How to Catch a Queen

by Alyssa Cole

  She kept her gaze resolutely down, not wanting to deal with whatever issue Josiane had come up with to bother her about now. Being able to smile serenely in the face of people trying to provoke you was a queenly skill that had taken years to develop, but Josiane was treading close to the waters just outside the Cape of Fuck Off.

  The shadow didn’t move. And, now that she glanced at it, unless Josiane’s shadow reflected the truly large and intimidating nature of her personality and not her actual short, plump frame, this wasn’t her. It looked more like . . .

  Shanti just reined in her instinctive reaction, which was to jump up out of her seat. Instead, she smoothly removed her gloves, then her earphones, and turned her head up and to the left in a graceful arc.

  Her husband stood over her in his royal robe, the exposed skin of his arms and shoulders glistening in the sunlight filtering in through the library’s windows. A pair of slim rectangular glasses were perched on his nose, making him look like a stern professor who’d come to chastise her archiving methods before bending her over a table and—

  “H-hello, Husband,” she said. Dammit, why had her voice trembled like that? She might as well have announced that she was having inappropriate archive fantasies.

  “Hello.” He was stiff. Tense. Glaring down at her. It seemed she was the only one who remembered what had happened the night before.

  “Are you angry?” There was no deference in her tone. If he wanted to tread water just outside her good graces with Josiane, she wasn’t going to indulge him.

  “I am not angry,” he said, though his expression was enough to make a fainting goat keel over. Shanti was of hardier stock.

  “You look angry,” she said.

  “I am not. I was on my way to give my speech and needed something from the library. That is all.”

  Oh. So he hadn’t come to see her. At least he’d stopped to give her an angry hello instead of ignoring her as he had all the other times he’d passed through the library while she worked.

  “Did you need to look something up in reference to the speech?” Shanti doubted that, since the speeches were most definitely written by Musoke, who only referenced the Book of Egomania in his works.

  “No,” Sanyu said. “I found what I need and I will go to give my speech soon.”

  Sanyu was speaking strangely, as if he’d forgotten the contractions section of his English grammar book.

  “What did you need?”

  He reached toward her and slid a dusty old paperclip across the table toward him, then picked it up between thumb and forefinger and held it up. “This.”

  “Well, okay then,” she said, and moved to slip her earbud back in. His shadow turned and moved away from her and she paused.

  She wasn’t in the mood to try to decipher him. He was the one who’d said that everything should remain as it was during the day, and now after she thought things had progressed, he showed up to glare at her and steal paperclips before going to this speech where she wasn’t even allowed?

  Oh.

  It was improbable, but what if . . .

  “Husband?” she called out.

  He looked back over his shoulder, and she saw it in the way he tried to look like he didn’t care at all. He needed something more than a paperclip from her, and maybe he didn’t deserve it, but Shanti didn’t believe in bartering. She could give him this without expectation of anything else.

  “Good luck with your speech,” she said. “You’re going to do great.”

  He nodded sharply and stalked off to join the retinue of guards that waited near the entrance. Shanti settled back into her work feeling a little less annoyed whenever she glanced at the trail the paperclip had left in the dust.

  The files in the box Gertinj had brought her weren’t ancient, but old enough to have collected a thick layer of dust and, judging from the husks that fell to the table and scared the crap out of her when she began pulling things out, to have been home to several generations of an insect family.

  The first few dozen pages were dossiers of companies that had been interested in doing business with Njaza in the eighties and nineties. There was no follow-up, but from how things seemed to work here, she was certain most of the requests had been denied.

  An old, old letter from the head of the Thesoloian archives requesting books on Njazan religion was amongst the mess, and she plucked it out and scanned it, preserving additional evidence against Musoke’s claims that Thesolo had ignored Njaza for decades.

  She sorted mindlessly until she came upon a bright plastic binder with technicolor rainbow dolphins on it—she was tempted to just throw it into the trash pile because it didn’t look historically relevant, but queens didn’t do things half-assed, even if they were worried about what kinds of creatures might be living in the binder’s rings.

  She wiped the dust from it with a microfiber cloth, and when she carefully opened the cover was happy to find that the only thing in the binder was paper. The first few pages appeared to be someone’s to-do list, chicken scratch scrawls.

  More trash.

  Still, Shanti was thorough, and continued flipping past blank pages until she came across something that made the slight warmth that stayed with her after Sanyu’s odd visit go cold.

  In the center of the binder was a page with three large words written carefully in the middle:

  QUEENS OF NJAZA

  Her heart thumped in her chest as she flipped to the first page, which had a black-and-white wedding photo of Sanyu’s father and a short pear-shaped woman pasted above handwritten text in a neat script.

  Second wife of Sanyu I. Tended to palace gardens.

  Shanti turned the page, certain there had to be more to the caption, but on each page was a new wedding photo and with the same brief, benign description of the wife in it.

  Organized the library books.

  Oversaw religious ceremonies.

  Managed the palace kitchens.

  Her stomach turned with each flip of the page. These women had all been beautiful in various ways, but in the photos their eyes grew increasingly dull, as if they knew their time was short. Sanyu’s father looked the same in every photo—entirely indifferent. Shanti couldn’t help but notice that every woman’s singular accomplishment was something that, while not devoid of value, didn’t match the rank they held.

  A third of the way through, she saw a photo that stopped her in her tracks—a woman that looked so much like Sanyu—her Sanyu—that she had to blink. She was tall, muscular, and stunning—and unlike the others, her eyes held a rebellious fire as she gazed from her photo.

  Twentieth wife to Sanyu I. Bore a single son.

  That was it, even for the one queen who’d produced an heir.

  The first queen hadn’t even been deemed worthy of an entry.

  Shanti’s face suffused with heat as she imagined her own entry—Scanned trash in the library. Nothing like the encyclopedia entry she’d imagined for herself all her life. She’d be reduced to a single line, forgotten in an old box somewhere and covered with dust and bug crap. Whoever had made the entries hadn’t even bothered to add relevant information like name and age.

  Because they didn’t care.

  She closed the binder with shaking hands and tucked it into the cloth bag on the chair beside her, then walked calmly away from the various papers piled at the table where she usually worked—they’d be there tomorrow.

  “Leaving already?” Josiane scoffed.

  Shanti didn’t say anything—she was good at containing her emotions, but if she opened her mouth, she knew she would yell. Would demand to know why exactly Josiane was so disdainful of her when she had to be aware Shanti wasn’t in her archives by choice. Or maybe she’d shout the question running laps in her mind: What exactly had happened to all the queens who had preceded her?

  There were the rumors of course, but those had always seemed to be the usual whispers that surrounded royals—she knew that people also said Prince Thabiso of Thesolo had set a r
estaurant on fire and tricked an old woman out of her home in order to win his bride, and she knew that couldn’t be true. The more common legend about Sanyu I was that he’d been such a prolific lover that one woman couldn’t satisfy him for long, but there had been other, darker rumblings—what if the whispers of the iron-fisted king and his disappearing wives were true?

  She took the staff passageway to her chambers, head down and avoiding the gaze of people who all seemed to understand she was expendable and not care why. When she got to her room, she sat at the finely crafted desk and paged through the photos again, wondering what exactly she’d gotten herself into.

  Chapter 8

  Most absolute monarchies ended long ago, but Njaza’s kingdom, though relatively young, is ruled by one man. Not much is known about daily life in the isolated kingdom, but history shows that rule by a single person is invariably not the best for a country or a people.

  Lessons from Sanyu’s senior year course, The Management of a Kingdom, popped into his head from time to time. This particular snippet from the course’s textbook, likely the result of his deep dive into the Ramatlan Theory of Kingdom Building the night before, came to Sanyu as he stood with his arms akimbo as two members of the palace staff draped, pinned, and tucked the formal robe he had to wear for his public address. Sanyu kept his thoughts on his class because if he focused on the speech he had to give, the not-fear would overwhelm him.

  The teacher hadn’t been correct, but Sanyu hadn’t spoken up, because speaking in class had been as enjoyable as eating glass. Njaza hadn’t been ruled by one man. If his father had worn the iron gauntlet, it was Musoke who’d guided it.

  “You are ready, O blessed King,” Anej, the old woman who dressed him every week said. “Ready to lead Njaza into new glory.”

  Sanyu nodded, his lips pressed together against pre-speech nausea. He was used to this. He closed his eyes, remembering how the former king had looked during past speeches. Happy. Confident. Just a bit sly. Like the people of Njaza had nothing to fear if he was around. Sanyu inhaled deeply and tried to channel that strength into himself, or at the very least pass off a reasonable forgery.

  To pretend to be the king Njaza needed instead of the one it’d been stuck with.

  He opened his eyes, as ready as he could be, and his stomach lurched when he caught sight of someone familiar in his peripheral vision.

  Father?

  Sanyu hadn’t even finished the thought before he realized he’d only glimpsed himself in the full-length mirror, but relief had ballooned in him for that split second and its deflation now left him hollow. The awful emptiness that had swallowed him up three months ago stirred in him.

  The fact that he’d confused himself for his father was laughable. He stood staring at his reflection, eyes stinging and hands fisted as he struggled to get himself back into the headspace necessary to give the speech.

  There was a knock at the door and Lumu stuck his head in. “Let’s go, Your Highness.”

  Sanyu nodded, then unfurled his fist, revealing the paperclip he’d taken from Shanti as an excuse to see her. He fastened it to the cloth pulled tightly around his chest and followed Lumu out.

  Sanyu’s pulse began to race as they walked through the corridor toward the auditorium where the address was held. He knew what he looked like to the guards and staff members he passed on the way to the stage: a calm, intense man, walking slowly because the world revolved around him. Inside, he was quaking. He took deep, cleansing breaths, filling his belly and then slowly releasing them, feeling the gentle scrape of the paperclip against his chest as he did.

  “Do you want the daily report? To distract you?” Lumu asked.

  Distraction and downplaying were Lumu’s attempts to help, since suggestions that Sanyu see a therapist about his stage not-fright had been immediately shut down. A king who needed to cry on a therapist’s couch was certainly not cut out for this job.

  “No. I talked to her myself. We’ve been talking for days actually.” It calmed him a little, thinking of the way Shanti never belittled him, even when she corrected him.

  “So that’s why you haven’t been harassing me as much as you usually do.” Lumu grinned. “What do you talk about? When? Have you kissed? Come on, you can’t hold out on me now.”

  Sanyu said nothing. He didn’t want to think about his wife before taking the stage in front of hundreds of people.

  “Fine, be that way. I’m sure you talk to her about politics or something boring.” He turned to look at Sanyu as they approached the door to the stage, giving him a clap on the biceps. “It’ll be over before you know it. You’re going to do great, Your Highness.”

  Lumu held his hand out and Sanyu pulled off his glasses and dropped them into his palm. Sanyu didn’t wear his contact lenses on days when he had to speak publicly. His vision wasn’t awful, but bad enough that from a distance he could pretend all the blurs weren’t actually people.

  His stomach heaved as he walked onto the stage, facing the citizens who gathered to see the address of their beloved king. They filled the auditorium, a blur of vibrant patterns under the golden arc of the auditorium’s ceiling.

  “Blessed and favored by strength and strategy, Njaza will never fall,” he said, giving the customary greeting before launching into the mindless recitation of the memorized speech.

  He didn’t remember what happened after that. He spoke, but he didn’t pay attention to what he said. His mind wandered somewhere else as his body carried on mechanically—the same way he’d learned to carry out many of the tasks that didn’t interest him at all but were necessary to the role of a king.

  “We need jobs, King Sanyu!”

  It was a cry that broke the silence and pulled Sanyu’s thoughts back to the words that were actually coming out of his mouth.

  King Sanyu. That was him, not his father. This person was yelling at him.

  “We will continue to be a blessed and powerful kingdom that needs nothing but the love of its citizens . . .” His mouth still moved, reciting the speech by rote, even as his gaze fixed on the woman who stood in the front row, looking up at him. She was an old woman with gray hair shorn close to her scalp and a soft, wide-hipped build. He couldn’t make out her face at all but when he squinted he could read the bold black words on her yellow T-shirt: NJAZA RISE UP!

  “How can you speak of glory to our kingdom when jobs have dried up, crops are failing, businesses go bankrupt, and doctors are so scarce that we wait months for treatment?” she demanded.

  Sanyu heard the clatter of guards rushing down the aisles, but didn’t move his gaze from her. He continued to recite the speech as his brain sorted through all the actions he could take. Should he stop? If he did, should he yell at her? Engage with her? Why was she taking this already torturous event and making it even more difficult for him?

  Sweat beaded on his scalp and he fought to maintain control of his breath. This was what he feared every time he stood before the crowd—the unexpected. Something that snatched the tiny bit of control he had over his not-fear and revealed his vulnerability. His fingers began to tremble and he gripped the wooden podium hard, speaking more emphatically because if he stopped talking his act would fall apart.

  “And how can women and other marginalized groups feel like full citizens when we have no voice in this kingdom?” the old woman continued. “We are not your ornaments! We are your backbone!”

  He expected the people around her to jeer, to call her out for this complete breach of Njazan protocol.

  No one did.

  Then someone else stood, a girl wearing the same shirt. Each of her arms was slipped into the support of a walking assistance device that was often used by the victims of land mines—likely plastic and not the mahogany and gold of Musoke’s cane.

  “You are supposed to be our protector! You are young and know we need change. How can you let things go on like this?” the girl called out.

  A line of guards surrounded the women; the older woman raised
her hands to show they would leave without a fight and then placed her hand on the girl’s shoulder to calm her. They began to walk out, the girl thumping her walking sticks in the familiar rhythmic beat that was the background music to his lifelong earworm.

  “Sanyu II! Even crueler than his father,” they sang loudly as they were marched toward the exit. “Sanyu II! Our new and useless king! E-ne-mies, of Njaza! Our king, he does your work for you!”

  Their voices echoed in the auditorium as they were pushed through the door, their words lingering to shame him. Whispers started, and then murmurs, and they spread through the crowd like a bushfire. Sanyu grit his teeth against the rising panic in his chest and the sweat beading at his temples, finished his speech without deviation, and walked slowly from the stage.

  He didn’t generally look people in the eye—that was one of the benefits of being king, as people’s deference meant it wasn’t considered rude—but he noticed that his dresser and hairstylist and the woman who had brought him drinks all looked away from him as he entered the dressing room. They usually showered him with false praise, but the only thing Anej managed was a strangled, “Oh my.”

  Sanyu was struggling to maintain control, but the tightly wrapped robe began to feel like a constricting shroud. He ripped it off with one hand, tearing the pins instead of waiting for assistance. Beneath it he wore shorts, as he always did when he had to give a speech. Anej flinched as he handed her the fabric, then lowered her gaze to the ground to hide the fear in her eyes.

  Sanyu’s stomach convulsed like he’d been hit with the dull end of a fighting staff.

  This was one of the reasons he’d never wanted to be king—to be king was to be feared above all, and Sanyu had never wanted that. He caught sight of himself in the dressing room’s mirror again—he looked furious.

  He wasn’t angry, though. He was ashamed. If he’d never wanted to be feared by his people, he’d never wanted to disappoint them either. Now he felt the urge to run from it as he always did, to escape the itch on his skin and inside his head caused by the knowledge that he would never be the man his father had been.