“Perhaps,” I said, chewing on my lip.
I doubted it. Who could sleep well when they had been sold into marriage?
Even as I thought it, I knew that technically, the term “sold” was too strong a word. The legal terms presented to the Council of Lords by Her Majesty Queen Marguerite’s representative were “being brought together under the unity of matrimony.”
But no matter the terms, the reality was that I was chattel and being treated like a marketable good. The Prince of Darkness needed a wife, and Ipotha needed an alliance with Eleyta.
A shudder ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the late hour. What kind of killer was I marrying?
If the rumors whispered in the darkest corners of the castle held even a drop of truth, my future husband was the cruelest, black-hearted vampire to ever live in the Four Kingdoms. They said he drank the blood of infants to break his nightly fast and that no one, human or vampire, ever dared cross him and lived to tell the tale.
I would find out soon enough what kind of male he was.
“Do you remember the plan?” Papa asked, straightening the lapels on his shirt.
“Yes,” I replied. A knot twisted in my stomach as I met my father’s brown eyes. Like me, his skin was perpetually tanned, and we both had dark brown hair. His was short, but mine reached my waist when it was down.
Papa squeezed my hand. “Tonight, the vampires are taking you to Eleyta so you can marry the prince. Under the terms of the agreement, Queen Marguerite is sending an army of her strongest soldiers to help protect Ipotha from the coming war in the east.”
“And the Council of Lords is shipping hundreds of pounds of grain to isolated human villages in the north of Eleyta, correct?”
“Yes.” My father nodded. “The first shipment went out last week, and we will continue to be delivered on a monthly basis for the next five years.”
That was my worth as determined by the Council of Lords: grain and an army.
Somehow, it didn’t seem like enough.
I said as much to my father, and he let go of my hand, wrapping me in a tight hug. “You never know, pumpkin. Perhaps, in time, you may learn to love the prince. It might not be so bad.”
Was that all I could hope for? That my marriage would not be “so bad”? It felt like a low bar.
I frowned. “Maybe.”
Even as the word left my lips, I knew it to be a lie. I wouldn’t find it, because I already knew the truth about love. Three times in my twenty-one years, I had stood witness as my father married for “love”. All it had done was teach me that love wasn’t real. It wasn’t quantifiable, nor was it measurable. Every time he got married, Papa said he was “in love”. How could that be true?
He was a good male, but he didn’t understand science as I did. If something couldn’t be measured or seen or touched or tasted, was it real? I didn’t think so.
Like fairy tales told to young children at night, love was a fabrication created to make people feel better about their marriages.
When I first arrived at this conclusion a few years ago, I tried to explain it to my current stepmother, Ysabel. She just laughed me off, patting me on the head and telling me to get my nose out of my books. Maybe then, she reasoned, I would see love for the beautiful thing it was.
Ysabel didn’t understand the appeal of books. Literature was constant. It was always there to provide a comforting hug when needed. It never judged me, nor did it ever make me feel like I was less important because I was the youngest of four daughters.
Another reason that books were better than people was because they never hurt anyone. I had never heard of anyone being murdered by a book, but I couldn’t say the same thing about my future husband. People said the Prince of Darkness left dead bodies in his wake.
His power was unrivaled, and his heart was as black as the shadows he wielded. That was the male I was marrying.
“I love you, Lulu,” Papa murmured. “Kinthani, gods be with her soul, would be proud of you.”
“I miss her, Papa.” Blinking furiously as a tear came to my eye, I straightened. Catching it on the tip of my finger—the servants had spent hours doing my makeup earlier, and I did not want their efforts to go to waste—I sniffled. “I miss her so much.”
For the first eleven years of my life, Kinthani was the only mother I knew. It didn’t matter that she was a Fortune Elf, and I was a human. Her arms were the ones that I found refuge in when my sisters excluded me on a nearly daily basis. Her lips were the ones that kissed me when I got hurt. It didn’t matter that we didn’t share blood. I loved her, and she loved me.
When she died giving birth to Marius a decade ago, I mourned her death like I would have any blood relatives. Even now, ten years later, my brother was a sickly child. He had little of his mother’s magic, and he needed near-constant care. He remained in our summer home, being cared for by some of the best witches in Ipotha.
It was for Marius’s sake that I spent countless hours in the university libraries and laboratories, searching for information on the wasting illness that had plagued him since birth. No matter how much he ate, he was always weak.
Papa had spoken to countless physicians and witches from all over Ipotha, and none of them knew what was wrong with Marius. They tried everything they could think of, from bleeding him to various diets and exercise, but nothing worked.