Kingdom in The Sand

Loyalty

When he was eighteen, Beldon had fled the family and been held hostage in a castle for three months – though he himself said it was less an imprisonment and more that he'd forced his captor to allow him to stay. Even Luka said he wasn't very good at playing prisoner.

When Beldon had first gone to war, he'd been away for about eighteen months. It had felt like an impossibly long time to not hear from him for the family, she couldn't imagine how long it had felt for him.

Marie-Fey had asked him after he finally returned from his first tour what it had been like. She hadn't wanted to drag up painful memories and raw fears, but she couldn't understand how he could survive living in constant fear on both occasions.

What had stuck with her back then, what stayed with her, was when he'd considered the question for a moment, then shrugged and explained that, after a time, he stopped being scared.

Not that he didn't feel fear ever again.

Every time he went into battle, the fear came back like a devil that had lost his scent for a time, but came roaring back once it found the trail, never truly shaken off.

But one couldn't survive in a constant state of terror. The mind tricked itself into steadying out. Into thinking. Into assessing rather than obsessing.

He was always scared at some level, somewhere in his core, but wasn't frightened in the moment.

The only time before that day in the desert that Marie-Fey could liken to the fear Beldon might have felt was the day she had been attacked back in that rotten excuse for a village and struck a man's eye from his face. It wasn't a day she cared to think about in any detail, not the moments before her hand had closed on the whip, but she did remember how the fear had changed.

She had felt a fear so deep; it had felt like it was all that sat in the core of her. But she also remembered how her mind had raced to save herself. Though she didn't care to, she remembered every detail.

She remembered the dirt of the road, right by her left temple had been four rocks, two the size of her thumbnail, one slightly smaller and the fourth about half the size of her fist with a jagged white streak.

She remembered the seventeen twigs that littered the ground around her. Twelve had various knots on them. Seven had smaller branches.

She remembered the whip handle had been three and a half inches out of the reach of her middle finger, the fourth loop of the fabric on the handle fraying, eight strands stuck up at awkward angles.

Her mind had taken that in in the second she'd taken to try and see where the whip lay. She'd then managed to drive her foot up and make contact with something that hurt her assailant and she'd broken the cage that held her down.

The fear hadn't had time to come to the fore until two days later when she'd finally got away from her sisters when they'd gone out for a walk with their father and her brothers had all gone into the village.

Only then had she been able to sit on the thin, hard bed she shared with her sisters, fists dug into her skirts and stare at the floor. The trembling had almost shaking her apart, but she hadn't been able to do anything more. She couldn't let her family know anything was wrong. It wasn't the time. There was too much already going on. Tears were too much a tell-tale.

Even when they asked what was wrong, she didn't let them know. She hid it with arrogance and anger, though it was too much. She knew Constantine had been trying to figure out the problem, and had been doing so ever since. She knew her sisters and Valentine were worried about her mood change but were too wary of setting her off into another rage. She knew her father was trying to understand what was wrong, through the fog of his depression, he was trying. She knew Beldon had observed her shift in mood and would start to question it more and more. Considering how much time he spent with the villagers, he may have even started joining the dots. But then he'd run to the castle to save their father and sisters and everyone's attention turned to him and his sudden, violent absence in their lives.