He sighed. "It's not ideal, that's true. But it's for your own good," he insisted.
She stalked to the other side of the room and faced out the window. "Everyone always says that. They always think they know what's best for me. At first they knew it was best for me to just stay by myself in my home and never have any friends or go anywhere. Then the neighbors told me it was best for me to not get too close to Darien and let him into my life even though he was the only person who actually cared about me. Then my parents told me it would be best and easiest if we just stayed in Florida and things just stayed the way they had always been, even when the doctor told them otherwise. 'It's for your own good' they always say. But it never is. You think I'm going to start to believe that's true when my kidnapper tells it to me when it was never true when people who were at least slightly concerned about my life and my welfare said it? I'm not that stupid. I'm not that gullible," she said.
He protested that it really was for her benefit. He tried to explain there were things she didn't know about that threatened her safety. He was never willing to talk about the wizards and explain them to her, though. She obviously wasn't buying his half-hearted attempts to explain things out.
Eventually, he threw his hands up in the air. "I don't know what else to say to you now! You just aren't listening to me."
"Obviously, you aren't listening to me, either. I'm not going to follow what you say now or in the future, because the thing about kidnappers is that they just aren't trustworthy," she said.
He turned his back to her and moved to pause by the door. "Maybe you're right and you should never listen to me. I don't care. I'm not going to send you out to get killed by them. Whether you'd prefer to be gallivanting about or you agree to being held here makes no difference."
Alyss sneered at him, then jumped for the open doorway. Sparks flew from his eyes. "Don't leave," Aeron said. "The workers in the palace know that you can't leave your room without me now due to your adventuring. You may no longer access the other rooms in my chamber nor the hall, and neither of them will open for you anymore. Do not try to sneak out again," he added coldly. "You will regret what follows."
Aeron cleared the doorway. "I'll send you more entertainment so you don't go nuts here, but I refuse to allow you to be in danger. Even if that means I'm guaranteeing I'll be hated by you, I'll do it anyway because I care," he said. Her chin still jutted out mulishly, and it was obvious she had no intention of following his dictates.
He looked at her for a second, head tilted in thought. She shuffled nervously. "I suppose I should enforce my rules," he mused. She backed a step away.
At that moment little puffs of flame, nothing more than burning snowflakes, fell softly on her. She became still and frozen in place. Her eyes looked frantically around the room, but each time she tried to run, to escape, she found her muscles would not move. A snap of his fingers, and the sickly green smoke surrounded her, just as it had days earlier. Even her eyes had to stop the fight for freedom as they drifted closed, hazy dreams surrounding her.
The spell wore off after an hour without any of the dreams that plagued her natural sleep. When she got up it was to find with relief that some of her demands had been met, and a bookshelf stocked with tomes similar to the few she had managed to take out of the palace library on her last trip there populated it. She took one with relief and started to read, hoping to drown her worries for at least a few hours by escaping to the world of a story.
Not long after one brother had left the room, another entered. Richard slammed the door open. "Hello, hello," he said.
She looked up and saw his velvet clothes and dismissed him as being in league with Aeron. So she ignored him and continued to read in her book. "At this point I've had too many people coming in to observe me. I welcome Murray and any other footmen, or maids, or my friends, to visit me but not other obnoxious people who tell me prison is for my benefit.
He smirked. "Did you say prison? I was under the impression you had chosen to take up residence in my brother's guest quarters," he said.
She snorted and turned the page. "I can't see why anyone would. Guest rooms that you aren't allowed to leave without a guard watching to make sure you eventually get back here to be locked up again is not my idea of hospitality. This is just a prison, pure and simple. The fanciness of it doesn't change that there's no freedom here."
Richard waved his hand and made her book vanish. "Hey, I was reading that," she protested.
He smirked. "I think I have something that will be of more interest to you than your silly tome," Richard said. He waved his hand again and opened a portal into her bedroom. "If you think of this as prison, would you like to be freed?" he asked.
She looked at the portal and jumped out of the bed. "I would, I would. That's really my room, not just some image of it?"
He nodded. She ran towards it, but he held her back by her
