Alive (The Veiled World Book 1) Read Free Page B

a meter or so away. “Did you hear? They’re coming! They are finally coming!”
    “Good news,” I said, trying but failing miserably at sounding excited. It was fairly hard to fake excitement when you’ve heard that “they” were coming every day for the past year.
    I sighed with relief as King Cyril seemed to lose interest in me and made for the library door, but cried out as the old man about-faced and gripped me by my shoulders before slamming me against the brick wall. Though I was taller than him by at least a head, and more built, the old guy’s madness seemed to give him superhuman strength.
    “Didn’t you hear me? They are coming, boy! This time for real. The one with the flying bird. He is bringing them. The one who visited!” He shook me, beating the back of my head against the stone wall twice. “You should be excited, you stupid fool!”
    Pictures formed inside my mind of me seizing the old king by the cuff of his golden robe and tossing him down the hallway like a stuffed toy, but I shook my head to erase them. He was my king, after all, and not a bad king, truth be told. Plus, his crazy babble was music to my ears.
    The old man’s watery blue eyes lit up and he laughed, revealing surprisingly good teeth but terrible breath. Did the gardener have to grow so much garlic? I held mine and twisted my face away slightly.
    “He is bringing,” King Cyril lowered his voice, “ challengers. ”
    My heart worked faster. If this was true, then perhaps King Cyril would send me out with them. Perhaps I would finally have a chance to get my brother back.
    “Your Majesty, do you think, if they do arrive, do you th-think—”
    “Stop stuttering, fool, my son is calling for you!” He spat out the word son, not hiding his disdain for his only child, then released me and disappeared down the corridor.
     
    ***
     
    “Look, Axel!” Prince Ollie stood at the foot of the bed I was making, his bed, and shoved a piece of parchment in front of my face. “What do you see, boy?”
    I finished tucking the sheet beneath the mattress, my hands meticulous and slow. The prince hated to wait and I enjoyed stirring the brat, especially when he called me boy .
    “Look at it!”
    Instead of raising my head, I concentrated on folding the perfect corner crease and said, “Didn’t your father, our king, ever teach you that patience is a virtue?” I moved to the other side of the bed to fold the last two corners, meeting Ollie’s gaze at the same time.
    The prince’s pale, round face turned crimson. “Speak to me like that again and I’ll have you salted.”
    My back prickled. My broken skin hadn’t yet healed from the last salting. Ollie was becoming more of a tyrant by the minute. I let out a long, slow sigh. It was better to be on the tyrant’s good side if what the king had said was true, that visitors were, in fact, coming.
    “Give me a look, then.”
    Ollie laid the parchment on the bed carefully, as if it were a baby, his pale, childish fingers fluttering over it. “It’s a drawing, my drawing. It came to me in a dream last night. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
    Putting a hand to my mouth, I coughed to cover my grin. This was no drawing. All I could see was a scribbly line that quite possibly resembled a…“Is it a goat?”
    A frown creased the prince’s brow, but it quickly vanished and instead he laughed, musical and girlish, like he always did. “I forget your simple servant’s mind, boy.” He laughed again, his beady eyes glinting up at me like shiny black pebbles. “It is Her hand,” he boasted with raised brows.
    My eyes narrowed at the scribble until I saw something that could possibly be a hand.
    “Whose hand?”
    Ollie snatched the parchment from the bed and smacked it across my face.
    “The Goddess’s hand, you idiot. You do know what this means, don’t you, servant boy?”
    My hands made fists, nineteen-year-old fists that wanted to smack Ollie’s eighteen-year-old mouth to make certain