Timeless by Amanda Paris Page B

much
attention.
    “Emmeline,” my father called to me from the
dais, raising his glass. I smiled at him, but his kindly light gray
eyes had moved from my face to sweep the hall, searching, I knew,
for Lamia.
    “Come give us a kiss, sweetheart,” he said,
though I wondered whether or not he meant me. For the first time, I
wondered whether his affection was merely a show for others.
    I stepped up beside him, and I could feel
Lamia’s eyes following me. She was jealous as always of any display
of my father’s love for me. These were the times that I missed my
mother the most.
    My father had married Lamia last summer,
waiting an indecent time after my mother’s untimely death in
childbirth. Mother should have been long past her childbearing
years, and yet, happily she thought at the time, she would give my
father his long-awaited heir.
    Lamia, a distant cousin of my mother’s—nobody
knew from where— had arrived to help with the birth. She and my
mother had grown up together, and my mother had had strange fancies
near her confinement. She wanted someone from her past to stay with
her during the birth of her son.
    And so Lamia arrived, a beautiful,
golden-haired woman who seemed ageless, looking much as my mother
had remembered her from years before. When she’d first arrived, I’d
regarded her with fondness—she seemed to take such good care of my
mother, and she spared a kind word or smile for me as well, despite
the coldness I saw in her dark eyes.
    When the time came for the birth, we’d stood
together, helping my mother through the throes of an agonizing
labor. It had ended, finally, three days later, my mother suffering
before the child, dead inside her, had been ripped from her womb,
killing her. At that instant, Lamia withdrew from me completely, a
knowing smile on her lips. She immediately went to comfort my
father, whose grief at my mother’s passing knew no bounds. He had
wed my mother twenty years before, and they’d lived a happy life
together before the unfortunate birth of the brother I would never
meet.
    Lamia arranged for the burial the next day—an
unheard of, rushed event that gave the mourners no time to grieve
or prepare the body. It was customary at Montavere Castle, our
ancestral home near to the town of Sarum, to spend several nights
praying for the soul of the deceased.
    But my father would not hear of it. Though I
cried, pleaded, and begged, he turned a deaf ear, relying on Lamia,
who, some maliciously said, had bewitched him. Knowing the depth of
my father’s love for my mother, I could not believe he could so
disrespect her in death.
    But time would prove me wrong. Less than
three months after she died, Lamia had become the lady of the
castle, and rumors of the dark power she wielded over my father had
been silenced. Everyone feared her.
    Once she became my father’s wife, she dropped
all pretence of affection for me. She took a heavy hand to the
servants and would not have my mother’s name mentioned in her
hearing. It was as though she wanted to erase all memory of her
childhood friend and relative.
    A dark cloud settled over the castle, a sense
of foreboding filling our hearts with dread. Behind her back they
called her la belle dame sans merci, the lady without mercy.
    My sorrow increased tenfold when she began to
turn my father away from me. Though she commanded him and all the
castle inhabitants, she could not efface his love for me entirely.
I suspected that she practiced the dark arts, but even I dared not
accuse her. She exercised such power that I shuddered to think what
could happen if I defied her.
    If it had not been for Damien, the truest and
best of my father’s knights, I could not have born her tyranny over
us.
    I rushed to embrace my father, my heart
gladdened at the memory of our once happy home, and I missed my
mother. My eyes found Damien’s, and he smiled at me, knowing, of
course, my every thought.
    Though my father had thrown the banquet
ostensibly to honor