The Sleeping Prince - Melinda Salisbury Page 0,117
did. I used your brother’s blood and made two little simulacra. I told him I’d protect them, and as long as I did, you’d both be safe. I called one Errin, that was you. And one was Trina. Trina was my favourite, actually. Easier to play with. Malleable.”
My ears are filled with a high-pitched sound as the puzzle clicks into place. The doll in the dream. He showed it to me. He said it was me. It was real. And… Oh Gods… Sweetling. My mother said it when she was under the curse. Except there is no curse. There is no Scarlet Varulv. It was him all along. He made her like that. He made her do those things to me.
He smiles again as he watches me put it together. “I liked to play with my little simulacra. There was something poetic about doing it during the full moon. Something mystical, like in the stories. I didn’t tell Lief; I don’t think he’d approve. But I do get bored.”
I turn my head, tears falling down my face. All those times my mother went for me. It was him. And all my dreams. He was there inside my head. I feel bile burning in my throat. “Why?” I ask in a small voice. I should be relieved Mama isn’t cursed, but this is worse.
“I was robbed, Errin.” He strokes my face with his thumb before turning it back to him. “Of my life. Of my inheritance. Snuffed out at barely twenty-two years old. I have spent five hundred years asleep. I woke to nothing. The legacy my family spent generations building is ash, scattered to the wind. I was promised a kingdom,” he snarls. “I was promised the greatest kingdom the world had ever known. And I will have one. If it means cobbling one together from the ruins of Lormere and Tregellan.”
His eyes bore into mine, lit with madness, made worse when he begins to laugh. “You should be thanking me. You of all people should be welcoming me. Look at you.” He pushes me away, holding me at arm’s length as he examines me. “You have nothing. You live governed by rich, ignorant men and women, liberals with no respect for tradition, or history, or hard work. They took your mother away and locked her up. They killed your blood, Lief told me. Your great-grandfather died at their hands. You should have always lived in a castle. I will give that to you. I will restore things to how they ought to be.”
I stare at him. “How they ought to be?”
“Mine.” He smiles wolfishly. “All mine, under my order, and at my pleasure. I told you, I have to scotch the nest, Errin,” he says gently. “That’s what you do with an infestation. It’s what we should have done in Tallith, instead of calling for the rat catcher. I see that now. Burn at the source.”
“You’re a monster,” I whisper.
“I’m a king. My father told me a king can rule through fear, or through love. Fifty years from now, the people will love me. They won’t remember this – and those who do will consider it the necessary dark before the dawn. When they have prosperity, and security, and know their place, they will be content and they will love me for it. But until then, I’ll rule through fear if I have to.”
He smiles at me lasciviously. “And then I will begin again. I will use Silas, and the chosen few I save, and I will breed new alchemists. I will find the last of the Sin Eater’s line and I will mount her head above my throne, I will have her hair woven into a crown, have her teeth strung on a chain as a necklace. And when I am safe I will make these lands glorious, Errin. Like Tallith was. And even you will learn to love me for it. You will give me your fealty. You and I, and Silas and Lief, and whomever else I deem worthy will stay with me in these lands and be a court. For ever.”
He kisses me on the forehead, pushing my hair behind my ears. Then he pulls me so close that our noses touch. I can taste his breath, faintly metallic, faintly rotten, decaying, like the smell of his golems. “I have been asleep for five hundred years, save for when I woke to eat the hearts of silly little girls like you. I ate the heart