Louisa's Lamentations SAMPLE (Book 4 of The Sovereign Series)

3. Nèamadh

The silence in the room was deafening as all the wolves shifted their eyes from the angry Xavier to the serene Alaric. When someone finally spoke, it was no wonder that it was Kane.

“Is this true, father?” He spoke in a low, gravelly tone that bespoke of his horror on the subject. Though he was mated to Lexi through their Mondblume potion and ceremonies, he would never have stopped two true mates from being together. It was near blasphemy and frowned down upon even in the upper echelons of royalty.

“I was going to tell you, but it…it damn-well slipped my mind,” Xavier muttered. “It was so long ago, I had nearly forgotten. The…” He closed his eyes and breathed in deep. “The history between our kind is long and difficult to think about. Something one would push away.”

“You all know about your heritage by now,” Alaric told them abruptly. “Well, maybe except for Louisa, but I’m sure Brighton will share it with her in time. The sorcery that runs in the veins of the Reifenbergs is only apparent in the women of the clan, and as most of you know, most of your female ancestors have been…special.”

Lexi immediately thought of her daughter and how intuitive she always was. She wondered about that, but kept silent until Alaric’s gaze flickered over to her.

“Yes, Queen Alexandria, what you think for your daughter, Kate, is true. She will make a wonderful empath one day if she harnesses the power. Louisa, too, has many attributes hidden within her as well, gifts that will open up once she is mated to my son. With their blood exchange—”

“Blood exchange?” Kane interjected.

Alaric nodded. “While you royalty have your Mondblume potion and true mating pulls, we fae have our own way of marking what is ours by rights. How else would Louisa become queen of the fae without mingling with our essence first?”

“Queen?” Lexi quipped eagerly. Alaric nodded in turn.

“Yes, Your Grace,” he affirmed. “My given name is Alaric Soilleir, King of the Fae until my son, Rionnag, has marked and mated with his gràdháich—or mate—and he will rule the fae. Along with Louisa, of course.”

Kane looked like he wanted to speak, but Lexi asked another question. “Why did Franz deny his daughter her true mate?”

“Although Franz and I were allies for a time, he still looked down upon the fae. I don’t know why he felt that shifters were superior, but it’s not strange to have some sort of bigotry between the species. Look at the bear shifters, for example. Because they are larger than wolves, they feel more empowered and rarely mingle with your kind. I have a feeling it was the same way with Franz. Because fae don’t shift into an animal, they are somehow inferior.”

“But your kind have so many more powers,” Lexi told him. “Could it be that he was afraid you held too much magic?”

Alaric nodded as if he’d thought of that before too. “It’s possible, but as we never spoke again after Klara’s death and he died so young, I never got a true answer. But before he died, he made sure that all his descendants would hate our kind. We fae are peaceful, and always have been. There was nothing more than unity that we wanted, but Franz looked down his nose at us because we are usually secretive and cloistered in the mountains or on islands. We enjoy nature most of all, so we prefer the great outdoors more than the cities or the civilizations surrounding them.”

“Klara was a weak female to take her own life,” Xavier muttered weakly. “My Louisa would never do anything so rash.”

Alaric blinked over to him. “My son said the same thing about Klara before she killed herself. That she would never do anything so rash. Once she died, his pain was severe. He was entranced into a deep sleep for weeks after her passing because the pain—both the physical and emotional—was too much for him to bear. And it took him hundreds of years to get over it. He still can’t stand to hear her name, so it is never spoken if it can be helped. It only reminds him of a love lost and makes him bitter towards you and your kind, though he would not usually be so. Your daughter will never forgive you if you don’t grant her this coupling. If she lives that long.”

“Louisa—” Xavier started to say.

“Is a female who has found her true mate,” Alaric butted in. “Can you say the same? You may love your wife or not, and the Mondblume does a damned good imitation of creating and mimicking the bond, but it never will be as strong as a true mate’s pull.” His lips twitched for a moment. “You deny my son his mate and he will live for hundreds of years slowly dying inside. I’ve seen it. The only time he wasn’t sad was after he met Louisa in school. He felt the pull once she was born, but once she found her wolf, the need to see her and be close became too strong for him to ignore and I gave him leave to find her—find out where she was and who she was. It was the first glimmer of hope I had seen in Rion in centuries. He had life in him again. Xavier, you haven’t lived the hundreds of years I have and had to see your child wilt from the inside. It’s like watching a slow, agonizing death. The only thing keeping you from allowing this is your own deeply-rooted prejudice against the fae. Let that consume you and it will be your family’s ruin.”

The room was silent for a bit, only the ticking of a grandfather clock in the corner making sound.

Xavier couldn’t seem to respond, and his eyes and face went blank.

“I’ll give you time to think it over for now,” Alaric said, standing up and turning to Lexi. “I believe you said there were guestrooms? Might I indulge upon your hospitality for the night in one of the spare bedrooms? I don’t need much.”

Lexi smiled graciously and stepped forward, Kane looking at her as if seeing her for the first time again. When he moved to her and kissed her cheek, it was a sweet, simple gesture, but bespoke of the true love he had for his female.

“I will be up shortly if you wish to head to bed after seeing to our guest’s lodging.” He sighed. “I promise not to be long.”

She nodded and gave him a brief hug before escorting Alaric from the room as a silent Xavier and King Kane looked over at them. Once the door was closed, Kane turned to his father.

“Let them be happy,” he told him. “She may be your daughter, but she’s my sister, and I would rather see her happy than dead like Klara before her.”

***

Brighton and Louisa sat on the enormous bed in his guestroom, the latter exhausted by all she had learned that evening. It made Louisa’s mind want to shut down, but there were so many questions she still had. Her brain refused to rest, and she looked up at her mate with each and every one peeking through her eyes.

“What didn’t they want me to know about? Why is there such animosity between my father and yours? Why can’t we be together?”

Brighton’s lips pursed as he tried to find the words. No matter how many times he had rehearsed telling Louisa about his former mate, nothing every sounded right or true in his mind.

“You are not my first gràdháich, Louisa,” he told her gently. “Seven hundred years ago, I met Klara Reifenberg. She was nearly as old as you are, but I stayed away until I was certain her Coming of Age Ball was to held soon. The fae can feel the pull of their mates from their birth onward, and I had waited far longer than any of my ancestors before me. I wanted to go to her much earlier as I felt the pull, but my father warned me off. Once a shifter has found their animal side, the pull to be with them is intense for fae, but your traditions of mating at 21 years of age were entrenched bone-deep, and I knew I would not be ingratiating myself with Klara’s father if I ‘found’ her too soon.”

“But it was a different time,” Louisa said. “Many people back then married much sooner, In their teens, even.”

“People,” he reminded her. “Not wolves, and especially not royalty. Your customs were and are harder to buck than the traditions of today. Royalty has always held a strange fascination to mating to whom they chose and not waiting—or in your case searching—for their true mates. I…I don’t agree with your royal ways, but I’m also highly sensitive to them as I found a true mate once before and was denied my happiness.”

“What happened?” She sat up straighter until Brighton could stand it no longer. He hauled her onto his lap and held her there, the crown of her head cradled into his neck.

“After I met Klara, I told my father and we met with King Franz in his chambers. Back then he was mated to a softhearted female named Lillith, whom I was sure would be on our side. She was, but it wasn’t to our good. We’d gifted Franz and Lillith with jewels made by the fae when they got married. They held them for over 25 years as a sign of peace between our races. When we told Franz of Klara and my true bond, he denied our mating, and the crown jewels, the gifts we had given, were taken back by my father. I met with Klara after we were ordered off the island in secret. I kissed her once—the only kiss I’ve ever given or had—and left her. She died later that night.”

Louisa was quiet as she took in the information. When she cleared her throat, she looked up at him as he gazed at her with soft, crystalline eyes. “What happened to Klara? Why did she die?” Why are you still alone, she wanted to add, though she was sure the reason was a heartbreaking one indeed.

“Klara threw herself off the roof of the palace later that night after trying to convince her father to allow us to mate and wed,” he told her quietly. “I only know this because I was summoned by Queen Lillith shortly before her death. She told me that Klara’s last words were something about brightness. She said, so bright here. Tell him…tell Rion, I love him…always will. Tell him I’m free.”

He swallowed thickly, remembering how he’d felt when he’d heard the words coming from the queen’s mouth. They were her last words for him and they always would be. Though he’d come to terms with her death over his many years, he would never forget the pain they invoked in him when he’d heard them, as well as all the memories of the pain he’d felt when it seemed as if half his soul had been ripped away from him when she died. That piece of his heart had been gone for so many years until he felt the tether being reforged at Louisa’s birth.

“She…she killed herself?”

He nodded. “When her father refused, she waited a few hours and snuck up and tossed herself over. Franz was an obstinate man ‘til the day he died. His wife, the queen, never forgave him for his part in her death. They hardly spoke and never slept in the same bed. All over something that could have been avoided if he had looked past his own stupid prejudices against our race.”

Louisa wanted to ask why he was prejudiced when she was overcome with a sense of calm. She could only think that it meant their bond was working to soothe her, and she covered her mouth as she yawned. 

“You should get to bed, Princess,” he told her, though his arms never faltered in their tight grasp on her. “We have a hard row to hoe tomorrow and the next day, for I will not allow your father to deny me what’s mine. Not this time. I need to convince him somehow, but you, my future Queen, still need all your beauty rest.”

“Queen?” She was suddenly wide awake. “What do you mean?”

He laughed at himself merrily, albeit a little frustrated that he had forgotten to divulge something so basic. “Have I forgotten to tell you who I truly was? Well, I guess this is understandable under the circumstances. Your mate, which would be me, of course, is next in line for king of the fae. Once we are wed, you shall be crowned my queen and my father will retire to the Rìoghachd Nèamadh, or the heavenly realm. Fae never die, my love, they just pass onto the next stage of their life and the ever-after.”

This book as been published in full on Ama zon under the same name and already available for e-book. Paperback available and is on Kind le Unlimited as well!