Page 1 of War of Her Heart

1

Chapter 1

Violet

The rustling of the fabric of his pants being rubbed together while the servants folded them. The click of the clasp on his leather bag as the servants filled it with his clothes. The most wretched sounds I had ever heard.

I should have been the one doing those things. I should have packed his clothes and helped him ready for his trip. But I couldn’t. Every task the servants accomplished—every fucking thing they packed—brought us one step closer to his inevitable departure, where he would leave to begin his engagement to another.

I didn’t know what I did to the gods to deserve to have to watch the love of my life walk out the door to spend the next six months getting to know his future wife.

Actually, I did.

That was what happened when you fell in love with someone so far out of your reach that you shouldn’t have had him to begin with.

Calum Evers. The Sovereign of the Mountain Realm. He was always destined to marry the daughter of another Sovereign, but I didn’t know it would happen so fast.

We lived in the kingdom of Alentara. Thousands of years ago, before there was any order every type of faerie and creature lived together under pure chaos. They fought each other to survive. Fae—the most humanlike of the faeries—were among the easiest prey because they had no powers to protect themselves. They stayed hidden, constantly looking over their shoulders.

Then, a powerful witch named Evidannan came along. She summoned every fae to the center of the land. She told them of her plan to magically split the land into realms where everyone and everything was placed in the realm that they could live the most peacefully in. She painted a picture of order where instead of being hunted by creatures, fae would be given power and protection in their realms. All that the witch asked was that the center of Alentara, where she was to complete the spell, becomes her home. Eager for a place of safety, the fae were willing to do whatever it took to help her make it happen.

Of course, each realm needed someone to rule and keep order in the realm, so she held a series of games where any fae could participate. The games basically turned into a fight to the death where only the smartest and strongest survived. She then assigned each of the winners a realm and gave them a gift to help rule their realm. All that was left was to have the Sovereigns give her a vial of blood so she could complete her spell. When she spoke the spell, the earth shifted and magical borders split the land into seven realms, each with a distinct climate and landscape to meet the needs of the faeries and creatures she placed there. The seven realms became the Mountain, Ice,Night, Forest, Flower, Ocean, and Sun Realms. While fae could move between the realms freely, other faeries and creatures became trapped in the realm Evidannan chose for them.

What the seven Sovereigns didn’t know at the time was that the blood they gave for the spell linked them to Evidannan, which gave her control over them. Control of the gifts she blessed them with. She gave them their power, and she could easily take it away if she wanted to.

She became known as Queen Mother, ruling Alentara from the center of the land. The Sovereigns feared losing their gifts and their realms, so they did everything Queen Mother told them to do, without question. Whatever she wanted became law.

Queen Mother told the Sovereigns they must marry from the royal bloodlines of the seven realms in order to keep their blood pure, which is why many ended up in arranged marriages.

I thought Calum and I would have a few hundred years before we had to face this, but after everything that happened the last few years, everything changed.

When I was still a small faeling, my father became the Commander of the Mountain Realm’s Guard and he moved us into the castle. It was customary for the Commander to live in the castle to ensure that the Sovereign was always protected. Commanders were raised in the Guard where they knew if they wanted the chance to become Commander, the highest title in the Guard of each realm, they must focus their entire lives on that, meaning no wife, no children. Obviously, my father never planned on having a child.

He also never planned on meeting my mother and falling in love.

She ended up pregnant, and he dropped his dream of becoming Commander and married my mother. She died during childbirth, something unheard of among fae, which left my father alone with a baby that he had no idea how to take care of.

He realized almost immediately that something wasn’t right with me. I guess that came with whatever curse that killed my mother. He could feel my heart stop, as if I died for a second, and then start back. He traveled to the Land of the Healers with me looking for answers. I was the only thing he had left of my mother, and he couldn’t let anything happen to me. He needed to protect the only piece he had left of her at all costs.

No one knew how to cure what I had because they had never seen a faerie that had something wrong with their heart. He spent years traveling within the Land of the Healers with me, going door to door, begging for help. He finally came across a healer that came up with a solution. He developed a medicine that I had to take at the same time every day, and it pretty much cured my condition. I just couldn’t ever miss a dosage because he feared that one day my heart would stop, and it wouldn’t start back.

After our travels, we came back to the Mountain Realm, and my father worked as a border guard. He hired a nursemaid to take care of me since he was busy with work. Astrid took care of my every need, and when I was old enough, she began to teach me. I learned everything from basic skills a lady should know to how to communicate with any faerie I may come across—which seemed impossible given I was never allowed to leave our home.

One day while my father was working, a creature attacked Calum’s father and his Commander, and my father was the first one to arrive to help. Because he had trained his entire life to be a Commander, he was able to save both of their lives. The Commander lost his arm before my father got there, and Calum’s father knew he had to get a new Commander.

He was so impressed with my father that he asked him to become the new Commander of the Mountain Realm. My father told him about me and that he couldn’t leave me, and Calum’sfather didn’t care. He told my father to bring me to the castle with him.

My father and the Sovereign, Calum’s father, became very close so we spent a lot of our time with him and his family. Calum and I were in the same stage of life so we played together very well. At first, it was an innocent friendship. I mean we were only faelings. It was nothing but chasing each other around the gardens, playing hide-and-seek in the castle, and sleepovers where Calum would tell me scary stories about the Night Realm, which is the worst and most evil realm in the kingdom.

After we reached our teenage years, Calum started avoiding me and anytime we were around each other, he would ignore me and act like he couldn’t stand to be around me. It hurt because he was my best friend. My only friend. Being a lady in the Mountain Realm wasn’t easy. We were meant to be seen but not heard, simply pretty things to serve the men. But it was different with Calum. Since we were so close, no one dared to say anything to me when I was with the son of the Sovereign, and Calum never treated me as less than him. One day, I finally got tired of being ignored so I went to his room to confront him.

I’ll never forget how he looked me up and down and said, “Fuck it” before he pushed me against the wall and kissed me.

He wasn’t avoiding me because he didn’t like me; he was avoiding me because he had feelings for me. I had always had a crush on him, and when he kissed me it opened the floodgates of feelings.

We knew it was doomed from the beginning because he had to marry someone else chosen for him before he was even born. We would sneak around because we knew if his parents found out, they would put an end to it. He told me he loved me within a fortnight of our first kiss, and I cried because I knew that it didn’t matter in the long run. He told me he could never lovesomeone the way he loved me so I ran out of his room and avoided him for a week.

I couldn’t get any deeper into the mess we made because we both knew how it would end: me, brokenhearted and married to someone my father deemed suitable, and Calum, ruling the realm with I can only imagine to be a goddess-like wife.

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