Dawn of Legends by Eleanor Herman

Author:Eleanor Herman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2018-04-25T17:35:42+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

ALEXANDER

As he paces up and down the small antechamber outside his mother’s rooms in the Ambracian palace, Alexander feels a kind of trapped tension in his muscles—he is far better suited to battles on the field than in the home. What could his mother and Philip be talking about all this time, just on the other side of that thick door?

He should have gone to the guest quarters with Heph. But then, there was a whole other kind of tension there, in their closeness, in what almost happened but didn’t in their shared tent near Chaeronea. Since then, they’d gone back to their old, easy friendship and had vigorously celebrated the signed treaty of the League of Corinth before packing up and heading here, to Epirus. Home of Olympias’s brother, King Xander. But still, when things were quiet—in between feasts and strategy meetings and head counts and recruitments, in between arranging for ships to sail west and navigating not only the rough sea but also the storms of King Philip’s moods—there were moments when Alex knew, in his heart, that things would never really be the same between them, at least not for him. Something had awoken that he had hoped to leave dormant, curled, and sleeping peacefully in the deepest part of him forever.

Now he paces, wishing there were a place to sit, almost—almost—missing the frivolous decor his mother always obsessed over back home at the Pellan palace. Everything he’s seen of his uncle Xander’s palace here in Epirus is old-fashioned and threadbare. When his entourage first rode into a courtyard and Alex saw the low-slung building with arrow-slit windows, he assumed he had approached the palace from the rear and was looking at the kitchens and stables. But it was the main entrance.

They disembarked in Epirus only an hour ago, and, after King Xander welcomed them, Philip insisted on talking privately to his wife. The two of them have been in her chamber for quite some time now, and it makes Alex nervous. The king has some plan afoot, a plan that he has hinted at but not revealed since the victorious Battle of Chaeronea.

Finally, the door bursts open, and Philip comes out, scratching his head. “I think her injuries from the flood have affected her brain,” he says, then, possibly seeing the alarm in Alex’s expression, adds, “for the better. I’ve never known your mother to be so calm. Pleasant, even. She doesn’t seem to mind I brought Cleo, or that she is pregnant.”

This last statement worries Alex even more. Either Philip is right, and Olympias’s brain has been addled by her injuries, or Olympias is playing along with Philip because she, too, is plotting something and his plot weaves perfectly into her own. He wonders whether his mother will stay calm when his stepmother—who is only a year older than he is—fondles and kisses Philip in front of her, which she did with such nauseating frequency on the week-long journey from Athens that several times Alex wanted to jump over the side of the ship and swim to land.

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