The White Sheep's Disguise ✓

Chapter 39

Over the next three intervals, I write Chaska plenty of letters, including many for Castiel. In fact, I write so many that I stop hearing from her for a few days and wonder if I've driven her into a mad silence that only a lack of contact with the outside world can fix. As it turns out, she ran out of parchment and no one brought in shipments of ink for her to steal when the merchants aren't looking.

In my next letter, I send her parchment and as much ink as she can use.

Time passes rapidly at the palace. One moment, I arrive, then the next, I'm scheduled to leave on another of Theo's dragons. Before I can fully grasp it, the morning passes and I'm left to fill the afternoon with what I can before the sun falls from the sky and is replaced by too many stars for my eyes to count. And for my mind to process.

Slowly, I fall into a routine that annoys Cloak but pleases me. As early as I can, I scarf down a meal in the dining hall—sometimes alone and other times with members of the Panjandrum Corps or Gustus, who has taken kindly to picking out my wardrobe while on his weekly excursions into Exole. Flying by dragon is one enjoyment, but arriving at the palace to my small room to discover a heaping pile of new clothes on the edge of my cot is another wonder entirely.

After eating a breakfast that fills my stomach until noon, I knock on Cloak's door until he wakes. Either that or I instruct Lyndel to dump a bucket of water onto his head. After I spilled an entire bucket full on the floor of Cloak's chambers, dropping more water on me than on him and receiving a brutal cluster of laughter from the prince, I will not take that chance again. Now it's up to a grumpy Lyndel—who would rather stand at his door and guard nothing—to wake the grumpy, hungover prince.

Each morning begins with a physical heal to drive any pain away. Cloak throws on a spare change of clothes, something clean for my sake, and sits on his sofa to tell me of what happened in the war. Not how it made him feel or how it wrecked his soul, but what happened. On the rarest of occasions, he'll venture into what he wishes he would've done differently or that he wanted to run rather than obey his mother's orders.

He planned to find his father in all of this. Once the war to protect the Wildsurge border was over, he wrote a letter. But it was never sent. His mother held onto it and used that as leverage to grant his full loyalty. Through pieces I have fit together, Cloak left his father behind to start a life as son of the Raven Queen once she discovered his abilities in hand to hand combat. Taught by his father, Cloak fought in the Exole slums—at taverns, brothels, and in the pits themselves.

One of the spies assigned to report to the Raven Queen discovered him and brought his talents to her attention in the same time she began her search for a son with the same abilities as what Cloak possessed. To make a living for his father, he won those fights and made out with enough to purchase a cottage on the outskirts of the city, near dealers of magical goods and drunken men.

At first, Cloak had protested to what the Raven Queen desired. He had a life that he was happy with, as a mortal feliram he wanted to grow old with a woman he loved. Though he didn't desire to have children, that was enough for him. Happiness was what he searched for until the queen of Rivian marched her way into his life and practically demanded to adopt him and tear him away from his father.

Upon threat of killing the only family he had left; Cloak had no other choice. He would become the Raven Queen's son on one condition. Allow his father to live. And she lived up to her word, there have been no reports of a mysterious death. Even in Cloaks' mind, he knows mystery murders take place in Exole every single day and no prince could keep up with the amount, but he has a kernel of belief that his father is out there somewhere, living off his winnings.

I constructed the story myself, only to revise it when Cloak revealed that he asked for his mother to send his father somewhere safe, to a different part of the kingdom. He was never told the location, or if his father made it there safe. The downturn of his mouth, pulling the scar towards his jaw, reminds me of Chaska's breakdown. Cloak misses his father; he misses the life he once had. A mortal life, now shifted by his mother's Luminary abilities. He's to live for thousands of years, under this rule and the next.