by S. K Munt
Her declaration was met with stunned silence.
19.
Karol was the first one of us to speak. ‘What did you just say?’
Martya smiled at him, and I saw colour grace the apples of her too-round cheeks. ‘The spray I treated my garden with worked,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t touched by the locusts at all. And not only is the formula that I have created natural and without toxins- but the key ingredient is so common, that it could be produced in large quantities at a very low cost.’
The room burst into a hum of anxious chatter as the Given girls stared at Martya like she had a second head, and the king stared at her as though she’d spoken in archaic French.
‘Your crops weren’t eaten?’ the king demanded, looking more sceptical than excited.
‘Not so much as a pinprick of a hole on any leaf or fruit. Not the tomatoes, pumpkins, carrots, watermelons-’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I demanded, speaking out of turn but who cared? Clearly I’d already failed table manners- I may as well take a hit on conversational decorum too!
Martya gave me a pointed look. ‘I was going to, but we ended up discussing something else, remember?’ Her eyes darted to Kohén then back to me. ‘And then you were in quite a hurry to get down to dinner...’
My mouth fell open. What was she playing at? Of course I’d want to discuss her experiment before my non-existent love life!
‘Your crop is tiny!’ the duchess protested. ‘I saw it last week on one of my walks. Why would the locusts target it with the larger gardens there for the taking?’
‘My garden produces the largest produce of any of the palace ones, thanks to Larkin.’ Martya said calmly. ‘And it is between two of Eden’s- both which were eaten while mine remains in perfect condition.’ She smiled, turning her attention back to the king. ‘The results are really quite clear, and very staggering. It is a lot to expect you to take me at my word, and I know it is almost sunset and that you have places to be- but if you’d like to go and see it with your own eyes…’
‘I absolutely would,’ the king stood up from his chair, looking animated at last and years younger. ‘This very minute.’
‘I’d like to see this too!’ Maryah announced, standing up in tandem with the duchess. ‘Just imagine- one of MY girls, curing the locust problem! I’m so proud!’
‘Do not excite yourself prematurely, Maryah,’ the duchess hurried to say, but I could see that she was looking at Martya in a way that she’d never looked at any of us. ‘Hopes are the worst things to have dashed.’
‘I’d rather think that having the pumpkins dashed was worse,’ Kohén joked, but he slapped Martya’s shoulder in the way he used to pat me as she strolled by, looking positively smug. ‘Well done.’
‘Thank you, your highness,’ Martya said smugly, and she was gloriously pretty in that moment.
‘Well if we’re going to go see this garden, we must do so quickly for our ship is waiting for us to set sail,’ the duchess said. ‘And I am quite excited to see my son and no amount of fresh pumpkins can heal that!’
‘The ship can wait!’ the king announced, waving his hand. ‘As can Kohl.’
His wife gave him a foul look behind his back, her mood slipping instantly. ‘I believe he’s been doing little but that for nine years already, your majesty.’
‘That is his lot,’ the king said darkly. ‘Protecting Arcadia is mine and I dare say he wouldn’t switch positions with me right now for all of the pineapple juice in Pacifica.’
I shared an anxious look with Kelia as she got up from her seat. The last thing any of us needed to see was the cracks in the foundation of the royal marriage!
Or maybe it’s what the world needs to see- that this spousal system causes as much hurt as the old world’s did!
‘We have an hour,’ Kohén said quietly, staring at both of his parents with concerned blue eyes. ‘Let’s not waste any of it bickering, hmm?’
Karol cleared his throat. ‘Tell me, Martya- I’ve heard that you’ve tried many combinations of things to make these sprays of yours- what did you use this time that would make such a difference?’
‘That is something I would like to disclose after your father has seen the garden,’ Martya admitted, smiling back at the prince, ‘and not a second before he’s torn up the contract.’
The king stopped moving and turned to look back at Martya as I rose from my own chair. The other Given girls were all getting up too, and no way was I going to let them have a front row seat ahead of me on the project that was partially mine!
‘Torn up WHICH contract?’ King Elijah demanded, and at his side, the duchess hesitated, looking concerned.
‘The one I signed the day I was taken in- promising my life to Eden,’ Martya said, standing as still as a lady with her head held high and her eyes locked on the king’s. ‘And in exchange, I will give you a copy of the exact formula I have used to protect my vegetables.’ Her eyes flashed. ‘But only in exchange for my release from this harem nonsense.’
We all froze then- every single pair of eyes in the room settling on Martya like she was the one bearing the plague.
‘Excuse me?’ the king asked, his face tightening and the warmth leaving his eyes, as the blood surely must have drained from my face.
Oh my goodness! Did she just state her intention to blackmail the king?!
‘Martya!’ Maryah exploded, looking purple. ‘Have you forgotten yourself?’
‘No. And I’m one of the few who doesn’t intend to,’ Martya flounced past the irate-looking teacher and straight up to King Elijah. ‘I’m worth more to the kingdom as a scientist than I am as a Companion to your son,’ she said, looking him straight in the beard, for his jaw was lifted defiantly. ‘And I don’t care if I’d been born eighteenth to a pirate’s prostitute- if I can offer the kingdom a cure for what plagues us, you will offer me my freedom and the right to take the exam to enter into the Academic caste at the end of the year, or content yourself with waiting for someone else who has studied the subject for almost ten years to come up with another solution.’ She walked past him. ‘For you won’t get mine, until my name is in my possession again.’
‘You’re making demands of the crown?’ the duchess asked, her eyes wide. ‘Elijah, this is certainly a trick and if I were you, I wouldn’t pout stock in another second of her nonsense.’
‘We’ve fed you!’ the king exploded, and we followed him out into the throne room as he chased Martya down. My heart was pounding like crazy. ‘Educated you! Taken you from mediocrity and-’
‘You invested in me,’ Martya interrupted him, swinging around to face him. ‘And you will get a much higher return for that if you release me from the contract and put me to work like the other third-borns until I am twenty-one.’ She waved her hand. ‘I know this is a very risky thing to suggest or, as the duchess said- demand- but Kohén doesn’t need me here, and I belong somewhere else.’
‘Somewhere better, you mean?’ Emmerly demanded bitterly.
Martya backed her eyes. ‘You were sobbing over Kohén leaving not five minutes ago, remember? If you meant a single one of those tears, than this is precisely where you belong and if you didn’t… this is precisely where you belong.’
Emmerly scowled at her, but had nothing to say to that and I saw the duchess forcibly tighten her lips to hide a reluctant smile. Kohén’s face was beet-red and behind them, Lette looked like she was going to eat off the tops of her fingers from one hand in distress and confusion.
‘I can’t tear up that contract!’ the king went on. ‘This tradition is centuries long-’
‘So is your locust problem,’ Martya contradicted him.
‘The Barachiel Kings do not break rules for anybody!’ Elijah shot back.
‘But they’ll bend them for their own will. Like the Given one, correct, if that sees the monarchs kept in bedmates?’ Martya asked icily, and I pressed a hand to my stomach, feeling ready to throw up my dinner. Martya was making a good point, but she
was scaring me with her candour! No one EVER spoke to King Elijah with such disrespect, and the contempt behind her smudged lenses was clear. ‘And yes, girls have been released from it before and sent off to work out their sentence- as punishment, remember?’ Martya shrugged and gestured over her shoulder. ‘So follow me, see what I have done, and then decide if I belong in Eden, or if you’d prefer to ‘punish me,’ she put air-quotes around the words, ‘by sending me elsewhere to do hard labour for the next five and a half years. No one has to know that I demanded to leave- we can just say that I was an unsatisfactory companion and that I belonged in soil, not in silk. I get my freedom, you get your cure, and when I’ve done my time, I’ll take the test for the Academic caste and find another way to relieve the kingdom of a burden.’ She crossed her arms. ‘But if you want that cure tonight- I want to leave here tonight.’
‘This is… a highly inappropriate conversation to be having in front of the Given girls,’ Karol said breezily, stepping forward and taking Martya’s wrist while locking eyes with his father. ‘And the roads south are still rather mucky after the last snow. Perhaps we should just go outside and see what you have done, and what you plan to do after before we discuss it, hmm?’
‘This conversation is inappropriate for us?’ I repeated, feeling a bit of hysterical laughter bubble up from my diaphragm. ‘Honestly Karol, if you’d seen some of the pictures in the Companion books…! Well, there’s one when the woman is being held by her ankles and-’
‘Larkin!’ Maryah gasped, and I felt someone lace their fingers through my hand and pull me back. I caught a trace of Kelia’s perfume, and then felt her heart pounding as she pulled me up against her. She was shaking, and though I was too- from rage- I immediately felt awful for having let a bit of my own candour slip out and scaring Kelia the way Martya had just scared me. I met eyes with Karol, expecting to see a scowl- but his eyes were dancing with amusement again. Beside him, Kohén looked ready to dig a hole through the granite floor and burrow through to the earth’s core.
‘Sorry,’ I mumbled, looking down at my hand in Kelia’s and squeezing it in reassurance. ‘I clearly need to read it again myself…’
‘Clearly,’ Maryah said coolly.
‘Let’s just go see this garden,’ the King said, standing taller and just like that, Karol released Maryah’s wrist. ‘If you can prove that what you’ve accomplished will actually work for other crops, we will discuss the matter of releasing you further.’
‘Karol will,’ the duchess said tightly. ‘You and I have somewhere else to be, remember?’
‘That’s fine with me,’ the king said, exchanging another loaded look with his son.
‘The St Miguel Corps division IS in need of more people to help plant a forestry reserve for lumber,’ Karol said slowly. ‘And it’s co-ed.’
‘I don’t care where I go, so long as I can use my hands and my mind and not my body,’ Martya said, and then glanced from me, to the king while Kohén winced behind her. ‘And for what it’s worth, Larkin has done a lot of work on this project as well-’
‘Absolutely not!’ the king thundered, and I almost jumped out of my skin. He stared Martya down with a fierce look that I felt in my heart like a cold shadow. ‘I will make a decision based on what is best for the kingdom, Miss Rice, and NOT blackmail! If you couldn’t have come up with this formula alone, than you’re not as valuable as you’re claiming to be, are you?’
‘Everybody needs a team to accomplish anything great!’ Martya snapped back, pushing her glasses higher onto the bridge of her nose. ‘And Larkin has been invaluable to me. Do I need her? No! But she too would be of more use to the crown if she-’
‘That is a preposterous suggestion!’ Elijah roared, and we all recoiled. ‘I may permit you to leave, but not two, and if that is your demand than you can forget-’
‘Dad! Martya, please…!’ Kohén’s eyes widened in panic, and he stared at me, silently begging me not to try and sprint out of the cage door that Martya was trying to hold open. ‘Don’t argue, not over Larkin. Mother’s right- this isn’t the time!’
I wanted to speak up- to say anything- but I had a lump of fear in my throat that I could not talk around, especially not now that I could see the tips of the king’s fingers sparking with little blue pulses of light. And across from me, Martya finally looked off-balance.
Save yourself you idiot! I have a parachute of my own; don’t weigh down yours with my weight!
‘So which is it?’ the king asked coldly, ignoring his son as he glared at Martya. ‘Are you an exception, or one of many you wish me to make to prove a point?’
Martya glanced at me, and I managed to shake my head while Kelia’s fingernails dug deeply enough into mine to draw blood. And yet, Martya still looked as though she was considering pushing for me, and my heart couldn’t take it.
‘She did it alone,’ I said with a trembling voice at last, and the duchess, Karol and Kohén all stared over at me. ‘You can thank me for the sweetness of those strawberries, but the fact that they survived is Martya’s doing, not mine.’ I released Kelia’s hand and clasped mine in front of myself, knowing that the less desperate I looked to escape, the less likely I’d warrant watching. The last thing I needed was for the king to see that the loopholes in the law were big enough for me to crawl through or that that was my intention. I needed to go on being the unobserved duckling, I needed to finish my time in the palace to qualify as nobility if I ever wanted to make my dreams come true- and as desperate as I was to be free of the Given noose around my neck, I needed to not leave Kelia, or Kohén just yet either, and be sent off on some work party and then be spat back out into the Blue Collars where I’d never earn more than my keep.
Besides, trapped Companion or not- Kohén was my friend. I didn’t need the luxurious lifestyle or education that he’d promised I would get for the next six years- I could be okay without it. But Resonah had been right about one thing- perhaps the prince needed ME.
According to Maryah, Karol had kissed every girl in his harem by the end of his fourteenth year, but we were all almost sixteen now and Kohén hadn’t laid a hand on any of us yet, and part of me hoped that that was because of our friendship and my influence on him. I was his buddy and confidante, so if I left now in the middle of a cold war between us… what would he think of me, or of women in general? He’d hate me, and feel betrayed, I was sure of it. He’d never help me with my cotton plantation, or I him with his pineapples, I’d never meet my trans-pacific reading buddy, and I’d never get to play soccer with my best mate again. But if I stuck it out to the end, well, I’d leave with the prince of Arcadia as my ally, not my enemy.
‘Honestly,’ I finished, meeting my friend’s glassy eyes. ‘Thank you for thinking of me but… but I don’t want to leave.’ Martya’s eyes widened and behind her, the duchess narrowed her eyes at me suspiciously, and I looked back at Kelia and pulled her to my side, afraid that the duchess would be able to read my thoughts if she stared hard enough. ‘I am very happy here.’
‘Good then,’ the king said gruffly, turning and clicking his fingers at Martya. ‘Case closed.’
Kohén smiled at me in a relieved way, and I tentatively smiled back even though I kind of wanted to cry. Martya had a powerful bargaining point with the king- had I truly just waived my own share in it for the option of staying in Eden for Kohén and Kelia? Was I insane? She’d risked a lot by asking that- why hadn’t I risked seeing how much she could demand and get away with?
‘Okay...’ Martya said, glancing once more back at me. I glanced over at Kohén, then back at Martya, then swallowed and nodded. She sighed and then turned to follow the king out of the room with the duchess, Karol and Maryah hot on their heels.
“I tried,” she’d said with that sigh.
“Thank you,” I said by swallowing back my tears. “But I’m going to do this for myself.”
As they disappeared from sight, and we all stared after her, in a stupor. I looked over at Kohén and saw that while
he’d gone quite white, his eyes were shining after my departed friend in a way that he’d never looked at any of us before- like we were all looking at her; like she’d broken a glass ceiling and now, the fragments were raining down upon us. For some, they fell softly and in a welcome way, like the sweetest of summer rains on budding crops but for others, well, they looked more than a little lacerated.
Brains had just bested beauty, and Martya had just become the most entitled of all of us. Not to being Kohén’s favourite, but to living with herself- something they’d all kissed good-bye the second they’d first batted their eyelashes at the prince and had revealed their hands of threes to a royal flush.
*
Martya proved herself within a matter of seconds- our garden was untouched, and she was the only person in the entire world who knew how to make that happen in other gardens and other fields. King Elijah ripped up her contract twenty minutes later while everyone’s dinners went cold, and Martya was packed up by the time the sun finished setting over the ocean and the ship waiting at the dock below.
Karol immediately arranged to have a telegram sent to St Miguel, to let them know that a Given had just failed to comply with the palace’s standards, and would be joining them to fulfil the rest of her sentence in their Corps, and Martya tried not to grin her head off when she handed the king her scroll with the formula written on it before going upstairs to pack like a manic person. Karol tried to talk her into staying for a few days more but she refused to even consider it, and threw her things into her suitcase without the slightest bit of her usual precision, before vanishing into the bathroom for ten minutes and changing.
I was equal measures excited and fearful for her. She’d be judged for being rejected by the other third-borns in St Miguel at first, but that would pass because Martya was going to do great things with her life, even if the world was never going to learn about this particular one. To save face, I was sure that the king would credit the breakthrough to his scientists in the Academic caste, and we all knew it for his countenance was far too stiff and cold with her to be considered grateful. She’d out-witted him, and he would not forget it or grant her the title of nobility for this accomplishment.