Page 44 of Bride to the Fiend Prince
“I know it.” She smiled, and her dull face turned suddenly bright and beautiful. “For the people and the kingdom I love, I would risk anything.”
She rose from the chair, giving me a curtsey. “A pleasure to speak with you, Princess. I’ll contact you again as soon as I can. Until then, wait, and enjoy your new husband. And get some sleep.”
After she left, my nerves and brain were electrified. Even with the tea and milk, sleep did not come to me for hours. I woke early and sat staring at the Fiend Prince, trying towillhim awake, eager to tell him about what I had learned and the ally I’d made.
But he didn’t stir.
Finally I leaned in close, intending to kiss him awake. The instant my lips touched his forehead, I knew something was wrong. His skin was hot as a kettle, and his breath was shallow.
I leaped for the cord and rang frantically for the servants.
For the next few hours I prowled the edges of the room, unable to get close to Galanrae as the servants and a court physik clustered by the bed. My heart brimmed with impotent anxiety. I’d never been good by a sickbed. I hated fevers, coughs, vomiting, all those things—things I couldn’t fix, things I couldn’t work on until they went away. So I let the servants and the physik bustle around my husband, while I shrank, too nervous to insert myself and demand a place at his side.
Halfway through the morning a servant stopped by, requesting that the Fiend Prince report to the Dreadlord in the war room at once.
“Can’t you see what’s going on?” I snapped. “The Fiend Prince is ill. He won’t be coming.”
The servant looked me up and down as if he didn’t think much of me. Then he went away.
He’d been gone only a handful of minutes when the door to the Prince’s suite exploded inward and the Dreadlord himself strode in, masked and cloaked, with heavy weapons and chains jangling at his belt. “What’s this nonsense about the Fiend Prince being ill?” he thundered. “I need him on the front lines today.”
Like cockroaches scuttling away before a harsh light, the servants and physik scattered from the Prince, clearing a path for the Dreadlord to see his son, pale and sweating. The Prince was murmuring to himself in the throes of a fever dream.
“Now you see,” I said quietly. “As I told your messenger, he cannot come.”
The Dreadlord’s masked face swiveled sharply toward me. “Have you done something to him, you godsdamned cow?”
Blood roared into my face, but I responded as calmly as I could. “I’ve done nothing but bed him well, as you desired. This is somethingelse, I think.” I gave him a hard, intense stare, hoping he would discern what I could not boldly say.His weakness is your fault, Dreadlord, not mine.
After a moment’s staring at me, the Dreadlord said, “Why have you not summoned a healer?”
“The servants told me that sorcerers with healing powers are used for wounds and grave diseases, not fevers—”
“Idiot woman.” The Dreadlord swirled around and marched toward the door. “Summon every sorcerer in the Cursed Palace, except Andreas,” he said. “Have them all converge on this room. They will not leave until they have mended what ails him.”
I was near enough to hear the last words he muttered under his breath as he left the room. “I’m not ready for him to die. I’m not done with him yet.”
Those words weren’t a father’s pained clutching to the son he loved. They belonged to a villain whose plan was not yet complete.
If I thought the bedroom was crowded before, it became even more so as the sorcerers of the Cursed Palace began to arrive. They pushed aside the physik and the attendants, plying their abilities on the Prince.
One encased him in a thin sheet of ice to cool the fever. Another stripped the Prince naked, pressed her hands to each locus on his body and made those points glow golden with energy. Her treatment had no effect, and I didn’t like the way she looked at him and touched him, with a lingering sort of possessiveness. I found myself wondering if she had slept with him at any point in the past. He’d had lovers before, but until that moment I hadn’t thought to be jealous of them.
Five more sorcerers did what they could, and by the power of their efforts they managed to bring down the fever. The Prince roused, blinking in disbelief at the crowd in his room, and at his own naked state. I chewed my fingernails while he scanned the circle of somber figures around his bed. When he reached my face, as I peeped between the robed bodies of the seven sorcerers, his whole expression shifted into relief and longing.
“Amarylla.” He stretched out a thin hand to me, and I rushed to him, pulling the sheet over his lower half and then kissing his sharp knuckles.
“You bastard,” I hissed under my breath. “I thought you were leaving me.”
He laughed, thick and congested. “Not yet.” He coughed, and his hand came away wet with blood.
When his eyes met mine, there was a sorrowful resignation in them. “Come here, Princess. I have something to tell you.”
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I tilted my head so my ear was near the Fiend Prince’s mouth.
His voice was a ragged whisper. “Find the servant Sil. She’s an airhead, but she is Onwe’s cousin and knows how to reach him. I need Onwe’s skill, or I may not survive this.”
