Excerpt from my new WIP:
“They say your people are destined for the stars,” says the young prince. Zeraphina stares at him, taken aback.
Their first meeting had been nothing but a brief greeting, a whisper in the wind, a rustle through the leaves tangled in her hair. Her eyes study him, the sharp curve of his jaw, dimple in his cheek, thick brows and plump lips, and she decides she hates him. She hates them all for abandoning her to a life of wifehood, of becoming Queen, of having responsibilities.
She wants freedom: the burn of salt on her tongue, desert sand in her hair, smoke staining her skin. She wants the feel of the ground beneath her feet, fur between her fingers, fire within her soul. This boy, his father, her father, they had stolen the freedom from her heart and wrenched it from her frozen hands.
And he was going to try and be decent to her. To look her in the eye as if he hadn’t ruined her life, to have the audacity to say she must have come from the stars, when she knows for a fact she is from the sky, the moon, the earth, the flames licking the horizon, the waves that crash against cool gray rocks on the coast. She is love, she is anger, she is femininity, fierceness, determination. Stars are too cliché a description for the feral heart of Zeraphina.
But despite the growing hatred, the rumbling emotion in her chest, she must be decent because she loves her country more than anything.
She says, “Yes. Well, they say a lot of things. But no one ever really knows who they are. I suppose they’d also say me being forced to marry someone I hardly know is destiny, too.”