The Witch and the Prince

Chapter 3

Demi stared at the male in front of her. His dark hair was swept wildly across his warm brown eyes and his posture tense as if he was reading for a fight. Without Anna, there's be no excuses to escape. She'd gone to the forest, Demi assumed, to start setting up her grimoire, leaving the two of them alone with nothing but unsaid words between them. Her eyes momentarily flicked towards the flaps of the tent, hoping that her gaze would summon someone to interrupt whatever this was.

"You said you wanted to speak? What about?" Her voice shattered the silence, catching Eric off guard. He looked positively baffled for a second before regaining his composure, but even then it took a few seconds for him to finally open his mouth.

"Yes. You were born in the south right?"

The question startled her into taking a step back, her hip bumping the wooden work table. Eric looked like he regretted the question as soon as it came out of his mouth. But he wasn't what Demi was focused on. Not when the tent had suddenly gotten brighter and hotter and somehow bigger and smaller at the same time. Fear and panic washed over her simultaneously, crushing her, making her feel so small yet too large, and blocking out all rational thoughts.

Run. Her mind screamed in time with the thumping pulse stretching through her taut muscles. Demi would've given in, but the scent of rain enveloped her, pushing out the panic bit by bit. Enough so that she could think through things and finally use her voice.

"Yes." The word sounded too breathy to Demi, and she knew Eric noted it too.

"Sorry," He slowly drawled. But he put more emphasis on it than needed, almost as if he was apologizing for more than the invasive question. Warning bells continued to throb in Demi's head as Eric continued. "Eva, Doyle, and I were having a debate and I was just curious to see if you had any insight on it, considering you were born there."

"What was the debate about?" Demi slowly moved towards the other side of the table, trying to put something a little more physical in between them. A few herbs were laid out in preparation to dry and her hands began to fiddle with them.

"The human queen," Eric answered, maing Demi freeze all over again. Echoing laughs mixed with screams raced down shadowy hallways, none her own. A breeze carrying salt and blood called to her, luring her back into the talons of a memory. She could only manage to hum in response.

"Whether or not she's alive, more specifically." Eric took steady steps forward, soundless on the plush carpets. "And if she is alive, it begs the question of is she with her followers or the southern fae? Doyle believes she's' either with her followers in the capital or dead."

Demi stared at her hands for a moment, contemplating what she could share without too many questions being asked as to how she knew about it. "She's definitely not with her own people since any followers in the capital or in the middle lands, in general, are dead." Her father had made sure of that.

"Oh?"

Demi explained, wary of sayig too much, "The clans may be fumbling dolts who can't coordinate, but they were able to work together long enough to kill any human uprisings in the making." From what she knew, the southern clans, along with the north, had killed almost all the human soldiers in the crossfire of their own battles.

"Then she's dead." Eric had made it to the wooden table at that point, and his entire body seemed to lean over, trying to get closer to her.

Demi swallowed hard before finding her voice again. "No. The king's too meticulous. He doesn't waste blood with no intention." She knew that from personal experience. "He'd keep the queen until she became useful. Probably in Bryola." It wasn't probably, it was a definite. The human queen, Aella, was in Bryola, trapped like lightning in a bottle in the pretty little castle on the hill. Same as Demi had been years ago. But at least then they'd been together. Now, she was all alone and her father was doing gods know what to her. Not that Demi was going to tell him that.