Princess of Death
Page 14
“I have to go, Soraya. I’m sorry, but I have to get home.” She needed those plants—now. Especially since she’d lost the only bit of glitz foil she had. “I’ll do what I can to talk to Bae first, and then I have to go.”
Without waiting for permission from the other princess, Cali swept out the door, pausing in the antechamber only long enough to snatch the book on plants before heading into the hall lined with fish tanks.
Word would spread around the palace about King Emir’s death soon, and then who knew what mayhem Captain Kelsey would cause? The ships making up his armada were still along the coast. Soraya’s rove would tell her guard the truth of what happened, and then it wouldn’t be long before Captain Kelsey signaled his fleet to attack. She had to act quickly.
Much as she didn’t want to, Cali thought of Bae. He’d been so at home on the sea, up until they’d been attacked by the finfolk. And then it was as though his own monster emerged. His father said he’d suspected she wasn’t Soraya from the start. If that was the case, why would he attempt to sail with her?
Was that why he’d done it? Had their boat ride been a test, his way of getting an answer? Risky move, if that was the case. Something told Cali he lived for risks. He’d tried asking her for the truth during their stroll in the garden, and she’d shot him down.
For a few illicit moments, she recalled that night. How seductive he’d looked standing outside her doorway. He’d found her garden when he didn’t have to. And then he’d sought her out and taken her sailing.
In a moment of stillness, she remembered the feel of him there on the boat. It was more than the heat of his body or how glorious his appearance was as he stood at the helm of his own vessel, how in control he’d been, and just how appealing it was to see a man so in his element. No, it was more than that.
She couldn’t escape the connection they’d had in those few moments. It was as though the barriers, the lies, the unknown, they had all been stripped away. She was seeing him as he was, as he truly was. He’d made himself vulnerable to her.
And she’d kept up her own deception when he’d needed her the most.
Cali pushed that aside. He should never have taken her at such a risk to their lives in the first place. If there was a chance he’d thought she really was Soraya, he still should have been straightforward with her about his curse from the start.
Yes, he should have admitted he was targeted by a sea witch to the girl he was trying to impress.
It didn’t excuse his behavior. But she found she understood him better now.
Guards were moving through the halls, readily on alert. Hushed words spread beneath their breaths, words of the king’s death. Cali felt uneasy, uncertain of what to do. She wished she could speak with her father. He wouldn’t be foolish enough to agree to anything Captain Kelsey proposed to him, would he?
What bargain had been struck between the pirate king and King Emir? Bae was the one who wanted Lunae Lumen and its magical princess. What was Captain Kelsey after?
Cali rounded the corner, colliding with a firm torso and the smell of watery spice, like the sea mixed with musk. She glimpsed a bunch of pink flowers in his hand for only a second before they crumpled against her chest, and she squealed and dropped the book in her hands.
“In a hurry?” Bae said.
“What are you doing?” She couldn’t confess her knowledge about the king’s death. Despite the increase in guards along the halls, no announcement had yet been made.
“For you. Hibiscus.” He offered the mangled bouquet. A few flowers still held their showy, trumpet-like shape.
Mistrust pricked at her heart. He couldn’t mean the gesture with sincerity, not when he was clearly in on this bargain with his father, and certainly not after the forceful way he’d demanded the truth from her on the beach.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“You don’t believe what, the flowers? I promise, they’re hibiscus. I asked.”
He grinned. All she could do was shake her head. “You’re unbelievable.” She pushed past him, but he caught her arm.
“We didn’t leave on the best of terms after our venture. It was my fault. I should never have taken you on the sea, not knowing what awaited us.”
“And on the beach?” she said, the wound of his actions, of the way he’d shouted at her, still fresh.
A flicker of shame crossed his expression as the same thought passed between them. The mention of his mother. Who was she? She had to mean a lot to him for the sentence Cali had spoken to be enough to get him to yield.
“My actions were unforgiveable,” he said with sincerity. “Yet, I’m asking for your forgiveness, Princess.”
She reached out to stroke the hibiscus petals. The same lure she always felt around him tugged at her now. She tried pushing it aside. This was the perfect opportunity to try to fulfill her promise to Soraya, she told herself. Not because she felt anything more for him than she should. But for Soraya.
“Thank you,” she said, taking the bouquet from him. The gesture touched her heart more than she cared to admit.
Bae slouched and shrugged, as though he wasn’t used to giving apologies. He probably wasn’t. The pirate prince knew who she was, and she suddenly wanted to be Cali, to be straightforward and find out exactly what was going on.
“This still won’t win you your prize,” she said instead, not sure how to broach the subject.
The mention pricked the corners of his lips. “No? I thought ladies were touched by flowers?”
“These are all ruined.”
“That was your fault, not mine. Still, a bouquet grants some points in my favor, doesn’t it?”
Bae didn’t come any closer, and she couldn’t move either. He didn’t touch her, yet he heated the air around them, adding his own dizzying drug into her senses. His eyes said it all, a soft curiosity within their blue depths, a suggestion, a question, a snare.
A bell began to toll, jarring her from his spell. It clanged through the hall, rattling Cali’s bones.
Cali shook herself. She had two days left. Now wasn’t the time to let anything distract her, not even a roguish, apologetic, vulnerable pirate. He was such a contradiction of what she thought he should’ve been.
She took advantage of Bae’s distraction to slip past him, continuing on her way to the gardens.
Bae jogged to catch up.
“Shouldn’t we answer the summons?” he asked. “That is a summons, isn’t it?”
“You’re welcome to,” she said, discarding his bouquet on an accommodating bench and cracking open the book. Firethorn. Firethorn. She found it on the page, a wide-leafed plant with small blue blossoms along its edges. She remembered seeing something similar the day before, near a set of fountains. The problem now would be to retrace her steps…
The bell continued gonging.
“It could be important.” He tugged her arm.
She shirked from his grasp. “So is this.”
“Princess—”
Caliana rounded on him, fixing him with as fierce of a stare as she could muster. “Go then, if you’re so worried. I’m not leaving until I find what I need.”
Bae glanced over his shoulder, to the fallen bouquet, to the palace, the source of the clanging bells. “What do you need?”
Cali hesitated. Still, she could use the help. “It looks like this.” She flared open the book, displaying the picture. “I need as much of it as you can find.”
Bae’s brow pinched, but he didn’t question her. “As you wish, Princess.”
He led the way below the line of floral arches. Cali couldn’t stop to admire the beauty. It seemed every time she came, she noticed a different flower or unusual arrangement. She branched off at the end of the arches toward a collection of shrubs dotted with white blossoms.
She tucked between the flowers, tiptoeing into the bed around clusters of shiny pink flowers with leaves so transparent they could be quartz stones. But the firethorn was nowhere in sight.
Bae was bent low behind a line of trimmed hedges. Cali forced herself not to stare at his build, but failed miserably. He was finely formed, that was for sure. Her cheeks heated at the thoughts creeping in.
“There we go.” Bae stood upright, his fists full of a plant with blue blossoms, roots and all. Adjusting his shirt, he stepped out of the flowerbed. “Firethorn.” And there, beside it, was the long-stemmed purple flower. She bent, rubbing its leaves between her fingers. A soft glow emitted from the crumpled leaf, seeming to ignite in her hand.
Cali’s heart swelled. Glitz foil and firethorn. Two of the plants she needed. Bending, she plucked a handful of glitz foil, a dash of glowing dust sprinkling to the ground. She hugged it to her chest, holding out her other hand for the firethorn Bae held.
He took her hand instead, towing her closer to him. Dirt streaked down the front of his shirt, but he didn’t seem to care. The bells had stopped clanging, but they still chimed in her head at being so close to him.
“Why are you helping me?” she asked. “And don’t tell me it’s for the kiss you asked for last night.”
“And what if it is?”
“There’s more to you than that,” she said, the words ringing truer the moment she spoke them. “I don’t believe you really want to take her kingdom. I saw you out on the Lady Bold today. If circumstances were different, you wouldn’t be here. You’d be sailing. You told me you’d been living in an inn, waiting for the opportunity to arise. Is your father taking her kingdom for himself, or for you? What do you really want out of all this?”
“You never call it your kingdom.”
“What?”
“You always say, ‘the kingdom.’ Right then, you said, ‘her kingdom’. You never call it your own. I know you’re not Princess Soraya.”
Of course he did. Cali just wished she’d thought out how to handle it a little more before now.
She opted for silence.
“You claimed a childhood sickness that didn’t exist. You were awestruck at the sight of birds the real Soraya wouldn’t have glanced twice at. And she certainly wouldn’t have led me along in finding her way to something as simple as these gardens, which I found easily enough on my own.”
Cali’s throat closed. Still, she said nothing.
“I’ve seen pictures of Princess Soraya. While you resemble her greatly, you aren’t her. She would have known how to handle the finfolk this afternoon. She wouldn’t have hesitated to use magic. Magic you don’t have.”
“What do you want me to say?” she said.
“I know we’re imposing where we’re not wanted—I know Soraya would want to put up certain guards around herself, including refusing to bow to our wishes. I wouldn’t respect her much if she didn’t. But it wasn’t a wise move. My father is angry King Emir isn’t keeping up his side of their bargain.”
Oh, Captain Kelsey was angry all right. She closed her eyes, hearing the echo of the clanging bells announcing the king’s death. Bae’s words sank deeply into her.
“You mean you haven’t told him?” She waited for the lie to come.
Bae bent for a few more of the plants, deferring the question. He shook their roots free of the dirt still clinging there before holding them out to her. “What I’d like to know is who you really are?”
Cali glanced at the palace, remembering it standing proud and stalwart high above the ocean on its cliff with the ships anchored along the eastern shore below. Captain Kelsey’s words rang in her ears. She isn’t there. She is here.
Bae already knew the truth. With King Emir dead, what good was it to pretend any longer? Perhaps this way she could get Bae to open up to her as well. She needed to know more about this bargain, to keep her promise to Soraya, so she could go home.
“My name is Caliana Brahmvir.”
“Brahmvir. As in the royal house of Brahmvir, of Zara?”
“The same,” she said. “A dreadful sickness has overtaken my kingdom, and I was sent here to retrieve elements needed to brew a cure.” She raised the plants in her hands. “I have only a matter of days left before someone I care about very much will die.”
“I see.” He cupped a hand to his chin. “Then what are you doing pretending to be Soraya?”
“It was the only way I could gain access to these.” She inhaled the plants. The ripe smell of fresh earth lingered on the firethorn he’d retrieved for her. “When I first arrived, they mistook me for a servant, and I chose not to correct the assumption. Then when your father made the proposal for you to wed Soraya, I was chosen from the staff to stand in her place. We’ve only just discovered we’re cousins, which is why we look so much alike.”
“You sought out the gardens for the cure.”
A cure her father said his father had.
“Yes. Now what about you? Will you tell me about this bargain of yours? What are you really doing here?”
Bae ran a hand through his hair. “My father has sailed as much of the sea as he could. He doesn’t like that there is ocean beyond the boundary. He’s become obsessed with it—he doesn’t like that part of the sea is cut off from him.”
“He thinks he deserves the world?”
“Don’t we all?”
“I don’t think so,” Cali said, lifting her chin in defiance. All she wanted was for her people to be well and safe. She wanted to keep peace, to do her best to rule as she’d been trained to do her entire life. One small section of the world was enough for her.
Too much of it should never be entrusted to anyone.
“My father began contacting rulers of other lands, and he found a way to get through to King Marek.”
“Through his brother-in-law,” Cali said.
Bae nodded. “He paid King Emir substantial amounts of money for access to the communication. But then one day, he was denied the right to use it. It seems the two kings found a way to open the boundary without my father’s assistance.”
“And your father didn’t like being left out.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“What was the means of opening the boundary?” Cali wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Whatever it was, it had caused the necrosis inflicting her people.
“I don’t know,” Bae said. “It seems the two brothers-in-law needed a foolproof way to propose the boundary’s removal to their people. My father found out he was being secluded, so he sent word to all of his ships across the ocean to congregate around Lunae Lumen, to threaten King Emir and remind the king of the money he’s indebted to him.”
Cali considered this. “And you’re going along with it because of the curse?”
Bae turned away, facing the direction of the ocean as though it had a call only he could hear. “I tried entering the boundary for my father, to see if it could be taken down from the inside. We didn’t know until it was too late that Undine Daray herself lives there. I was cursed. I barely escaped my ship, the Undaunted, with my life—many of my men weren’t so fortunate.
“I waited here for my father while we researched magic, trying to find some way to counter the curse. That was when I learned Princess Soraya’s magic was feared by the very creatures attuned to my presence on the sea. It’s much showier than the magic of any other princess, it seems. And the finfolk shy away from it.”
Cali thought of the golden bursts of light leaking from within cracks in Soraya’s skin. It was formidable, much like the way some might fear drawing too near the sun or a bolt of lightning.
“It just happened to be coincidence that the kingdom of Lunae Lumen also owed us a substantial debt.”
“Because of the money you paid to King Emir,” Cali surmised. “That’s what you meant by your claim you weren’t stealing it.”
Bae nodded. “And this kin
gdom was chosen. I’ll still be able to sail if Soraya is at my side.”
“How can you be okay with that? With taking someone else’s kingdom? Especially when yours was taken from you?”
“It’s logical to me,” Bae said simply. “We’ve invested so much money in this kingdom, money I helped my father to obtain. It should rightfully belong to us. At first, I disagreed with my father as you do, but he suggested an alliance with the princess so she wouldn’t lose her kingdom altogether.”
Cali gripped the plants in her arms, rage boiling through her. “So you think you’re being merciful now?”
He straightened. “I do, but I can tell you don’t see it that way.”
Cali clutched the flowers in her arms, wishing she had a basket of some kind to contain them. She’d asked for the truth, and he was giving it to her. “I don’t think it’s right to take someone’s home just because of a few disagreements. Just take your money back. There must be some other way to settle the debt.”
“Lunae Lumen was failing. The diamond and copper mines collapsed, killing many. King Emir granted my men and me amnesty in exchange for my assistance. Greedily, he used every sovereign we gave him, investing it into his palace and into those stricken with poverty. Many kings in the past weren’t born into royalty. They obtained it through perseverance. We’re just doing the same.”
“Through violent domination, you mean.”
“We’re presenting a way that doesn’t have to be violent.”
Not violent? Captain Kelsey had just stabbed King Emir in cold blood! It took all the effort she had not to snap this at him. Bae couldn’t know she and Soraya had been the ones spying on their meeting. He was still his father’s son.
“And what of Soraya, now that you know I’m not her?”
Bae shrugged, dusting dirt from his hands. “Aye, now. That was her choice not to meet me. She should have agreed to a meeting. Why didn’t she?” The faintest trace of vulnerability flashed in his eyes.