Page 25 of Of Skulls Of Shackles

True enough. “I will harm no monster, your husband included.”

“Do you give me your word.” Her tone was mocking. She had little reason to trust a queen. Ours was the beginning of a friendship, not the hearty and warm middle of one.

I could not look at her. I would need to fathom how to unlock my body if I wanted to conquer kings. “Consider that obsession is granted by ancients, princess.”

“The same ancients that drove me to union with my husband. What is driven by ancients is not always a blessing. Consider that I mean to protect him and always will, chained by love as I am.”

I would consider just that. For there was something in what she had said about ancients driving her to union with a king.

If throne is seat

Union is seam

The chant of thirteen mothers mentioned unions, and so I must not disregard their importance ever. “You speak from fear. You speak too hastily. My obsession need not be as it has previously been, and your union need not always remain a curse, but your union will not change if you continue on in the same manner of the last many centuries.”

“I have seen you in the throes of madness,” she whispered. “When you attacked Princess Change.”

“Is Princess Change yet unharmed?”

The princess did not answer.

Princess Bring exclaimed, “You forget that ancients fill us with power too. If our queen grows too seized with violent and thoughtless intent, we possess what is needed to hold her. If you do not trust her promise, then consider that your role as your husband’s shield is best carried out from where you are. Abandoning your role as queen’s steward to hasten to your husband’s side will only see you locked away and unable to act as shield at all.”

Raise dragged her hands down her face, and oily prints remained. She was very upset. “I envy your position, Bring, so indifferent you are to your king’s fate.”

“I try to be indifferent because he wished to kill me,” she replied. “And I also believe Queen Perantiqua holds the fate of the world and monsters in her stitches. I feel certain about this where I rarely feel certain of anything.”

Such feeling rose in me at her soggy utterings. A monster believed so powerfully in my fate when I felt doubt on the subject from breath to blinking and back again.

Raise squared her shoulders. “Know this, Queen Perantiqua. You may rule the world, but if you harm my husband, I will be your enemy forevermore. Princess Bring has the inner strength to do what is required of her as your servant, but I am seized in the trappings of all I feel for my husband, and I cannot imagine that changing.”

There was somewhat of a resounding boom in me at her phrasings of love, for I certainly felt Princess Bring was the stronger of the two in this moment. I did not care to inspect this feeling too much.

Princess Raise sighed. “But love does give me hope when I perhaps should not hope. I must be a fool, for I shall tell you the source of a king’s kingdom, so infected with hope as I am. Kings share a source indeed. You are right that this is not tied to union nor the power gained from union.”

I inhaled the heady aroma filling the room. Bring shivered, and Raise stopped speaking all together.

She took a breath before continuing. “My husband has often remarked on how kings were once unified. Even when they made their pact to save the world, the beginnings of ruin and resistance existed in many of them, so they were not truly unified then, you see. You must go back to the very beginning. To that which is olden. That is the only time that kings were unified, so my husband recalls.”

In its ancientness, my mind could fathom two verses at once. And so they played in a blink side by side and all together.

Five soldiers rode across the plains,

At a cave they arrived.

Green light shone from far within,

So sought it, the brave five.

A pulsing power, a stone half-buried,

Beckoned, taunted, coaxed.

’Til five brave men, in unison did,

Touch left hand to olden rock.

Each man awoke in icy darkness,

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