Ageless

Chapter 26

One-thousand years appeared to have done little to improve Malcolm's taste in art.

A glossy marble floor extended across the open Royal Gallery. The room looked like a museum, the walls carefully arranged with golden-framed paintings facing marble viewing benches that matched the floors.

Most of the art gallery appeared to be self portraits of my husband. Malcolm riding on a horse with long hair. Malcolm giving a piece of bread to a starving child in the street. Malcolm, shirtless with a sword above his head, and more than a few liberties taken on the definition of his muscles and number of visible abs.

That is, unless he had been working out in Lentempia. What a few dozen lifetimes had done to his physique was still yet to be determined.

When I entered the gallery, Malcolm was sitting on a bench on the far side of the hall, staring up intently at a picture out of my view. He did look thinner, that was for sure. And lankier, like a string bean. If he had once been buff in this world, it had eroded away after he had taken the crown.

I twisted in my wheelchair to face the escort guard. "May I have some privacy with the King, please?"

"Of course, your holiness. I will wait outside, near the entrance." The hooded guard bowed and left.

I began to push myself down the hall. "You're a hard one to track down, you know that babe?" I called out, over the rusty squeak of my chair's wheels.

Malcolm looked over from the bench and jumped. "Jillian!" he said, and began to stride over to me, his long velvet robe brushing against the marble as he walked.

I spread my arms out wide. "Get over here. I missed you." He wrapped his arms around me, but the embrace was stiff and tense, and I felt the tendons in his shoulders contract as I pulled him close. Much thinner than before.

"Jillian," he said, "Words cannot express how happy I am to see you, at long last, by my side. The stars have aligned, and we are together. Praise the Gods!"

I'll praise myself, I thought. I did all the work to find your ass, not the Gods.

My head came forward for a kiss but he flinched away like a reflex. "Not until after the royal wedding ceremony," he warned. "Would not want anyone to question your purity."

"Wait, kissing one's fiancee out of wedlock is scandalous here?" I poked him in the ribs. "What type of Puritan-ass Kingdom are you running here?"

He shook his head. "We are both Holy figures of the faith. We must respect that."

"Oh come on Mal," I said with puppy dog eyes, lacing my fingers through his. "Your queen missed you." I pulled him towards me. "I haven't seen the King's bedroom yet, why don't we go take a tour of that?" I patted the arm of my wheelchair. "Then afterwards if you're lucky, I might even take you for a ride on my new set of wheels."

"If others were to find out that the Angel from the Outside was suggesting such impure things-"

"No one's here," I pointed out. "And besides, we've already left our mark on purity in about five thousand different-"

"Shh!" he said. "There could be spies. Now, if you are finished, I wish to show you something."

"Fine, go ahead then," I said, my initial happiness to see him replaced with a sour resentment towards his steely resolve.

He pushed me past row after row of self-portraits, until we arrived at the small, humble corner of the room dedicated exclusively to subjects other than Malcolm the Great. We stopped in front of a tall life size portrait of a pale, ethereal woman dressed in white silk. "Here we are," he said. "Well, what do you think?"