She should have let him die.
Chapter 4
The next day their party grew larger—at least Hellebore heard more horses and another set of wheels, but she was only let out of the carriage for basic necessities. Afterwards, her hands were rebound and she was roughly shoved back in.
She didn't see the captain again. Her collection of bruises changed day by day. Had what she'd done even worked or had she failed to save the elf from her unintended homicide? If it hadn’t, she'd sacrificed her chance to escape for nothing because now they had her on murderandpracticing alchemy on an elf. Plus, stealing a magical plant and using the blood of an elf for transmutation. Her status as a princess might go a long way protecting her from physical harm, but those offenses stacked together and not even her status would save her from execution.
Finally, when she was brought out of the carriage after two weeks of traveling, it wasn't to a forest surrounding them. Well, mostly. There were still lush trees and sunlight streaming in over the leaves, but there was also a wall. She looked over her shoulder as her guards put her on her feet to see a massive castle stretching up into the sky, framed by the mountains around them. They were in the capital, Auror.
She was being pushed forward, unable to really look around as elves rushed about. A female elf came striding out of the castle, a baby elfling on her hip. Given the circlet on her head, Hellebore imagined this had to be some relation of the king. The pattern on her dress was familiar, but when Hellebore looked around, she didn't spy it on any of the elves she'd traveled with. Where had she seen it then?
Then she was being shoved through the doors and hauled through hallways, no one bothering to say a word to her about where she was being taken. Was she going to meet the king and would he reveal what he was going to do with her? Or why he had been apparently targeting her in the first place?
But instead of being taken down, they went up. She wasn't being held in the dungeons, at least. She tried out her Iubian again. “Where are we going?”
The two elves looked at each other, and the one on the right shook his head. The one on her left said, “Your room.”
“And the king?”
That earned her harsh glares from both of them. “The king will see you when he desires, alchemist.”
Then they were in front of a door, and once more she was being pushed inside somewhere. They didn't remove the rope binding her wrists, which was driving her insane with the way it had rubbed her skin raw and broken it so it bled. They just shut the door and locked it.
They'd had the foresight not to give her her belt back. Not that there was much she could do now. If she'd failed to escape the little patrol that had caught her in the forest, she knew she wasn't going to make it out of the castle and the city without being caught. With the mountains around them and the terrain outside the city she’d observed, there was probably only one main road out, if she even made it that far.
Hellebore still took stock of the room just to see if there was anything useful in it.
Huh. The room was nice, far nicer than she anticipated even as a royal hostage. It was the height of luxury, or... if this wasn't the height of luxury for Sun Elves, she couldn't imagine what thatdidlook like. There was a four poster, gilded, canopy bed covered in plush pink and orange blankets. On the other side of the room was a tall dresser made of the same soft white wood as the bed and a vanity with a gold framed mirror, and next to it, a deep wardrobe that matched, with gold trim in swirling sun and iris patterns. Toward the front of the room was a sitting area with a low table, a sofa, and a few plush chairs, all trimmed in the same bright, sunny colors—orange, gold, pink. On the table was a vase of flowers in the same colors, though unfortunately no Sunrise Irises. Just normal, but pretty, flowers.
Why were there fresh flowers? Did they put fresh flowers in every room? Or...
Hellebore turned on her heels, looking up at the ceiling, a stunning painting of a sunrise splashing the surface in gold, orange, and pink.
Had they been expecting her?
She made her way over to the window and peered out into the courtyard, using her sore, bruised shoulder to nudge the shimmering gold curtain out of the way.
The activity had slowed. The royal—whether she'd been the queen or a princess, Hellebore wasn't sure—was gone. As far as she knew, King Taiyo wasn't married, but knowledge of minutiae like that wasn't her area. Their neighbors and the politics of foreign affairs were all Callahan’s arena.
She desperately wished Callahan was with her, and not for politics. If he were there, she would be able to trust nothing bad could happen to her. Callahan wouldn’t let it.
But he wasn’t. So, missing the way her brother always crushed her to him every time she’d returned home from the academy didn’t do her any good.
The last of the patrol was being cleared away. Hellebore moved farther down the room to the next window—her room was obscenely large—and did the same, catching sight of the next courtyard over, connected to the first but separate enough. She spotted bushes of orange, gold, and pink flowers, the ones that made up the bouquet on her table. But what was most interesting were the servants scurrying about it, seemingly deep in some kind of preparation. Some court event maybe taking place there?
A banquet for the king who had returned shortly before they received their human hostage?
Hellebore sighed, trying to roll out the stiffness and the ache in her shoulders, but not being able to do much with her hands still bound. After a few hours of trying to rest while shifting from spot to spot to find something comfortable, she gave up. Instead, she did another lap around the room, looking at everything around her and coming up with a dozen ways she could use her alchemy on them to fashion tools for escape or weapons to protect herself, but knowing it was all fantasy.
With some awkward, slow positioning and work, she opened the drawers of the dresser to see it was full of clothes in the Sun Elf style, lots of shiny, spotless silks that were completely impractical in her mind. As she stared at the dresses in the wardrobe, all she could think of was how the hems were so long they'd trail behind her and the nice fabrics would be ruined in a lab. The harsh cleaning treatment the alchemists used when purifying themselves while around toxic substances would render the delicate fabrics to shreds.
Whose room was this? They couldn't have been expecting her for long, and all of these clothes clearly indicated this room was lived in.
Her stomach sank. Unless the king had been planning on kidnapping her before he’d ever even left for Chymes. Hellebore wasn’t a fan of those implications, so she pushed the ludicrous idea away. Why would the king go through the elaborate ruse of visiting her father in the name of peace just to steal her away? He could have taken a page out of the alchemists’ book and just raided the academy to steal her. But that didn’t even explain what he would want with her.
No. While possible, it certainly wasn’t plausible. Her fear was simply getting the better of her, and if she had a knife and the right formula, she would have cut it out of her. Since she could not, she just pushed it away. Logic dictated the most reasonable explanation was that she was in someone else’s room, and that female elf had simply been displaced for the time being.
Hellebore then made her way over to the wall closest to the bed and tried the second door there, but it was locked. And the sun was setting.
