THE HAUNTED KINGDOM 3 by CHARLES E.J. MOULTON (ereader that reads to you .txt) 📕

the castle waiting to be catapulted down to oblivion. Her thought was that all these castles had someone in them.
How many people had been there that night?
One-hundred? Two hundred? Had Nomed given the potion to five hundred people? A thousand? Maybe Nomed had given the sleeping potion, the serum that put them to sleep, to more than them. Maybe the entire country had fallen asleep. Maybe armies of soldiers had entered the country and put the entire world to sleep.
How many demons were there?
Many, she supposed.
Maybe the entire world was asleep.
Maybe this was about more than just the royal throne.
Maybe this was the last battle.
All she knew was that someone was keeping her alive. Someone was feeding her fresh meat and newly baked bread. Someone was giving her wine and cheese and grapes and chocolates. Someone was playing music for her and then waking her up in the middle of the night and chasing her down the hallways.
She remembered Alexander. She remembered saying goodbye to him on the beach. She remembered returning to the castle. What was there before was not there now. She had been alone now for almost a year. And she could remember that day as if it been yesterday.

“I came here on leave to accompany you, but until you win the game you won’t see me again.”
Belinda saw her father cry and she knew that he was although there were no tears in his eyes.
“What do you mean?”
”I mean that this is it. You have to win the game now in order to see me again.”
She was tired and felt very alone. She would have to go back to the ghostly palace now. Whatever was waiting for her there?
“How do you know?”
She looked at his vest and started playing with one of the leather strings
“I feel it.” She half-smiled, bitterly. “That forest is no-man’s land. Meant for you and Lucinda, no one else. No one knows where she will take us after this.” Alex looked so worried. She sighed, trying to put this mildly. “I could not tell you, Dad, because she wouldn’t let me. She let me arrive in the chapel. I was your messenger. But she let me prepare you on one condition: that she could do anything with us that she wanted after you enter the real forest.” He looked to his right and shivered. Belinda stroked his cheek and saw the look of fear in his eyes. “What lies there is the real forest, Dad?” He looked back at her, his eyes now wide open.
They embraced and now time seemed to stand still, every breath cherished, the silence golden, every feeling a mystery and every emotion a treasure. He would never let her go. She would never let him go. He would never let her go. She …
“… will never let you go, Belindy. Never!”
”Win for us, Father. Win for all of us.”
He nodded, unlocked the embraced and looked into her eyes.
“I will.” Those eyes were hers. They were the same person in two different souls. “I will.”
Then she smiled and drifted away. She could feel his hand slip out of hers, the texture rubbing against his like soft sandpaper created by dust and sleep and water bottles and fleas on horses. She saw him floating back into nothingness and disappearing into the wind of the darkness and until she was gone in this illusion she looked at him, trying to memorize this moment forever.
Then she was gone.

For what seemed like an eternity now she had seen no one and she knew that this last battle was the hardest part. She had replayed all her mistakes over and over. She had relearned everything she had ever learned by heart. Every song she had ever sung, every poem she had ever had written, every book she had ever read, every trip that she had ever taken, every moment with her father. Every moment with Steven, every moment making love, every moment holding a speech, every flower she had smelled, every glass of wine.
But at night, Belinda Winsletenna still woke up screaming, Lucinda looking into her eyes like a red demon dancing the jig in her dreams.
Every night, she prayed that someone would be strong enough to save her. In which hell she ever was, she hoped that some angel would hear her strongest of prayers.
She hoped that the angels would send her Alexander that would save her and her family soon enough before the monster above chewed the last chain off, leaving her rotting in the bowels with the rest of eternity.
Where ever her family was she hoped that Raphael at least would hear her and save them all.
She hoped that Alex would hear her.
Before it was too late.

§

“Five years, my friend” the man said, grinning. “Five years I have been innkeeper here and not once have I served mead not well brewed or fish not well fried. I have not met one man who did not know how to discourse tidily and be able to live with a troubling task in spite of problems.”
The innkeeper belched and smiled.
“You, my friend, are a problem.”
The pub was so full and so noisy that he could not hear himself think, let alone have an innkeeper lead him into analyzing his soul. He took his fat finger and almost pushed him off the stool with it.
“You think too much. You follow what you don’t understand instead of what you do understand.”
“You gathered that from my few comments about my journey?”
“What did you tell me, Alex? For the past mead you have pondered over how long you have been wandering now. You are afraid that you are not ready to face the challenge.” The fat man wiggled with his eyebrows and his red cheeks puffed. “You didn’t even look around. Maybe you find some friends in here. But no. You went straight to the bar and started belly achin’ ‘bout your … woes.”
Alex at once had a vision of this man by his dinner table with a huge handkerchief on his belly, eating a chicken with his bare hands as he walks in the door of some inn and then the man bouncing up and bowing to him. Where had he seen him before? “Your problem is that you are ready for anything you want to be ready for and you don’t know it.”
“Maybe I am.”
The man shook his head, walked to the counter behind him and took him his large lead glass of mead and drank it all down in one gulp. “No, Sir!” He belched loudly and wiped off the one drop trickling down his chin with the back of one hand. “No maybe’s! Maybe you should think of the good things you have and be happy you have what you own. Life would be worse if those things were not there. What would life be like if you didn’t have what you have?”
Alexander took a large gulp of his mead and thought about the man’s words.
He turned to another man who arrived. The man was blonde and muscular. A young buck of maybe 25 or 30.
“Yes, Sir Steven!”
At that moment he knew where he had seen the innkeeper.
He had seen him on the way back from Alliland. He had been the man who had pranced and slimed around Alex like a caterpillar around a tree. His name had been Julian, right? Yes. Julian. My God. What was he doing here?
“Two pints of wheat mead, please.” The man sat down next to Alex and rubbed his legs, stretching. “Some of your bread, too, as well. My wife is on her way.”
Julian nodded and started pouring the thick mead from the other barrel into two large lead glasses. He took some bread from a large covered basket and out into a big wooden bowl.
“Sir?”
Julian turned around and the young man turned around to look at Alex, as well, having faced the other way toward a chubby woman and her thin friend sitting and laughing in the corner.
“Don’t I know you?”
Julian handed the young man the bread and the mead.
“Have you not met me before?”
Julian shook his head and wiped his hands off his apron. The apron was wet and dirty by now.
”Sire, the first time I saw you was when you walked in through that door.”
”Your name is Julian, right?”
”I introduced myself when you did, Sire! But your name I have forgotten.”
He stretched forth a hand. Julian took it. “Alexander Winsletenna.”
The fat man took his hand and shook it.
“Pleased. Never forget a face, even if it is the first time. Sorry. Now mingle.” The man pointed toward the tables, made a sweeping gesture opening his eyes and smiling. “Open your eyes, man!”
It was the fat innkeeper from the inn near Clurafar.
For some odd reason this reality had transformed Julian into another man who did not know him. The young man next to him took his mead and started drinking it. Alex turned his head very slowly toward the young man. Mingle? Why? He had expected the inn to be full. The old man on the hill had in a way prepared him for that. He gathered that the lights would lead him. Something always did. He looked at the young man and at once recognized who it was.
It was his daughter’s husband. It was Steven.
He smiled and patted Steven on the back, a tear running down his cheek.
“Steven!”
The young man looked at him, baffled.
“Sir?”
“Steven, my friend, don’t you know me? It’s me. Alex!”
The young man took a long look at Alex and then looked at the innkeeper, who shrugged.
“Don’t ask, Sire,” Julian responded, drying off a glass with his dirty apron. “It is better that way.”
Steven looked back at Alex.
“As nice as I am sure that you are, Sir, I must claim not to know you. Just like the innkeeper here. But I might get to know you. Let us have a mead and talk.”
”You are married to my daughter Belinda.”
The young man stood off his stool and picked up his knife from its holder at his belt.
“You might’ve heard Julian mention my name. But how do you know my wife’s name?”
Alex raised a hand and shook his head, smiling. “Steven? I mean no harm. I am your father-in-law.”
A few people had stopped talking and were looking at them, suspiciously.
Steven was slightly crouched forward, his woollen, striped vest hanging forward over his thick cotton shirt. His one brown boot sticking up in the air and his left foot resting on the wooden footrest of the bar. Julian walked up from behind the bar and put his hand on Steven’s shoulder. Steven was startled and looked at him with wide open eyes.
Julian nodded at Steven and Alexander was left wondering why Steven was wearing these simple clothes and why Julian knew nothing about who his king was.
“Calm down, you rascal! I told him who your wife is. He put together the rest himself. Quite a fantasy he has, this one.”
Steven nodded and put his knife back in his belt. He inspected Alex for a long time and sat down on his barstool. The talking commenced and Julian walked behind the counter again, drying his glasses on the apron again.
“Feisty one, ain’ he?”
Alex nodded very quickly without sitting