Across the Midnight Sea

Chapter 31: A Good Man

Hello lovely human's I'm excited for how some of the next few chapters are going to play out and what is to come for Imre and Adira.

This is a longer one, hope you enjoy.

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A good man.

Adira paced her room. Her father, was a good man, a just man.

It seemed impossible to trust that he was everything he seemed and yet his unyielding sense of right and wrong with the guards, the way Yeona spoke of him were both indicators that the man she remembered from her childhood, even after war and battle, was still good.

Time had roughened his face and his demeanor leaving his sense of honor untouched.

This was the man her mother had left?

Adira closed her eyes. It made no sense.

If her mother's desire was for house and rank and respect then staying with her father would have given those things as well.

She would have had to leave Tameria though, she thought pointedly.

Glancing down out of the window to her new bedroom Adira looked out over Shaynaria. It was different from her home. The trees were shorter, their leaves more spiked and green. The air was cooler, but not so much so as to be unpleasant. In fact Adira quite preferred it to the hot coastal winds she had grown up with.

Here the air seemed more crisp, sweeter.

Maybe she was fooling herself. Maybe it only smelled sweeter because of the chance of freedom here.

Turning her back to the window Adira leaned against the window frame. The cool stone was refreshing rather than chilling and felt good against her still slightly tender seat. The bruises had faded quicker thanks to the balm and she could almost walk now without wincing.

The balm...

Shaynari were known for their medicine.

Was it really because of the plague that her mother and father had separated?

The fact that he didn't want to fight?

Was there anything wrong with wanting to avoid a fight?

Her sister died, that's what Lord Warren said. Her sister died and she blamed him for not going to fight.

It's not like him going then would have saved her though, she shook her head. She had no siblings and her mother never spoke of the aunt that Adira barely remembered.

In the end her father had joined the others and set sail to Shaynari.

The decision came when his only daughter fell sick.

She remembered hearing them fight, while she lay in her little straw bed, shivering with the fever.

She remembered him touching her face despite the danger. The gentleness of his goodbye. His promise that he would get the medicine needed.

And he had.

They had been poor then. Her mother would never have been able to afford the Shaynari medicine needed to cure her.

But one day a soldier came, cure in hand and her father's name on his lips.

All these years her mother had let her believe that the soldier had brought news of her father's deal along with the medicine,  when the truth was that he had stayed in the conquered city in a position of power and honor.