18 4.1

I stared at my ceiling, mindlessly throwing a red rubber ball back and forth between my hands. My thoughts were still frustratingly slow after a few restless nights. It was hard to sleep when a maelstrom of worries, problems, and imagined horrors kept swirling in my mind, keeping it from properly shutting down.

Despite the extra time those sleepless nights forced upon me, I was still lacking any practical options on how to begin the hunt for my thief. All the options that had occurred to me required help from either my stepmother or my father, neither of which was practical. My stepmother was the safer option, but not by much. She would instantly blow up a search for a girl into some romantic hunt, no matter what claims of 'justice' and 'for the greater good' I made.

I had little respect for my father, both as a king and as my parent. We met for the first time during the summer of my seventh birthday, and all I had known about him was the information that my mother had provided.

She rarely mentioned him, but whenever she did, she tended to be brutally honest about his faults. It tended to be her way to never sugarcoat any of her romantic encounters, which tended to pull her opinions toward the pessimistic side when telling me stories of her past trysts.

I don't know if he had any traits that she liked, or how they got together in the first place, but the information I did get was rather damning. He had a well-known tendency to engage in romantic relations with beautiful women, and he wasn't picky about if they were married or single. My mother was one of those women.

My mother was objectively gorgeous, with hair down to her waist and enchanting grey eyes. She was shorter than most, about five foot three inches, and carried herself with the grace and dignity of a queen graciously interacting with her subjects. The only clues to her fey parentage were her pointed ears and her capricious temperament, and she tended to be as flighty with relationships as she was with everything else in her life.

According to her, father dearest never told her he was married at the time. He had promised her the world, but as soon as she told him she was pregnant with his child he dropped her as he had with those before. He rarely accepted the product of his infidelity into his household, so I am honestly not sure how many half-siblings I had floating around the continent. By my last count, I had three brothers from my father's first marriage, two sisters from his marriage to my stepmother, and three sisters from various other mothers. As the girls weren't eligible for the throne, they were usually left with their mothers to be raised.

He provided the families with financial support but little else. It was probably a mercy to those children that they didn't have to deal with the court or any fight for the throne.

My wandering thoughts came to a halt as the ball bypassed my left hand entirely and bounced off my wall, rolling somewhere into the stacks of books and the abyss beyond. I looked towards it for a couple of moments, sighed, and let my head fall to the covers. It didn't feel worth it to try and get it back. Who knows how many books I would have to move to find it?

Turning onto my stomach, I closed my eyes in an attempt to catch another moment of rest. My blankets were warm and soft, and the comforting texture was almost too much for my tired mind to resist.

I had nearly succeeded in my quest to go back to sleep when a knock came at my door, shattering the peace I had almost found and thoroughly making me grumpy. I groaned, rolled over, and fell onto the floor.

I narrowly caught myself with my hands and almost landed face-first on a couple of books that I put next to my bed for late-night reading. As I pulled my feet under myself, I grabbed the edge of the comforter to leverage myself up to a standing position. The knock came again, and I dragged myself over to the door to face my new demonic tormentor.