Alara's Curse Read online

  This edition published in 2018 by

  Burning Willow Press, LLC

  3724 Cowpens Pacolet Rd.

  Spartanburg, SC 29307 (USA)

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  The persons, places, and events of this novel are works of fiction. Any coincidence with individual’s past or present, is merely that, coincidence.

  Print ISBN-13: 978-1-947584-59-4

  First Edition

  This edition published by Burning Willow Press in 2019

  © S.L. Perrine - Author, 2019

  Edited by Christina LoBianco

  Interior Format and Cover Art by Mayhem Designs

  More from S.L. Perrine

  Of Kings and Queens

  Alara’s Curse

  Scarlett’s Fire

  Cendal’s Revenge

  The Crawford Witch Chronicles

  Immortal Slumber

  Power Surge

  Collision of Fate

  The Covenant

  Blood Rites Trilogy

  Blood Rites

  Turning the Stone

  The Fate’s Seal

  The Beast Within

  The Curse of Ormshire

  Maga’s a Beast

  The Passing of Pylira

  Of Fire and Light

  And many more

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  THE world was a gruesome place to behold. For the queen, life as she knew it was over. Taken by a poisoned spindle. Forced to remain prone, sleeping, while the world around her moved on. Or was she?

  No. Alara knew what went on around her, at every given moment of every day.

  In the beginning, she spent countless hours trying to console the king, who sat vigil by her side. He was in mourning as if she’d been killed. Eventually, she worked on tuning him out, finding ways to cope with the existence that would be her new life.

  She tried to will her body to move. A finger. A toe. Breathe a bit deeper. Nothing worked. Nothing moved. She would have given anything to feel her nails digging into her hand as she tried so very hard to squeeze it into a fist. Still, the pain did not come.

  She thought of the child, nestled deep within her, and eventually wondered if it had died when she fell victim to the sleeping curse.

  At first, she refused to believe such a tale, but then she wept. Even if nobody could hear her. Even if the tears did not fall from her eyes. She wept. She wept for her child, for her king, and even for those who surrounded her daily to wish their queen well. Though she never wept for herself, and she vowed never to do so.

  The sun beat against her face. She could feel the warmth of the summer rays dancing against her pale skin. She did not know how much time had gone by. She did know that the land had been in a state of perpetual cold when she was laid in a room of gold, draped in satin. She knew when the heat of the sun beat against her face that she was facing east, which meant the room she had intended for her child must have been converted.

  Alara pictured the four-poster bed. The etchings on the headboard told a story of her husband's kingdom. The lion and crown embroidered into the blue and gold rugs. Mirrors hung over a chest of drawers she would not need, and a privy sat nearby, one of which she would never use. Alara was frozen in time. That’s what the voices all around her said.

  As Alara contemplated her surroundings, a voice fluttered to the surface of her mind. All that time spent blocking them out, and one made it through without her trying to hear it. It was a high-pitched, nasally kind of voice. A woman. An old woman.

  She wondered if her husband had brought a sorcerer of Ikrith to see her. To break the curse she was under or in the very least, check on her babe. As the woman spoke, Alara became concerned. She had an overwhelming need to tell the king to dismiss the woman.

  “Do not accept her form of help, my love!” she screamed inside her imprisoned body.

  “Your Majesty, your queen’s babe is not lost. This curse she is under has not aged her a day. Therefore, the child shares her state.” The old crone swooned over the king. “He will not grow. Nor will he age inside your wife’s body.”

  “What shall I do then? How do I get them awakened?” Alara heard Tomas ask.

  She had tuned out the voices for so long, and then at that moment, she only wanted for him to speak again.

  “I can do nothing for her curse, Your Majesty.” The woman paused, and a loud bang came from across the room. “However, your babe is another story.”

  “Tell me.” The sound of insistence deep in his throat boomed at the crone.

  “The kingdom needs an heir. A prince. You need a queen. Your queen is gone. You must consider her as such and take another,” the nasal voice beckoned.

  “Take another bride? The kingdom won’t allow it. My queen is there.”

  Alara heard the anger behind his words.

  “Yes, but she cannot be awakened. Take another for your bride. When she is with child, I will give you a potion to slip to Queen Alara. It will link her child’s life with the life of the other. As one grows, they both shall grow. You will have your son.”

  “My son?” Alara couldn’t contain the joy she felt. She wished only to be able to move her fingers. To grasp her stomach. She thought of nothing else but what it would feel like for him to grow and move inside her before it was stripped away from her.

  “Fine.” She heard the reluctance in the king’s voice. “I will marry.” His tone was docile.

  Alara heard the woman humph her way out of the room, her feet shuffling along the stone floor. Then she felt the rough hands of her husband as he lifted a hand from her side. “This should not be happening. You are my queen. You alone have my heart.” He brought her hand to his brow.

  The soft wisps of hair tickled the skin on her hand. It was a strange sensation. To feel everything that touched her. Hear every voice around her. Yet, she couldn’t move or speak herself.

  “I will do whatever I need to keep this kingdom from falling. I’ll never stop looking for a way to wake you, my love.”

  Again, Alara felt as he brought her hand to his mouth. She felt the warmth of his breath and the wet of his lips against her skin.

  On the outside, she lay as still as stone. On the inside, she convulsed; screaming into her own mind. She thra
shed against the body that remained still until she was too worn out to think.

  HER hair glowed red against the gold satin bedsheets. Her face, pale. Beneath her closed lids, Tomas knew the clarity in which her emerald eyes glowed. He feared he would never see them again. Holding her hand killed every part of him. He felt the limp limb against his own. Each time he grabbed onto her, he felt his insides sink further into a deep, dark abyss.

  For the sake of his kingdom, he told himself, he would marry another. His heart, however, would remain with his queen. In a room of gold and brazen red.

  He had her dressed in her favorite blue gown. She was like the sea, endless and beautiful. Tomas rubbed a calloused thumb across her ruby lips. Her skin was warm; a sure sign she lived. Yet, in the time she spent in that room, she had not aged a day—still as young as the day they wed. It made sense for the child to have stopped aging as well. The king had never considered that a possibility. After a few months, he merely thought the babe lost.

  Tomas stared at her for hours, his blue eyes begging hers to open. His ears yearning to hear a moan, a cry…anything. Other than lacking the sun-kissed glow on her skin she once had, she appeared no different. Tomas had to remind himself she was sleeping, not dead. He could find an answer; he was sure of it. He would seek out a sorceress or witch to lift the curse. He had to.

  Abruptly, he moved his hand from her face. He took in one last look at his sleeping beauty and left the room. Tomas needed to not think of it. Of her. The king needed to think of his kingdom. He had to preserve it for the future. Whether she woke or not. It was the right thing to do.

  “What are we doing?” he yelled to the staff who stood weeping outside her room. Every day more and more stopped to mourn the queen.

  “Sorry, Majesty.” A small framed girl bent at the knees and dipped her head. “We grow weary for you. Is there no hope?” She regarded him with a tear-streaked face. The weight of the world seemed to linger somewhere above her shoulders.

  “No. There is none.” He bowed his head. Unable to glance at the faces around him to admit he could not bring back his queen. How could his people expect him to keep them all safe when he could do nothing for his wife, who lived within the safety of the castle walls? “Please, care for her. As best as you can. Keep her comfortable. She sleeps still. She will sleep forever,” he said to those who hadn’t run off, stricken with grief.

  The girl stood her ground before the king. She squared her shoulders and straightened her back. “I will care for her. And when I can no longer, my children shall continue on in my stead.” She bowed her head and moved around the king to tend to Alara’s lifeless form. When the small girl opened the door, the light of the sun mixed with the gold of the bed sheets, filling the room with a beautiful glow.

  “Alara’s gilded cage,” Tomas spoke softly, but not so soft that a young guard nearby did not hear his words.

  “Sir?” The footman stepped forward.

  “You. You will protect this room. Nobody but that girl and I can enter. Guard her against every angle. Make sure nobody can reach her. If that woman returns… put a spear through her heart.” He sneered.

  The footman stomped his feet together. “Yes, sire!” He was no more than a child, Tomas noted.

  Although the boy spoke in a voice befitting a grown man, his face told a different story. The king also saw the sinister smile spread across his soldier’s face. Tomas could tell the young man looked forward to the witch’s return. His knuckles whitened as he gripped the spear in his hand.

  The king gave a curt nod and went on his way.

  Tomas sped through the castle, stopping only when he found himself in front of his council room. He rubbed his hands together, feeling the layers of hard skin from years of working with them. When the castle needed lumber split, he went to the lumber yard behind the stables and grabbed an ax. The first time he had done so, he was ten. His father told him, to run a kingdom, he could not be scared to get his hands dirty. Dealing with Politics was much the same but more comfortable to handle after a lifetime of hard labor.

  The King of Anaphias stood at his council room door, fingers blistered and calloused. Dirt stained lines into his skin. His nails were chipped, unkempt, and seemed to find every loose thread in his clothes as he dressed.

  “Majesty?” The short man Tomas had come to know as his most-trusted advisor opened the door to the chamber and peered out at him. “You called this meeting. Would you care to join us?” The man’s candor was refreshing. Tomas was well past the point of being irritated at every scheming servant who tried to kiss his ass. Ren was no such man. He would tell him he was fat as a house as he fed him cheesecake.

  “Yes, Ren. I’m coming.” Tomas didn’t look up. He kept turning his hands over, feeling the roughness of one palm against the other.

  Ren took one look at his old friend and slipped from the room, closing the door behind him. “Something’s troubling you. I know that look.”

  Two years the king’s senior, Ren had grown up within the castle walls along with the king and his sister, Princess Mila. No one would ever guess those two had been thick as thieves in their teen years. That was until Tomas had to spend more time preparing to be king when his father fell ill the summer he and Alara had married. Now, as the king celebrated his twenty-third birthday, their friendship has become strained.

  Ren flattened his already thinning hair against his head for good measure and rocked on his heels. He thumbed a pocket watch at his waist as Tomas collected his wits.

  “It’s nothing,” the king lied. “I’m just coming to the realization things are far worse than we had hoped.”

  “You need an heir.” A smooth voice swept through the hall like a snake.

  A tall, lanky man moved into the shadows of the corridor. He glanced briefly at a stream of light, which floated in through the open window nearby, and sidestepped to keep away from it.

  “Majesty,” the man bowed at the waist. His smile showed the black spaces where teeth were missing. The hair above his lip tickled at his face, making him twitch his nose as he spoke. “I’ve said as much for three years now.” He straightened, his full height roughly the same as the king. However, his girth was the complete opposite.

  Built like a warrior, the king spent his youth training with the soldiers of Anaphias. Manual labor was nothing compared to that of heaving the weight of a sword to best your opponent. His father pushed him to take up the sword. So, he may lead the army of his people when the time came, and not hide in the background on a horse. Little did they know he would be needed within the walls of the castle much sooner than they thought. Tomas had a responsibility to the people; to lead them as their ruler, not just as their captain.

  This man was no warrior. Tomas thought him nothing more than a rat. An appointment made by his father that could not be undone until death.

  “Vesis. What are you doing here?” Tomas squared his shoulders and made sure to speak to the elf as a king, not as a grieving man.

  “Majesty, as your High Chancellor, I was made aware of a privy council meeting. So naturally, I am here. Is there some reason why I should not be?”

  He moved too close to the king for comfort. The elf, the king called him, pushed his limits to see just how far he could go before Tomas made an example of him.

  “No, I suppose you’re right. You should be at the meeting.” Tomas moved closer to the elf. He looked down his nose at him, even though they were matched for height. “But do remember who wears the crown here. We wouldn’t want you to get overconfident. Now would we?”

  Vesis took a calculated step backward. “No, sire. We wouldn’t want that.”

  Forgetting the man before him, Tomas dropped his hands to his sides and pushed his way through the chamber door. His boots thumped against the stone floor as he crossed the oddly shaped room to the large wooden table in the center. Grabbing the chair before his page could, Tomas pulled it away from the table and landed his backside on the hardwood. Six other men stood
in the room. They quickly fell silent and observed the king.

  His body slumped forward. His fists propped under his chin as he thought genuinely for a spell. When he glanced up and noticed he had the attention of the room, he straightened himself in the chair and cleared his throat. “We have much to discuss. Please, sit.”

  Once the men sat, Tomas jumped from his chair. In unison, the men stood as well. Ren shook his head at the men as Tomas turned his back on them, walking to the light of the window. They quietly took their seats once more.

  “Majesty, why don’t you tell us what it is you need,” Ren said from his place, without turning to look at the king.

  Even with his back to his friend, he knew Tomas was in a restless mood. He would move around until he got whatever he wanted to say off his chest.

  “An heir.” Tomas fisted his hands on the sill of the window.

  “Majesty?” The question of uncertainty came from the Captain of the King’s Guard.

  “Just what I said, Callen. I need an heir.” Tomas paced the room. Its odd shape kept him from going farther than around the table. Slowly, he walked, laying a hand on the shoulders of those he trusted more than anything. When he reached Vesis Fellfall, he made a wide birth back to the window.

  “Do you mean to choose an heir?” the white-haired man in white robes asked as the king considered his options.

  He beheld the kingdom below the land and its people he promised he would care for until his dying breath. He would need to leave another king of the Basile line to carry on after he was gone.

  “No, Pallor. I have no intention of leaving this world without a Basile on the throne. I must remarry.” Chair legs moved across the stone in unison. He turned, feeling the eyes in the room trained on him. “I will leave it to you to find out if it can be done.” He headed for the door but stopped short. “Also…” he rubbed a hand over his face before rubbing them together. Trying to rid himself of the idea as if it had stained his skin. Shame formed behind his words as he spoke next. “Find me a wife.”

  Mouths hung open in question, but none had a chance to voice them. Tomas raced from the room. The heavy wooden door slamming shut behind him.