Rest assured, I will not continue to update this regularly even though I have finally figured out what to do with this.

On a lighter note, I forgot I wrote that I was on hiatus on my profile. OTL I guess I'm not on hiatus anymore.

With a quick nod, the king dismisses Lou from the room.

"I'll call for you again," he says, and Lou bows in return before closing the double doors behind himself.

Alea bites the inside of her cheek, sorry to see the manservant leaving. As stiff and awkward as the man is, his propiety is the only barrier between the king and herself. With him there, only the barest hints of an advance escape the king's lips.

And now he walks to the seat nearest to her, his stride even and confident. There's no hurry with him, the smile on his face as perfect as it had been on the beach.

As he seats himself, his right hand comes up to his chin, and he rests against it as he once more appraises her appearance. On her end, she returns his smile with a small smile of her own, but it still feels as if the corners of her mouth are stretching her skin too tight. The air up here is too dry.

"I have not received your name, miss," he comments, raising one eyebrow at her.

Ah, this. She's learned this from Lynn earlier. "Alea," she answers, casting her gaze downwards. "Forgive me, but I can not seem to recall where I come from."

"Alea." His mouth is a poor container for those syllables; they spill out with every flap of his lips. And yet, once he is finished saying her name, he wears a satisfied smile. "A lovely name. For its sake, I suppose I can forgive you if you impose on the castle until you regain your memories."

"How generous," she replies, bringing a hand to her lips. He catches her wrist in a firm grasp, but not tight enough to leave marks.

All she can think of is how easy it would be, how simple it would be to wrench her hand back and toss this man over her shoulder, swirl him around and sink her teeth into the stringy meat of his neck. She sets her jaw at the thought of it, hoping he doesn't pay any attention to the jump of muscle on the side of her face. A trick of the light, she hopes he'll say to himself because to refuse a king is unthinkable.

"Your hand is surprisingly dry," he murmurs, shifting his grip to hold her hand in his. His voice takes on an amused lilt. "I've never seen a woman with features such as yours."

If he looks closer, he might just see the jagged scar encircling the tip of her middle finger, but his thumb just barely grazes against it. The light touch is not enough for him to feel the uneven surface of her skin, but she feels his touch all too much. However, her gaze on him is the one she reserves for her prey. When he inevitably catches the sharp glint of her narrowed eyes, his hand, which is just beginning to reach out to her cheek, stills in midair. The curve of his Adam's apple bobs up and down as he swallows.

"Just where do you come from?" he asks in a tone less tender than the one he used before. "And do all the women from your country have such lethal looks?"

She tilts her head to the side, still smiling as she smoothly slides her hand out of his grip. "I fear we have become much too close for propiety's sake. You do have a queen, do you not?"

"My queen?" The quirk of his eyebrow combined with his crooked smile is strangely deriding, and without saying a single word about the queen, he's expressed all he's ever thought of her.

"Your queen," Alea repeats.

The king leans back in his seat, chuckling to himself as if he's privy to an inside joke. It makes Alea all the more aware that she is not of his kind.

"My queen," the king finally says once he's finished his private merriment, "could care less what I do with the strange woman I've found washed up on a beach."

And with that, he reaches out once more the hand he dropped onto his lap, and caresses her cheek in an almost affectionate gesture if not for the way he steadily meets the warning in her eyes. "You see this, Alea?" Again, that strange dryness to the sound of her name which sets her teeth on edge. "I've never touched my queen like this. No, indeed, I have not even kissed her since our wedding day. Even the look you give me now is much more endearing than the thought of seeing that woman again."

All at once, he again adopts the perfect smile that he usually wears and drops his hand from her face. "I suppose I've said too much, haven't I?"

Alea can not say anything for fear of everything spilling out. The queen. That cruel, hateful woman! The mermaid-turned-human stiffens in her seat, the ache of her legs a distant reality. Only the queen lingers in her thoughts. The treacherous queen who already meets her low expectations.

"I'll call Lou back in," the king says, getting to his feet. "I'm sure he suspects the worst of us now, as long as we've been alone together." He places a hand on Alea's shoulder for a fleeting moment, the tips of his index and middle finger brushing against her neck before he makes his way back to where he was standing before. Her arms shake as she suppresses a shiver. Just an involuntary reaction, she tells herself, pushing the thought of weakness out of her mind.

"But of course, he thinks of me as more than just a master," he adds under his breath, but Alea catches it anyway. She keeps her face composed and facing forward once Lou reenters the room.

The manservant's eyes go straight to her, and she's the picture of modesty. The king as well, once Lou turns his attention to him, is maintaining a proper distance from her. He doesn't seem to have moved at all, but the girl's shoulders are unnaturally tense. Her smile as well, is all wrong at the corners when she looks up at him.

"Make sure Miss Alea is made comfortable in one of the guestrooms," the king orders, turning away from the two of them. Even if Lou glares at his back, there will be no adequate answer from the king as to what might have transpired here while the manservant was outside. He catches the hint of a smirk on the king's face, however, before he enters his inner chambers.

For now, there's a woman who can't use her legs that he has to take care of.

As if he were carrying a burdensome piece of furniture, Lou stoops over Alea and gathers her back up in his arms without a change in his neutral expression. She could ignore it so well before, but now she feels mortified when he places his hands on her and barely looks her in the face.

Silently, she swears that once her legs recover, she'll never ever allow anyone in this damned castle handle her like this ever again.

There's still this annoying itch at the side of her neck where that hag clawed so viciously. When it was an open wound, the blood attracted...things. Lesser things. Bottom-feeders with glazed eyes too sensitive for sunlight, and gaping jaws with tongues hanging out, searching for the scent of prey.

As weak as she is, she is no prey. The lesser creatures learned that before, and her cave has been conspicuously absent of unwanted visitors for a long time. Emboldened by the smell of blood-She's finally weak and injured, they must have thought- they swarmed to her over the course of a day. Of course, she squashed all those inferior beings between her bony fingers and lithe tentacles right before stuffing them into her mouth because food is food. And food is always hard to come by in the depths of the ocean.

They were all bony creatures though, and every time her jaws closed on what little flesh they had, their bones pricked against the soft skin of the inside of her mouth, some of them almost piercing the skin through. And at the end of the day, the inside of her mouth is just a mangled mess of torn skin. All she can taste is blood, even if it isn't all her own.

The wound's scabbed over now, just a lumpy brown patch on the side of her neck. The glow of the fungus of her cave casts an eerie light against the hideous thing, but at the very least, there's one thing she can thank that damned mermaid for. She hasn't eaten this well since the old witch was alive.

The jar filled by that boy's voice still whispers so soothingly to her. She has to press her face against the glass to hear, and as she does so, she vaguely thinks about everything else she should be doing instead. There are recipes in the cave aboveground that can close up the cuts in her mouth and numb her to the pain, and maybe if she sets herself to the task, she'll be able to organize the mess and rescue the books from the damp that has accumulated from a year's worth of neglect. There's no reason to it, but the thought of going back to those books and staying to look at everything the old witch left behind makes her press closer to the glass jar.

"She left me, did you know. Said she was going to teach me everything she knew, but she still left in the end," she murmurs. The whispers subside at the sound of her voice, and she's hesitant to speak up again and deprive herself of their presence for even a few seconds.

However, it's so easy to believe that this, this thing she's stolen and sealed into a jar, is actually listening to her, giving her words more than just a passing moment's attention. How ironic it is, that he has to pay her more mind in death than he did when he was alive.

"I hate them all. All of your kind," she begins again, and there, once more, the whispers cease. When they begin again, she feels that her delusions have become far too strong. They take on a softer tone, as if that is even possible, and their musical tune sounds almost consoling.

Its orange glow is barely any brighter than the fungus growing on the walls of her cave, but it feels as if it has life of its own to fuel the warmth she feels against her cheek. When she closes her eyes, she can still see that merboy, floating hesitantly at the entrance of her cave.

"What is it that you seek?" she hissed at him, half-sick of the trickle of visitors coming to confirm the rumors, the thrill-seekers who accepted foolish dares to venture to see the deceptive witch working her spells. He looked just like them all: young, and healthy. He seemed to glow from the inside out from spending his whole life in the light.

The sunlight blinded her the last time she dared to look.

Unaware of all that might befall him in that treacherous land above, he smiled a sheepish smile, and simply answered, "To be closer, even just for a little bit, to her."

The pretty lilt of his voice in her imagination seems a mockery with these whispers right next to her ears. It's better this way, she thinks, opening her eyes and letting the orange fill her vision.

As with other nights, she dozes off to the ghostly sound of whispers in her ear. The throbbing pain in her mouth is simply a phantom feeling that drifts away with her consciousness.

Half-asleep, she barely hears the glass jar, the voice trapped inside it whispering one coherent word among its melodious gibberish:"Up."