A NEEDED ARGUMENT

I am not a queen because I rule. I rule because I am THE QUEEN.

Birthed in my heart. Alive in my veins…

**********************

Zorgan brushed aside her words, for the fire of needing to understand her actions roared louder.

In the days she was out, he had questioned everyone, pressed for answers, but all they offered was the same: she came back from the Main Palace radiant…but soon after, there were shouts, breaking things, and then silence.

Moments later when her door opened, she walked out with fire in her eyes- and the forest in her sights.

His thoughts had lingered in the halls of the Main Palace, wondering what darkness might have touched her there.

Yet her chambermaids insisted she had been her usual self and even appreciated the soldiers who had brought her back.

He remained, drawn to her side like a tide to the shore. He had seen her in agony, watched her toss in pain, rise for a fleeting breath of wakefulness, and then sink once more into the dark.

He had even returned to the hunting grounds with the only conscious soldier, but their search had turned up nothing.

Perhaps he hadn’t looked hard enough, more focused on getting back to her. Or maybe whatever had happened had covered its tracks well.

That only fanned the flames of his anger.

He guttered,

‘‘Tell me- what version of your recklessness drove you to hunt on premises I never permitted.

Every room here was yours to walk through, but I never gave you the right to go beyond.

I return to rest, only to find a soul teetering on death’s bloody edge.’’

Zorgan spoke of her, but the side of her that clings to the belief that no one apart from her dead mother could ever care for her assumed he was speaking about the unconscious soldier.

It was as if a needle had touched a single thread in her heart and her fury burst free, wild and unrelenting, drowning her in a blinding void.

She got up onto the bed and marched across it, the need to tower over him pulsing inside her.

Grey orbs judge and bleed disdain into deep-set black ones…

‘‘I know I’m the reason that soldier lies broken, fighting for breath.

But do you even grasp the weight of your crimes Commander Zorgan?

No- you never do. In your mind, you are always justified. But I’ll make you see.

Because this- this unforgivable act- is why my rage has drowned out reason. Why I want to unleash on you every vile thing they did to me-”

Their faces were close with Nadezhda’s head above his like she wanted to catch every twitch of any emotion from his face.

She caught it all… but it didn’t make sense.

Nadezhda couldn’t trust sense. Not when ‘sense’ had led her to believe something Queen Maeve wasn’t.

Zorgan cut in.

His voice was like steel left in the snow – shrill, glacial, and utterly controlled. The snarl and bark had died.

‘‘THEY?!

THEY?’’ He asked twice, unsure of the trust he had in his ears at the moment.

‘‘Who in all of hell is this ‘they’ Nadezdha?

Who. Touched. You?’’

Pain rippled behind Nadezhda’s gaze, quiet but deep, but her defiance stood tall, and it would not be dimmed.

‘‘It is not in your place to question me.

I will see my justice served. What is in your place is the deceit-”

Her words were stolen midair as Zorgan’s voice returned, cold and abrupt.

‘‘You are going to talk and you are going to do so now. What happened and who made it happen?’’

If not for how she leaned in, it could have danced past her blind spot- the tremor in his shoulders and the slow furious curl of his fists. Zorgan was coming undone, reining in the need to strike down the guards who had failed him by failing her. She held her silence, but the truth clung to her like smoke. He needed it spoken.

Enunciating with precision, Nadezhda pressed. ‘‘I said I will serve my own justi-”

Zorgan lost it.

‘‘Zounds Nadezhda! Good grief!’’ Zorgan exclaimed as he painfully pushed his fingers into his tied hair.

‘‘Four days I watched you, pain written in your every breath and I would have ripped the venom out myself if I could. And now it’s clear you know who is responsible.

You said it yourself, you spurn pretenders-”

Nadezhda’s words from that table in the Southern Royal Castle came back to her.

‘I am Nadezhda, and I detest most of you. Pretenders, backstabbers…’

‘‘But now you are acting like one of them. I do not doubt you but this once, can you think of it as the key to freeing me from a certain misery?

Tell me. Tell me what and tell me who!’’

And when her upper lip still twitched in bristling anger, he added, ‘‘Please’’.

Perhaps it was his unshakeable persistence. Perhaps it was the curiosity – to see if that fury in his eyes would remain once he knew who was to blame. Or maybe, just maybe, it was because he had asked her…and he had pleaded.

Nadezhda nodded once in agreement. But there was something she had to know.

‘‘First, tell me why you hid the fact that you are to be Crown Prince- because I will never be a part of that, and I absolutely won’t be your queen.’’ She spat out the words, fire flashing in her eyes and beneath her breath.

Confusion, sharp as whiplash cut through Zorgan’s pleading stare. He narrowed his eyes at her and said with absolute certainty, ‘‘I have no idea where you heard that, but I will never be the Crown Prince of Valcresh- not now, not ever.

Even if the heavens and earth trade places, I will never be their king’’

For a moment, Nadezhda still kept her eyes squinted at him. But somehow, her heart rate began to ease; every other part of her body, save her head, could tell he was not lying.

His voice carried a truth not shaped to convince, but forged from a decision etched into him long ago.

In an instant, she felt a wave of exhaustion, and the dull throb behind her eyes returned – this time with a string of quiet humiliation.

Queen Maeve’s words had been so certain and heavy that she had not even remembered how moody he had been on the day they rode to the arena of Judgement or the outstanding fact that he wasn’t joined to the hip like other Royals and lived on his own.

‘Oh Heavens! What have I done? If I had been thinking right, I wouldn’t have told him of anything at all. I would have planned their payment out myself’

She straightened. “I apologize.

Queen Maeve made me believe you are to take up Crown Prince duties on your return and I felt jilted and…and trapped’’

Zorgan almost growled as a candlelight of understanding reached his mind.

He moved closer, taking her fatigued state in. ‘‘I promised you the freedom to live your life as you will and you might count me to be an immoral swine, but one thing I don’t do is go back on promises.

I won’t go back on my promises to you Rebel’’

‘This damn Dragon, still referring to me as a rebel,’ but she had no words to respond with, and her thoughts were tangled, her mind resisting every attempt to make her think, a moment’s flutter in her belly and one particular uneven thud of her heartbeat.

She turned from him and walked back to the side of the bed she had woken up on. It was at this moment she also realized that she wasn’t in her room and this room was a smidgen smaller than hers.

“Where am I?’’ She asked as she rested her back on the headboard.

‘‘My room- and before you flip out, you wrecked yours-” Zorgan responded.

What he didn’t say was that he had wanted her in his space where anyone with a vile intention would think a gazillion times before stepping in.

‘‘I expect you to honor your word.

Speak to me, what happened while I was away?’’

Nadezhda exhaled. There was no way out of it.

Gradually and tiredly she began to recount the events of that day. As she spoke, she was aware that her body felt like it was living in the shadow of that day, she was aware her tears were threatening to flow against her restraint…but she wasn’t aware of the man sitting across her.

Zorgan was still, his heart luckily still beating, but it wasn’t at the normal pace a normal heart should thump. It was wrong, so very wrong.

And when a chill had crossed the room, Nadezhda had thought it was from the opened window. She had no idea this chill was going all the way to Valcresh’s Main Palace.