I never feared rain before I became the Princess. Sure, it’s wet and cold, but the rain produced by the perfect storm is something else—sharp as needles, intense,drowning.
I take a deep breath. It’s the last one I’ll get for a while.
A blast of thunder tears my hearing to shreds and then the rain buckets down. I can’t absorb it in the same way that I absorb the lightning. All I can do is hold onto it like I’m some sort of rain magnet.
Water fills the space around me as if I’m standing in an invisible orb. There are drains beneath me, but they’re never fast enough. In moments, I’ll be swimming…
The rain sweeps down, flattening my hair against my back, drowning my clothing in ice. Sometimes the rain is hot like lava. The first time it burned me, it shocked me to my core.
Today, it’s cold. So cold. I shudder so hard I lose my warrior pose.
That’s when the rain’s tone changes.
I frown, still holding my breath.
A whisper reaches me through the pounding flood of water. I strain to identify the sound, but I can’t make it out.
My feet are covered in the deluge and it rises to my calves, then my waist. As new raindrops hit the surface around me, I sense a melody in it, sounds I’ve never heard before, but I’m not sure how that’s possible.
I stretch out my arms, palms upward to the strange new beat. Raindrops slam my skin. I struggle to focus on the swooshing whispers, trying to hear…
Curse, curse, curse…
Your husband…
If the rain weren’t pushing down on me so hard, my eyebrows would have risen into my hair. As it is, all I manage is a wonky, single eyebrow lift.
I don’t have a husband. Not yet.
But my twenty-fifth birthday is a month away and I’m required to bond. All Princesses have to, because there comes a time when we can’t control the storm on our own. We need to share the physical burden and only the strongest male elf can share it with us. He can’t control the storm like we can—he can’t use its power—but he acts as an extra buffer, an extension of our own bodies so to speak.
I dare to take a breath, inhaling needles of cold water, and shout into the growing wind. “What do you mean?”
Death.
Not by choice. By curse.
Death? What the…?
If I die and another princess isn’t waiting to replace me, the elements will break out of the Storm Vault and tear Erawind to shreds. It’s the reason everyone treats me like I’m made of porcelain. My death would unleash the fury that killed so many elves long ago and nearly destroyed my home.
A dozen curse words rest on the end of my tongue but I don’t let them loose. Elves believe that language holds power and a word spoken aloud in anger returns that anger to the speaker. I can swear inside my head as much as I like, but a spoken curse word is just that—a curse. And right now, I’m already hearing ‘curse’ way more than I want to.
“How?” I scream.
Your husband will kill you.
Not by choice.
I freeze. Still it repeats, over and over and the message is loud and clear: My husband is going to kill me. It won’t be because he wants to. He’s going to be cursed.
Against my will, I’m shaken to my core. Still the rain pours down and I can’t listen to it anymore. I slap my hands over my ears. For the first time, my resolve slips. I’ve been calming the storm for so long that it’s a part of my life. A strange part, that’s for sure, but something I do to keep my people safe. Now I want nothing more than to escape. The rain is talking to me, for heaven’s sake!
Fear gives way to frustration and something else I haven’t felt for a long time—panic. I struggle against that emotion. The last time I felt panic that bad, I hurt someone I cared about.
I struggle to push the emotion away, but it clouds my logic and rises like the rainwater, rushing against me.
The orb of water has almost reached my neck. My hair floats behind me. My arms are immersed. I can’t feel my feet. It’s so cold that my toes have turned numb. At the same time, the lightning returns.
