He wore grief like a cloak. As much a part of him as the crown. It was not painful. It was not sad. It simply was. There was a weight to it, but it was not unbearable.
The grief for Dionysus, though, it was tinged with anger.
For he should have known better.
He knew the stories of how Lazarus had vanished.
He had gone in anyway. Brash and bold to impress a woman. For the forest would surely deem him worthy. As everyone had deemed that golden child, born after the King and Queen’s first loss.
Worthy, more than worthy. Invincible.
But it had proven not to be so.
Dionysus had been lost in the wood, cementing Alex’s reign as inevitable. Cementing his reputation as a fated ruler.
It was the Lion who remained. The Lion who claimed the throne.
The Lion who now found himself alone with the woman who had once been his brother’s. Soft and delicate. And not for him.
It was all a bit gothic.
“How can you talk about it like that? You don’t have a heart.”
“No,” he said, and that at least was true. It had been replaced with granite long ago. And without a heart, all he could fathom was duty.
Tinley was a duty. No matter how she might try him.
Her animals, her yarn, everything she came with. They would be his problem for just a little while longer.
“But I do have the means to find you a husband. And I will do so, Tinley, you have my word. I will return to you that which I stole from you. I will find you a husband. You have my word.”
CHAPTER TWO
TINLEY HADN’T BEEN back to the palace since King Darius’s funeral. It had been just two weeks after Dionysus’s funeral and she’d been shocked the palace hadn’t crumbled around them all.
To lose both of them so quickly had been... It had been unthinkable, and yet it had been real.
Her life had felt like an absolute parade of grief. One blow after another. Her father. Her fiancé. The man she’d thought of as an uncle.
Her mother was still alive. She had her mother, but...they had never been...close. She had always been such a disappointment to her mother.
When King Darius had told her that she would marry Prince Dionysus she’d been so honored. She’d been young enough she hadn’t fully understood what married meant. But she’d felt...approved of. She’d felt special.
Her mother had been so upset. Why Dionysus? Why not Alexius? Why not the future King?
A princess, not a queen. A slight, her mother had said.
Because of her tromping footsteps, frizzy hair and dizzy demeanor.
That was the first time she’d realized her mother had had loftier plans for her than she would ever reach. The first time she’d realized she would never be what her mother wanted.
Their distance had not improved in the years since.
Tinley had felt like she might as well not have a family, while her mother had gone to Italy and joined a fashionable crowd there.
Her engagement then might not have been all her mother had wanted, but it had brought Tinley into the fold of the royal family and from the time she was eight onward she lived in the palace part-time, along with her father who acted as advisor to the King. When he was there, she was too. They went on family vacations, attended royal balls and ate dinner with the family.
She’d been besotted with Dionysus from the moment she’d learned he was to be her husband.
He was beautiful, and kind. Closer to her age than Alexius, who frightened her. And who never smiled. Who always seemed to disapprove of her and who had not gotten less forbidding, but more so once she became a teenager.
Still, she’d been happy with her engagement.
But second best would never be good enough for her mother.
Her parents had been older when her mother had finally fallen pregnant with her. She’d been like a fairy tale gift and her mother had built up a store of expectations for what that might mean.
But she had been her father’s pride and joy. Just as she was.
Then she’d lost him. And the other two men in her life who’d meant the very most to her.
Illness had taken her father, and the King.
Dionysus had been taken so cruelly she...she couldn’t even allow herself to think of that night. It was too painful.
So she had left Liri. She had immersed herself in her new life. In University. In the friendships she’d made there. The new hobbies she had discovered.
She had joined clubs. She had learned to bake. She had taken knitting lessons from an older woman who lived near the University. She had enjoyed her years in Boston. She had experienced new food, new culture, and she had escaped.
But it had never been real. Because marriage was the end destination for her, whether she wanted it to be or not.
Or else she’d be exiled in poverty, which wasn’t a great option.
She had returned to Liri six months ago somewhat reluctantly, but there was a cottage there waiting for her, and she had known that. She had also been given the opportunity to head up a charitable foundation that contributed to the education of special needs children. The combination had been irresistible. So home she had gone.
Home.
After the death of King Darius, that final loss of the familiar life... Liri hadn’t felt like home.
But the cottage had begun to feel like home.
This palace...
She had spent weeks at a time there sometimes.
It was a second home, and she had moved between her parents’ grand manor home in the Lirian city of Tanaro and this castle with ease.
She’d felt happier here than there. For a time.
Coming back she felt nothing like happy at all.
It had been strange to come back to Liri at all, moving into the cottage near the edge of the wood.
There was dark magic at the center of the wood, and she knew it. Every Lirian child knew it.
And the palace overlooked the Dark Wood. This forest that had taken the love of her life away.
Even now, it made her heart ache.
She had been promised to Prince Dionysus since she was eight years old, and he was twelve. She had fallen in love with him when she’d turned fourteen.
A smile from him had been worth a pound of gold. More. She had thought he was the most beautiful, brilliant man. She had tried to explain her situation to some friends when she’d been at school, and they had all been horrified, that two children had been promised in marriage to each other. But they didn’t know the truth of it. They didn’t know him. They didn’t understand how handsome he was. They were imagining some kind of medieval arrangement, but it hadn’t been. The affection between their fathers had been real.