come for me? Sometimes, in those precious moments before dawn and after dusk, I thought I could feel her close to me, I thought I could hear her tears and feel her anger and the love she once felt. I thought I could hear her whispering my name and in those moments, I clenched my fists around the hope that her anger and sadness would end and she would remember those precious promises and come.
Forever and always.
K. B. WEST LIVES NEAR Washington, D.C. with her fiancé and their tuxedo cat, Damien. In addition to writing, K. B. enjoys gourmet cooking, baking, painting, and photography. Of all of her many hobbies, writing is by far her greatest passion. Her journey to the pen began at the tender age of 8 when she realized she would have to write stories with heroes and heroines she wanted to read about. Destiny’s Promise is her first published novel.
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GET UPDATES ON K. B.’s upcoming novels and check out some of her photography at: www.kb-west.com