30 Days As A Substitute Prince

Prologue

Hasty feet raced down the palace halls with a bit of a hop in each step as Zadkiel rushed to learn if the news was true.

The buzz had been going around for a while, but he didn’t know for sure. Zadkiel didn’t even hesitate to pursue the truth. He simply needed to know.

“Is it true, Mother? That I’ll be going away soon?” The question was out before Zadkiel even stepped into his mother’s bed-chamber. The hush rumours passing from servant to servant of this ‘alleged trip’ were simply too good to be true.

But Zadkiel couldn’t bear the suspense. He yearned to know if it all was correct.

Could it really be? After twenty-two years of hiding in the Imperial Kingdom, he would finally leave? It all seemed surreal, yet there was a slight nudge telling Zadkiel that this was the time. He was of age, after all.

“What do you mean, my dear?” Queen Vivian asked as she spun on her heels, a smile immediately brightening her features at the sight of her precious boy. Zadkiel had been and always will be Queen Vivian’s most prized and cherished gift of life, and everything she did for him was from pure love.

“Oh, Mother, do not tease me. Is it true that I am leaving soon? Will I be free from these kingdom walls?” Zadkiel’s hands grew sweaty as he inched closer to his mother with bright blue expectant eyes and his pearly whites beaming at her.

Vivian sighed as she closed the rest of the distance and held his cheeks between her hands. “It will pain me to see you go, my love.”

“So it is true, then? I am to leave Imperial?” he asked, his pitch rising as he spoke. The news alone caused electric waves to surge through Zadkiel’s veins, but the confirmation was much more significant.

Growing up, he led quite a fulfilling childhood, and he got everything he desired. He possessed all the toys a boy could ever want, and had a lot of space to play, frolic and enjoy the freedom of youth. That is, until he started to grow and discovered there was more than just what he experienced behind the palace walls.

The king and queen got their fair share of questions from young Zadkiel. ‘Why can’t I go to public events? Why can’t I have friends on the outside? Why can’t I ride a horse through the gates like the guards always do?’

‘It is only for your safety, Zadkiel,’ they had told him many times. But he grew deaf to this plea, eventually. He was all too curious about what lay outside the enormous gates.

The outside.

Oh, how Zadkiel dreamt so much to go beyond the large brown gates guarded by ten men and the walls as high as the largest trees. He’d lay awake at night, plotting new ways he could get a glimpse of the outside or just a mere second of freedom, with no one ever knowing.

And he did. He hid in the back of a carriage on a Saturday evening, when the guards were carrying the horses outside. He was whisked away into the open world beyond the safety of his home. Zadkiel remembered how fun it was at first to be running around the village with kids his age, frolicking in meadows and riding horses through it, despite the hundreds of times he’d fallen off.

He recalled climbing an apple tree to the very top, where he sat and shared his fruit with his new friends, telling them stories about the palace.

He remembered how he found his first experience with actual kids a bit confusing when they all expressed that they had no knowledge that a prince was living in the palace. At twelve, Zadkiel was old enough to realise that no one knew a prince even existed.

It wasn’t long after when a guard found him and pulled him kicking and screaming back to his home, where he met a furious King Eric and his weeping mother awaiting him. Zadkiel wasn’t too fond of the moment either, after learning that they kept his existence a secret his whole life. That day, he knew something was wrong.