Kaira looked surprised: and she was. The King wasn’t one to interrupt her speeches, nor was he one to ignore her desires. There was something about the forest that Kaira didn’t know, though, that the King knew all too well.
And King Liam was not one to take risks with his most prized possession.
It was simply not his style.
“Ian, leave us,” the King commanded. The poor servant boy stumbled over his too-big feet as he hurried to escape the King’s gaze. He closed the heavy doors behind him and waited in the hallway with the lone guard.
“Trouble in paradise,” the guard commented softly.
Ian just nodded.
**
Inside the room, the King was struggling to deal with Kaira.
“Why won’t you let me go?” She whined. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted. You just don’t want me to be happy,” she pouted. “You wish I was boring and dull like all the lords and ladies. You wish I was bored.”
The King frowned at Kaira.
“You may not go to the forest, Kaira. There are wild things – horrible things – that a princess need not know about. The castle is where you belong. You have full range of the gardens and full freedom to explore the village, but the forest is one place where you may not go. I forbid it.”
Kaira growled at her father, furious with his lack of understanding. Frowning, she turned and stomped out of the room, slamming the door behind her like a toddler who didn’t get his way.
When she was gone, King Liam collapsed in his throne and closed his eyes. How could he tell his daughter why he didn’t want her to go? How could he warn her about the dangers that she was so frequently drawn to? He knew perfectly well why she wanted to go into the forest this week: trolls. It was troll season and all the best knights were out hunting them, fighting them, and killing them to prove their strength.
He knew Kaira wanted to find a troll.
He also knew that it would kill her in an instant.
That wasn’t why King Liam forbade his daughter to enter the forest, though.
In actuality, a much bigger threat resided in the mountainside behind the darkness of the trees: a threat that would love to get its hands on a princess, especially one as young and tasty as Kaira.
Though the risk of being captured was small, it was less small when you were royalty. And though many believed the fables to simply be myths that had been passed on for generations, the King knew better.
As a young prince, he had wandered too far into the depths of the forest and eventually found himself in a deep, dark cave.
With nothing but his bravery, the King had encountered a monster so great that he had spoken of it only to his one-legged, dim-witted brother Percy who had died later that year. How the King managed to escape, he still didn’t know. How he managed to find his way home, he never knew. How the King managed to find a cavern that few had ever seen, he couldn’t comprehend.
Despite years of searching, he had never been able to find the cave again.
But he knew it was there.
And the King knew that if he warned his daughter of a dragon in their country, she would be running for its cave even faster than she was running for the trolls.
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“Heather, can you come help me with this puzzle?” Judith called out from the toddler half of the Hourly Care room at the Child Development Center. Heather glanced over and nodded.
“Just a minute,” she said. “Let me finish cleaning down the changing table.” She grabbed a fresh pack of wipes and carefully sprayed the changing pad before wiping it down. She dropped the wipes and her plastic gloves in the trashcan, then headed over to the waist-high partition that divided the Hourly Care room into two separate rooms for children.
Heather liked the divider because it made caring for children who weren’t regular daycare attendees very easy. She could talk with the other workers and ask for help when she needed it, but she didn’t have to worry about the toddlers accidentally stepping on the infants. Hourly care attendees were usually drop-in children whose parents needed last-minute care for their kids. Since the CDC was located in the middle of an Air Force base, they had to offer flexible hours for care. Parents never knew when they might get called in to work, so they had to be ready for anything.