Heat filled my cheeks, but the king turned his eyes away and cleared his throat. “Yes, but all knowledge before The Great Darkness was lost as my people were forced to flee the land of our forefathers and rebuild here.”
I looked at the king, at the sorrow etched across his stiff brow. His beauty made his pain all the more tragic.
“I’m sorry,” I found myself saying.
“My father lost his mother and father on that dreadful day six hundred years ago,” the king said, eyes far away. “Father spoke of it often. Of the magic, the balance we had to restore, but he never knew how to accomplish it without the treaty. Humans were always wary of the elves, but once magic was taken from them, that wariness turned into fear and then into hatred. My father attempted to bring back the magic, to heal the wounds of our two peoples in the last hundred years. He sought out the best craftsman of your people, hoping to one day discover that magic had been rekindled in your race once more.”
“And the maidens?” I asked flatly. If his vision of his father was so rosy, how would he explain the women he took every few years for a hundred years?
The king fixed me with a bewildered expression, almost as if he were surprised and…hurt. “That is a discussion for another time.”
I clamped my mouth shut, but still felt the anger simmering beneath the surface. He may think of his father as some kind of hero, but any creature that needed that many maidens to satisfy was no hero to me. And it seemed his son was no different. I could stay silent no longer.
“So, this is why you stole me away from my family? From my life?” I whispered, though my words dripped with thinly veiled venom. “On the hope, themaybe, that I would have this magic and then what? Somehow fix this? Rid the elves of this shadow blight?”
The king blinked, his eyes growing wide. His mouth a straight line. “I have the right to claim any human I wish.”
“You are not my master,” I said, anger rising as I attempted to back it down. I was surrounded by potentially dangerous magic-wielding elves, but I had to speak my mind. “And I do not have any magic. I am just a human baker. And I had a life I loved. I have a little sister, so very much like your little brother. I havea mother who is stern, but never wavering in her love for me and now I will die as some shadow wraith in the middle of the land of the elves because of this plague.”
This last little bit of my words came out in a whisper. In a plea. My throat tightened and tears stung my eyes.I will not cry in front of the king. I will not.
But the tears fell all the same. My chin trembled, and I turned my face away. I hadn’t been dismissed by the king, but I could not stay here any longer standing bare before the king. I turned to run from the library, from the large male that must be laughing at my pain. I fled from his face, but as I made it to the bookshelf, the king spoke into the silence—words that chilled my bones to their core.
“You do have magic, Little Baker. I knew it the moment you fed me that pastry in your bakery. It is you. You are meant to save us all.”
14
MAGIC
Istilled at the king’s words.You do have magic. You are meant to save us all.
He said it without a trace of mockery. The words fell from his lips like a prayer.
My heart pounded, and I swallowed down the lump in my throat. I fixed my bleary gaze on his and tilted up my chin. “You are mistaken.”
“I am not,” The king said. “And though you spoke to me quite rudely about things you know very little, yet I feel your magic coursing through me even now. This unmistakable…joy.”
The joy I’d felt while I’d baked my gingerbread cookies.Hecould feel it? Even from the wildly misshapen little gingerbread man I’d given him this morning. I blinked over and over, not quite understanding this unexpected moment as I stood before the Elf King in an ancient library with rolling ladders and twisting bookshelves. The Elf King’s eyes never lost mine. As if he was hoping I’d feel the same pull of magic.
“The cinnamon roll?” I stuttered remembering the little boy with bright gold eyes who’d cried when I’d fed him the pastry in my bakery—then thrown the buttermilk to the ground and fled.
“You told me, well, told the little boy you thought I was, that I would feel hope.” The king’s gaze flicked to the carved stone floor. “And for the first time in a year,”—the king’s throat worked through some emotion— “I did. I felt true hope. It infused my very soul. I hoped, no I knew in that moment you held the magic we so desperately needed.”
I stared at him flatly. “Then you decided to wreck my kitchen.”
A slight smile lifted up the corner of the Elf Kings mouth, just enough to see a glimpse of his white teeth gleaming—as if the memory brought him immense pleasure. “The hope, the magic. It filled me. I knew what I had to do, and well, I’d looked for so long, but it had come too late to save my father.”
My hand was poised on the doorway, as if at one wrong word, one wrong moment, I would flee back to whence I came. My leg throbbed, reminding me that I was sick. That my life and the life of the king were bound together, our fates in the balance. Though I didn’t care much for the king, he was being honest with me, finally. I could see that now, and felt it in the tension in the air. As vulnerable as I was, the king had also laid his story bare before me.
“My father fell sick not one year ago.” The king hung his head, opalescent hair spilling around his wide shoulders. “I learned all I could, searched for an answer, enlisted Jel’s magic. Yet my father turned.”
My breath caught. I knew sorrow like that.
The king pulled in a deep breath, then fixed his golden eyes on mine with trepidation I hadn’t imagined the proud king ever felt. “He was the shade monster who attacked you not two nights ago.”
I blinked at the startling revelation, then dropped into a large white seat by the wall I’d been clinging to, my mouth open in shock.
“And though my elven blood slows the disease, I’ve been infected for far longer than you.” The Elf King fixed me with his gaze. “I, too, have until Winter Solstice.”
