by Lucy Tempest
I failed to imagine what it would be like if anything I did led to anything as catastrophic.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The next days passed in a blur.
The ball Loujaïne had mentioned wasn’t going to be held for us. Instead, we had to arrange it ourselves. We were going to be judged on our contributions, not individually, but as a group.
I didn’t understand how this was going to work. Anyone who’d ever done group work in school knew that one person did all the work, another delivered a sloppy ten to twenty percent and the rest sat around doing nothing until they took the credit.
Unsurprisingly, this was exactly what happened during our arrangement of the ballroom, our preparation of the meals and the baking of the desserts.
Cyrus hadn’t shown himself all since the ride back to the palace. I feared it might be out of regret. He’d held my hand, offered to get me a ring and kissed my cheek and now didn’t know what to do about it.
Or it might have been me proposing for him to come with me.
Or proposing in general.
I might have scared him off.
I tried to take into consideration that the cause of his disappearance might not have been that serious, but with no leads to go on, I could only guess and obsess in total futility.
I knew I couldn’t afford to be on edge about him, even when I couldn’t help it. I had two days left and still no lamp. I had run out of places to look. It wasn’t in the palace or in the temples in the city. I had wasted four weeks chasing my tail. And when I went back to Nariman empty-handed…
I couldn’t bear thinking about what would happen then.
Now I was fifteen feet up in the air, nailing Princess Ariane’s banner to the wall. She was quite handy with craftwork, but I was the only one who’d had experience with heights higher than three-feet, so I was tasked with hanging duty.
“You don’t look too good.”
The deep, raspy voice felt as if it was projected from nowhere. It startled me so much I dropped my hammer and nail and flew back with a shout. Before gravity could slam me down with its grasp, I latched onto my ladder and threw my weight forwards, steadying its legs.
A shadow separated from the corner of the ballroom. Ayman!
For a terrible moment there, I’d thought it was something else.
Since that day in the market, I could have sworn I’d been feeling…something watching me. I couldn’t tell if there really was something or if it was my morbid imagination.
Trying to steady my trembling hands, I scowled down at him. “Just because you look like a ghost, doesn’t mean you have to creep around like one.”
He chuckled softly. “The reason I creep around is because I look like a ghost.”
“Right. Forgot. Sorry.”
“You forgot?” That seemed to stun him.
I shrugged. “Once I got a good look at you, I thought the difference in your coloring only makes you more interesting than regular folks, almost magical. But if it really bothers you, and limits your life, you could easily blend in if you wanted to. I personally think it would be a shame, but you could dye your hair with henna, like greying staff here do, and maybe shade in your brows. People would think you’re a really fair foreigner.”
Judging by his dumbfounded expression, he hadn’t thought he could do any of that.
“Also, can I have my hammer and nail back?”
After making sure the ballroom was empty, he lifted the hood of his cloak and left the shadows to return my things. He stabilized the ladder for me as I hammered the banner in place.
When my feet touched down on the floor, he repeated, “You don’t look too good.”
“Yes. Thank you. I know.”
“Why?”
I didn’t answer him as I strode to the door, peeked outside to check the corridor. Finding no one, with all the girls escaping their chores, I slipped out of the room, heading to the kitchen on this level. He tailed me, as soundless as a shadow, and repeated his question.
I turned my face to him as he fell in step beside me. “I’m under a lot of stress here.”
“You seem to know what you’re doing.”
“Not about my potato festival. The lamp.”
“I’m still not clear on that part.”
It seemed Ayman hadn’t bought my story like Cyrus had.
I shrugged. “Well, neither am I.”
We arrived at the kitchen and found it mostly empty. A few bakers were at the far end by the stone oven with six girls, watching their efforts to make bread by the looks of it. As I crept in with Ayman behind me, exclamations of distress and disgust reached us across the massive space as the girls’ fingers stuck to a too-wet dough or their handful became rock hard.
I was tempted to go over and show them how to knead the dough in flour to make it less sticky or keep wetting their hands to make it more malleable. The bakers must have instructed them at first, but were now content to watch them struggle unaided.
But my time was almost up and I had to focus on trying to find a way out of my own mess. I couldn’t waste even more time helping others in this stupid competition to marry the elusive and probably grotesque prince.
Speaking of grotesque, the rumors about Fairuza’s brother had been escalating. It made me wonder; what if it was hereditary? What if both her brother and cousin had a sort of disease that ran in their family that made them look like monsters to the superstitious, and that’s why no one ever saw them?
Shaking my head at the turn my thoughts had taken, I exited the kitchen with Ayman on my heels.
Once we reached the alcoves by the tower’s staircase, secure that we could have a conversation unseen, I turned to him. “Why are you here again?”
“Cyrus has been busy this week. He wanted you to know that.”
So, he wasn’t avoiding me?
Relief drenched me like a midsummer torrent.
“And he said I should keep an eye on you for him.”
I exhaled raggedly. “Because?”
“Because he can’t do it himself. Princess Loujaïne has noticed how…friendly you two were being in the city.”
I gulped. “He’s not in trouble, is he?”
“He will be if he’s caught alone with you again before the verdict is made.”
We definitely had to leave soon. We needed to find the stupid piece of junk, hand it to Nariman, get the Fairborns, go home, and get Cyrus and Ayman to adjust and find jobs on Ericura. And, if Ayman liked tiny, bossy girls that much, I could set him up with Bonnie.
That sounded like such a perfect plan. What were the odds any of it would come to pass?
With my luck, none.
I inhaled, trembling. “Is there any other place where that lamp could possibly be?”
He regarded me thoughtfully for a long moment as if debating what to tell me.
Then he finally exhaled. “The king has a safe in his own quarters. That’s the last possible place it could be that we haven’t searched.”
The king’s quarters themselves.
Now that I thought of it, it was probably the first place I should have considered. And the last place in this world we could possibly sneak into.
This just kept getting better and better.
Later that night, the feeling of being watched proved to be more than I could dismiss, or bear.
Cora and Cherine, my only company now, were both deep in dreamland. But with this unsettling feeling, sleep eluded me, even harder and longer than usual. Knowing I wouldn’t be able to sleep, I got up, unlocked the balcony doors and stepped out into the night.
The city in the distance was a dark pit of inactivity and the palace gardens were quiet and still. The only movement was the clouds’ reflections gliding off the glass domes and the breeze sifting through the trees swaying below me. I breathed in the rare moment of peace.
“Your time is almost up.”
Heart almost exploding with fright, I jolted with a shout that blasted its echoes through t
he night. Spots of yellow light flared all around the gardens like massive fireflies, as the night watchmen snapped up the intensity of their lanterns.
As I stumbled back out of their sight, a faded apparition in the form of Nariman appeared before me.
Her face was frightening in its see-through pallor, her hair undulating like dark flames past her shoulders and the snake staff clutched in her hand seemed alive.
Her disembodied hiss zapped my every nerve again. “Have you found it yet?”
“How—how are you here?” My voice shook with my shivering.
“A mere projection.” Her image distorted sideways. “And not a strong one. The city wards interrupt my magic. It has been hard enough trying to monitor you from afar the past few days.”
So, it hadn’t been just my imagination. She’d been watching me.
I tentatively reached out and poked her midsection. My finger went right through her but a painful buzz discharged through my fingers. I snapped my stinging hand back.
She stalked closer, half of her washing out, the anger in her expression and voice made more menacing by the warping in her apparition. “Well? Did you find it?”
I wanted to retort that if she’d been watching me then she should know I hadn’t. But then she’d said she’d been “trying” to monitor me, implying that she’d failed. I also didn’t want to be shocked again.
“I…uh…might know where it is now.”
For a moment, her image seemed to solidify, coming to life with vibrant color as if she was right before me. “You might? It’s been nearly a month. What have you been doing all this time? Every time I managed to get an eye on you, you seemed to be lounging around.”
“Yes. Lounging around. In between risking being thrown into the dungeons for sneaking around looking for your lamp, and struggling through this ridiculous contest trying to buy myself more time to continue searching!”
She retreated, the intensity of her colors fading. “Where have you searched?”
“Vaults, temples, shrines, silverware cabinets, staff and servants’ quarters and storage rooms. Literally everywhere.”
“Then where is this place you now think it might be?”
“The king’s quarters.”
She seemed to freeze, a hand hovering over her heart.
I huffed. “Didn’t think of that, did you?”
“Of course, I did.” Her image brightened again. Fury did a lot for her complexion, it seemed. “But I hoped he kept it somewhere else. The king’s quarters are guarded all day and all night, with no way to reach them except through the front door.” She paused a moment before floating nearer like a menacing ghost, almost making my heart catapult from my mouth. “But this is where your special skills come in.”
Her image fizzled again, becoming cloudy with silvery fog before it swirled into a revolving circle, becoming a window into another place.
Within the fog, a complex image formed and began to move, the figures within it becoming clearer, familiar.
In a dungeon with craggy, stone walls, a shackled greying man was slumped to the side on a patch of hay. A girl in a cornflower-blue dress rushed over to him, lifting his face and yelling in distress and desperation.
Bonnie! Mr. Fairborn!
A monstrous shadow crept over her and she turned with a scream, spreading out her arms to shield her father, horror written all over her face.
The shadow of the beast covered her and the window vanished in wisps of smoke, thickening back into the fog and reforming again as the washed-out form of Nariman.
“The beast has finally found its latest offerings. You should hurry before it rips her and her father to shreds.”
“B-but if it already found them…”
“I can still hold it off.”
I swallowed, my tongue as dry as sandpaper. “How long do I have?”
“You’ve already wasted a month.”
“Because you sent me here with no instructions about what I was getting into, didn’t tell me where to look, and because what I’m looking for doesn’t seem to exist. An oil lamp made of gold isn’t even a concept here.”
“Of course, it’s not. That’s why it’s unique. It had to be pure gold, or else no one would have been able to lure the damned thing into it!”
My mind screeched to a halt. “Thing? What thing?”
Nariman’s wavering image suddenly became completely still.
When she finally spoke again, her voice was an ominous echo that froze me down to my marrow. “The girl who wins the competition will be invited to the king’s quarters to be presented with Queen Zafira’s tiara. I will hold the beast off until they announce the winner. After that, it will be over for your friends. And it will be your fault.”
Then she blinked out of existence.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“You nervous, honey?” Princess Ariane asked me, setting her hands on my arms, startling me out of my fretful daze. I realized I had been biting my lip tight enough to draw blood. “You don’t have to worry that much, not like some of the others. Your food looks great, and it smells amazing too. Where did you learn to cook?”
My practiced answer of “Our mansion cook” or “My lady mother” couldn’t form on my tongue or get past my grinding teeth.
I felt if I opened my mouth I’d rave and rant my real feelings to the whole palace; that I cared about this petty competition and this whole pointless world only because I wanted to get the mad witch her lamp and save my friends.
Nariman had implied that only winning this competition would get me into the King’s quarters, when she expected me to use my “special skills” to swipe the lamp.
But winning was impossible, and she must know it. I would be eliminated tonight. Her extension was pointless, just the cruel clemency of an unhinged woman. Then, like she’d said, it would be all over. She’d unleash the beast on Bonnie and Mr. Fairborn.
This meant one thing. Now I knew where the lamp was, I had one last chance to acquire it. Tonight, while everyone was preoccupied with the prince’s arrival.
I’d been waiting all day for Cyrus to show himself during the ball’s preparations so I’d ask him to do whatever it took to get me into the King’s quarters. But he hadn’t appeared. And every minute that passed sent me farther out of my mind.
It all felt even worse now I realized there was more to this than I’d thought. Nariman’s slip-of-the-tongue last night had felt like a mallet to my temple, still reverberated its confusion and dread in my head.
What thing had been lured into that lamp?
Everything was like those riddles of the Simurgh of Alabasta. But unlike Esfandiar of Gypsum, I had no clever answers. I had only more questions that tangled and compromised my sanity further by the second.
“Isn’t this the same dress you wore the first week?” Unable to drag my thoughts to the one-sided, mundane conversation with Ariane, I stared at her blankly. She smoothed the complex, glossy braids crowning her head and elaborated, “Don’t you have anything else of the same caliber?”
I did. My magical qarin had conjured more clothes and accessories for me, but this was the same turquoise dress I’d worn on the first test. I’d needed some sense of familiarity to keep me grounded, some illusion of good luck to keep my wits about me.
Not that it was working. I started to chew on my nails.
Ariane tutted and removed my hand from my mouth. “Don’t do that. Even if you don’t get picked, you still have other options. You have quite the reputation now.”
Her last words snapped me out of my fugue. A reputation? Did they know I’d stolen the jewelry from the vault and Fairuza’s coin pouch?
I was going to get thrown in prison before I could even try robbing the king’s safe.
“You’re a hero!” I gaped at Ariane, sluggishly realizing she’d meant the opposite of what I’d feared. She rubbed up and down my arms, and that affability she exuded somehow managed to calm me down a bit. “You punched Fairuza in the face and ruined h
er week.” I blinked at her again, and she snorted a small laugh, shaking her elegant head. “You saved Cherine. Really, I have never seen anyone act that selflessly. I didn’t think anyone like us had it in them.”
“Like us?”
“People who are used to being helped, not helping. You know, now that I know what kind of person you are—” She pretended to dust my shoulders and adjust my necklace. “—once the prince picks me, my family will come for the wedding.”
I continued to stare at her. Was there a point to all this?
“I have three—uh, actually two brothers. The eldest is the heir and expected to marry from a neighboring kingdom. But it’s no issue. You can have your pick of the other two.”
It took me a long moment before her meaning sank in. And if I could feel anything besides gnawing, debilitating anxiety, I would have laughed.
I couldn’t believe it. Another girl offering to set me up with her brother.
And not any brother, but a prince. Many steps up from Cherine’s lord of a brother.
Not that this offer mattered to me in any way. Such a royal alliance would have been tempting only if it could help me save Bonnie and Mr. Fairborn.
But with every second that passed, I feared nothing could. Nothing except something just as magical as Nariman was. If I needed anything in this world, I needed that ring that granted wishes.
And I needed Cyrus.
And not only because he was the one who could help me.
At Ariane’s prodding, mind swirling with desperation, I dully said, “Cherine already offered me her brother.”
Ariane crinkled her nose at me. “I know she’s your friend, but let’s be honest here. Her brother is probably just as insufferable as she is.” She paused, as if waiting for my input. I couldn’t utter another word, so she went on. “And he’s a distant member of the royal family. My brothers are princes. You came for a prince and you’ll get one. Just a different one.” She smiled cheerily. “So it wouldn’t be like you’ve come here for nothing.”