Part 6 is the final part of In the King's Power. It will be available February 1 on Amazon, free on Kindle Unlimited, $3.99 to purchase. Check out the rest of the series on Amazon here. Bonus excerpts are available here on my blog - access them from the series overview.
SYNOPSIS
Reunited with her foster father at last, Alyssa must choose the life she ultimately wants.
EXCERPT
THE coming weeks were every bit as hard as Clayton had imagined they’d be.
After he treated and bandaged the wound, Alyssa began to speak, haltingly at first. He’d picked up a few leatherbound journals in town, as well as some pen and inks, and now, he asked her permission to take notes as they talked. She granted it.
Their progress was interrupted the following day when she took the bandage off. The scalding metal had done nothing to mar the dessin itself—just the flesh around it. Clayton explained that, from what he’d learned from talking with Thia and her Red Garter friends, the dessin was created using alchemical inks, formulated with powerful enchantments. Occasionally, women who’d managed to escape their husbands and keepers found ways to black out the marks, but that was all. Even an alchemist or a healer could not erase it completely. They could remove the colors, but the woman would still be left with a ghostly outline.
Alyssa became quite hysterical at that. She howled, she screamed, she pounded the walls with her fists until she fractured her knuckles, and blood ran down her arms. If she were any other mental health patient, Clayton would recommend a sedative, anti-anxiety medication, but with Alyssa, that just wasn’t an option.
Outwardly, he kept his cool, holding her when she finally wore herself out, tending again to her injuries. But inwardly, he was heartbroken. No parent wanted to see their child go through this. He was also frightened. This was the most dangerous time. What if she hurt herself so badly, he wouldn’t be able to treat it with ointments and bandages? Or what if…?
But no. He refused to even think it. She’d come this far. She’d make it the rest of the way through this.
When he stepped outside to refill the water bucket, he found animals surrounding the house, looking somberly on. He left the door open and some of them followed him inside. Having a fox curled around her feet, a chipmunk on her shoulder, seemed to soothe her.
The priority was to make sure she didn’t hurt herself again. Clayton didn’t think she would. Both times, she’d injured only her hands, trying to destroy the dessin. But all the same, he asked her to stay close to the cabin for the foreseeable future. “Please, don’t go anywhere without me?” He put in only the tiniest hint of a question, to make it sound like a request and not a directive.
Understanding him perfectly well, she nodded. “I won’t.”
Alyssa resumed speaking. Days passed, and she continued to speak. Of course, the story did not come chronologically. She laid it out like a terrible Tarot spread for him to interpret. The cards shuffled and overlapped and reversed direction, but they stuck with it. The individual incidents even sounded like the trump cards of some strange new arcana: the Mute Queen, the Burning Girl, the Forty Slain Men, the Masquerade, the Kiss of Life, the Suicide Princess, the Sword and the Carving Knife.