Malice Maze

This chapter is also the prologue to my story Eldora and the Three Kings. The chapters after this are all lead ins to that story, and also telling you what happened to the children that the women bore after the maze. You do not have to read any further, the story of the women is truly complete, but for a sense of where I am heading, or a sense of the children they created, the next five chapters will (sort of) tell you.

Chapter 31
The Light

Helen looked into the murky waters of the bucket she had been using to clean the floor. The kitchens could be scrubbed and scrubbed again and they never seemed to come clean. She always wondered, as she looked into those horrid murky waters, why she bothered to stay a maid. She may be a vampire but she was beautiful, and kind, and deserved better than to be a maid in a castle with a constantly revolving cast of players. The kings had no interest in her, nor did she expect to catch the eye of a king.

“Helen, if there is no wine left I am going to be angry.” She recognized that jovial joking grin and that misspoken tone even before he came into the kitchen. She lied to herself when she said she did not want to catch the eye of a king. She wanted nothing more than to be with one king, the middle king, the man who had made her a vampire in a first place, the whole reason she continued to serve at this castle. Stephen Von Dio. He, like his brothers, had inherited his father’s thick black hair and dark brown eyes, but his features were soft and sensual where Nicholas was hard and menacing and Sion was small and indifferent. Stephen was everything Helen could have wanted in a man, and for one glorious night she had had it, even though he had gone a little out of control and killed her.

“There is plenty of wine for you and your guest,” she told him, going to a cupboard and pulling out the fancy glass goblets he used to impress his many mistresses and a bottle of red wine that would resemble blood but taste sweet on the tongue unlike the metallic sting blood first had to it. “Who is it tonight?”

“Just a barmaid,” Stephen smiled. “She is no beauty like the blonde goddess in this kitchen, but she does give excellent head, if I remember correctly. Or was that her sister. Shit…” Stephen walked off muttering, leaving Helen with that glimmer of hope and that small ray of light in her ever dimming life. She wanted something for herself, something that meant she was living for her own life.

She wished too hard.

The frantic knocking at the kitchen door caught her attention. No one but servants used the kitchen door and they would not knock, unless one of the stupid stable boys had been caught in the downpour and his arms were full. Those boys, who longed to become something by serving in the guard around the castle, were too ignorant for their own good. They only saw beautiful metal and forgot there had not been a war for nearly three hundred and eighty years.

Helen opened the back door and was surprised to find Queen Ilona standing on her doorstep, looking disheveled and out of place, her body shivering with the raindrops and something else, something more…

In Ilona’s arms she held tight on to a baby girl, not a newborn but close to a three month mark at most. The baby girl was surreal in appearance, already with eyes the color of a deep pink rose and hair that was somewhere between red and auburn, sienna in coloring. No three month old should be looking at Helen with such perceptive eyes, but Helen knew only fear as Ilona started to fall.

“Ilona!” Helen cried out, forgetting the woman’s title as her hands dashed out and took the child from Ilona’s cold hands. Ilona looked grateful to Helen as she fell to her knees at the doorstep. The Queen Ilona, the ruler of the southern most continent, a place so far south that it almost became north again to another point of view, a place so far south that heat had begun to come up in part of the kingdom instead of just dead cold. This queen had visited the kings once in the past year and a half since she had become queen, her husband King Dralnu at her side. She had never seen two people more in love and now the scarlet haired violet eyed beauty looked to be dying and forgetting she had ever loved anything.

Helen had not even been aware that Ilona was pregnant.

“Hide her,” Ilona said in a crazed voice, a voice filled with concern and plight. “Keep her from him.”

“Him?” Helen asked, kneeling, the baby tight in her arms as she reached out to Ilona. “Him who? Your majesty?” Helen shook her as Ilona fell and Helen leapt to her feet and began screaming for her kings, forgetting all titles as her worry overtook her. “Nicholas, Stephen, Sion, someone! Please come! Quickly!”

Stephen was the first to return to the kitchen, his eyes going to Ilona’s dead figure with shock. Helen did not know how she knew, but she knew that Ilona was dead. Her body was growing cold quickly.

“Can’t you save her?” Helen cried out. “Can’t you turn her into a…”

“She has demon blood in her,” Stephen sneered. “Dralnu changed her to protect her, but the blood seems to be what is poisoning her now. I can’t, if I do I will be poisoned as well.”

“Dralnu never would have…”

“No, he wouldn’t.” Stephen stood and turned to see Helen clutching the baby tightly. “What is that?”

“That is a good question.” Nicholas had entered the kitchen looking down at the dead figure of the queen and then at the calm figure of the child. The child’s eyes were filled with tears but she did not make a sound. Nicholas, the hardened king who had fought in wars hundreds of years ago, looked hard at the child with disgust.

“She told me to hide her from ‘him’,” Helen explained.

“Him who?” Stephen asked calmly.

Helen shook her head. “Perhaps Dralnu really did do something that scared her.”
“That child is not our responsibility,” Nicholas snapped. “Put her in an orphanage and she will be safe.”

It had been his saving grace, and the reason Helen had decided to keep the child. He had not referred to the child as an ‘it’ like a man who was truly disgusted had. He had referred to her as a her and that settled it with Helen. She was keeping this child safe and away from Dralnu at all costs. “She stays with me. You can throw me out, though, if you wish.”

“Stop this nonsense,” Stephen snapped. “We will keep the child, but we need to find a way to tell Dralnu that his wife is lying dead in our kitchen without revealing the child.”

“Give the child to me.” Helen and Stephen stared at Nicholas doubtfully. He huffed and reached out his hands. “I will not drown her in the river,” he insisted. “I will take her from here until it is safe while you two get to explain to the king that his wife is dead. Make up something good, would you, I have no interest in coming home to your dead bodies.” Nicholas left the room, a baby girl carried out in his arms, a baby girl who finally began to cry. Helen and Stephen pointedly turned away from Nicholas as he took the child away.

“If you get me killed for this…” Stephen began. “You are already making me miss a great sexual romp.”

“Oh, you aren’t even sure if it is her or her sister,” Helen snapped. “Now find a way to contact Dralnu so we can do this.”

“You want to raise her, don’t you?” Stephen asked, for a moment taking this maid in for all she was worth and what her hopes and dreams are.

“More than anything,” Helen admitted.

“Well, then you have to choose a name.”

“I already have,” Helen smiled brightly. “Her name is Eldora.”