“Never.”
The word landed like a curse.
That same night, while Diana cried behind locked palace doors, royal guards marched through the sleeping village. They found Muniaka outside his mother’s hut, washing dust from his hands beneath the moonlight.
He did not run.
He knew why they had come.
By dawn, the village had heard everything. The princess was a prisoner in her own palace. The farmer had been beaten and left bleeding in the dirt. And King Jifawan had declared that any man who gave Muniaka work would lose his land, his animals, and his place in the kingdom.
Love had not saved them.
Love had ruined them.
Or so everyone believed.
But no one knew that beyond the fields, beyond the river, beyond the oldest trees where even hunters feared to walk, the spirits of the forest were already watching.
And they were waiting to see which man in the kingdom truly had a royal heart.
Muniaka was twenty-five years old when poverty made him older than most men twice his age. In the village of Piedu, where red dust rose beneath bare feet and roosters announced the morning before the sun had even stretched across the land, people knew him not by what he owned, but by what he carried.
He carried sacks of grain for widows who could not pay him.
He carried bundles of firewood for old men whose backs had given up.
He carried his mother’s pain in silence.
Most of all, he carried the future of his younger brothers and sisters.
