King of Dust

Chapter 10

I grumbled as I moved to my door, past the armor. Urien crouched near me, silent as the night, his hand on one of a pair of dense wooden doors. The doors creaked open, and he shut them behind himself. I shook my head and crept into the door I had been assigned. Who did Yra think he was? If he wasn't careful, I was going to lose my temper. We had been friends at a point, and now... now he just hurt me.

I knew Astrid could not fend for herself as well as Urien anticipated. She was new, had barely dipped a toe into the world of magick, and she had no formal teacher. I gave her a holy book one day, that was all, and from that she had learned her spells. Was I glad that she had enough magick in her to learn? Sure. Did I want to leave her alone? Absolutely not.

I opened the door to a bathroom. Great. A bathroom. It wasn't even a great bathroom. It had a mediocre-looking wooden tub with a matching kettle, and some rusty pipes. I sighed and closed the door, figuring I would follow Astrid. She was only a baby – at least compared to me. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if something happened to her. It was my fault that she wanted to come along in the first place.

When she came to my castle, she had expressed a joy of reading. She possessed natural magickal talent, I could feel it. I thought, What the heck? and gave her some books off my shelves, not expecting anything to come from it. She learned a few spells, which impressed me, and that had probably given her the courage to come along. Holy magick was not my strong suit, and the Tomes of Ohaldin that she now held in her possession might as well have been written in a language I couldn't read. Calling me anti-religious would not be accurate, but I certainly did not subscribe to the religion of the Starkovian natives. Her god gave her strength, however, and that strength had convinced her that she needed to fight by my side.

I passed Yra to get to the room that Astrid explored. Yra closed the door he investigated with disappointment and huffed a heavy sigh.

"Anything?" I asked.

"Just dust, moldy sheets, old bars of soap, and cobwebs."

I moved past him to the farthest door, the place where Astrid would have entered, but he barred me with his arm.

"Where do you think you're going?" he asked.

"What's your problem?" I demanded.

"You. You're my problem."

"What did I do?" I exhaled in an exasperated whisper.

"Remember when we used to walk arm in arm together? We were inseparable, Darius. In any other circumstance, we'd be moving through this place as a team. You wouldn't be chasing around some girl."

I nodded and let out a deep sigh. I had to take care of this somehow. This was just the worst time. "Yra, can we talk about it later?"

"Later. Later, always later."

"Fine, if you want to talk about it now, we can talk about it now."

Dust settled around us as we stood there, and the house fell into a dead silence. I wasn't chasing her. I just wanted to make sure she was safe.

"Do you remember the last fight we had?" I asked.

"Of course I do," Yra snapped back. "I went and hid in the attic for months it was so bad."

"It wasn't that bad."

"You were obsessed, Darius. All you cared about was finding Clara. Clara was all you talked about. I'm done with Clara, and I want to make sure that when you look at Astrid you don't just see a living breathing Clara that you can play with just like you did with Liliya Sorensson."