Of Spinning Gold and Song

| Thirty Two | The Resolution

The next two days Rosie and I were confined to our room. Luckily, we were allowed to be together. Unluckily, this in particular room also did not have a window, and although the door had a knob, it was locked from the outside. It was still grand, but it was a bit of a prison nonetheless.

This time though, I wasn't scared. It had been the Prince Lawrence who had seen us safely here, and the last I had seen the queen had been screaming about injustices and lies. I didn't know what the king knew or had known about the whole thing, but I trusted that he wasn't as crazy as his intruder wife and thought we would have some degree of safety now.

Still, I was beyond nervous. I didn't ever want to let Rosie out of my grasp, and I sensed neither did she. There was only one bed in the room and we slept right next to each other, two peas in a pod, something that I hadn't done in a great number of years. But it was comforting, and not just to her. I needed the comfort too.

I did wish that I could speak with Bradyn. I wasn't sure what had happened to him since arriving in the capital when the queen had pried me away. I had inquired about his whereabouts from a servant that had come to bring us food, but had had no answer.

It still hurt my heart to see Rosie's face. She insisted that it hadn't hurt so much; she claimed that she hadn't stopped protesting about wanting to see me and Bradyn when the queen had taken her away and had been hit as a result to shut her up. I told her that she shouldn't have, and asked for ice from the servants to tend to it. We were given the ice and a salve, which she claimed helped.

"Besides, our wounds make us stronger," she said.

I smiled down on her a bit sadly, wondering where my kid little sister had gone and this young woman had come from and feeling more than a bit nostalgic for our childhood days.

It was on the third day that a servant came to retrieve us. Feeling a bit terrified that it would be the queen, the two of us followed the girl back down the halls. Luckily this time we did not go to the throne room, but instead to a sitting room not unlike the one in which I had first met Prince Lawrence.

Sitting there, in fact, was the prince himself. But along with him was the king, and upon seeing this, I swept into the best curtsey I could muster and prayed that he wasn't as cruel as his wife. He had to be better. Or else we were done for and I refused to consider that possibility.

"Majesty," I murmured, and my sister echoed me.

"You may sit," said the king, motioning to a sofa opposite the chairs he and his son occupied.

The two us sat, and I thought that both of our hearts were hammering at some thousands miles per hour.

"How are you?" asked the king. "Is your face feeling better, Miss Rosie?"

I couldn't say that it wasn't weird to see the great and noble king that everyone praised so highly speaking to my little sister so casually, but I supposed that I shouldn't have been surprised after everything that had happened.

"It is, thanks," she replied in a small voice.

"I'm glad." After a long pause, he said, "My son and even my wife have been filling me in on some happenings that I was previously unaware of happening in my own house."

I said nothing, my throat having a sudden likeness to sandpaper.

"I have suspected, for a long time coming, that my Isolde was not who she claimed," said the king, with a sigh. "I knew there was something up with the fact that she refused to ever visit her home, or see visitors, or anything of the like. And for the first couple of years she was unbelievably paranoid, always looking over her shoulder at everything. And of course; there's the fact that everyone in her family from Ayrelia always bragged about the great princess Isolde's unparalleled powers, powers I have yet to see. She claims she speaks with animals, but the fact that she had her horse killed almost immediately after arriving and now rarely goes riding leads me to suspect that is not true. And of course, the most powerful one that I'd heard about was her wind powers, wind powers that I only saw for the first time in my life when you used them a couple of days ago."