No One Could Silence the King’s Twin Princes — Until the Wolfless Servant Girl They Chose Changed Everything She Thought She Knew
Part 2
He tore the twins away from me.
The boys screamed.
Screamed the way they had screamed four weeks after the queen left.
That raw, desperate sound that had broken every nursemaid in the palace.
Their arms stretched toward me.
Their small faces contorted with terror.
“Please,” I said.
My voice had stopped working properly.
“Please, I’ll only come at night.
I’ll stay out of the way.
They just need—”
King Doran’s expression didn’t change.
“If I see her look at my sons again,” he said to Edna, “I’ll have her whipped in the courtyard and thrown from the palace to die in the woods.”
My knees gave out.
Edna’s hands were on my arms.
Another hand on my other side.
They were pulling me backward, away from the door, away from the sound of the boys still screaming.
I don’t remember leaving the nursery.
I remember the corridor.
I remember the stone floor.
I remember Edna’s rough palm against my hair.
“I tried to warn you, child,” she said.
The next morning they put me out through the servants gate at dawn.
One change of clothes.
The apron they forgot to take from me.
I walked into the forest.
I had nowhere else to go.
By nightfall I had stopped walking.
I sat against a tree and thought about dying.
Not seriously.
Just the way you think about it when the alternative seems too large to carry.
That was when I heard footsteps.
Not quiet ones.
The kind that don’t bother being quiet because whoever is making them isn’t afraid of the dark.
A man stepped out of the trees.
Broad.
Armed.
Looking at me with an expression that was annoyed rather than dangerous.
“You’re the girl from the palace,” he said.
“The one with the princes.”
I didn’t answer.
He sighed.
He pulled a cloak from his pack and dropped it over my shoulders.
“Come on,” he said.
“The queen’s been looking for you.”
I looked up.
“The queen,” I said.
“She left.
She left with a lover.
Everyone knows—”
“Everyone’s wrong,” he said.
“Come on.”
His name was Kael.
And what he told me as we walked through the dark changed every story I had told myself about who I was.
Queen Sera had not left with a lover.
She had left because King Doran had refused, after the twins were born, to keep the promise he had made to her twelve years ago.
He had promised to let her reclaim a child she had been forced to abandon.
A wolfless child.
A girl.
An unwanted firstborn daughter he had ordered killed, whom the queen had bargained and suffered and endured twelve years of captivity to keep alive.
“She’s been building an army,” Kael said.
“Not for the throne.”
He glanced at me.
“For her children.”
I stopped walking.
“All of them?” I said.
“All of them,” he said.
Above us, the forest was dark and full of sounds.
And somewhere ahead, there was a woman who had spent twelve years fighting for children she had never been allowed to touch.
I thought about the twins.
About the way they had screamed when the door closed.
About Edna’s hand in my hair.
About Kael’s cloak on my shoulders.
I kept walking.
