He had certainly not been thinking of that, but I was glad for the distraction. “You cheated, so it doesn’t count. I call a rematch.”
“A rematch?”
“Yes,” I smiled into my pillow, “You cheated. Next time I require you tie at least one hand and leg behind your back. Your elvish speed is an unfair advantage. Are all elves that fast?”
Elden’s answering laugh turned my insides molten. Sent my heart out on a wing.
“Now, that is an interesting question that we will have to puzzle out.” Elden put a hand to his chin as if in thought. “For I have not been around many humans in my short life. But I was fastest in my class.”
“You went to school?”
“Well, Iwasthe only one in my class, so that would make me the slowest as well,” Elden said with a grin.
“Private tutors?” I guessed.
“Yes,” the king answered. “But they were mostly schemers and politicians trying to sharpen my mind into a tool that could skewer rival courtesans.”
“Sounds stimulating. My school days often involved me positioning myself to be alone.” I laughed. “I was always trying to get away from all the gossip and noise.”
“You will make a lousy royal, then, I should think. Gossiping is one of the many duties you will be expected to perform as queen.”
As queen? Heat filled my cheeks, but I found I had nothing to say. Yes, we had exchanged the words. Yes, I felt that love in my heart, but this new love was, well, new. I did not know how far the king’s affections truly reached. What he envisioned for us.
WhatIenvisioned for us.
A glance at the first queen answered my own question for me, a knowing glimmer in her eyes that had not been there before.
The next morning,I awoke to find the couch across from me empty. The king was gone. I sat up, searching the room, fresh panic in my mind. Where was he?
I pulled on my boots and stood, ready to wander around the entire palace to find him, when Elden ran into the Christmas Room, a giant smile lighting up his ethereal face. I sighed in relief.
“It works!” he exclaimed with a look of pure delight. His wild white hair fell across his shoulders and surrounded his head like a halo. “Come, Noelle! Come!”
Before I could ask a single question of what he fixed, Elden pulled my hand and led me down several hallways. Dark browns and cream tones reached my eyes as we entered the king’s bedchamber.
“I thought it was a myth, an old tale my father used to tell me, but we are finding out that more and more of these tales are based in truth.” Elden’s words came fast, still not making sense. “Father showed me the other side before he died, when he’d told me of the blight, but it had been blocked off. It is why we had to travel for so long to get here?—”
“The other side of what? What was blocked?” I practically tripped over a massive leather ottoman in the center of King Theronvere’s ornate bed chambers. If Queen Elayna’s rooms were a colorful burst of flowers and wildlife, then the king’s rooms were the opposite. The walls were a muted white and the tapestries geometric in style. He favored browns and tans, earthy tones and bold lines and patterns.
“Here we are,” Elden exclaimed as he led me to a gigantic tapestry of browns and whites blended together abstractly taking up an entire wall.
“It’s very unique,” I said in confusion.
Then Elden did the unthinkable. He ripped the fine tapestry from the wall in a fluid motion. I gasped and jumped back in shock, but something else jumped back with me: my own reflection. Before me was an intricately carved archway. Leaves, baubles, evergreen trees, the phases of the moon were all etched into the columns and curves of the doorway. The bristlecone pine at its center. Inside the archway was a warped reflection of myself in a strange muddled puddle, as if a body of water lay pooled on the wall ahead of me. My features were distorted, my breath disturbing the tranquil motion of the ripples. I watched as Elden moved to stand beside me.
But deep in the ripples as if at the bottom of a great lake, I saw something just beyond the king’s chambers of Winterthorn. I squinted, taking in another bedchamber quite different from this one.
“What is this?” I asked in awe, lingering on Elden’s handsome reflection beside me. Even warped, he was magnificent.
“This, my dear Noelle, is our way home.” Elden bowed.
I blinked, nerves squirming in my gut. “This?”
“It is a portal. One that leads to the king’s chamber back in Elkhaven.”
“A portal that will take us back, just like that?” Would I ever get used to elven magic? “We just walk on through?”
“Yes, but it had been closed off for centuries. The way blocked because of the blight. But I followed the instructions my father laid out before he passed, and then, well, here it is! I am quite relieved,” Elden said cheerily.
