by Lucy Tempest
“And look how she repaid that honor,” Loujaïne spat. “By usurping him, and imprisoning the whole court.”
“Kingdom,” Cora interjected, waving the ladle in an encompassing gesture. “The whole kingdom is on lockdown. It wasn’t just you.”
“Even worse,” Loujaïne said sarcastically. “She established an isolationist dictatorship in her own image, forcing me to flee my ancestors’ palace with what I had on my back.”
“Is that all you care about?” Cyrus turned to her, incredulous. “My father is still trapped up there, so are most of our staff, and all you care about is your belongings and royal status?”
“Someone has to care. You certainly don’t, when you lowered yourself to the common-folk’s level by dressing like a servant, when you bent and broke our rules by setting up this ridiculous Bride Search.” Loujaïne turned to me, unbridled hate radiating from her pale eyes. “When you shamed us and our worthy contestants by picking a disgraced swamp-lord’s daughter…”
He interrupted her. “What I did when I was crown prince is of no significance now. The entire kingdom is in the grasp of an angry witch and nothing else matters.”
Loujaïne paced away, lifting her skirt off her feet, revealing the iron shackle around one ankle, a piece of broken chain dangling from its side. “That witch did nothing but mess with our traditions and expectations since your father stupidly let her have control of your upbringing instead of me. She’s the reason for all the erratic things you’ve done in your life. With her poisonous wiles and ambition, that minor nobleman’s daughter who came here as a comforting accessory for your mother, ended up controlling you, our crown prince. Those foreign tutors she hired to plant disruptive ideas in your mind, pushing you to martial arts rather than traditional ones, sending you to Almaskham to keep you away from us, going against my orders when you brought home that zāl…”
I beat Cyrus to the outraged shout. “Don’t call Ayman that!”
She turned her head so fast I heard her neck pop. “Did you just give me an order?”
“Yes, I did,” I spat.
If looks could kill, I would have been pinned to the wall with a hundred daggers. “You can’t give orders to a princess, you disgraceful, unmannered nobody.”
Nariman had really been justified in spiting and undermining her at every turn. Shackling her to the wall was also the one thing I could applaud Nariman for. If this hateful woman had had her way of being Cyrus’s mother figure, he would have turned out as unlovable as she was.
“The princess of what?” I said, a measure of satisfaction fizzing in my blood that I could finally hit back at her. “With your brother usurped, you are nobody. Also, this is my house. If you don’t like the way I talk, you can walk right down and turn yourself in to the guards.”
Fear blew her pupils wide enough to overtake her pale irises.
Cyrus set a hand on my shoulder, giving it a soft squeeze as he addressed her. “Father was the one who wanted to send me away to a boarding school in Anbur with Master Farouk as my guardian, to get me away from grandfather. Lady Rostam convinced him it would be better for me to go to Almaskham, to be with my mother’s family, where I could learn about her, and shadow members of the royal house to learn the ways of our closest ally.”
“You should have been learning from us, not from them,” Loujaïne gritted.
“Learning what exactly? Father could barely see me while grandfather lived, and when I came back to Cahraman when he became king it didn’t become much better as he struggled to fix and reform the kingdom. And you only paid me attention to compete with Lady Rostam.”
“That’s not true,” she cried. “I wanted to take care of you.”
“If you did, you would have shared my care with her, but you wanted all or nothing. And then sending me to my mother’s land was the best thing anyone could have done for me. It’s where I was among an extended family and learned to navigate all kinds of relationships, where I mastered many skills a future king should harness, and where I met my best friend. Lady Rostam fought for weeks to keep him with me, because she wanted me to have a friend, not assigned companions.”
“That witch only argued for that abomination to stay just to spite me,” she said hotly.
“Because everything is about you.” He shook his head in disbelief. “My upbringing and my choice of companion was about you, now the state of the kingdom and my choice of bride is about you.” His grip on me tightened, a possessive, protective hold. “Didn’t you learn anything from your own marriage that you tried to shove me down the same path by forcing Fairuza on me?”
Starting as if bitten by a scorpion, Loujaïne swung her arm, slapping his bruised cheek. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that!”
It took all my self-control not to punt her into the fireplace.
He seemed unfazed by the blow though it had been hard enough to expand his bruise. “If this is how you treat me, the closest thing you have to a son, I wonder what you did to Lady Rostam to push her to do all this?”
She smacked a hand on her chest in disbelief. “What I did?”
“Yes, even before you had Father banish her.”
Loujaïne’s eyes hardened. “I only made him realize she’s been using black magic to control you and vanquish him. And ‘all this’ has proven me right.”
He pointed out the window. “This wasn’t a long-term plan, or else she wouldn’t have lingered as his unofficial advisor for twenty years. This is revenge. On the two of you in specific, since everyone else was treated relatively well. You got Father to banish her for no reason but your jealousy. You are the reason this is happening.”
Loujaïne stomped her shackled foot, clinging the chain, stuttering in her fury. “She’s the reason for everything terrible that has happened to me. And now she’s learned to wield magic like a genie, she’ll destroy us all.”
I involuntarily flinched. It hadn’t occurred to me they hadn’t figured out how Nariman had obtained that level of magic. But it was clear they didn’t know about the genie.
King Darius hadn’t mentioned the stolen lamp then, either because he hadn’t had the chance, or hadn’t noticed its disappearance before Nariman’s takeover.
But I believed he’d used the genie to banish Nariman, must know only it could break its own ban—and do all that. She must now have him isolated so he wouldn’t tell anyone, so everyone would believe it was her doing.
Now she had two more wishes, and I dreaded thinking what she’d do with them.
As for King Darius, I believed he had at least one wish left, and he’d been about to use it the day I’d stolen it. That must have been why he’d had it out by his bedside. I had a good idea what his next wish would have been.
From the way he’d reacted to me, he would have logically wished for Cyrus to forget me and happily marry Fairuza, as they all wanted him to.
I couldn’t hate him for it, not when I, too, had used the ring to influence Cyrus, thinking it was for his best.
What would Cyrus think and feel if he knew I’d done that to him? Or that I had more to do with all this than the aunt he was so angry at?
Would he be as understanding with me as he was with his old governess? Would he defend my crimes and look for rationalizations for them, too?
The consequences if he didn’t were unimaginable. I would lose him. This time for good.
No. I couldn’t tell him. Not before I fixed this. And I had to fix it.
Until then, the truth could wait.
Chapter Four
Too caught up in the turmoil of my thoughts, I missed the end of their argument.
Loujaïne stormed past me, slamming her shoulder into me for good measure. She opened the first door she found, Cora’s bedroom across from mine, and slammed the door with enough force to send a fresh crack traveling down its length.
She reminded me too much of Fairuza at this moment, a beautiful, glamorous shell hiding a hideous personality.
No. That wasn’t a fair co
mparison. Fairuza was far better than her. The girl had been under maddening pressure to conform and perform since her crib days. From her accounts when we’d been trapped in the cave together, her mother Zomorroda was even worse than her aunt Loujaïne.
I’d also learned that Fairuza’s nastiness and outbursts had had a survivalist motivation. She’d been trying to avert a curse that would kill her within the year. She’d come to the Bride Search thinking Cyrus would break the curse. But since only the love of the most noble of men could do that, and he couldn’t love her, she’d lost hope, had been resigned to her fate, even before all this had happened.
When we’d last talked she’d had six months left. Now only four remained. I’d been seething with the futility of knowing there was nothing I could do for her in our circumstances, that with her still trapped in the palace it was impossible she’d find that man. Nariman’s siege, while it doomed us all to this degraded existence, would literally doom Fairuza.
But what was Loujaïne’s excuse? Not that I cared if she had one. In my book nothing would justify what she’d done, to Ayman, even if she’d never suspected he was her son, to Cyrus, to Nariman and most probably to my mother.
Paying her no mind, Cyrus remained in front of Ayman’s statue, still holding my hand. “Has he been like—this the whole time?”
I gritted my teeth on the explanation that almost slipped my lips. Telling him how this had happened would expose what I wasn’t ready to tell him just yet.
The ring had never answered wishes concerning transportation, but the last two it had granted me had been enabling us to slip outside Nariman’s enchanted siege to get Ayman, and influencing people throughout the city so they wouldn’t see Cora and I towing him all the way up here. It had stopped working completely after that.
A shuddering breath deflated my lungs as I nodded. “It took three days to get him up here.”
A grimace of anguish and horror contorted his features. “Is—is he dead?”
Thankful that he didn’t probe the details of how we’d been together in the first place, I considered how to answer the question I’d asked myself a thousand times in the past two months.
I chose the answer I’d told myself as many times, to preserve my sanity, and now Cyrus’s. “I-I think he’s only trapped.”
“You think he’s in the stone?” His extinguished eyes flashed a bright, hopeful green. “If so, we can break him out!”
I blocked him as he started to turn, presumably in search of something to use as a chisel. He was clearly not thinking straight yet. “If he were, he’d be long dead by now. If he isn’t, and you chip at what you think is an imprisoning layer, you might break him apart. This was done by magic, and has to be undone the same way.”
Despondence drenched his face. “Did you see this happening?” I hated lying to him even more, but I shook my head. He exhaled forcibly. “Why would she do that to him?” He clearly didn’t expect an answer to that question, so I didn’t try to provide one. He ran his tongue over the cut splitting his lower lip, gazing at Ayman with a defeated slump to his shoulders, before he suddenly asked, “How did he end up out here?”
Ugh. Here it came. The inquiry that could expose everything prematurely.
“What do you mean?” I evaded.
“Why was he in Sunstone? He always told me where he goes and why.”
And he hadn’t told him because I’d asked him not to. Any answer I gave now would expose my involvement, and I’d already decided this would be the worst time to be honest.
So I just said, “I have no idea.” Before he could ask anything more, I tugged at his hand. “Let’s sit down, shall we? I’m exhausted, and you must be, too.”
A look of concern darkened his gaze as he looked down at me, as if taking in my condition for the first time. It was followed by one of contrition, that he’d been keeping me standing after our strenuous dash across the city. He nodded and let me lead him to the kitchen.
Cherine was at the table, looking smaller than ever, frail and vulnerable. Her unnatural silence continued and she avoided my eyes as we sat across from her.
I was wondering why she’d retreated after her feverish reaction at our reunion when Cora’s grumbling distracted me. “We need new bones. These have given all the flavor they have to give.” She picked a turkey leg bone from the soup. “Next time you’re at the butcher, steal some actual meat.”
“Is this how you’ve been living?” Cherine finally talked, her voice a tiny scrape of sound. “You’ve been here the whole time? Stealing food?”
Cora leveled her with a glare fueled by her perpetually cranky hunger. “Where else did you think we were? In the lap of the gods, being spoon-fed ambrosia?”
Cherine hugged herself with shaking arms, wilting further in her chair. “I-I actually thought you were chained up, or-or worse, d-dead in a cell somewhere.”
“Why?” Cora asked as she heaved the broth off the fire and onto the counter, scooped some into the rice pot before hanging it over the coals. “His Highness said the witch only took her anger out on people who pissed her off.”
“You and Ada piss everyone off!”
“We do?” Cora goggled at her.
“I believe she didn’t hurt anyone.” Cyrus paused before quietly adding, “But I don’t know where she has my father or what she’s done to him.”
Cherine, tactless as ever even in her state, asked, “As the new queen, what would be the point of keeping the old king alive?”
Cyrus’s face drained of blood, matching the ash in our fireplace. It was clear he’d never thought Nariman would go that far.
Cherine didn’t stop there, had to back up her claim. “If I were her, I would kill the king I deposed immediately so his loyalists wouldn’t try to overthrow me to reinstate him.”
Cora flung pointed her ladle at Cherine, spraying her. “Shut up, you’re not helping!”
Cyrus clutched his throat, looking like he was about to be sick. “I can’t believe Lady Rostam would do that. But I didn’t imagine she’d do any of this either. If she’d gone truly mad and killed my father, I-I never got the chance to part with him peacefully.”
This was the only way he’d believe she’d do something this terrible. If her mind had disintegrated and she was no longer the woman he knew.
And though the Nariman I’d last seen hadn’t been exactly stable, she hadn’t been mad either. I had to convince him of that, without betraying it was a firsthand opinion. Though I could never ease my own mind, I wanted to do anything to ease his.
I hugged him around the shoulders. “Na—the witch is not mad, but she is very dramatic—just look at what she’s done to the kingdom. If she wanted to kill your father, she would have executed him before everyone in Sunstone. Killing a king is a major opportunity, an unrepeatable intimidation tactic and display of power she definitely wouldn’t pass up. She wouldn’t do it in secret. I believe he’s alive.”
As if my corroboration of his own deep-seated belief was all he needed, he nodded, deflated, elbows slamming on the table.
I reached up to stroke his hair. He’d usually had it arranged in a side part, or falling over his eyes in an effortless style. Now it was an unkempt mess, the longer locks fanning around his head like a lion’s mane. Messy looked good on him, far better than neat and restrained. The beard was also as magnificent as I’d once thought it would look on him. It made him look older, more rugged, a seasoned warrior rather than a refined prince.
But then, whatever he did, he’d always be the image of absolute gorgeousness to me.
As for Darius, I only hoped what I just proclaimed was true, for Cyrus’s sake. He might have been terrible to me, and a distant parent to Cyrus, no matter his reason for being so, but he was still his father and the only parent he had left. The last thing I’d want was for Cyrus to become me, orphaned, with his life in shambles.
But his life was already in complete disarray thanks to Nariman and her genie. And me.
Not knowing
what else to do now, I stroked Cyrus’s forearm. “So how did you escape?”
Cyrus leaned back in his chair, exhaling heavily. “I’d been confined to my quarters all through. Nothing I tried put the slightest dent in her magical wards. Then a few hours ago, I was ramming against the door in a fit of frustration and saw a red light playing before me.”
“You’re supposed to ram a door with your shoulder, not your head,” Cora said.
I shushed her, giving him an encouraging squeeze. “Go on.”
His mouth twitched in a tired smile. “At first, I did think it was a hallucination. But when it didn’t disappear, I thought it was an ifrit, or some other malevolent force cut loose by Lady Rostam’s magic. I braced myself for an attack.” He stared in the distance, like he was watching it all play out before him again. “But it only moved away, and I followed it. It led me to a closet where I found a false wall I didn’t know existed in all my explorations and study of the palace. I followed the light into a tunnel I finally recognized.” He squeezed my hand. “The one that led to the room where you stayed with the other girls. I knew they now kept Cherine and her mother there, so I went to free them.”
It was only then I remembered that Cherine’s family had arrived to collect her just as we’d escaped to go confront Nariman. They’d been trapped up there along with everyone else.
“Where’s your mother?” I asked Cherine.
Cherine crossed her arms, looking at the table. “She insisted on searching for my father and brother. She would have gotten us caught.”
So she just left her behind? And she didn’t appear worried about her or them, not like Cyrus was about his father. I knew she wasn’t on the best of terms with her family, but still.
But even if she didn’t care about them, Cyrus did, about everyone. He’d risk his life to ensure others were safe. Like the time I’d set the ballroom on fire and when he’d come to save us from the ghouls. If he’d left them behind, there’d been nothing else he could have done. But…