The Slum Queen (an Outlier prequel novella) by Daryl Banner

Author:Daryl Banner [Banner, Daryl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Frozenfyre Publishing
Published: 2015-02-22T22:00:00+00:00

Queen Of Wishes

The bodyguard just outside, she finds she isn’t comfortable enough to disrobe for the night, no matter the assurance and security he’s supposedly tasked with providing. With that beast-thing outside her door, she feels the magical privacy of her balcony-side evenings somehow robbed, and by that notion she feels nothing but bitter resentment. That balcony and the wind is my only comfort, and you, people of the slums, wish to take that from me too.

Or maybe it’s that boy sitting in a cell all by himself seven stories below her … a boy with the night sky for hair. Maybe he’s the one that so unrests her.

“I must go,” she decides suddenly, telling the bodyguard just outside her door. “I will return later, but I must go and you cannot follow.”

“That is not allowed.” The bodyguard doesn’t move, still appearing as a statue affixed to the wall, of stone and metal. “I am charged to protect you. My Queen, there may even be eyes and ears in this Keep of yours that you need protecting from.”

Her eyes hover on his dark form, annoyed. He appears almost like a shadow, not a person, that bleeds against the stark white walls of the hall. The day’s long badgering of her soul has left her broken, and the last comfort she’d think to ask for is a dangerous-looking banged-up man charged to protect her, yet looking as if he’s been charged to eat her limb from limb like a three-mouthed demon.

“There is no convincing you otherwise?” she asks coyly, the double meaning of her Legacy lost on the man-thing.

“No.” The man adjusts his belt, sword tapping his massive thigh. “There might be many who love you, yet still others who’d sooner put sharp things into you. I will come with you.”

She hesitates, genuinely considering whether to “talk” him into leaving her alone for good. She can do it with the ease of batting away a fly, considering her Legacy.

“Fine,” she says instead. Janlord and Umber and the rest were likely looking for a man with whom she’d have little to no sexual interest, which is quite a feat, to be honest. Indeed, their purpose was to keep her secure, not distract her with her more commonly-used medicine. “Protect me as you ought to, but stay behind, and stay away.”

She moves like a sudden wind, silks flapping behind her as she descends the smooth metallic steps of Cloud Tower. Her sweeping is punctuated twelve steps behind by the heavy footfalls of the armored bodyguard. Passing through six security points where codes and keypads must be fussed with, she arrives on the floor that was once called the King’s Keeping … that she, in her reign, renamed the Queen’s Keeping.

Within its eighteen large barred cells, there is only kept one single occupant. She finds him sitting with his back against the smooth metal wall, his knees pulled up to his chest. The shadows of the bars and the poorly-lit hall play funny shapes across the room, across his face, across hers.

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