Chapter 15
Relief flooded through her veins, every beat of her heart pumping it swiftly through her body and leaving her trembling as the fight-or-flight instinct left her body to disappear into the shadows.
The exhausted girl stumbled up the steps after the torch, trying her best to to avoid all the broken dishes. Which was nearly impossible because of the sheer quantity and her vision, which was so blurry she could barely see where she was going. The light went through a door off to the left at the top of staircase and she followed.
She quickly lost track of where she was going, with the twisting and turning stretches of nothing but torch light, darkness, stone walls, floor and ceiling with wooden supports. It all looked exactly the same, but she couldn't focus her eyes enough to notice any differences, anyhow. The torches she passed on the walls seemed to light themselves when she drew near, and then snuff out after she passed them, but she was too tired to really notice.
The torch she was following proved to be rather shy, always staying just out of clear sight where she couldn't see anything but its movement and follow that. It stayed just out of her line of clear vision, but never left. On one occasion when she stumbled and nearly fell, it came back and waited for her as she forced her throbbing feet to keep going.
After what felt like a few dozen years of walking through twisting halls and several different doors, flights of steps and passing multiple rooms, the light up ahead dove through an opening in the wall and seemed to stop.
Avalina limped up slowly and turned inside, and the sight before her had never looked so heavenly.
A bed lay in the center of the room, its head against the wall, directly in front of her, its foot pointing toward the door. The blankets were folded neatly back, looking like they had been laid down just a minute ago. The torch that had brought her here was in a holder on the wall by the hot little fire in the tiny fireplace, casting light to the entire room. There was more light off to her left, and limping forward, Avalina came into a smaller room. . .obviously the washroom, by the looks of it. . .where there was a hot bath drawn and waiting.
The girl wanted nothing more than to go and fall into bed and just sleep. But the servants obviously meant for her to use the water, and she didn't wish to anger her host.
Closing the thick wooden washroom door behind her, she was finally able to get out of her soaking wet clothing and take a well-deserved bath. She knew she would sleep much better if she felt clean. Carefully prying her feet out of her boots, wincing as she did so, she examined them. There was dark marks across them in the neat shape of about one third of Mitternacht's hooves.
'Dumb animal,' she thought, slightly irritated. 'Can't take a little lightning.'
She sighed a moment later, admitting to herself that she had been just as scared as he had. She didn't blame him for bolting like that, she just wished he had handled it a bit better than he did. If she had kept her seat better like a more accomplished equestrian would have done, she wouldn't be in so much pain now and may not be here. She could be home!
'In the morning he and I are going to have a long talk about fear and how to manage it,' she thought irritably as she eased herself into the hot water. 'And then I'm going to go ride something that bucks to get my riding edge back.'
Fighting drowsiness with all her might, she managed to wash off as quickly as possible. She made sure she didn't stop, knowing that she'd fall asleep in the water, as exhausted as she was. After she had combed her hair and changed into a long nightgown that had been laid out, she walked carefully into the bedroom, looking forward to the bed more than anything in the world right now.
But the surprises weren't finished for the night, it seemed. For on the little table by the crackling fireplace was a tray full of food that must have been brought in while she was bathing. She did a bleary-eyed glance around the room, but there was nobody there. The smell reminding her of her gnawing hunger, she limped over and attacked it. Too tired to really understand what she was eating, she roughly gathered that it was fried potatoes, fruit and some sort of meat that was very good. A glass of water sat on the table's edge.
Finished, Avalina whispered a thank you to anyone who might be listening as she limped painfully over to the bed and fell gratefully into it. As the warmth enveloped her, the last thing she saw inside head was her mother pacing the floor in worry.
'I'll be home soon, Mom.'
She fell asleep the instant she closed her eyes.
The Horned King paced his chambers slowly, studying his decision he had just made downstairs as an artist would a mural. For the first time in centuries, his steps were neither aggressive nor brooding, and his thoughts calm and contemplating, rather than vengeful and calculating.
He had summoned the goblin earlier and ordered him to stay out of the human's sight or else, in less but decidedly more effective words. The goblin had been too happy to agree if it meant he would not anger his Master.
The Horned King pondered what could have possibly caused him to make the choice he had downstairs. Part of him blamed the Invisibles for distracting him and making it impossible to think at all. In his haste to shut them up he had made a decision he would not have made under normal circumstances. But since when did he ever make hasty decisions, even when he *was* under pressure? He was a war general, a king even! He was used to pressure and he was a strategist. Not a narrow-minded alley thug that ran blindly from authority and ultimately cornered themselves. He was not a rat in a maze, doomed to blindly wander til he found his way out. . .or was he?
He growled softly. As much as he had told himself over and over (And over) again in the days since his resurrection, no matter what his decision, it seemed the Fates (Or his Invisible servants, at least) had somehow coerced him into making it. Nothing he did felt like his own doing, anymore.
But that wasn't true, he corrected himself. The Invisibles, although terribly annoying with their antics and sarcastic arrogance, had never impressed on him to do anything. They obeyed him and they acted like the slaves they were. . .when they felt like it.
The Horned King wondered if that one stipulation they had told him about. . .not being able to harm anyone, nor able to help someone (It didn't matter who) harm anyone else. . .was actually something the Fates had forbidden them to do, or they had just made it up just to annoy him further. Both were thoroughly plausible.
With slight effort, he returned his line of thought to the matter at hand. Why *had* he allowed the girl to stay, and furthermore, why had he not killed her when he had the perfect opportunity?
He turned the question over in his head, observing it from all angles, picking out all the points and trying them out for probability.
She could always be useful at some point. This was the first thing he had told himself when he saw her.
The Horned King prided himself in being able to use nearly anyone or anything that came under his control for at least one thing or another. He looked over everything, no matter how seemingly small or insignificant, for any type of potential he could put to his own use. Anything he could salvage to serve his purpose at the time, he would do so, but the instant they proved more trouble than they were worth or if they were no longer of use, he would have them eliminated from the picture faster than you could blink. That was one of the reasons he had been so successful in conquest in the past, and he would not pass up this possible pawn.
The Invisibles had reprimanded him.
He had never been scolded before in his life. If he had he could no longer remember it, and it was of no importance now.
The complete shock of being criticized heavily by his own slaves was a new one. Anyone else that would even have thought about it would have promptly had their heads removed. But since the Invisibles were anything but mortal humans, nothing he did could intimidate them in the slightest. He couldn't threaten them, couldn't scare them, punish them, abuse them, or even force them to obey him in any way. And they took full advantage of it. When they weren't cracking sarcastically arrogant comments and jokes within earshot about everything related to him under the sun, they took great pleasure in tossing things back and forth through the air like childish games. Everything from flaming torches to brimful teapots had been thrown all the way across a room before, and to date nothing had ever been dropped or broken.
It was like having a bunch of brattish trolls around instead of slaves. He had irritably asked one once why they felt the need to take any assignment and turn it into a ridiculous game, and they had replied that the Fates had only told them to obey him, they hadn't specified how they were to go about it.
Now he had a hunch that they obeyed him merely because they felt like it, because he was completely powerless to make them do anything at all against their will. He was not used to that. He had always had people fear him and obey him immediately before, and once again, it was another reason for his tremendous previous success. People were too scared to disobey or do anything less than total submission for fear of his wrath.
The flashbacks.
They were always there, in the back of his mind, just waiting to spring to the surface and scream in his face. They wore heavily on his thoughts and his nerves, taunting him, mocking him. Constantly. No matter how hard he tried to suppress them, they would bubble to the surface whenever his guard was down, leaving him terrified all over again, snappish and with an absolute zero tolerance for anything other than silence and solitude.
She was a female.
This reason had more to do with that abominable task the Fates had assigned him with at the very beginning of this madness than her gender did. He had killed more people than anyone would ever want to count. Rather, his men had, but he had ordered it.
'Find someone to love you,'
the Fates had said. He snarled out loud in fury at the reminder, the noise sounding even more frightening in the silence of his chambers. He was not going to even think about such a thing ever happening, but if he decided to, a young girl like Avalina would undoubtedly be his best choice.
Her name. Avalina.
He couldn't get it out of his head. He had tried ignoring those four syllables ever since he had spoken them aloud, but they danced across the top of his other thoughts as lightly as a fairy in midair, pirouetting round and round, kicking off with the breeze of his thoughts to dance higher til it would flit to the surface again and hover, shimmering like dawn sunlight over a dewdrop enshrouded cobweb. It was unforgettable. Unignorable. Perhaps even, beau-
'No!' He forcefully snapped the thought it two, refusing to let it finish.
Perhaps he should not have asked her name. Names were a hindrance and had no place in his thoughts. So why couldn't he forget hers? The odd times when one of his new recruits would introduce themselves by name, he would brush it off and it would be forgotten not five minutes later. Not that he had a bad memory, oh no. . .no one remembered longer than the Horned King. . .names were simply petty and not even worth speaking, let alone remembering. They implied you cared for someone, whether positively or negatively. It made the named one worthy of some sort of recognition.
He recognized no one of anything. They were less than worth his time.
He had done both with the girl's, both spoken *and* remembered her name, and he wasn't certain why. He had never asked anyone for their name before in his life, but he had asked her who she was, and her name was part of the description, he supposed with a mild huff. Mortals always seemed to think names were so terribly important, they had to name everything.
Perhaps he simply couldn't forget it because he was unused to hearing someone's birth designation, and the novelty of it had not yet worn off.
The tap at his door shook him from his thoughts, and he settled himself into the small throne before telling the Invisible to enter. Sometimes they would wait for his answer, other times they would march right on in, and he could almost hear the cackles of mirth they got from hearing him growl in displeasure at their antics.
The door came open and he felt the presence enter the room. "The girl has been settled, Your Highness."
The Horned King gave a small nod of dismissal in reply. The Invisible turned to go, the door being drawn shut, but before they left completely the door popped open a little more and the impish brat laughed every syllable.
"She sure was pretty, wasn't she?"
"Get out!" The Horned King hissed, his previous good mood eradicated.
Cackling in mirth, the Invisible shut the door and the laughter faded into the distance, leaving a fuming Horned King longing, for at least the fourth time today, that he could wring their necks.
Nevertheless, that infuriating servant had a point. He had not been able to study her well, from the distance and bad lighting from earlier. It was unwise to have anyone around you could not even recognize. He nodded to himself. Tomorrow he would place a face to that name.
Avalina.