A Window to the World, Excerpt 2

This is another excerpt from the serialized novel, A Window to the World, that will be coming to the website Chanillo in November.  More details to follow soon!

Once the doctor’s staff had taken Kitty to the hospital, there was little for the King to do but return to his office.  Distracting himself with work, however,  proved immediately impossible.  In despair he canceled all of his non-essential appointments for the day; even the critical ones received only his half attention.  Fortunately for his sake and that of the kingdom’s he was soon able to withdraw to his private quarters, with instructions for his staff to come find him if something urgent arose.  Otherwise, he would await word of Kitty’s death alone.

Because surely she would die.  He had seen her pallor when he took her from Leo, had felt the shallowness of her breath.  When the doctor then sent word that the blade had been saturated in juice from the toxic brixly plant, well, the King felt all whatever small bit of hope he retained drain right out of him.  Not even Kitty, the strongest woman he’d ever met, could survive such an attack.  No one could.  She would die, never knowing what she meant to him.  And with her a part of him would die as well.  The teenage girl from the Exterior could not have hurt him more than had she plunged her own poison dagger right into his heart.

Not for the first time the King felt a fit of rage that he’d even met Kitty.  How absurd that she would just stumble into the Interior when he, and not someone else, was king!  And through the Arizona window, when the Last Window was located mere moments from her home.  Why?  Why couldn’t she have fallen through some other window, realized her mistake, and retreated again to the safety of her own world?  Why had Kitty stepped through at just the moment she would nearly run straight into him on an extremely unusual scouting mission?  If only he could understand.  If only he could turn back time and make it so that he never knew she existed.

But that was not to be.  Instead he would lose his family, find Kitty through the most extraordinary set of circumstances, and then lose her as well.   All of this, while he enjoyed the dubious honor of being king during a time of war.  "What more do you want from me?" he whispered to the butterfly ornament now in his hand.  But of course it didn't answer.