Page 22 of Ruling the Green

My wife’s teeth.

Her whole body was trembling hard enough to vibrate the bed.

She seemed fast asleep, an arm out of the blankets and thrown over her head.

Reaching out, I touched the skin of her hand, finding it icy.

Huh.

The thick castle walls did maintain a cooler temperature, but that usually wasn’t an issue until the deepest part of winter. It was still rather mild out—the kind of night where I would typically open the windows and let a cool breeze in.

That didn’t seem to be an option now.

I went to the wardrobe, finding one of the thick woolen blankets reserved for frigid nights, then spread it over her body.

But five minutes later, she was still as cold as death and trembling. Even more alarming, she was whimpering in her sleep as if in pain.

“Alright,” I murmured to myself as I turned and made my way over to the hearth, lowering down to pile some fresh wood inside, then coaxing a fire until it was dancing and spilling hot air into the already stuffy room.

I ducked into the water closet to brush my teeth. When I walked back out, the bedroom was as warm as a midsummer day.

But the woman on the bed was still trembling, chattering, whimpering, and now rocking.

Making my way over to the bed, I climbed on and scooted to the center before sliding an arm under her body and curling her in toward me.

I readjusted the blankets around her, already feeling my shirt starting to stick to me with sweat.

But the closeness on top of the blankets and fire seemed to finally be easing her trembling.

As the night drew on, though, the whimpering in her sleep only seemed to intensify.

Was it simply bad dreams from being ripped away from her life and forced to marry a stranger? Or was there something else going on? Was the Bellhush having other negative effects?

I should have asked Vishen more about it. At the time, though, my only concern was the silence.

Hopefully, as the drugs worked their way through and out of her system, it would all ease.

As it was, all I could do was be a source of heat for her as she tossed, turned, and cried out in her sleep. I maybe got ten or fifteen minutes snatched at a time before something she did woke me up.

I wasn’t complaining, though.

I had a lot to think about.

Besides, I didn’t sleep much. Not because I was forced to live that way, like Vishen. It was my own mind that didn’t allow much rest. One of those ‘heavy is the head that wears the crown’ sort of things. Only I didn’t wear the crown. Not yet. And watching my father drive our realm into the ground while I had to stand by and do nothing was frustrating at best.

To calm that anxiety, I sat awake planning and plotting all the things I would change when it was my turn to take that throne. I’d been doing it for years, and yet there was still no shortage of problems to try to solve—without pissing off too many people in the process.

The work camps, for example, had to fucking go. Sure, I might still be fine with them for criminals—since my father’s methods of housing and torturing them for eternity were generally unwarranted and entirely too expensive—but not for random Light fae caught in our realm or the humans who were unfortunate enough to be able to get through the veil on our side of The Green.

The imprisonment and forced breeding of rare fae creatures also had to go.

Perhaps if we acted less like animals, the Seelie and Unseelie courts could, if not get along, at least not constantly be gearing up for war.

Unfortunately for me and my plans, my father was still in decently good health, despite losing his mind a little bit more day to day. And those closest to him—from his guards to his political allies—were doing their best to keep his madness from the public eye. He could go on for years like this.

By the time I finally inherited, what the hell would there be left of the kingdom? Aside from men as evil as they were rich and powerful? Men like Grimwood. Ones who thought they could outsmart not only my father, but me.

Maybe I should have called him out at the ceremony. It wasn’t Grimwood’s likely imprisonment and torture that bothered me. But what would happen to this woman?