As usual, my queen ran away the moment she saw my carriage rumble through the palace gates.
This time she made it all the way to the stables, evading her own guards and attendants all the way, but she was finally captured as she tried to get her horse out of its stall. One of her guards slung her over his shoulder and toted her back to my carriage like a sack of potatoes.
Her maids had already packed her bags, and one of them – the queen’s newest favorite – waited by the carriage, hands clasped together meekly. When she saw that we were transporting her queen in such an undignified way, her eyes grew wide. Obviously she hadn’t heard how things were done in the palace.
As my carriage rolled away again, the spreading news filled the palace with smiles and wry laughter.
Queen Latis had been kidnapped… Again.
~
“I’ll have you beheaded for this.”
Not counting the threats she’d shouted to the world in general, they were the first words she’d said to me directly. They were always the first words she’d say to me directly. They’d lost power since the first time she’d screamed them, years ago. Now they were more calm. Resigned.
She’d known that she wouldn’t be able to escape, though that hadn’t stopped her from punching one guard in the face trying to get away.
She sat on the carriage seat across from me, glaring as if I were some foul man who wished her harm. Nothing could’ve been further from the truth, and she knew it. I was perhaps the most loyal man in the kingdom.
And it was out of loyalty that I took the jobs no one else would. The jobs that earned Queen Latis’ hatred… Among other things, finding her potential suitors (none of whom lasted long) and taking the queen on the vacations she so despised.
The maid sat in the corner of the carriage, still wide-eyed as she looked back and forth between the queen and myself. I don’t think the poor thing had realized yet that this was a thing which happened rather regularly.
“How many times have you threatened to have me executed, your majesty?” I asked the queen. She just stared at me evenly, eyes hard. The stare of hatred a seventeen-year-old girl can give is formidable; even more so when that girl holds the throne of one of the most prosperous kingdoms in the region. Undaunted, I continued. “You haven’t made good on the threat yet, your majesty. That is, if you could even get your guard to carry out your order anyway… Beg your pardon if I’m not exactly trembling in my boots.”
Her stare grew colder, but she directed it out of the window, perhaps attempting to scare the passing scenery, or perhaps trying to bolster the image her people had of her as a serious, fierce queen…
Or perhaps she was simply angry.
In any case, not another word was spoken until we passed into the parcel of land I own on the banks of Lake Latis – the lake our fair queen was named for. Her parents – rest their souls – stayed on its shores many a time before they came to their tragic end.
Mist laced the air, sticking to the curtains of leafy vines that hung from twisted, old trees lining the lakeshore. The light fog remained on all but the very warmest summer days, yet I never grew tired of it. Frogs chirruped. Ripples washed softly over round stones. Occasionally the splash of a jumping fish could be heard. It was as far from the bustling city streets as you could get… Away from the barking dogs and begging people and urgent merchants… Away from the noises and odors that cluttered up the area around the palace.
My queen despised it.
Not stopping to enjoy the view, she was out of the carriage before it came to a full stop. She stormed into my cabin on the shore – the slam of the door leaving little doubt that her plan was to remain there. Luckily, after last time, I’d taken great care to dismantle the latch on the door so that I couldn’t be locked out of my own home. I’d thought about fixing the latch to the other side, so that she could be locked in, but had then decided that she’d simply find a way to lock me into the house, steal my carriage, and take it back to the palace on her own.
I stooped to heft the queen’s bags onto my back and caught the maid looking at me with those wide, shocked eyes again.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “She’ll be a beast the whole time she’s here, but once she’s back in the palace you’d swear she’s the kindest, most gentle woman you’ve ever met.” That said, I brought the luggage into the house, ducking smoothly to avoid the cooking pan my queen threw at my head.
~
Dinner was, as usual, a tense affair.
Queen Latis sat at the head of the table, in a place befitting her rank, and I sat at the opposite end. The maid sat on one of the long sides, across from an empty chair, and looking very nervous to be sitting so close to her mistress. If I was remembering the palace’s system of doing things, she would normally have been eating in another room, with the other servants.
But then… The palace’s system had many such flaws.
“Food to your liking, your majesty?” I asked, cutting my meat with gusto. I saw in relief that my queen did the same. One of my greatest fears was that she’d one day grow into one of those impossible ‘cultured’ ladies who made their servants cut her food into bite-sized pieces.
“No,” she snapped. But I saw the way she scraped her plate clean. “I demand to be taken back to the palace at once.”
“My apologies.” I dabbed at my lips with a napkin, making a grand show of it. “Perhaps the Deffer fish tomorrow will suit your tastes.”
Her fork hit her plate with a sharp clink. “You cannot keep me here against my will, Oreff. My new head of the guard won’t stand for it. The time has come to end this nonsense.”
“New head of the guard?” I tapped my fork against my mouth, pretending to think. “Do I know this man?”
“Lord Storin.” Queen Latis spoke the words with relish. She thought she’d won. “He’d heard of this, but assured me it would come to an end.”
Yes, Lord Storin… He’d paid me a visit, demanding I cease my flagrant disregard of the queen’s authority over me… And then he’d found out who I was. The man would not be a problem, I felt certain.
“And where is this man now?” I asked. The queen’s mouth opened, then shut again, her face hardening. “He wouldn’t happen to be away from the palace, would he? Maybe… Off in the east, checking in on the training of new troops?”
I could hear the Queen’s teeth grinding from across the table. “You got to him. You stubborn, bull-headed fool. You got to him.”
“More bread, dear?” I offered the maid the bowl of rolls, putting it down near her plate even after she refused. Skinny little thing… Most palace maids were. The young ones, at least. Then they got older and were expected to be ‘matronly’.
“Don’t just ignore me,” complained Queen Latis, half out of her chair with indignation. “From here on, I forbid you to speak to anyone in the palace.”
“As if I’d want to speak to anyone in the palace,” I scoffed. “And as if you could really control who I talk to…” The maid gaped at me, probably sure that she was about to witness some kind of brutal execution.
“Whether you have respect for the position or not, I am queen of this kingdom,” Queen Latis began.
“Mm… And an odd thing, that,” I noted. “A queen in control of a kingdom…”
“Well it isn’t as if there was anyone else to take the position,” Queen Latis said with venom. “Remember? You-”
“Enough,” I interrupted, glancing quickly at the maid. Remember who we’re with.
Queen Latis took that as her cue to storm away from the table, fuming. She paused by my chair, eyes narrowed as she hissed into my ear. “I outrank you. Whether I’m the only one who acknowledges that or not, I outrank you.”
The door to the guest bedroom slammed shut, leaving the maid and I alone at the table.
The poor woman divided her quick glances between me and the guest bedroom door; I could just see her mentally debating whether to follow her mistress or give the queen some privacy.
“I’d finish your supper if I were you,” I said with a sigh, leaning back in my chair and balancing on the back two legs. “She’s impossible when she’s in this kind of mood.”
We ate in silence for a moment, before the maid finally worked up the courage to speak aloud the question I’d seen brewing in her mind all evening. “How can you…” She hesitated. “How can you speak to her that way?”
“What way?” I sipped some water, inwardly cheering when the girl snorted in shock. That’s it! Work up a backbone! Show some independent thought! That was the problem with most palace maids… They just couldn’t remember that they were anything other than servants.
“How can you speak to her… Without any of the respect she deserves? Like she’s perfectly ordinary?”
“The respect she deserves?” I repeated quizzically. “And why should she deserve respect?”
“Why?” The maid laughed in disbelief, rubbing her temples. “Taking the throne at twelve years old? Guiding the kingdom through a time of war? And all this after her personal tragedies? Why shouldn’t she deserve respect?”
Ah… So this maid was one of the truly loyal ones. The ones who idolized Queen Latis, probably giving her more recognition than she deserved… Although she did deserve some. Twelve years old was too, too young to lead a nation… But all that was no one’s fault but mine.
“I treat her as if she’s ordinary…” I said, thinking carefully about my next words. “Because to me… She is.”
The maid’s brows knit together, but before she could ask anything more, I left the table to retreat to my own room. The food had lost its flavor.
~
A few days later, I found Queen Latis sitting on the shore with her bare feet resting in the lake water. Her hand built little piles in the sand around her. I was not fooled, however, by what anyone else might’ve taken as the careless work of idle fingers.
With one sweep of my foot, I destroyed the queen’s battle plans for the military patrols in the southern part of the kingdom. She was up in a flash, shouting in protest.
“There’ll be no war strategizing here on my watch, your majesty,” I told her firmly.
“The Alitians are moving,” she informed me, red-faced. “If we don’t prepare now-”
“You have advisors to take care of those things,” I said, “and you’ll excuse me if I say, I’m sure they’ll manage a few days without a seventeen-year-old girl planning their battles for them.” Queen Latis’ eyes flashed, and she launched into a speech about how much work she had to do, and how the kingdom could fall, all thanks to me, and several other often-heard arguments.
“What if the palace is attacked and I’m not there?” she finished angrily.
“Then you’ll have escaped assassination, and our kingdom will still have a queen.” That left her sputtering, and after a moment she stormed off again, furious with me as always.
The maid – Atali was her name, I’d found out – had been standing off at a distance, watching while pretending not to, the way such maids do, and the second Queen Latis was gone she rushed over, as I soon learned, eager to continue the conversation from dinner a few days prior; she hadn’t been alone with me since.
“What did you mean? ‘To you she’s ordinary?’” she asked, eyes flickering with curiosity. Of all the things to grow a spine over… Why did she have to learn more about this? Couldn’t she have just started some romance with a lowly stable boy, or some such nonsense?
I tried to shrug off the question. “Because she is… She’s just… Ordinary.”
“A queen can’t be ordinary,” Atali insisted. “And… Why didn’t Lord Stolin stop you from taking her like this?”
“Well… You see…” Curse the day maids discovered curiosity. “I was… I was close to her parents To me, they were more than just the king and queen.” So much more…
This visibly shook the girl, and I could read the questions in her eyes. The ones everyone asked in their heads, but never asked aloud.
Was he there when it happened? Does he know who did it? Was he one of the ones who found them dead, their bodies cold and the murderer long since gone?
I never graced anyone with the answers to those questions, and this maid was no exception… So I continued. “Queen Latis is just the baby I rocked and the child I played silly games with, now grown up too fast and taking on responsibilities that should still belong to her parents.”
“Or her brother,” she added quickly, as if she didn’t even really think about it. “Her half-brother… The one who disappeared.” We both looked out at the lake, watching as the surface shifted, so that you couldn’t tell which ripples were water and which ripples were swirling mist.
“Or her half-brother,” I agreed after a moment, ignoring the heat on my neck. I left her there on the bank, leaving before she could carry the thought any further.
~
The day before Queen Latis was due to return to the palace, she went missing from the cottage. She’d disappeared before, on other ‘vacations’, and since the time she’d tried to walk back to the palace and gotten lost in the woods, I’d sought her out every time she vanished. Sometimes the disappearance was an escape attempt, and other times she was just looking for privacy.
This time it was the latter.
Only a few rays of sun were left on the horizon - further obscured by mist and distant trees – when I found her on the shore a ways off from the cottage, sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, the ridiculous full skirt puffed up around her as she watched the lake turn dark.
“Not a very modest way to sit, your highness.” I settled down next to her in the sand, sensing she was in a talking mood.
“Now you’re choosing to be formal?” She laughed bitterly, not looking at me. “No one’s out here but you and Atali… Unless you have guards slinking about in the woods, making sure I stay here.”
“I can be formal, when I choose to be… And the guards are here to protect you, not to spy on you.” She hurriedly pulled her skirt into order. Really, I wasn’t sure if there were guards in the woods or not. There may have been… I left all that fuss up to Lord Stolin.
“It’s been nearly a week,” she said. “I go back to the palace soon, right?”
“Actually, we’ve decided to keep you here for a year, while foreign diplomats run the kingdom into the ground during your absence.”
“That had better be a joke.”
We sat in silence for a moment. Lightning bugs were just starting to show up. We watched the little sparks lighting the mist.
“Why are you still bringing me here?” she asked finally. “Why can’t you just let me work?”
“Because.” I gathered up some pebbles in my hand absent-mindedly. “You hate your job.”
“What are you talking about? I love my job.” But she said the words without any passion. It was an argument out of habit; nothing more.
“No you don’t… You get so sick of it, you forget to do it well, even if you won’t admit that. You and I both know you need these breaks to keep you willing to work.” She didn’t argue. We both knew that once she got back to the palace, she’d launch into the everyday chores she hated and get more done in a week than she had in the past month.
“But if I’m needed…” she persisted. I lobbed one of the pebbles toward the lake. It disappeared in the fog before we heard the tiny splash.
“If you’re needed, we’re less than a day’s travel from the palace. We have the swiftest messengers in the kingdom at our disposal. There’s really no danger…”
“There’s always danger.” Queen Latis picked up a stone of her own and threw it. It soared through the air, into the swirling vapor, and the splash it made sounded farther away than mine had. “Especially with a murderer still out there somewhere.”
“Nice throw,” I said, just to change the subject.
She scowled out at the lake, then scooped up a handful of sand and stones and threw it all at once. “I hate this place.”
“Naturally. Why do you think we take you here? If you liked the lake, where is it you’d want to go every time the work got hard?”
The pebble she threw bounced off my ear.
“I really hate this place… How can you stand to live here?”
“I’ve lived here most of my life. You know that. It was mother’s, before she remarried. It’s more home than anyplace else…”
“More home than the palace.”
“Everywhere is more home to me than the palace is.”
She forced a gust of air through her nostrils, showing her dissatisfaction. She never had been able to understand that part of me. She blamed me. For lots of things. A long silence passed, and the sun finally disappeared entirely. Without discussing it, we both settled back into the sand, lying down to watch the stars appear.
“Why couldn’t you come to the palace?” she asked finally. It wasn’t the first time she’d asked… Maybe it was time I gave her an answer.
Or maybe not…
“I could set up some tower for you, away from everyone else, so you could keep your privacy…” she wheedled.
“Right, because having privacy makes being a prisoner much more bearable,” I snorted.
“Fine then. You’d have free run of the palace,” she amended. “You could do whatever you want… Whenever you want… It wouldn’t be much different from how you behave now, actually.”
“It isn’t just the ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ of the place, Latis,” I sighed. “It’s the people… The politics… The gossip and backstabbing and everything that goes on there. I won’t be a part of it.”
“Like I am,” she said. I didn’t contradict her. “You have to, Oreff. You have to, if you want to keep control.”
“I don’t have to,” I pointed out. “Not here.”
She didn’t speak for a moment. “I suppose that’s true…” Wryness came into her town. “And it seems like you have a lot more control over things than I do. Even though they’re supposed to answer to me.”
She turned over onto her side, propping her head up on her arm to look at me.
“You’re still the king, Oreff. Even now… Those that know who you are will always respect you more than they respect me. I may be the queen… But you were supposed to rule.”
“I don’t have the king’s blood,” I said stiffly, in a low voice. “There was nothing that said I had to take control…”
“But Father loved you like his own son… And the people loved you like their own prince… The armies you led. The people you helped. They’d all give their lives for you, even now. They don’t say it, they don’t whisper about it, some might not even realize it… But they will never think of me as their Queen without thinking that it should have been you.”
“Latis,” I said the words sharply. “Just stop. I couldn’t. I can’t. I never will. I want no part in it. The only reason I’ll even get near the palace is because of you. You know that…”
I turned over, facing away from her. I didn’t want to see the expression I knew she’d have. The angry, lonely, pleading look she got every time we spoke about it.
About the way I’d abandoned her.
I hadn’t been able to show my face to her until the second year of her reign.
And I still couldn’t tell her all of my reasons for leaving.
It killed me… But I couldn’t tell her everything.
~
The next morning, another carriage arrived to bring Queen Latis back to the palace. I didn’t accompany her. She didn’t linger to say goodbye. She and her escorts just left in the swirls of dust, Atali peeking her head out the window to look back at me one last time.
And then I was alone again, by the shores of Lake Latis, with no one to stick their nose in my business or tell me how I should be doing it. The way I liked it… The way I wanted it…
My ears in the palace would get word to me once the Queen began to show signs of stress again, and when that time came I would bring her back, ripping open old wounds again and again. It was painful… It was frustrating… It seemed like every time we saw each other, our anger at each other grew…
But I needed to see her. And she needed to see me. It was the last link to each other and our parents that we clung to…
Perhaps that’s why, despite all her threats, I have not been beheaded as of yet.
We still didn't explore the mystery surrounding her parents deaths but I think that just adds to the intrigue, which is great! Awesome job and thanks for sending me the link so I could check it out 
Considering how Oreff is, he would give a better explanation- or mentally run through that explanation, and then say "you hate you're job." I mean, the Queen can't take a break simply because she doesn't like it. 