Fate and Destiny (The Fated Series, #2)

Epilogue - Lance - A Ship Lost At Sea

It's so calm up here. So peaceful and quiet with only the whispers of the easy flowing wind swirling through your hair and pulling you towards the lapping waves of the ocean. The small town on Vandaria's eastern edge is quiet. Its heart has gone to the mountains in the north for safety, taking the sound of life with them. Only the small critters and slowly overgrowing plants claim the town as theirs now, and I'm just a visitor on a rooftop, looking out at the expanse of nothingness with monsters beneath the surface, and watching the sails of The Trinity Hind billow east.

For all this calm around me, I feel anything but calm.

That ship carries more precious cargo than it ever will. Four royals, one of which is my sister, ten dying women, twelve chaperones I don't trust to actually chaperone, and a bunch of pirates who were already drunk when we arrived at dawn. I didn't bother saying goodbye to any of them. Goodbyes are final, and much as I may regret not getting to say it in the past, I refuse to say them now.

Goodbye means you don't know if you'll see them again, and if you don't, then at least you gave them a decent farewell.

No. I told them I'd see them in three cycles, all in one piece. Fauna tried to say goodbye, and I told Darius that if none of them make it back, I don't want his damn kingdom. He already made me his Hand to the King, then proceeded to leave me as Regent without having consulted me about any of it, or at least give me fair warning. I'm still mad. I've got a hundred other things to worry about with the storm of everything that's been dumped on me. It's all so unlike the harmonious crash of the waves below. Where this splashes and sings the ballad of the coast, my thoughts rumble the bass of the sea Gods in dark clouded skies.

Just when life seems to come to a somewhat still water in the new normal of my life, the Gods drop a boulder in the middle of it and send a tsunami to drown me.

I don't know where I went after that night in Cadorelin. All I remember is seeing red and suddenly waking up the next night with Mary yelling against a migraine thrumming in my head. From what I still remember of her rant, it seems I got drunk and wandered the town unattended and was caught by my own assassins. Thankfully enough it was just Blaise and Julyan who were misted in by Willa, along with another two dozen assassins who all came to hunt for me since I never returned to the camp, and they haven't said a word about it since. Their trained expressions make it hard to tell if they've been sticking close to me since then because they're concerned, or because Mary has them tailing me.

It's annoying.

Much as I want to put my anger into my fists and buried in people's faces and ribs, I don't know where my emotions are at these days. I'm so damaged from learning that everything was a lie and that who I am is based on nothing but death and destruction, that emotions I once felt so often now numb everything.

Rose wasn't my fate and all I feel is disappointment. In who, I don't know, but that's all I feel. I feel unsure about knowing that she was Will's fate and I've carried nothing but a death sentence on his name ever since we found him over her body. My mind doesn't even know where to begin and where to end. It has no middle, and it has no plotline. It's just a barrel of shit shaken until it turned into nothing but an ugly brown mess, and tossed into the middle of the sea to wash up on shore, and be left in a pile of junk because that's what it is. Junk. Trash. Fragments of a life that never was.

I don't even know how I feel towards Will anymore. One second I'm angry - at him, at Xaxias, at my father, at Rose, and my mother for all keeping their words tied on their tongue - and the next I feel ashamed for the act I committed. Acts.

For Saint's sake, I bedded his fate and carried her around like a Godsdamned trophy right in front of him. And then he came out of a trance with her blood all over his hands and my sister trying to kill him.