But beneath the thin, meticulous mustache curved a friendly smile, and his blue eyes were warm when he turned away from an ecstatic and tearful Helene to welcome Zenobia. “My wife has spoken of you so many times. I received with sincerest pleasure the news that you would be accompanying her.”
He did seem sincere. And he was all cordiality beneath that stern exterior. No wonder Helene was besotted.
Zenobia returned his smile. “I was grateful for the opportunity.”
He looked to Lieutenant Blanchett, who stood behind them, and seemed on the verge of greeting the officer when Helene took his hand and directed his attention to Ariq. “And this is Governor Jagungar of Krakentown. He helped to rescue us when the airship was attacked, and was kind enough to act as our escort the remainder of our journey.”
The ambassador’s face went utterly blank. Zenobia had seen him glance at Ariq when they’d first descended on the cargo lift—it was impossible not to notice a man of his size. But Ariq had insisted on carrying her heavy satchel of gold and letters, and Zenobia had let him, so she suspected that Auger had dismissed him as a porter. Now Auger had the expression of a man who had opened up a larder in search of a cake and found a growling tiger, instead.
He quickly recovered. “My lord Governor.” A deep bow accompanied his greeting. “You honor us. For all that you have done, my gratitude knows no bounds.”
Beaming, Helene said, “I have insisted that he stay with us as our guest, and the governor has accepted the invitation. I hope I have done right.”
“Yes! Of course.” Though beads of sweat had popped out on his brow, the pleasure that suffused the man’s stern features seemed genuine. “My lord Governor, you are most welcome. Please come in and we will see you settled.”
That was the last Zenobia saw of Ariq for some time. She was shown to a room on the second level and abandoned—which suited her perfectly well. Ariq’s arrival had put the household in a quietly elegant uproar, and poor Helene was trying to greet her husband, step into the role of ambassador’s wife, and play the hostess all at once. Better that Helene didn’t have to worry about her, too.
The chamber was lovely, in bright yellows and cream, with a separate sitting area and a curtained bed. She unpacked her trunk and typesetting machine, then realized that Ariq still had her glider contraption with her manuscript inside the pack. Unease struck her. Most of her secrets lay inside that satchel. But this was trust, wasn’t it? She’d trusted him enough to hand it over in the first place. She had to trust him now.
In any case, Ariq already knew she was Zenobia Fox. He would just discover a little earlier what Zenobia Fox did.
To occupy herself, she opened the balcony doors in her bedchamber and stepped into the late-afternoon sun. The front of the house looked out over the tree-lined street and the garden across the way, so she couldn’t see anything of the imperial city. The view was lovely, but everything that she wanted to look at was in another direction.
A tap sounded at her door. The maid, probably. She called for the woman to come in and went inside.
Ariq stood in her bedchamber.
Her heart thumped. Oh, his eyes. So dark and focused. The door was wide open, so nothing could happen, but the way he looked at her she might as well have been spread across her bed.
The way he looked at her, she wanted to be there.
As if it weighed nothing, he held out her glider contraption. Breath shallow and color high, she went to him. Had he always been so big? Of course he had. Broad shoulders heavy with muscle, arms like steel—and the way he carried himself, so that even if he’d been a foot shorter he would have still seemed like the tallest man in the room. She’d always noticed it. They’d even made a joke of it. But it didn’t feel funny now, when he seemed to take up every inch of her bedchamber.
“Thank you.” The heavy satchel dragged her arms down and hung from her hands, gently bumping into her knees. “Will I see you at dinner?”
He nodded, his gaze never leaving hers. “And now, too. Come walk with me.”
“Outside?” she asked hopefully, but didn’t really care. She’d go anywhere.
“Up the street. You can see over the wall at the top of the hill.”
Just as she’d wanted, while standing out on the balcony. He must have known. Only yesterday, she’d cried in his arms and told him she’d just wanted to walk down a street alone.
She wouldn’t be alone. But he was giving her part of that.
Heart full, she locked the pack in her trunk.
“The balcony doors, too,” he told her. “Keep them locked when you’re not out there.”
“Yes, Mara,” she said, because the mercenary would have told her the same thing, but did as he asked without argument. It was sensible. If another kidnapper came, those doors offered the easiest access to her bedchamber.
He smiled when she picked up her notebook. She didn’t know why it amused him so, but she didn’t intend to ask. He was one of the few people in her acquaintance who didn’t feel slighted when she briefly ignored him in favor of her notes, and she didn’t want to discover that he only tolerated it for some reason that amused him but would have humiliated her.
Like overhearing that she looked like an ugly ghost.
His face darkened. “What is it?”
“Nothing.” She tucked her notebook away. “Let us go.”
She would not let that overheard conversation hurt her anymore. She would let it go. How many times had she said something that she later regretted? So many. Ariq had been in private conversation with his brother and a friend. She cringed to think of what someone might have heard in her conversations with Archimedes over the years.
And she had to trust that Ariq’s interest in her was genuine.
That was not so difficult. He’d been blunt from the first, and there was something primal in his nature, matched with a deep integrity that was unsuited to subterfuge. Not that he wouldn’t hide his true emotions, or that he wasn’t capable of deceit—a commander in a rebellion, he must have deployed some strategies—but if Ariq wanted something from her, he wouldn’t resort to seductive lies to get it. He would pry it out with his bare hands.
It was just so very hard to trust. So very hard not to doubt.
But Zenobia supposed that was because of who she was, not because of anything he’d done.
Aside from agreeing with his brother that she was ugly.
That was nothing, though. Forgotten.
Then truly forgotten as they left through the embassy gates. An open-topped buggy passed, its engine puttering. All of its occupants wore masks, almost completely obscuring their faces. The driver’s was a horrid thing, black rubber with two giant lenses over his eyes and a long tube that covered the nose and mouth and hung to his chest like an elephant’s trunk. Seated behind him, a man and woman wore more finely wrought masks, with white faces painted so cleverly that it almost concealed the shape of the lenses and the tube filter. Not as horrible, yet more eerie, and when they turned their faces toward Zenobia and Ariq, it was like watching porcelain dolls drive past.
“Are those plague masks?” On their journey here, Helene had read a passage about them from her book, but Zenobia hadn’t thought they would still be in use. Almost a decade had passed since the Nipponese wall had first been opened to outsiders. Surely if any sickness were to sweep through the populations, it would have done so by now.
At her side, Ariq nodded. “They’re still required for visitors on either side. All foreigners have to wear them past the wall. Anyone who comes through from the imperial city has to wear them at all times while here, or wait through a quarantine before they can return.”
“But how can that be enforced? What if they went to a private house and took it off? How would anyone know?”
“There’s a saying in Nippon that ‘the Empress sees all.’” Ariq’s voice was grim. “No one likes to test it, because those who do often disappear.”
Like his mother? He’d once said the N
ipponese had executed her as a spy.
He didn’t say more now, except, “Come.”
He gripped her hand to lead her across the street. She hadn’t expected that. Color warmed her cheeks again, her heart raced, and she was sorry when he let go.
Beyond the embassy, she got a better look at the red wall. Unlike the roofs in the city, it hadn’t been painted crimson—instead the wall had been constructed of rust-colored bricks. Almost thirty feet high, with watchtowers every few hundred yards, the barrier began at the sea and snaked hundreds of miles south in a large semicircle, where it ended at the sea again. She and Ariq stopped to watch a queue at a gate, where the masked couple in the buggy waited for the guards to check their documents. One of the privileged access points, Ariq told her—where diplomats and nobles passed between the cities. Everyone else had to use the main gates closer to the harbor, where the wait was much longer and the restrictions tighter.
The hill wasn’t steep, just enough to make her calves and thighs burn a little. Presently they left the street, taking a path through a copse of trees, and abruptly the imperial city lay before her again, just as stunning as before.
Even more so. This time, the pink and orange of a sunset had begun to wash the towers in a deeper color. In the distance, the last of the sunlight sparkled across the surface of the turquoise water like gold coins. Between the canyons of buildings slipped airships of all sizes, and designs she’d never seen before. Some with balloons beneath wings, others floating along using sails with ribs like a lady’s fan, some that seemed to dangle from nothing until the shape of a giant jellyfish resolved against the darkening sky. It all looked unreal, like a painting of a fantasyland—and oddly familiar.
She’d never seen those coral towers before. She was certain of it. Yet she seemed to recognize the shape of the structures with their multiple levels and elegant, sloping roofs. Bridges stretched between the towers like gossamer strands.
Only yesterday, she’d hoped to cross a similar bridge.
“It’s like the Fox Den,” she realized. But instead of wood and brick, steel and coral. And so much larger.
“Yes. That’s why the twins chose it.”
But Ariq wasn’t even looking. He’d turned toward the Red City, which sprawled down the hill and toward the harbor. The warm glow of the sunset washed across the high planes of his cheeks, caught the rough shadow over his strong jaw. His expression seemed pensive, and melancholy, and Zenobia thought that his name suited him not just because of his grip or his tattoo or because he never let go, but also because he kept so much beneath the surface. And when he did show a bit of himself, like now, he could very easily crush her. Already he was squeezing her heart.
“What is it?”
“My mother’s house.”
Oh. She slipped her hand into his and loved how his fingers weaved through hers, clasping their palms together. “Which one?”
Not far down the hill, a cluster of homes stood, each with a garden. She couldn’t be certain which one he pointed to, but she supposed it didn’t matter.
“I’d assumed that she made her way into Nippon,” she said.
“There were no visitors then. No quarantines. No trade. Anyone could leave; but if they did, they couldn’t come back.” The melancholy had hardened. “They were also at war, so the soldiers had to leave—and their families had to decide whether to live behind the wall or never see them again.”
So the Red City had sprung up, she realized. Made of families waiting for their soldiers to come home. “It seems a rather bad reward for their service—that they couldn’t return across the wall.”
Ariq frowned. “If they fight for a hero’s welcome, they fight for the wrong reason.”
“Then it should be given to them.”
“Given? What a warrior earns is his. Rank. Honor. Anything given means nothing compared to that.”
“And you don’t think they’ve earned the right to return home?”
He softly squeezed her hand. “It is never about returning. It is about defending that home.”
Anyone who defended that home with his body and life had to deserve more. But she would not convince him. With a sigh, she said, “At least they can return now.”
“Yes.”
“But when your mother came?”
“Almost thirty years ago, there was only this city to return to—and many men looking for wives. She chose a naval commander.” Admiration filled his voice. “I don’t know how she decided, but she couldn’t have chosen better. He’s an admiral now—and at the time, he was involved in almost every major battle between the Khagan’s forces and theirs. She passed more intelligence to the rebellion than a dozen other spies.”
“Were you living with her?”
“No. After my father’s assassination, she left me to be trained with the other boys.”
His father. And his mother had been consort to the former Horde emperor.
Zenobia hadn’t put it together before. She could barely wrap her head around it now. She grasped for something that would fit better than Ariq might be an heir to the largest empire on Earth.
“It means nothing, except as a political tool.” He must have caught her astonishment and guessed the reason for it. “There were many consorts, and I’m one of many children. One of them is Khagan now.”
Then he’d been rebelling against his own brother—an old man. “How old were you when you began your training?”
“Five.” At her gasp, he shook his head. “It was no different than schooling. And I saw her more often than many other children saw their parents. My mother was an assertive woman. She directed my education. If she didn’t agree with anything that I was taught, she corrected me. She saw the turn the rebellion was taking—that it was no longer just about freeing people from the Khagan’s tyranny, and that the rebel leadership had begun to splinter over who would sit in his place and who would create the new laws. She didn’t want me to take that turn, too.”
And he hadn’t. She must have been a remarkable woman. “How did she manage to visit you?”
“She was careful. I was the only risk she took.”
But still a risk. “Is that why she was caught?”
“No,” he answered, and for a long moment she thought that was all he would say. The strident caw of seabirds filled the brief silence, and the deep lowing horn of ships passing in the harbor. “A message to her was intercepted. They shouldn’t have been able to trace her. There was a system of drops in place, and— It doesn’t matter. Her husband discovered her and oversaw her execution. My brother had no idea what she was, but they thought she’d influenced him. He was imprisoned. They tried to force him to talk.”
Zenobia didn’t need to ask how. The gravel in Ariq’s voice said it well enough. “And the husband, too? No—you said he was an admiral now. He wasn’t discredited? He’d given up secrets for years.”
Ariq gave a short and bitter laugh. “The Khagan had been fighting wars on two fronts—against Nippon and against the rebellion. And because of the information she’d sent, the rebellion knew where the Khagan’s troops had been moved to fight the Nipponese, where the weak spots were. Eventually the Khagan had to withdraw from the Nipponese front to contain our forces. My mother all but ended the war between the Golden Empire and Nippon. But the Nipponese said that her husband had known all along, and had fed her the information. They took what she’d accomplished and gave it to him. He did get a hero’s welcome.”
She looked across the wall at the orange, shimmering city. “He’s there now?”
“No. He still lives in that house. I think of killing him.”
He said it so easily. And he could kill him just as easily. He’d snapped a man in half as if he were a twig.
“But you don’t?”
“He is my brother’s father. Taka would be obligated to avenge him, though it would be brother against brother. True brothers, by blood and heart.” Ariq shook his head. “I would destroy us all—and there has been e
nough of that.”
Zenobia clung to his hand, not knowing how to reply. Only thinking: I could love this man.
Maybe she already did. What was the possibility of love? Meaningless. Anyone might be someone whom she could love. Any stranger, if she began to know him.
She had begun to know Ariq. Not everything about him. But what she did know, she loved.
So it was really: This might be a man who I could love fully, body and soul. This might be a man who can fill every part of my heart.
But she didn’t know if it was hope or terror that was filling her now.
Blindly, she stared out over the Red City. “Will you search for the marauders here?”
How long would it take? How long would he stay?
“They will know I’m here.” He glanced down at her. “My former general bought the flyers.”
His own people had attacked all of those airships? “Rebels? Why?”
His dark gaze searched her face before he looked away again. He didn’t answer her question, only said, “I will give them a short time to come to me.”
“Just as you gave me a short time?” Only until tonight.
“I would give you longer. But you’re not as safe when I don’t know why I’m protecting you.”
Zenobia knew that was true. She nodded, then stilled as his hand rose to cup her jaw.
“Not now. I will come to you later,” he said softly, and his thumb brushed the corner of her mouth. “How is your lip?”
Heart thundering, she whispered, “Better.”
So much better. Perfect. Ready to be kissed.
He nodded slowly, his gaze lingering on her mouth. “I know you aren’t in the habit of letting others make decisions for you. So when I visit you tonight, I will give you a choice.”
“What choice?” Her voice seemed thick, her body molten.
“You will tell me what you need to.” His thumb dragged across her bottom lip. “Or you can tell me in the morning when I wake next to you.”
The Kraken King Part IV: The Kraken King and the Inevitable Abduction Page 2