Gyrfalcon's Keep xi. could you tell me like it is? pretty little fears.

Her breath stuttered in her lungs, quivering vaguely with the effort of holding herself together. With a shaky inhale, she was forced to admit, "He hurt me."

"When your father passed and Lucavon sent for me - sent his guardsmen to collect me and bring me back to your Kingdom to fulfill our union - some instinct told me something was off." They'd been brigands - rough, crude sellswords as opposed to the refined Knights of the realm - but Kingdoms'd been known to hire them on occasion so Rhælla hadn't voiced her concerns. 

"When we reached the Icadearian borders, Lucavon ordered my escort - my father's loyal men sent to see me safely to my destination - to be butchered and forced me to watch." Genuine pain laced her tones. Those men had been her doting babysitters and playmates when she was a bairn, her mentors in combat and history and astrology; they'd practically been her uncles. Worse yet, their deaths were absolutely pointless.

"I was forced to go through with the marriage, right there on the borders and to consummate it later that night," the dark Seelie could scarcely look at him, tones wavering with shame as she blinked - forcing back any tears that dared threaten her composure. 

"I was a Queen in title alone, a prisoner in all other aspects - I was beaten, raped, tortured. My chance for freedom came in the form of a thrall girl named Tälea, who had managed to find a plant of nightshade."

"She made me promise that if she gifted it to me that it would never be traced to her, that I would use it to bring the whole Kingdom to its knees," she revealed in a hushed murmur, vaguely nervous he would be enraged over her destruction of his home, "so, I did."

"Nyke wyse syt ao; nyke swer, Daeg, yn pōnta io emagon ossēntan issa lo pōnta issa se naejot sagon drēje - nyke istan yentê drüin iemnȳ," she finishes earnestly in her mother tongue, for it was an old euphemism that Lireans could not lie in the olde tongue. 

"When I arrived home and the truth of Lucavon's death reached my father's ears, he took my eye and cast me out for treason," the girl shakes her head, lip curling bitterly. 

"But I'd have done it a thousand times over if it meant being free of that monster."