by Gwynn White
She froze, stunned by that radical—impossible—suggestion. She wasn’t the only one shocked into immobility. Neither Zandor nor Keahr moved. The only creature in the cavern to stir, other than Niing smoking his pipe, was Peckle.
The lanky tabby hopped off the sofa and sat, upright as a statue, in the center of the room. The lines on his face seemed even more prominent than usual. They gave him a commanding air.
Niing chuckled. “If Peckle could talk, he would say that he agreed.”
Peckle’s eyes closed to slits—and then bored into Aurora.
Unnerved, she looked away first.
As much as she hated the Guardians, announcing that they would be removed would send a tidal wave of shock though her kingdom. Artemis would never agree to removing the icons that had kept the nation safe for one hundred and fifty years. Neither would the Intelligentsia. Her courtiers would also protest the move. Coming so soon after Lazard’s death, the kingdom didn’t need that kind of turmoil.
If she were honest, neither did she. Not when Artemis was probably already plotting her demise. Announcing something so radical would only hasten his attack.
And as for bloody trials to win her hand?
She paled at the thought.
Jousting, sword fights, and other games of military conquest had never interested her. What kind of man would she be forced to marry in an elimination game like that?
A brute, skilled with a sword or with his fists, with no interest in me and my passions.
It did not sound like a recipe for happiness.
Perhaps it would be better to let Artemis take the throne. Even if she lost face with the courtiers. It would be better than death by Artemis or death by boredom in a loveless marriage.
And the courtiers already despise me anyway. What does it matter if they laugh in my face when I know they already do so behind my back?
Her skin burned, each freckle pulsing. It mattered a great deal. She suppressed that truth.
And as for her dream of helping the Infirm?
What can I possibly achieve when others far more capable than I have failed for so long to solve the problem?
She could at least try.
More conflicted than she’d ever been, she sat up and gave her verdict—the one that made the most logical sense. “Niing, I thank you for your efforts on my behalf, but I cannot announce something so explosive at my brother’s send-off. Not today, not tomorrow. Maybe never.”
Peckle hissed and stalked from the room.
Niing rested a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Perhaps when you’ve had a chance to give it some more thought, my princess, you will find—”
Aurora leaped to her feet. “No! Niing, put it from your mind. The Guardians have kept my kingdom safe for generations. I will never be the person to destroy them.” But even as she yelled that, she ached inside.
Why did ridding the kingdom of the Guardians sound so good? In theory, at least?
Unwilling to confront this problem now, just hours before Lazard’s send-off, she called to Keahr, “Come, let’s go back to the palazzo. I need to get ready to say goodbye to Lazard.”
Keahr stood. “I have picked out a dress. That blue-and-silver one I had made for you.”
Aurora stopped in her tracks. “It’s a send-off, not a ball.”
“Yes. And you need to look like a queen. A Ryferian queen would wear our national colors.”
Aurora bit her lip. Keahr made sense, but to appear dressed in anything but black would be most improper. She turned to Niing—the final word in decorum—for counsel.
“Wear the blue and silver. Let Artemis know that you are very much in the game for what is rightfully yours. Your subjects will laud you for it.”
Using Lazard’s send-off for political grandstanding? It didn’t sit well with her, but she trusted Keahr and Niing on this, and no doubt Lazard would also have agreed that it was wise to publicly stake her claim.
She nodded. “The blue-and-silver dress it will be.”
As Keahr followed her from the cavern, Aurora tried putting all of Niing’s nonsense about the Guardians from her mind.
Yet a voice niggled . . . what if Niing was right and a marriage trial that resulted in the removal of the Guardians was the only salvation for her people?
Chapter Eight
The procession to the canal, where Lazard’s gondola was tethered, moved slowly through the wide, Guardian-lined avenues of the capital, Jara.
Far too slowly for Aurora’s mood. With the sun beating down on her and the crowds of Able and Infirm jostling against her for a better view of the royal family—such as it was—she wished she could have held a private send-off for Lazard.
Sweat pooled behind her knee in her sidesaddle. She shifted her leg to let it trickle down. In this heat, it blistered where it touched.
Zandor, riding behind her on his stallion, didn’t look much happier. Blood streaked his clothing from the welts from his recent horse rides. Not to mention the loud sneezes that punctuated the air behind her.
Despite his own miseries, Zandor always protested when she was forced to ride through the crowds on her grumpy mare.
Not that his view mattered. She suppressed a derisive snort. Artemis, prancing next to her on a black charger, knew how much both Aurora and Zandor hated riding, but he still insisted that they ride to the canal.
Niing and Keahr were farther back in the procession.
The slow pace gave Aurora more than enough time to study each hideous Magical creature depicted in the steam-driven Guardians: Mermaids, dragons, giants, griffins, fairies, and unicorns gyrated, swayed, and twirled on their iron pedestals. It seemed every Magical creature that had once oppressed her countrymen was represented here.
Artemis tapped her arm overly hard with his riding crop. “Regardless of the outrageous dress you have chosen to wear to such a solemn occasion, your face is plain enough, Aurora. You don’t need to sour it even more with a frown.”
Before she could snap out a reply, a man lurched off the sidewalk into her mare. Even as the animal whinnied and bucked, Aurora noticed that the man’s eyelids were sunken and gummed closed. Blindness.
Zandor’s firm hand grabbed the mare’s bridle, instantly calming it.
Aurora shifted in the saddle, but her whole focus was on a child who darted after the blind man.
The little boy grabbed his hand and tugged him away from Aurora. “S-sorry, M-majesty,” the child stuttered, eyes raw with terror. No one ever called her Majesty; it had to be the result of her blue-and-silver dress. “Real sorry, Majesty. But he got away from me.”
A riding crop crashed down on the child’s brow. Artemis.
Spread-eagled, the little boy dropped to the cobbles.
Before she knew what she was doing, Aurora clambered off her horse and fell down next to him. Blood welled from a long cut on the boy’s forehead.
The blind man stumbled over and prodded. “Rinlin! Rinlin! Where are you?”
She grabbed his hand. “Father, he’s here. Your son?”
The man nodded. Hands flying with practiced skill that spoke of a lifetime of blindness, he felt his boy over. “He’s bleedin’.” Fury washed over him, reddening his face. Unseeing eyes looked up in Artemis’s general direction.
She looked up, too.
Contempt etched Artemis’s features. “Get back on your mount now, Aurora,” he hissed. “You are holding up the procession.”
Where had her horse gone? She scanned the procession until she saw it safe in Niing’s care. Zandor had his bow drawn with an arrow nocked, and another two in his fingers. He stood protectively over her and the pair.
Even though she knew she should obey—it was Lazard’s send-off after all, and the crowd was bunching behind them—she could not leave this child and his father to their fate. They would be crushed underfoot if they weren’t taken to safety. Still kneeling in the dirt, she glared at Artemis. “Call a couple of musketeers to help them.”
“Get back on y
our horse now.”
She folded her arms, glaring up at him. “There will be another low tide. I can stay here all day, if I have to.”
Artemis leaned down off his horse until he was eyeball to eyeball with her. “You will pay for this.”
She seethed, unable to stop her body from trembling. “I think I have already worked that out. Now, unless you want this stand-off to last all day, do as I say.”
Artemis waved two musketeers over to help the pair. While the soldiers fought their way through the crowd, her eyes roved over the people standing by.
Why had she never noticed before that the Infirm seemed more ragged, thinner, and more careworn than the Able? Maybe it was because, to avoid the sun, she came into town so infrequently. The Infirm at the palazzo may have been despised, but they weren’t poorer than their Able counterparts.
Determined to prove her quick assessment of life for the Infirm in the city wrong, she widened her focus. Everywhere she looked, the Infirm—and the Able who depended on them—stood out in their poverty. Even the pair carted to safety by the musketeers wore clothes that had seen far too many washes.
Despite Niing’s assurances that Ryferia had great potential wealth, this curse was sapping her kingdom in ways she had not imagined possible. Surely, for these people, life under the Magical would not have been much worse. Or much better.
The Guardians had been erected to keep her people safe. That isolation had bred disease. Disease had sown poverty.
Perhaps Niing was right, and it was time the kingdom of Ryferia opened its doors to the outside world again.
Zandor’s hand on her arm pulled her away from her depressing discovery and even more terrifying thoughts.
“Your horse, Aurora.” She didn’t argue as he helped her into the saddle. He whispered, “Not even I can keep you alive now. You have no choice but to announce the trials.”
She swallowed as she took the reins and set her horse into motion. As they moved toward the canal, she surreptitiously studied Artemis.
The malice in his eyes and the hard set of his jaw told her that Zandor was right. Regardless of whether she married or not, she would not survive challenging him.
She resisted the urge to wipe her sweaty, filthy hands on her soiled blue-and-silver dress.
Then burning fury seeped through her, hardening her trembling body. By the time she pulled her horse next to Artemis’s charger at the stand in the bell-tower piazza overlooking the canal, she was livid with rage.
Zandor reached up to help her dismount. Niing elbowed him out of the way.
Was her tutor going to lecture her on her impetuousness? Aurora swung out of her saddle, wriggled past both of them, and landed on the honey-gold cobbles. She had just started up the stairs to the podium when Niing grabbed her arm.
“Not so hasty, my princess,” he whispered. “I assume you have a plan for dealing with the situation you have created.” He gestured with a knobby finger to the bleachers, where the Intelligentsia and courtiers were claiming their seats.
They tittered like birds.
Hah! Some birds. Vultures at a kill, more like it.
Even the Infirm cast looks over their shoulders at her, but in their case, the expressions were wistful.
It flushed some of her anger. Letting her emotions rule her head would not help anyone today.
She whispered, “What was I supposed to do? Stand by like I approve of him hitting people?” She chose to make a point of being inclusive in her comment. Her people were divided enough already without her adding to it. If she were to be queen in deed and not just in dress, her first task would be to unite them around a common goal: finding a cure for the Infirmities destroying them all.
“No. And that is why you need to be queen.” Niing closed his eyes for a second as he drew in a breath. “Aurora, only you can do this for us. For all of us. Able and Infirm. I plead with you—announce the trials and the removal of the Guardians.”
What he said made sense, but how could he be so willing to sacrifice her happiness to achieve this? Did she not matter in all this? “Can you promise me a husband who loves me?”
Niing slowly shook his head.
Of course he couldn’t. She dragged her arm away from his and stalked up the stairs. It was Lazard’s send-off; she shouldn’t have to be dealing with this today.
Mourn for him in private. This is all for show. Back straight and regal, she took her seat beneath a banner of Ryferian flags.
It was next to Artemis’s big throne. He already presided.
They sat in hostile silence while the last of the Intelligentsia and the courtiers settled. Caps in hand, the rest of their subjects, not afforded the luxury of chairs, stood around the piazza.
The injustice of it made Aurora squirm.
In the canal Lazard’s gondola bobbed in the water. The slosh of it lapping against the canal walls was loud even above the shuffle of feet. Above it, a bell tower soared. A huge brass bell and a gong, powered by the restless sea, swung in the center of it. When the tide in the canal reached its highest point, the gong would strike the bell—and then the sea would begin its slow outward rush through the Guardians and chain mail planted off the shoreline, which stopped foreign ships reaching Ryferia.
In three hours, the tide would have receded far enough out of the blue-and-green-mosaic canal to wash Lazard into the sea. Great clockwork wheels would draw back the chain mail just enough for the gondola to drift out into the open ocean.
From her vantage point on the stand, she had a clear view of Lazard’s body. The priests had wrapped him in the blue Ryferian flag that bore the sacred emblems of iron, coal, and agrimony found in all the Guardians.
A hush settled on the crowd, broken only by the restless swoosh of the sea and the scrap of the polished black-and-silver wooden craft against the wharf.
The bell sounded.
Artemis stood as Aurora knew he would. He crossed to a silver podium, placed his hand on it, and stared out over the crowd. “My friends and subjects, it is in sadness that we gather today to cast our gracious King Lazard to the deep. Even now, the tide is turning, washing him and all he stood for away from us. Change is once again upon the kingdom.”
Slight as the shift in the tide was, Lazard’s gondola inched away from the wharf. Regardless of what Niing had advised and her own thoughts on the purpose of today’s spectacle, she could not stop sorrow twisting her face. With tears threatening, never before had she been so pleased to hear Artemis’s droning voice; it gave her something else to focus on.
“Given the precarious state of the succession, I know each of you are now troubled about your futures.”
Aurora sucked in a sharp breath.
Was he not going to say a few words about Lazard before he made the grab for the throne?
“You need not be. I have it all in hand.”
Apparently not.
From the expressions on the faces of the Intelligentsia, they were not surprised by his move. Disregarding them for the sycophants they were, she picked out the courtiers in the crowd.
More astonishment there. But not as much as she would have hoped.
Next she glanced at the untitled masses. Mouths gaped and people shifted from foot to foot. It was clear they wanted to hear a eulogy about their king.
Sweat prickled down Aurora’s back.
Artemis continued, “By law, Princess Aurora has one month to produce a consort, or she forfeits the crown. But do not fear—”
She could not bear to hear what else Artemis had to say on that subject.
She scrambled to her feet and shouted out, “King Lazard was cut off in his prime. But no matter how or why he died, he did so serving everyone one of us.
“Amongst the many good things he did for us, he also wanted to find a cure to the Infirmities that tax our people. There is not a person here who does not have family affected by this curse. Able or Infirm, it is impoverishing us all.”
She risked a glance at Artemis. His face was
puce. She didn’t have much time before he’d shout her down.
“I declare myself willing and able to fight this curse as your queen. And to that end, I declare that I will host a week-long trial in which the firstborn lords and princes of our neighboring realms will be invited to fight for the honor of my hand. I will marry the winner, and he will be declared my consort. We will combine our kingdoms’ wealth, and together, we will devote our lives to ridding our land of its afflictions.”
“Fine words, Princess Aurora.” Artemis’s voice cut through the silence that greeted her speech. “But how will you achieve that? Our Guardians are designed to protect us from contact from those very realms of which you speak. How will these ardent suitors of yours reach you?”
It wasn’t the ice in Artemis’s tone that sent a chill through Aurora; it was the susurrus of fear that rippled around the piazza. Anything that hinted at the possible return of magic through breaching the Guardians would terrify her subjects.
She inured herself against it. It was time the Guardians went and new life flowed into this dying land. She raised her hands up high. “Lord Artemis, you yourself have said that change is coming. Why do you fear it? Yes, my plan is new and different, to be sure, but look around you. Are you happy with what you see? Does the poverty that besets the majority of our people please you? Do you like that our subjects’ children are born with defects?”
Without waiting for a reply, she addressed the crowd. “My people, we all fear the return of magic because the Magical enslaved us. But are we not still enslaved? This time by our Infirmities? Have the Guardians truly protected us if we now rot from within? If we open the Guardians and allow in fresh life—fresh blood—we might turn the tide of this curse that afflicts as all.”
Artemis pumped his fist onto the podium. “And if we fail? If all we achieve is to allow magic to seep back into our streets, our homes, our families? What then, Princess Aurora? Do you and your consort have an answer to that, too?”