Tied to the Crown

by Neha Yazmin

  He joined the small group around Erisa, unable to stay away. Despite the cooled nature of their relationship now, it didn’t mean he didn’t care about her anymore.

  “She was taking so long to get dressed, so we—the tailor and I—became worried. We knocked and called for her, but there was no reply. I thought that maybe she’d fainted, so I begged them to break down the door.” Erisa swallowed. “She wasn’t there.”

  She wasn’t there. Wyett had heard these exact words once already today, moments before before he’d come to lunch. The pair of guards that he’d tasked to keep an eye on the Adgari had informed him that the girl wasn’t in the castle. He hadn’t been too bothered; she’d probably gone off exploring.

  “How is that possible?” The question was posed by Seth; he cared a great deal for Rozlene and Erisa.

  Quin cared the least. His sister had remained seated at the table, her youth making it easier for her to hold on to her grudge against Erisa at a time like this. Not that Erisa was bothered by it; she’d never warmed to his miracle sister. For a number of years after Quin was born, Erisa had behaved like a jealous older sibling, resenting Quin for being on the other end of the fatherly affection that had previously been directed towards her.

  “How can someone just disappear from a little cubicle?” Seth shook his head, bewildered.

  Yes, Wyett was familiar with the small cubicles in their favourite tailor’s shop. You entered and exited through the same door. The people in the shop would see you when you came out, hear the loud creaking of the doors.

  “That’s what happened,” Erisa insisted. “We tried on our new dresses, and Mother helped me change back before she went to do the same. And she was gone.”

  Somewhere along the way, it must have become too cold for her, the air too thin. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost consciousness. Aaryana couldn’t remember when, where, or how—she couldn’t remember if she’d known that she was close to passing out before she actually did.

  All she knew was that she’d been really cold, colder than she’d ever been in her life—and now it was sweltering. The heat was smothering, speeding up her heart and her breathing. There was a fire roaring nearby. A fire so hot that she was sweating.

  Expecting the brightness of the day to hurt her eyes, wanting to gradually let in the light, Aaryana opened her eyes slowly. It wasn’t daytime anymore. She saw a smoky black sky with a few stars peeking through the filmy clouds. From the corners of her eyes, she saw a raging fire to her right. Around the edges of her vision were the peaks of ice-capped mountains.

  I’m in the mountains! The heat wasn’t making her breathe fast, but the fact that she was high up in the mountains where the air was thinner than she was used to.

  Something heavy weighed her down when she attempted to push herself up into a sitting position. She looked down at her body. Several layers of fur and blankets had been piled on top of her. Furs that weren’t hers. A fire she hadn’t lit. In the mountains she couldn’t remember finding. Had she broken the line of dense trees that marked the beginning of the forested foothills? She had seen the mass of tall trees in the distance, but couldn’t remember riding through it.

  “My horse!”

  Aaryana pushed up onto her elbows and scanned her vicinity, the darkness illuminated well by the big fire. Her beautiful warhorse was nowhere to be seen. She sat up and pushed aside the blankets. Fear for her horse made her feel cold despite the fire so close to her. She felt for her weapons belt but it wasn’t there. Whoever had brought her here—and saved her life—had taken her weapons.

  With forced slowness, she rose to her feet. Even though she couldn’t see anyone, she knew she was being watched. There were people just beyond the circle of light thrown by the fire. Aaryana moved a couple of paces away from it, her steps no more than the shuffling of her feet. She didn’t want to seem like a threat by moving the way she usually did, swift and efficient, on-guard and ready to pounce.

  She wanted to talk to the Nidiyans. Learn about them, their history, and current way of life. To know if they were like her, if she was like them. They were her people, though she couldn’t tell them that.

  “Hello?” she called out into the night, her voice uncertain and small. “Hello?”

  A tall, fair-haired woman stalked into the light and halted ten feet from her. Aaryana spun on the spot to face the young woman. The Nidiyan was easily a foot taller than her, and everything about her seemed elongated—from her thin bony limbs to her tense face. Her skin was neither pale nor tanned. She wore a long fur coat and knee-high boots.

  “What brought you here?” The woman’s voice was cold, unwelcoming.

  I assume one of you brought me here, she would have said if she wasn’t planning on making a good impression. Instead, she said, “Thank you for saving my life. I trust that my horse is just as safe?”

  No response. Aaryana took that as a yes. She had to tell herself that her horse was alright.

  “I am new to the Island, and when I heard the story of Nidiya, I—”

  “You’re from the Royal Palace.”

  The woman looked her up and down. Aaryana remembered that she was in her guard uniform. “Yes. You see, I’m from Adgar,” she said in a soft voice. “I arrived in Roshdan on the Friday before last. Is it still Saturday, by the way?”

  The smallest of nods from the woman assured her that it was. Probably late Saturday night. She had most definitely missed the start of her shift. But there wasn’t much she could do. She was here, talking to a Nidiyan. She had to make it count.

  “I started working in the castle on Monday. I learned about the Nidiyan Mountains and I was curious to see everything for myself. To meet Nidiya’s descendants.” She lowered her head into a small bow, respectful but swift. “It’s nice to meet you…”

  She raised a questioning eyebrow, probing for the woman’s name. The Nidiyan simply stared at her, brows creased in contemplation. Did she want to trust this newly appointed Royal Guard—originally from Adgar—with her name?

  What if they don’t tell me anything? Aaryana’s heart rate sped up—it had been quite fast to start with, now that she thought about it; it had to work harder in this altitude.

  Finally, the woman said, “My name is Arzu.”

  “Nice to make your acquaintance, Arzu. That’s a very nice name.” A name Aaryana hadn’t heard before. She wondered whether it was a sea folk name, like Nidiya. “What does it mean?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Aaryana said politely. “It is, after all, your name.” She smiled at Arzu.

  Arzu didn’t smile back. “And your name?”

  “Aaryana.”

  Arzu’s eyes widened. A gasp left her mouth. Unintelligible whispers floated in from the darkness. They obviously understood what her name meant. Did they speak dead Adgari languages in the north?

  Her features sceptical, Arzu asked, “Aaryana?”

  She pronounced the name the way it was supposed to be pronounced, something that a lot of people back in Adgar found difficult. Aaryana had grown accustomed to the way people struggled to wrap their tongue and lips around her name; she’d stopped noticing it long ago.

  Now that she thought about it, King Keyan’s pronunciation of her name was incorrect, as was Seth’s: They, like most Adgaris, turned her three-syllable name into four syllables. AA-REE-YA-NA, instead of AAR-YA-NA.

  Despite Arzu’s perfect pronunciation of her name, the young woman didn’t appear to believe that the name belonged to Aaryana. Her chin jutted out, her shoulders straightened, her arms stiffened. Of course, that’s my name. How dare Arzu react as though… as though she wasn’t worthy of such a name? Her mother had named her Aaryana because she’d survived when most wouldn’t have.

  Nodding curtly, Aaryana said, “It means ‘of utmost strength’.”

  Arzu’s eyes narrowed a fraction, her lips a thin line. “In what language?” Her tone was smug, knowing. Mocking, too.

>   Aaryana couldn’t fathom why...

  “An ancient Adgari language,” Aaryana replied, her authoritative Princess voice coming out. “Long since dead.”

  “Says who?”

  No one. “My parents,” she lied. She hoped she looked more confident than she felt.

  Neither of her parents had actually said that the name Aaryana was taken from a dead Adgari language; she’d just assumed that. Everyone had, she supposed, since she hadn’t been questioned about the name’s origins. She had never asked, or been told, what language her name was derived from. It didn’t mean anything in the modern tongue used in Adgar today—or in the language spoken in Roshdan.

  How embarrassing would it be if it turned out that her name was from a language that the Roshdanis—the Nidiyans—were familiar with, and she, the bearer of the name, was incorrectly passing it off as a dead Adgari language?

  “Do you know what the name Nidiya means?” Arzu asked pointedly.

  “Pure as water.”

  Again, Arzu sounded smug, knowing, mocking, as she asked, “In what language?”

  “The language of the sea folk.”

  Arzu smiled mirthlessly. “And if I wanted the sea folk to name a girl that was of utmost strength, what name do you think they’d suggest?”

  Aaryana’s blood chilled.

  “Or,” Arzu went on, “if I were to ask the sea folk what the name Aaryana meant in their language, what do you think they’d say?”

  “I don’t know,” Aaryana said, “what you’re talking about.”

  But she’d figured out what Arzu was saying. Aaryana is a sea folk name. And it was her mother—Kanona Nidiya—that had given her that name. If there was any doubt that her mother was a descendant of the sea folk, that had cleared now. Aaryana had sea folk blood in her. She wasn’t completely human. She was something other.

  What of her sisters? Physically, they resembled Kanona more than Aaryana did, with their white-blonde hair, almond-shaped faces and small mouths. Leesha was more or less Kanona’s twin, so to speak, while Aaryana, despite having the right hair colour, had never looked like her mother’s daughter. Did that mean her sisters were more sea folk than she was?

  Something in her gut told her that it was the opposite. Wasn’t she the only one out of her sisters that had inherited their mother’s grey eyes? I must be more sea folk than the others.

  “I gather Arzu is a sea folk name?” Aaryana said brightly, her expression friendly and curious. After all, she’d come here for information. “Was it passed down the generations?”

  Nidiya must have given her children sea folk names, with the humans tweaking them to make it easier for them to pronounce, and as a result, sea folk names were still being used today.

  “Why should I tell you anything, liar?”

  “Liar?” Aaryana asked, bewildered.

  She wasn’t bewildered in the slightest, though—she’d inadvertently given her heritage away when she’d revealed her name and its meaning. Now, the Nidiyans knew that she was one of them—that she was hiding it.

  “Everything you’ve said is a lie!” Arzu spat, eyes flashing. “Why are you really here?”

  “To learn more about you.”

  “Why?”

  Because I’d be learning more about me. What it means to be a Nidiyan. But she couldn’t say that. If she admitted it out loud, and it got back to the King… Yet, if she didn’t confess everything to Arzu, she wouldn’t get any answers from her. It wasn’t clear what Arzu really made of her, with her two-toned curls and grey eyes, but she knew that it looked like she had a sinister agenda.

  Quickly, she had to decide quickly: Whose wrath did she want to avoid, Arzu’s or the King’s?

  “You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to,” Aaryana said eventually.

  Her decision had been made long before she was brought to these mountains. And the decision was really about which was more important, learning about her bloodline or going home to Adgar.

  Adgar needs you. Your sisters need you, her mother had said. She had to go back to Myraa, to her sisters, to her Throne in Adgar. Rudro was there, too… Dark times are ahead. You need to protect your sisters, protect Adgar. Don’t let it drown.

  Aaryana had to go home. She needed King Keyan, and Wyett, to make it happen. She didn’t need the Nidiyans to tell her who she was, what she was capable of—she already knew her truth. I am Aaryana Vijkanti, and I am needed in Adgar.

  “Just tell me where my horse is and I’ll be on my way.”

  “In the middle of the night? The forest will swallow you. Or the endless dark. Or the cold.” Arzu shrugged.

  Aaryana arched a brow. “Anyone would think you cared, Arzu.”

  “Hardly,” she snarled. “If you don’t return to duty within a week, they’ll come looking for you here. If they find your dead body in the forest, mauled by animals, or rotted with time, they’ll blame it on us savages.”

  She rolled her eyes, but there was genuine anger and resentment on her face, in her eyes. If people suspected that the Nidiyans had killed a Royal Guard, it could reignite the old enmity between the two groups.

  “You will leave at first light,” the tall woman told her—or rather, ordered. “Someone will take you to the hidden trail that leads out of the forest. You’ll find your horse waiting. You will not return here until you learn to speak truth.”

  Wyett was merely curious as to where that Adgari guard of his was tonight. Where she’d been all day. Why she hadn’t returned for her shift. He wasn’t worried. Of course, not. If anything, it had been a blessing to retire to his bedroom, long after midnight, and not have to see her smug face on the way in. Especially after the day we’ve had. He felt wretched for his curiosity—he should be thinking about Rozlene.

  Wyett had joined the search for her, and returned late, finding no clue as to where she might be. If Erisa hadn’t been with her mother when the older woman vanished, he wouldn’t have hesitated in linking Rozlene’s disappearance to the Adgari’s non-return.

  Rozlene was in the back of his mind as he kept wondering about his guard. She hadn’t been to her rooms after last night’s shift, according to what her maid told his spies earlier in the day. His men had asked him whether to go looking for her, but Wyett had told them not to bother. He was confident she’d return before dinner. But she hadn’t come back at all.

  Besides, she hadn’t left the Palace for good. When his men spoke to her maid again, just ten minutes ago, the girl had insisted that nothing in the Adgari’s room was amiss. Nothing that suggested that the guard was running away. She probably got lost.

  Whatever it was, it meant that she’d failed to turn up for her shift, without prior notice, thus breaching the terms of her contract. This was guaranteed to get her out of the castle and out of his father’s good graces once and for all.

  They gave her food. A bowl of rice—the grains longer than any she’d eaten in her life—and a stew of wild meat with soft, mushy potatoes. Ice-cold, it didn’t taste of anything but it gave her the fuel she’d need for tomorrow’s journey back to the Palace. At least the thick drink they’d given her was hot—Aaryana wasn’t sure what it was but it was delicious and thick and filling.

  When the young girl that had brought her the food returned to take the empty earthen bowl and spoon, Aaryana asked her, “Would you be kind enough to bring me a blanket that you can spare?”

  The ones they’d covered her in earlier had been cleared away after Arzu left her by the fire. A fire that would burn out soon and leave her shivering.

  When the girl looked at her as though she’d spoken in a foreign language, she explained her predicament: “For when the fire dies.”

  The girl’s confusion only increased. “You speak as though the fire will go out,” the youth replied. She couldn’t be older than twelve.

  “It will. Eventually—”

  “Never,” the girl cut her off confidently, almost reverently. “Fires in Roshdan never burn out. It’s ete
rnal fire. A gift from the fire angel to his homeland.”

  Aaryana wanted to laugh, but her body didn’t make it happen. She remembered the fire that King Keyan had built that night in the forest, how she thought he’d woken the next morning and built another identical to it. But it was the same one!

  “Fires in Roshdan burn and burn and burn,” the girl continued. “Until doused in water. Or if it’s put out some other way,” she added as an afterthought. “You’ll be warm through the night.”

  Staring at the flames, Aaryana asked, “How is that even possible?”

  Was there something in the kindling, the firewood, the very earth on which the trees grew that enabled their branches and twigs to not get eaten by the fire, not get charred to ash? No. The youth hadn’t said anything about the firewood being special, but rather the fire itself. Eternal fire.

  “Magic,” replied the girl. “I wonder why they didn’t tell you that in the Palace.” Shrugging, the girl left Aaryana to the raging fire beside her.

  Thoughts of everlasting flames, fire angels, and cagey, untrusting Nidiyans, kept sleep at bay. Why hadn’t the King told her about this incredible magic? Or anyone else at the Palace? What did any of them—Jeena, Seth, Wyett, Erisa, King Keyan—have to gain or lose from not disclosing this information to her?

  Well, she hadn’t found herself discussing fires with any of them, had she? Based on what the little Nidiyan girl said, Roshdani flames had nothing to do with Nidiya, so it didn’t feature in Wyett’s story about her. But when King Keyan built that fire, he could have mentioned it in passing.

  Then again, who goes around telling people that the rain falls from the sky or that Kings and Queens sit on Thrones? We just knows these things and assume everyone else does, too.

  Roshdan really was an Island with history and, funnily enough, magic. Giving the stars above her a crooked smile, Aaryana found herself falling asleep.

  It was now widely known that Princess Malin suffered from severe headaches on a regular basis. It had been plaguing her since the abrupt end of The Contest. Losers of the competition tended to develop similar conditions—side-effects of the immense physical and mental pressure the tournament put on them from a very young age.