Page 3 of War of Her Heart

The Queen Mother required her Sovereigns to have a group of Advisors that they chose themselves. They helped with taking care of the small tedious things like complaints from faeries in the cities to ensuring certain creatures were staying within their territories. In the event of an untimely death of a Sovereign, the Advisors made every decision for their realm until the Sovereign’s eldest child came of age and was able to take over control of the realm.

One problem with that: Queen Mother never specified an age.

So over the centuries, the realms interpreted this rule differently. .

Some realms picked a specific age, like one hundred, which was right when fae stopped aging physically. It took us one hundred years to look like we were twenty-five in human years.

Some realms chose to interpret it based on the “maturity age,” which to them meant the age they took their wife. Sometimes that happened when the Sovereign was eighty andsometimes, if they were stubborn enough, not until they were hundreds of years old.

Can you guess which interpretation our realm used? Calum would officially become Sovereign and get all of the power that comes with it when he married.

We never expected Calum’s father’s death, so we thought it would be centuries before he became Sovereign. To us, the arranged marriage thing didn’t seem real because it wouldn’t be required until it was time for Calum to become Sovereign.

You would think that his mother would want to drag it out as long as possible so she could keep her power by controlling the Advisors. She could keep pushing out an engagement for hundreds of years, which would give me and Calum a long life together, if she wanted to.

But there were two reasons she wouldn’t do that:

She hated me.

She knew it would be detrimental for the Mountain Realm.

Calum being so young made our realm vulnerable and an easy target for another realm to attack.

It wouldn’t be the first realm to fall from being too weak. That was the Sun Realm. It happened before I was born, but I’d read about it. They were once considered the most powerful realm because of one of the types of creatures that roamed the Sun Realm’s land—phoenixes. They looked like fae, but from what I read, they could shape-shift into bird form, burst into flames, burn down entire cities, and reincarnate if they were killed.

Some of the Sovereigns feared that these creatures were too powerful and that they one day might try to take over the other realms, so they found a way to kill them, permanently. It was a complete genocide. They sent armies into the phoenixes’ village within the Sun Realm and killed them all—even the babies.

The Sovereign of the Sun Realm tried to stop the armies but he wasn’t enough, and they killed him too.

With the death of the Sovereign, who didn’t have an heir, and the death of the Sun Realm’s strongest protectors, the realm fell. The faeries and creatures of the Sun Realm seemed to disappear. It seemed like no one knew what happened to them—or where they may have gone.

Celine had spies in several other realms, and they had heard gossip about “the weak and broken Mountain Realm.” She feared that another realm was going to make a move to destroy our realm.

She decided that the best option would be an alliance with another realm. She knew that it would have to be a strong alliance that the other realms would fear. And she did just that.

She managed to arrange an engagement with the worst realm of all.

The Night Realm.

2

Chapter 2

Violet

We’d been together for over two decades now and no matter how hard Calum fought his Advisors on this, he’s still being forced to spend the next six months getting to know his future wife. A six-month engagement at the female’s home realm was customary so the male could get to know her family before they moved back to his realm.

Calum had told me over and over again that he’s not going to even give her a chance and that he was going to figure out a way out of this before it’s too late. I told him I believed him but I knew that I was going to be brokenhearted in the end. I had no doubt that he loved me, but that didn’t mean he still would after he spent so much time with someone that had spent her entire life preparing to be the wife of a Sovereign.

Tomorrow morning, he was leaving for the Night Realm.

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