Finley Cai Aies Hall April 18th, 20XX

“Your highness! Didn’t I tell you to cooperate with the General?”

I closed my eyes and focused on actively purifying the magic in the air. My time was better spent cleansing the magic in the air than it was listening to whatever nonsense the green hag had to yell at me. Somehow, no matter how often I cleansed the magic in the air of my quarters, the unclean magic would find its way toward me and harass my senses until I purified it.

“The Ruan family is the best match for the royal family! Dont you realize that this engagement falling through means you’ll have to host a tournament to find the next queen?”

A tournament?

She noticed my peaked interest but brushed right past the topic despite having never taught me about it before. Even though she was my teacher, Esmeralda often spoke on issues I’d never heard about and acted as if they were things I should already have known about.

I just took a mental note to ask for a definition from the diary later on. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, and it most definitely wouldn’t be the last.

“I have to see if I can pull some damage control, but I hope you’ll reflect on your mistakes and think of ways to make things up with the General.”

Feeling cross, I directed the unclean magic toward her and forbade the pure magic from surrounding her and aiding her flight. It wasn’t anything particularly dangerous, but from the way her wings suddenly gained an irregular rhythm and her face twisted up, I could tell that she had been purposefully leeching off the magic I’d cleaned. The green fairy couldn’t exactly figure out what I’d done, but she knew that I’d caused her sudden discomfort. She stormed out in a flurry, beating her wings irregularly and occasionally staggering in place as she crossed the large room I used as a living space.

A wave of magic assaulted my senses from the direction of the door, and I vaulted off my bed as I realized she’d locked me into the room. Then I felt another, slightly more potent spell on the outer lock of the building and one on the gates to the land around the building, locking me in my space and out of the main castle.

Was she… grounding me?

Like a child?

It was just so wrong on so many levels that I had a hard time repressing the rage that bubbled up in my mind.

She had a nasty habit of looking down on me that I found hard to swallow. It wasn’t like I’d never been looked down on in the past, but the longer I spent in this place as a prince, the less reason I saw to put up with it.

It wasn’t even like she’d used powerful spells to seal me in here. Hell, if I sneezed hard enough in its direction, the spell would lose its shape.

I restrained the urge to put my theory into practice and pulled out my mother’s diary. First things first, I had to find out what a tournament was.

“What’s a tournament?”

‘A tournament is an organized competition used to find out the most powerful competitor. The ritual originated from the goblin cultures, but we fairies adapted them to suit our needs.’

The general definition reminded me that no matter how informally the book spoke, it was little more than a search engine.

“What type of tournament would occur if my ‘engagement’ fell through?”

‘Precedent wise, an unengaged prince and the remainders of the court would oversee a queendom wide competition where all eligible fairies would compete to assert their qualification to become the next queen and win the prince’s hand in marriage. However, this has not occurred in many centuries, as it is unlikely for a prince to be unengaged by the time they are old enough to oversee such an event.’

What sort of hellish tradition was that?

I thought of spending even longer than a second here than I’d already promised to, and a toxic wave of bile burned my throat.

“Ugh”

A grunt escaped my throat as I pulled back the urge to vomit and tried to laugh away the burning sensation.

Either way, it looked like I needed to make things up with the General.

I didn’t know why she’d suddenly acted as she had, but considering the vicious expression she’d put up when she’d randomly vaulted herself across the hall, I felt safe in assuming her actions of earlier were out of character for her.

My eyes drifted over to the large mirror that replaced the westernmost wall of my room, and my fingers gingerly drifted up to where the gash on my face had been.

Theodulus had warned me to get used to having my injuries heal quickly, and he had said I needed to work on my habit of panicking every time I got slightly hurt. According to Theodulus, having such a visceral response to ‘minor injuries’ would only serve as a disability in an actual battle. While it was probably a valid concern, I didn’t plan on getting into enough fights to worry about my efficiency in them.

He often spoke of such things with a certainty that made me nervous. Of course, nothing had happened yet, but the way he talked to me and trained me made me feel like it was only a matter of time.

I rolled off the bed, pulled my wings as close into my back as possible and finished the job by wrapping my back and chest with a thin cloth I’d cut from the sheets on my bed.

Thankfully, when I was in the human world, the transformation spell I’d learned from the diary put them away somewhere, but I couldn’t risk transforming like that while in the castle. Especially not with strangers around.

Sweat soon poured down my face and body, but I didn’t let myself off easy as I usually would and instead pushed harder.

It wasn’t like becoming any stronger would have done much in the situation I’d narrowly escaped from earlier. But it made me feel better to know that I could have escaped if things had gotten any worse than they already were.

After exercising until I could barely move, I used a spell to wash clean and collapsed onto the enormous bed. There was a large bath in another room of the building, but I didn’t think the gratification would be worth the effort it took to get there. There was also the awkwardness of having people try to help me bathe. When they had first tried, I’d raised such a fuss that they had offered to bring in a couple of male fairies to help me. That they had conceded that much as enough to make me agree, but then I remembered I was neither a baby nor a dying elder. I didn’t need help with such things.

I usually showered in the human world anyway, so it was fine, but showering was only one of many new changes living full time in the fairy world had brought me. There were people that would come to my room to brush and wash out my wings every night or someone that would come to style my hair and officially put my jewelry away until the next day came.

I woke up much later than I’d planned to and realized my nap had turned into a full night’s sleep that had carried me over into a new day. I waited for someone to come fetch me for breakfast. While I wasn’t particularly hungry, it had been on the itinerary for activities with the General, and I wanted to talk to her a bit more about what had happened yesterday. At this point, I didn’t even expect an apology since fairies didn’t seem to be into apologizing for things, but I at least wanted an explanation.

I decided that if there was a good excuse for why she’d acted as she had, then I didn’t see a reason to call off the engagement. There was also my craving for the food that the chef would prepare. While I didn’t actually need to eat much since the magic sustained my current body, but it was still something I enjoyed when there was good food to be had.

A small benefit that had come about from this situation was that we now held something over the Ruan family in negotiations. I mean, it wasn’t like we’d particularly needed it, but it was a nice dagger to keep hidden in one’s purse.

As long as I had this piece of information, I doubted the General would act too recklessly in the future.

I finally lost patience as the third hour dawned and casually broke through the lazy spells Esmeralda had placed around the property.

It looked like she’d had more confidence in her magic than she should have. Or rather, she’d held too much faith in my overall inferiority to her. As always, she’d forgotten that no matter how little I cared to fulfil the role, I was still a royal.

A few worker fairies tried to fly after me as escorts, but I waved them off. There were so many of them around, and it wasn’t like I’d become attached to any of them. Being escorted by the ones from my building was no different from being watched by all the stationary guards around the grounds.

At first, I walked around confidently, intending to get to the dining hall or Cambridge and Corin’s offices, but after the thirtieth minute crawled by, I realized something rather important.

I didn’t know where the hell I was going.

While I’d been to those respective spaces before, someone had escorted me around, and I hadn’t paid the routes much mind.

I slowed down and stood in place, debating whether to wait for a staff member to wander by and escort me. I could also keep exploring the impossibly enormous building and use the opportunity to learn the layout of the place I apparently owned.

As I slowly walked, the two choices bounced around my head. As I was about to make my choice, a sudden yell pulled me out of my deliberations.

“YOU WISH TO CANCEL THE ENGAGEMENT?”