She’d snuck out under the cover of night, taking great pains to keep her departure smooth and silent. It was necessary; hers was a quest that she needed to undertake alone. She couldn’t risk endangering anyone else.
No one should’ve noticed she’d left the castle.
But she should’ve known better where Lucian was concerned.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Alandra sighed, coming to a stop under the canopy of the trees as soon as she spotted the familiar armored figure of her personal knight standing in her path.
“And neither should you,” Lucian returned without hesitation, his voice echoing slightly inside his helmet, which Alandra had yet to see him without.
She chewed on that response for a moment. Eventually, she decided that she had to give him that.
“I need to do this alone,” she told him, crossing the rest of the distance to him. Although he wasn’t particularly tall, her own diminutive height had her needing to look up to peer into his visor-covered face.
“You know I can’t let you. Besides, you can’t actually think you can take on the Nightmare Queen alone, can you?”
“It’s my destiny, Lucian; it sounds to me like I have to do it,” Alandra pointed out.
“Then it’s a good thing I’m not asking you not to,” he said simply. “If you’re going, then so am I.” It was a statement, not a suggestion.
Alandra opened her mouth to argue, to order him to go back to the castle, but no words came forth as she considered the full depth of the situation. Lucian was her knight, yes, but he took very few orders from her, answering instead to her parents, the king and the queen. He’d sworn to them that he’d protect her, and it was a task he seemed to take seriously—sometimes annoyingly so.
She didn’t have the power to deny him—something that he most certainly knew, if his confidence was any indication.
“The king and queen would not approve of my undertaking this quest now,” Alandra told him carefully, the memory of her parents’ blunt refusal to allow her to fulfill her newly discovered destiny still clear in her mind. Lucian’s oath to them would demand he return her to the castle immediately.
She could almost hear the grim smile in Lucian’s voice as he replied, “Then we’d do well to be away from here before they find out.”
Alandra glanced back at him, surprised by the words and what they implied. But, slowly, she nodded.
Perhaps Lucian had made an oath to her parents, but maybe she’d misjudged his loyalties. The notion was not an unpleasant one.
By the time dawn arrived, they’d left the castle and the surrounding lands far behind them.
Thank you for reading!
