Ch. 71: Sydney's Desperate Plea

"Knock Knock" Sydney's ears barely registered the polite knocking on her bedroom door. She'd been locked in her chambers for the past several weeks, ever since Jasper had begun recovering from his condition. 

Sydney had taken to staring at the curtains that covered her windows, blocking her view of the castle courtyard. There was nothing outside of that window that she wanted to see, but she also didn't have anything inside of her room that she wanted to look at either. Every moment that she thought of Adrian out there alone with that psychotic girl who'd stabbed her, while she sat there powerless to do anything to help him, even here at the castle, she could feel the rage and guilt chip away at a little bit more of her sanity. She had reached her limit quite a while ago.

"I'm entering your chambers, Princess Sydney." The maid said, her words somewhat piercing through the fog around Sydney's brain. With a vacant expression, Sydney turned her head to watch the maid open the door and enter, head down in a servile manner.

"Princess, you have received another letter from the Queen of Salila in response to your last correspondence." The maid told Sydney softly. 

"Thank you, Rehasia." Sydney muttered softly, "Place it... It doesn't matter..." She trailed off at the end. To be honest, this was more response than any other maid would've gotten from Sydney at this point. Her only other points of contact with the outside world were the servants that her father had assigned to bring her meals.

As a way to prevent her from escaping or killing herself, Sydney's personal staff had been prohibited from entering her personal quarters, and guards kept rotating shifts outside of her chambers. The guards responded to literally every single noise that Sydney made. She'd already tried to hang herself, break the glass in her window and use it to stab herself, and she'd tried to escape thrice. Luckily for Sydney, she wasn't completely alone in the world.

During the initial week of her confinement, Sydney had managed to contact the royal messenger, Rehasia, and arrange for her to visit her chambers once a week on the sly. Since Rehasia wasn't technically part of her personal staff, the messenger maid had been able to bribe the guards to look the other way when she entered Sydney's chambers, but she was still risking her life just to help the princess exchange notes with the queen of Salila. That just showed how much the people who had served under her brother truly believed in his potential as the future king. 

It made Rehasia sad to see Sydney so hopeless, but she dropped the letter on the princess's bed and left her chambers without another word, knowing that nothing that she could do would break through Sydney's gloomy mood unless she delivered something that stated that Adrian had been found and her coronation was being transferred to him.

'Sydney. My apologies, but your father is putting intense pressure on Salila as a nation, and our internal search for Adrian has yielded no results. I hesitate to give the search up, even as it becomes clearer and clearer that he is no longer within our borders. As a result of this, I have been unfortunately backed into a corner, and have been forced into a compromise. I will keep the secret search for Adrian going, but I will be forced to reallocate almost all of the resources that I am currently pouring into it into external defense instead.

Your friend,

Amanda Salila.' Sydney'd been expecting this letter for quite some time, so she didn't break down into tears immediately upon reading it, but it still managed to break through the fog in her head.

"I need to do something about this." She muttered to herself, standing up.

...

"98... 99... 100!" Jasper grunted, finishing his push-ups. Standing up, he grabbed a cloth from a nearby chair and used it to wipe the sweat off of his upper body. After his fever broke, Jasper had been fully recovered within the hour, but his rehabilitation had been a pretty big pain. 

The sickness had totally sapped Jasper's magic power, and it'd taken days for him to even be able to gather enough magic to be able to see six inches in front of his face, since he was totally blind without magic. He'd managed to get his magic pool back to the point where he could see about five or six feet in any direction, but that was still nothing compared to the twenty or so feet that he could see without even trying before.

Frustrated about everything, Jasper had ended up barring himself in the cabin that his late mentor, Hat, had left him, and gone on an exercise binge. He'd cleared the thousands of books that had been haphazardly stacked in the living room and shut them all in Hat's old bedroom, clearing the space that Hat's bed had been in by destroying it with magic. He hadn't been able to shut every single old magic tome inside the room, but he'd cleared out enough to do his exercising without getting hit with books.

"Knock Knock" Jasper heard a knock at the door. Walking up to it, he saw who was behind it. With a sigh, he opened the door.

"Go away, Sydney." Standing in the castle courtyard right outside his door, completely alone outside of her room, was Sydney. Normally, since he was technically just an apprentice elder mage, Jasper would have to speak politely to the princess, but Jasper had a special position as Adrian's best friend. Technically, that didn't officially matter at the moment, but he and Sydney knew different. That was why he was so annoyed right now. He didn't even care to figure out how she'd escaped from her room.

"Just listen to me, Jasper!" She pleaded.

"I'm not doing it again, Sydney!" Jasper shouted at her, slamming the door in her face and turning away.

"We need to save him, Jasper. You know it as well as I do." Sydney argued, opening the door again behind him. 

"I said