Chapter Fifteen: A Road For Success

         “I’m not five. I’m eleven.”

        My sister Tasia was in a bitter mood against me. Usually she was nice as can be, especially to me but lately she’s been a royal snob. No pun intended.

        “I know Tasia, I was just wondering if you wanted to play a game with me. Big kids can do that too,” I try to reason with her.

        “Is Lisle playing?” she asks, referring to my brother.

        “He said he would play if you did,” I tell her. “But Hadrian is playing. Aren’t you, Hadrian?” I state then turn to look at him. His eyebrows knit together and he gives a very subtle no. Tasia seems to be pondering for a moment- I knew she had a crush on him.

        I mouth the words ‘please?’ to him but he just stares at me, blankly.

        How did I get here? After Hadrian knocked a little bit of common sense back into me he kept to his promise. I hesitated about it at first but eventually I came to find that he honestly and truly agreed with my opinion. I demanded that he helped me and he told me to start with getting my siblings to like me again, who recently decided they didn’t like me for whatever reason. He insists that since I’m the one becoming queen, I have to do most of the work myself. 

        But in this case, he was going to have to help me. So what if hide-and-seek isn’t exactly a very mature game, it wasn’t as if it was the most awful thing in the world. How else was I supposed to start rebuilding a relationship with my younger siblings?

        “In fact,” I sigh. “Hadrian wants to be it first.”

        Tasia looks over at him suspiciously and he just continues staring in that way as if to state that he most certainly was not going to play. She still doesn’t say anything as she tries to decipher the unfamiliar face.

        “Alright,” she sighs, obviously not getting the true meaning out of the face. “I’ll go tell Lisle,” she states. As she stands up and walks past Hadrian she pokes out her chest and walks straighter than usual, flipping her hair a little as she walks by. I attempt to follow her out before Hadrian can protest but he grabs me by the arm on the way out, stopping me. So close…

        “I have a fiancée to attend to…” Hadrian mumbles to me in a lower voice. “I don’t have time to play games with you. Think of something else.”

        Was I really going to have to do this? Apparently. I huff then draw slightly closer to him. “Well that’s a shame. I guess she’ll just have to wait, won’t she? Besides, you promised you’d help,” I flutter my eyelashes innocently a few times, trying to coax him. Even though he was engaged, he was still a man and beauty was bound to have some influence on him still.

        “One game,” he mutters. I smile, then he releases me. “Count to sixty,” I tease, then I walk out of the chamber.

        *~*~*~*~*~*

        “Here’s what I don’t understand,” Tasia sighs in the middle of our conversation. Hadrian stayed true to his word and only played one game before he abandoned me. Lisle was annoyed that he went through all that work for one game but then Hadrian offered to teach him a few fencing techniques later and he calmed down a bit. “Callea, don’t you believe in love?”

        I give her a shocked look. “Of course I do…” I replied slowly.

        “And I thought you were in love with Hadrian. That’s what I heard you and Vorion talking about one time…”

        “Not anymore,” I shake my head. “He’s engaged to Gloriana.”

        Tasia grimaces. She’s always had the same distaste for her that the rest of us have, due to Gloriana being an ultimate ditz and being over self centered. “Why are you marrying an old man? I don’t think he could possibly have that much money and not going to lie, that’s utterly… repulsive!”

        “Do mother and father keep you locked up in this room all day or what?” I ask. “Do you think I want to get married at all? Well, actually I would if it were somebody else but the fact is that I was never given a choice in the matter. How did you not know that?” I ask. I’m pretty sure that it has something to do with what she heard from my mother and father about how stubborn I’m being but I shrugged it off. It was to be expected, in the least.

        “What do you mean someone else?” Tasia wanted to know. “Like Hadrian.”

        “No, not like Hadrian,” I roll my eyes. Never was I going to go down that path again and fall for the buffoon of a man. “Like someone I could fall in love with,” I smile to myself, knowing exactly who I would marry if it were up to me but then feel a pit in my stomach a little bit as I recall just why I can’t.

        “Well why not Hadrian then?” Tasia wondered.

        I huff. “Because Hadrian is already getting married to your cousin, for one, and because no matter what I don’t get to decide anyway, alright?”

        Tasia seemed disappointed with my answer as she realized that clearly I wasn’t too fond of Hadrian. Yes, he had a agreed to help me but his word had never meant much to me since he told me he loved me then proposed to my cousin, barely ten minutes later.

        “Callea, why don’t we ever do anything anymore?” she questions. “When Vorion was at war we did things together. Now you never have time for me,” she practically whispers.

        I stare for a while, trying to come up with a good response but not being able to think of one, especially considering the distraction of her not looking at me. 

        “I looked up to you, you know Callea. Now it’s as if you’ve just turned into something else. A person that I just don’t know anything about anymore.”

        “Since Vorion’s death things have been changing,” I try to explain to both her and myself. “I have more responsibilities now and things to prepare for. I’ve had a lot going on…”

        “Like getting torn apart by the town. That sounds much more important than spending time with your sister.”

        For a while her words hang in the air. When the silence started becoming uncomfortable, I whispered, “I’m sorry. You’re right.” She doesn’t respond though, just turns back to the book she was reading before I disturbed her in the first place by asking her to play a game with me. Realizing that she didn’t want to talk to me, I huffed then stood up. 

        On my way out the door, Tasia stopped me. “I forgive you, Callea. And I hope you good luck on finding yourself.”

        I wasn’t sure if I knew who I was though. I knew what I wanted most was proof that love, and I mean actual incandescent love, actually existed. Not just in the form of a man falling in love with a single women but the kind of love that every nation seems to know about except for ours. The kind of love that realizes that war is bad and that it’s alright to do what’d right. But everything else with myself I wasn’t sure about. The kind of queen I was going to have to make and be in no time at all, the kind of wife I was going to be, what kind of mother…

        The truth was that I only know very few things about myself. I was going to be a very hard person to find.

        *~*~*~*~*

        That night was the first time since Vorion’s death that I had dreamed about him. I woke up in the middle of the night with sweat trickling on my forehead and Abigail was next to me, having had to shake me awake.

        “Princess, what is it?” she questioned.

        I shook my head. “Nothing. Just a nightmare, I’ll be fine.”

        Abigail nodded her head slowly but then she left me.

        The truth was that I was terrified that night though. My dream started back to the night before I met Kier, when I had to hide because someone was trying to kill me. Only this time, with the mysterious man, I was not warned, rather, he appeared at my window and I couldn’t even muffle a scream.

        The cloaked man showed himself. It was Vorion with a dagger clenched in his teeth and he was laughing, calling my names that he had never spoken about in his life. The insults he spoke in my dream even hurt for me to think about now.

        “A poison tester,” he mocked. Then, suddenly from under the wing of his cloak, Kier fell to the ground with a pale face and cloudy eyes. “A foolish man. Poisoned himself to death,” Vorion hissed. “And a foolish woman you are for falling in love with such a man,” he laughed. Vorion never spoke meanly to me though. And there was Kier, still but breathing coming out of his cloak.

        “No!” I screamed at him, tears even in my dream. “No, Vorion, I love him! I love him.”

        “Fool’s love,” Vorion spit. “This man poisoned his heart. In honor of what? Kaithronese royalty? It’s despicable,” and in my dream Vorion scowled, tilting his head up. “Kaithron killed me Callea yet you still fight for their sake. Now they’ve killed your love.”

        “Aza,” then Kier was speaking, still looking pale as ever. “Aza you lied. You lied.”

        Then Kier was lifeless. I screamed. Vorion vanished and in the next moment of my dream, all of Aynah was gathered around the castle with torches and weapons of all sort. The were screaming death taunts at me. And the more I spoke the worse I made things. The bottom line was that they simply did not care to hear a word of it. They just didn’t care.

        That’s when Abigail woke me up. 

        I close my eyes, trying to fall asleep. At the faintest squeak I turned my head to the window. Nothing was there though. I closed my eyes again.

        “Callea,” I heard my name whispered. “Callea,” it spoke again. I shut my eyes tighter, knowing I was just imagining it. 

        “Callea,” it said again this time, louder, then suddenly I felt something cold touch my jaw. I yanked my eyes open, my first instinct to scream but the hand covered my mouth to muffle it. “Shh, it’s the middle of the night,” Hadrian laughed. I calmed down and Hadrian took the hand off my mouth, just smiling.         “Come here… I need to show you something.”

        “But it’s late,” I whispered back, sitting up.

        “I know but you have to come see it now, because it probably wont be there later,” Hadrian says. I got out of the bed and he motioned for me to be silent, then the two of us crept down the halls with me following right behind him. He brought me to the chamber doors of the queen and king. I heard voices inside of it speaking.

        At first I couldn’t make out the muffles but then they must have come slightly closer to the door because I could start making out words.

        “After all we’ve put he through, it just doesn’t seem fair that we force her to marry. The child has a mind of her own. It’s too free to lock up when it still has more potential to grow…” it was Hadrian’s father’s voice, my future husband. I kept listening.

        “She’s just a child. She’s too young to have to suffer the pain that heartache brings alone. This way we’re helping her,” my father insisted.

        “Please your highness, I haven’t called any engagement off. I just wish for you to consider what I’ve said.”

        “Very well, we’ll see,” my father sighed. He seemed like he was actually agreeing… a smile forms across my face.

        “So?” Hadrian whispers to me, wanting to know what I thought. I gleefully smile at him, then as I hear the duke coming out of the room the two of us run down the hall so we aren’t caught.

        “So maybe there is a little bit of hope, I’m thinking,” I grin at him. “Just maybe we can do this.”

        Hadrian sighs too seeming relieved about what I said. “I think that maybe we can too.”