Saga of the Known Lands 0003: A Warrior's Curse by Jacob Peppers

Author:Jacob Peppers [Peppers, Jacob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, upload
ISBN: 9798407561927
Google: wEHwzgEACAAJ
Amazon: B09QJ7HVYF
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC - KDP Print US
Published: 2022-01-14T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The most important words in the world

Are often those that go unsaid.

—Scholar Kelden Marrimore

Matt watched his father walk out into the hallway, watched the door shut behind him, trembling with need. The need to tell him that he hadn’t meant it, not any of it, that it wasn’t him who had insisted on him journeying to the Black Wood just as it wasn’t him who had struck the serving woman. It had been his body, yes, but it hadn’t been him. He was a puppet—that and that only.

A puppet who now knelt within a cage inside his own mind, grasping the bars in two tight, sweating hands, the metal rough beneath his grip. He knew that, in truth, that metal was not rough, was not metal at all. He knew that, in truth, it, like the cell in which he was imprisoned, was not a thing of the real world but of his mind. And yet…this knowledge served no purpose except to tease him, to mock him with his helplessness. For real or not, the bars would not bend, and the cell remained around him, unmoving.

For a moment, though, when he’d been speaking with his father, the bars had slipped, had bent and shifted out of his way, and he had darted through them, meaning to tell his father everything, to tell him the truth. He had been just about to do as much when she had shown up. Emma. His puppet master. He had tried to fight her, to get the words out despite her, but it had been no use. She was the puppet master, he the puppet. She needed only to give a yank on his strings, and he was silenced. Moments after that, the cage had returned, forming around him as if by magic. And if it was magic, then it was a very dark magic indeed.

You will suffer for that, Matthias.

He stared after the door for a moment, the door through which his father had left moments ago, then turned away. There was no point in looking any longer, after all. He’d had a chance, and he had failed. His father was gone now. Gone to the Black Wood. Gone forever.

There were tears in his eyes, blurring his vision, as he turned and saw her standing a short distance away, regarding him. “W-why?” he asked. “Why did you make me do it?”

You know why, she said.

And he did. Cutter, his father, was a problem for the Fey. And while they hated all mortals, while Emma hated all mortals, she hated him the most. Matt knew that, not because she had told him but because he simply…knew. Whatever link Emma had created within them that allowed her to control him, to know his deepest thoughts, his most hidden secrets, that link seemed, to a degree at least, to work both ways.

Often, since she had taken up residence within his mind, Matt got flashes of her feelings, of her thoughts. Thoughts and feelings he felt sure she meant to hide, ones she did not know he could possibly be privy to.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.