Finally, on a rainy afternoon, she touched his shoulder.
But Kaelen carried a lonely heart. For all his blessings, he had no one to share his quiet evenings, no one to laugh at his terrible jokes, no one to argue with him about which way to hang the morning banners.
She tilted her head. “You know I could kill you in your sleep.”
Ysara was the oldest and the youngest—ageless, some said, with skin like bark and hair like willow branches. She had been a forest hermit, a healer of animals, a keeper of old songs. The king had begged her to come to the palace when a blight threatened the crops, and she had saved the harvest by whispering to the soil. The Blessed Hero And The Four Concubine Princesses
The hero, who had faced demon hordes and collapsing cliffs, found himself trembling before the four women in the palace’s moonlit garden.
“You’re too good,” she said. “It makes me suspicious.”
She was the hardest to win. She tested Kaelen with riddles, with traps, with disappearing acts that left him searching the castle for hours. She whispered doubts into his ears and watched to see if he would flinch. Finally, on a rainy afternoon, she touched his shoulder
She joined him first, forging his armor anew, and in the process, forging a trust that neither had known before.
He planted it by his bedside. Within a week, a small tree grew, and Ysara was always there, her roots tangled with his, grounding him when he threatened to float away on his own legend.
She was quiet, pale as moonlight on water, with eyes that shifted between blue and green depending on her mood. Lianhua had been a river priestess before her temple was flooded by a rival kingdom’s curse. She had drifted to Veridonia on a raft made of lotus stems, half-drowned and wholly serene. She tilted her head
She pressed a seed into his palm. “Plant this where you need me most.”
The four concubine princesses did not compete. They did not scheme. They wove themselves into Kaelen’s life like threads into a tapestry—each distinct, each essential.
He tried to argue, but she simply pressed a finger to his lips. “No. This is not a debate.”