Chapter 81: Don’t Leave Me

"Get back! Step away from the Lady before I forget my oath of fealty!"

"My Lady! Seraphina! Look at me! Breathe!" Sir Gallahan panicked wildly, ignoring his mutinous peers and reaching his large, armored hands out toward the hyperventilating child on the floor. He desperately attempted to scoop her up. "We are extracting! I am taking you out into the fresh mountain air! I will summon the ice-bees! I will fetch the wild honey! Please, My Lady, do not look at the grumpy Duke! Look at Gallahan! I will squish your cheeks! I will protect you from him!"

The knights actively mutinying against the most terrifying warlord on the continent to protect a crying toddler from his emotional incompetence was an absolute, high-fantasy comedic masterpiece.

However.

The legendary commanders of the North had made one fatal, catastrophic tactical miscalculation.

They thought Seraphina wanted to be saved from Kaelus.

The moment Sir Gallahan’s pristine, silver-gauntleted hands brushed the fabric of her navy wolf gown, attempting to lift her away from the Archduke, Seraphina’s primal orphan instincts rebelled.

’No!’ her hyperventilating mind shrieked in panic. ’They’re taking me away! They’re putting me in the return wagon! He ordered them to extract me!’

Seraphina did not let Gallahan pick her up.

With a sudden, rabid, uncoordinated burst of desperate toddler strength, she violently kicked her small leather shoe squarely against Sir Gallahan’s silver breastplate.

CLANG!!!

"GET AWAY FROM ME!" Seraphina shrieked hysterically, rejecting the doting knight.

She scrambled backward across the plush velvet floorboards like a rabid, cornered badger.

She bypassed Sir Lucas’s blocking legs.

She launched her tiny, bedraggled, snot-nosed body squarely at Duke Kaelus von Nacht.

She didn’t grab his leg.

She didn’t grab his belt.

She reached up with both of her tiny, pale hands and aggressively grabbed the loose, unlaced fabric of his black tunic directly beneath his mythril breastplate, right over his furiously beating heart.

She twisted the dark canvas into her tiny fists, digging her blunt fingernails through the fabric until they pressed against his bare skin.

Her knuckles turned stark white.

She pressed her wet, snotty, crimson face flush against the hard iron of his breastplate.

"DON’T LET THEM TAKE ME!" Seraphina wailed, sobbing so hysterically, so desperately into his armor that the sound vibrated directly into his ribcage.

She aggressively shook his tunic, completely refusing to let go. "Papa! Tell them to go away! I’m not broken! I’ll be a good bait! I’ll fold the fireman’s papers! I’ll eat the extra cabbage! Just don’t make me leave! Please! Don’t leave me behind!"

She was clinging to him with the terrifying, rabid biological imperative of a creature that believed that if her physical fingers slipped from his shirt for even a fraction of a second, the universe would completely erase him, and she would be left alone in the dark forever.

The carriage fell dead silent.

Sir Gallahan remained kneeling on the floorboards, holding his empty hands out, staring in hollow stupefaction.

Sir Lucas slowly lowered his broadsword, his scarred jaw dropping open.

Sir Boris’s war hammer slipped from his grip, hitting the velvet carpet with a dull thud.

They looked at her.

She wasn’t terrified of the monster.

She was terrified of losing him.

Duke Kaelus von Nacht stood there paralyzed.

The pain of her blunt fingernails digging into his bare chest beneath his tunic was imperceptible.

But the spiritual impact of her desperate wails completely detonated his soul.

The heavy iron door that he had slammed shut over his heart to protect her from his darkness shattered into a million fragments of gray dust.

The arrogant, untouchable Reaper, the man who believed he was a lightless grave unsuited for a sunlit bird, was completely obliterated at that moment.

He looked down at the tiny, snot-nosed, sobbing little Mushroom clinging to his heart as if he were the only sun in her sky.

He was her safe place.

Not Oakhaven.

Not the clay courtyards.

Only him.

A sudden wave of fatherly devotion exploded from Kaelus’s core, sweeping away the toxic ash of his self-loathing.

"OUT!" Kaelus roared at his knights.

It was not the cold, controlled voice of the commander.

It was a rabid snarl of a Leviathan claiming its young. "GET OUT OF MY CARRIAGE! SECURE THE PASS! IF ANYONE EVEN LOOKS AT HER, I WILL EXECUTE THE VANGUARD!"

Lucas, Boris, and Gallahan did not utter a single word of mutiny.

Recognizing the monumental shift in their liege’s core, they scrambled backward out of the missing doorway, almost falling over each other onto the granite ledge, locking their heavy shields together to block the mountain fog from the cabin.

Weeping silently, Gallahan firmly pulled his visor down. ’She really does love the grumpy hedgehog,’ the knight thought, his soul entirely at peace. ’She rejected my wild honey to cling to his canvas shirt. It is the greatest love of a daughter to their father in Northern history.’

Inside the shattered carriage, Kaelus dropped to his knees.

The heavy mythril plates of his greaves struck the velvet floorboards with a loud THUD, landing squarely among the scattered origami ducks.

He didn’t try to pull her hands away from his tunic.

He didn’t care that she was stretching the imported black canvas or leaving a pull of glistening snot-and-tear stain across the polished iron of his breastplate.

Kaelus reached out with both of his powerful, heavily muscled arms and enveloped her in a hug.

He pulled her tiny frame so firmly against his broad chest that she was entirely lifted off the floorboards, swallowed whole by the midnight-blue wool of his mantle.

He buried his face directly into her unruly, static-filled dark hair, his hand coming up to cradle the back of her head, locking her flush against his beating heart.

"I have you," Kaelus breathed.

His voice was a rough, broken, vibrating rumble against her ear, raw with an emotion that defied mortal language. "I’m sorry, I have you, Seraphina. Shhh. Look at me. I have you."