by K. B. Wagers
“Poison!” Emmory grabbed the young man’s head, trying to force his mouth back open, but it was too late.
My would-be assassin was convulsing against the tiles, his face gray, and his eyes rolled back in his head. His heels drummed a strange pattern before stilling, leaving me with my heart pounding in my throat and the hollow echo of his words ringing in my head.
Emmory swore, glancing up as other Guards pounded down the hallway toward us. The pair at Mother’s door hadn’t moved; it was Imperial protocol in case the attack on me had been a feint and the real attack was directed at the empress.
Blond Cas and another man with green eyes and sharp cheekbones—who my smati identified as Adail—skidded to a halt at my side. The moment they arrived, Nal moved to Emmory, looking down at the young man on the floor in disgust.
“Blasted Upjas,” she muttered.
“Maybe,” Emmory said and rolled his shoulders.
“Highness, are you hurt?” Zin’s hands were warm on my arms, the textured material of his gloves catching on the long sleeves of my dress. “Look at me,” he urged in a low voice. “Did he cut you?”
“I’m fine,” I replied, forcing out a smile as Emmory approached. “Survived the first assassination attempt. I wonder what the bookies’ odds were for that.”
This time Zin couldn’t stop his laughter. And even Nal smiled, though she looked more confused than anything. Emmory closed his eyes briefly, his throat working as he swallowed back his reply. When he opened them again, the expressionless mask was back into place, but not before I caught the spark of relieved humor in those chocolate-and-silver depths.
“Take the princess back to her rooms, Zin,” he said. “Cas, you and Adail guard the outside door until Nal and I return.” Both men saluted, and Emmory turned back to me. “Highness—”
I forced another smile past the hammering of my heart. “Don’t worry, Emmory, I’m not going to argue with you on this one.” I dipped my head at him, and turned for my rooms.
“Do not ever do that again.”
I didn’t turn from the open window at the sound of Emmory’s voice, but continued to watch the dolphins play in the azure waters of the Lakshitani Sea. The gorgeous creatures thrust themselves high into the air over the water’s surface, twisting and spinning in a dramatic acrobatic display.
Bearing the same name as Earth dolphins, and much of the same sleek, pointed nose physiology, Indrana’s dolphins were more intelligent than their cousins across the universe. Their coloring was a darker gray, more like gunmetal, with white shimmering markings that were unique to each dolphin. They could also survive the freezing temperatures of the sea in this area of Indrana.
“I was wrong back there. Technically that was the second attempt on my life.”
“Highness.” The bite of annoyance in Emmory’s voice dragged me away from my contemplation of the dolphins.
“Of course,” I said, just to throw him off balance. “You’re absolutely right.”
“You are no longer a gunrunner,” he replied.
“Princess, gunrunner—let’s be honest—they’re two sides of the same coin. For twenty years I was, Emmy,” I continued before he could interrupt me. “It was instinct. I’m sorry. I promise that I’ll work on it.” I offered up a blinding smile, but he didn’t react. “Wouldn’t you rather guard someone who knows how to defend herself? I’d think that would be preferable to a simpering girl cowering in the corner.”
“It isn’t your job, Highness. It’s mine.”
“I was joking—sort of. Did they take out your funny bone when you joined the Trackers?”
“Just temporarily. I got it back after I passed basic.”
I looked back out the window with a choked laugh. “Convenient that I was just attacked by a member of the Upjas.”
“They are looking to do away with the Throne, Highness. It’s not much of a stretch.” He braced his hands on the windowsill. “May I ask why you pushed Zin into Nal?”
“She was about to shoot you in the back.” I answered Emmory’s raised eyebrow with a lifted shoulder. “That’s what it looked like. I’m sure there would have been a lot of discussion about split-second decisions and horrible accidents. I didn’t feel like dealing with it. Plus, you haven’t annoyed me yet today.” I tried to sound flippant, but I wasn’t sure I fooled him. The truth of the matter was the thought of losing Emmory put a lead weight into my stomach. I was stuck here. No backup, no intel. Cire had said to trust him, that he could keep me alive and that was something I was seriously interested in.
“I don’t trust her, Emmy.” I pushed away from the window, pacing the length of my sitting room. The movement startled Cas, who was standing by the inside of the door, but I waved a hand at him when he snapped to attention. I wasn’t sure if Emmory trusted my baby-faced Guard, but my instincts didn’t scream warning bells at me, so I figured he was safe for now.
“Are we clear?” I asked Emmory, and to his credit it took him a fraction of a second to realize what I meant.
“Yes, Highness. We swept the suite last night.” Emmory glanced over my shoulder and dismissed Cas with a jerk of his head.
“Don’t trust him?”
Lifting a shoulder in a shrug, Emmory crossed the room and locked the door. “I picked him, but putting a team like this together should take months, not minutes. I trust Zin, that’s it.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“With pardon, Highness. I can’t figure you out. Everything I read about you said you’d keep your word, but I get the feeling you’re only here to find out who killed your sisters, and once that’s done, you’ll run.”
I blinked at the brutally honest reply and at the fact that there was no judgment on Emmory’s face. It stung more than it should have that he doubted my honor and that once again he’d hit the mark about my intentions. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I stood there for a few seconds looking like an idiot with my mouth hanging open.
“So let me get this straight. You don’t trust me to keep my word, but you want me to trust you?” I crossed my arms over my chest.
He rolled his shoulders, looking uncomfortable. “I could say the same about you, Highness.”
“Touché.”
We stared at each other, stuck at an impasse as the heartbeats ticked away. There wasn’t any point in sorting through my options. What it boiled down to was this: I either trusted him or not.
He gave his life for the empire, Hail, and you gave your word.
I looked at the star on Emmory’s cheek. The man had already lost a brother. He’d given his life, dying in whatever incident had garnered him that damn star, coming back to life through some miracle and sheer stubbornness; and then he’d gotten on his knees and agreed to do it again.
“Thank you for last night.” The words sounded forced, stupid. I cleared my throat and tried again. “It meant a lot to me that you felt like the oath was important enough to take.”
“I meant it, Highness. I don’t say things like that lightly.”
“I guessed as much.” I touched a hand to my own cheek. “That star says it all.”
The tension in his shoulders dropped away and a ghost of a smile graced his mouth. Emmory nodded once. I exhaled, amused to note that my hands, which had not shaken with the attempted assassination, were now trembling. “How bad are things?”
“You mean for us, Highness? Or the empire as a whole?”
I stopped my pacing and sat on the couch. “Let’s start with us. After we get a handle on that, we’ll worry about the empire. How did you know Cire? How did you get involved in all this?”
Emmory rested his hands on the ornate back of the couch opposite me, fingers digging into the pale stripped fabric. “Ven brought a number of us in on the situation four months ago when the empress started acting strange. After his death, your sister asked me to bring you home. She felt it would be necessary to have you at her side.”
“It didn’t quite work out that way, did it?”
I muttered bitterly, biting my lip to hold back the tears. I was going to have to come to terms with the fact that I’d be running into reminders of my sisters every time I turned around. Crying when it happened wasn’t going to serve anyone, least of all me.
“No, Highness.”
“And no one told you the real reason I left home.”
“The real reason?”
“I didn’t run away, Emmory. I may have stayed away for personal reasons, but I left because I was following my father’s killer.”
“Highness, they caught your father’s killers.” He frowned at me.
“I caught my father’s killers, Tracker. One of them anyway. There was a third man. A man I saw the day my—” Bugger me, but it was still hard to say out loud after all this time. “I saw him in the crowd. Jagjit admitted that he and Wayla were working with a third person, but he couldn’t give us more than a name—Wilson.”
“Who knew about this, your empress-mother?”
I shook my head. “She knew about my investigation after the fact, and if Ven told her the rest, it’s lost to her dementia because she didn’t say a word about it in there. Ofa and Tefiz were involved, and the head of the GIS—Fenna Britlen. I don’t know how much it matters.”
“It matters, Highness.”
“I lost the trail about sixteen months out. Whoever he was, he vanished like he went into a black hole. I decided not to come home, but I never stopped looking for him. I have the files, I could send them to you.”
“Let me talk with the GIS and we’ll discuss it more later.”
“Right.” I dragged the word out as I got to my feet. “I need to get up to speed. I’ve been gone for a long time.” I blew out a breath and forced a smile as I looked toward the windows.
The sun was shining, lighting up the whitecaps and tossing rainbows into the air. But I knew from experience the air was probably frigid. It was Paush, and we were in the depths of winter. Just three weeks away from Pratimas, the holy light festival.
Just three weeks away from a wedding to a total stranger—or worse, going through the utterly useless motions of trying to have a child.
Oh, bugger me.
Mother’s insistence that I marry was pretty much a moot point, while her declaration about being saddled with a useless daughter was the truth.
I could have sex until our sun died out, but there weren’t going to be any more little Bristols running around this palace. That hope had died with Atmikha.
Seven Indranan years ago, on one of the wilder outlying worlds at the edge of known space, we had a deal go horribly wrong. We were ambushed by the gang who’d contracted us for a load of neoprene explosive. They’d decided it would be easier to liberate it from us prior to delivery rather than paying the fee. Our navigator, Jexen, was killed, and I took an old-fashioned bullet to the gut. Which, ironically, saved my life while ruining any chances of saving the empire.
Thanks to the royal gen-manip done before my birth, I hadn’t died right there in the dirt of that shitty little world, but it had been touch and go for a month and more than a year before I was well enough to track down that gang one member at a time and burn them to the ground.
None of it changed the outcome. According to the doc, the bullet had been designed to fragment and the main piece destroyed one ovary while the shrapnel damaged the other beyond repair, killing any hope I had of bearing children. Even if we’d been able to find a Farian, they couldn’t replace dead tissue.
Mother was righter than she knew when she’d said she was stuck with me and that hope had died with my sisters.
I was barren.
It was a secret that could bring down the empire. The only people who’d known it were all dead, but I didn’t know if Portis had passed on the information. The fact that Emmory came to get me at all suggested Portis hadn’t breathed a word of it.
“What are your intentions, Ekam?”
“Highness?”
“I meant what I said. I’m not getting married and I’m not a damn breeder.” I tried to sound casual, but the moment hung on the tip of a knife. If Emmory backed my mother’s demands…
“Of course you’re not.” There was no derision in his voice. Emmory shrugged and a second flicker of a smile poked through his stone expression. “I can see the need for an heir, Highness, in the long run. But things are volatile right now, and from a security standpoint, I’m not in favor of putting a stranger in your bed.”
“I’m pretty much never in favor of that, unless I’ve had too much to drink.”
Emmory winced and I snorted a little laugh.
“As entertaining as it is to have this extremely awkward conversation with you,” I continued, “let’s move on to something important. Do I have some chamberlain candidates to interview?” The list from Clara had been waiting for me when I woke up this morning and I’d passed it on to Emmory before even getting out of bed.
“Yes, Highness. I didn’t care for two of the suggestions from Matriarch Desai, so unless you have objections, we won’t bother with them. I passed the other names on to General Saito and she sent me files a half hour ago.”
“That’s fine. We’re in a time crunch here anyway.” I needed someone to handle my schedule; there wasn’t any way I could do it on my own. General Saito was Emmory’s former commander with the Trackers, and if I couldn’t trust her information on these people, I was better off putting a gun in my mouth and pulling the trigger.
Accepting the amended list he sent me, I moved away from the window and settled onto the couch. “Will you have Stasia bring me something to drink? And who on this list is in the palace?”
“Louis Winston, Alba Tanaka, and Hanna Obedai. The other four on the list we could vid-conference with if you wish.”
“Have those three come here. We’ll start there. The questions I ask might seem strange, Emmory, but just trust me on this.”
“Of course, Highness.”
Two hours later I had a headache and a new chamberlain.
Alba Tanaka was a twenty-three-year-old who’d formerly been in Matriarch Desai’s employ as the assistant to Clara’s household coordinator. She’d answered my rapid-fire questions in a calm, even tone and hadn’t seemed the least bit intimidated by me. Which was more than I could say for the other two interviewees. I didn’t need a chamberlain who was terrified of me. I needed someone who could manage my schedule and—quite frankly—me should the need arise.
The best part had been right toward the end of the interview, and clinched the job for her.
I rubbed a hand against my temple. “So, Alba, do you think that this is a position that will suit you?”
“I’m sorry, Highness. If I could beg your pardon for just a moment?” Alba gave a quick bob of her head. “Ekam Tresk. Has someone seen to lunch for the princess? It’s been quite a while since breakfast and her headache is probably from hunger.”
I blinked at her, laughed, and waved a hand at Emmory. “She’s right, I’m starving.”
“I’ll have something brought right away, Highness,” he said.
“Some more blue chai for you would be a good idea in the meantime.” She got easily out of her seat and took my cup, handing it off to Stasia with a smile.
“Do you want the job?” I asked with an eyebrow. “Because you just got it.”
Alba’s smile spread and she bowed so low her straight black hair touched the ground. “Thank you, Highness. Thank you.”
“Go take care of what you need to. Zin, go with her and help her get settled.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Zin bowed and followed Alba from the room.
“Do you trust her?”
Emmory shrugged a shoulder. “Background was totally clean. She’d already passed all the basic requirements to be in the matriarch’s employment anyway, so it was a relatively easy process.”
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“She doesn’t set off any of my alarms, Highness. I’d be careful for a while until I get word back from some of my c
ontacts.”
My food arrived shortly, and after Emmory murmured something about sorting out shift issues with the BodyGuards, I was left alone to eat.
Nal stood by the door with her hands clasped behind her back. I studied her out of the corner of my eye as I ate. She wore the same mask Emmory had perfected, seemingly staring into empty space, but I knew if I moved in her direction, she’d focus her attention on me in an instant.
“Where are you from, Nal?”
“I grew up on Deepai, Highness.”
Deepai was the largest island in the Kormekain chain, a long string of islands near the equator. “I remember a visit there when I was about eight, I think.”
“My sisters spoke of it, Highness. I was just a baby.”
“How many sisters?”
“I had five, Highness.” Nal’s eyes darkened with pain and I knew what her next words were going to be even before she said them. “They were all lost to the war.”
“Uie Maa,” I murmured with a sigh. “I am terribly sorry.”
“It was long ago, Highness.”
I returned to my food, appetite lost. So much for an attempt to connect with my Dve. Had I been imagining that incident in the hallway? Maybe Nal had only been concerned for my safety and had the gun out as a precaution in case Emmory couldn’t subdue my attacker.
No. I tossed my fork onto my plate in annoyance. I knew what I’d witnessed. Twenty years I’d survived in the underbelly of the universe because of my gut. I wasn’t going to start second-guessing it now just because I was in a world covered in a thin veneer of civility.
“Is everything all right, Your Highness?” Nal hadn’t moved, but she was watching me.
“Fine, thank you. I’m finished.” I pushed away from the table.
“I’ll have someone clear it away.”
“I’m going to lie down for a bit. Please let Alba know I’d like to see her after she gets settled.” I didn’t wait for Nal’s reply and headed for the bedroom.
10
Alba, bless her, let me sleep for almost two hours before she knocked tentatively on my bedroom door. “Your Highness?”