by K. B. Wagers
Jet was still staring at me, confusion etched into his weathered face. His dark gray eyes darted between me and Emmory. “Your Highness, I—”
“Highness, your empress-mother will object.”
“You will hold your tongue, Nalmari. I haven’t asked for your opinion.” I didn’t raise my voice but my Dve jumped like she’d been stung.
Okay, so most of the time ass chewings happened in private.
“You think on it,” I said with another smile at Jet. “My influence sucks at the moment, but that’ll change eventually. If it’s in my power, I’ll grant you whatever you ask. Now, go get some rest.” Winking at him, I gave him a little shove toward the door. “You say, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and get out of here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jet echoed, still looking utterly baffled as he left the room.
“Zin, out.” I waited for the door to close before I turned on Nal. “Do we have a problem?”
“No, Highness.”
“I welcome suggestions, Nal, but not if they are prefaced by ‘my empress-mother objects’ or ‘my empress-mother will be offended’ or any variation thereof. I don’t care about what my empress-mother would do. I am not her. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly, ma’am.”
“Get out of here.” I watched her go and muttered an unpleasant word under my breath. “Emmory, when you have a moment, I’d like the files on all my BodyGuards,” I said, and headed back to the window.
“May I ask why?”
“I’m not going to interfere with your choices.” I grinned at him and leaned against the sill. “But I think it’s only fair I know something about the people who are risking their lives for mine. You included.”
“I think I’ve misjudged you.”
“I’m not even going to ask what that means,” I replied with a laugh. “Let me get my boots, Emmory, and we can go to the beach.”
We avoided the throng of media at the front gate and took off in an aircar for the coast. Cas and Zin stood like the statues around Balhim Bay, silent sentinels against the chill winds that cut in off the water. I huddled deeper into my heavy coat, burying my nose in the pristine fur of a silver tigerfox as I walked along the shoreline.
I could see the palace from here. The bright blue domes and intricate windows peeked out from among the tall buildings of Krishan’s downtown. The winter sun flashed off the steel surfaces, bouncing around and making the gold accents on the palace walls gleam.
Our ancestors had carried the plans and designs of their forefathers to this strange planet, surrounding themselves with memories of India in every rounded archway and curved dome they constructed.
The architecture of our capital reflected our roots at the core and then became more and more modern as it splayed outward toward the sea.
Emmory stood at my side, unaffected by the cold, in nothing more than a heavier version of his uniform jacket.
“Nal’s right. Your empress-mother will not be happy about you keeping Jet.” The wind and the song of the dolphins grabbed at his words with greedy fingers, tearing them into shreds almost as fast as they left his mouth.
“She’ll deal. He saved my life, Emmory. I’m not going to can him just because I got hurt in the process. By that logic I should toss the lot of you.” I trusted them now, and I didn’t want to have to try and forge ahead without them.
I swore as I connected the dots. “That’s why I don’t recognize any of her Guards, isn’t it?” All the familiar faces around my mother were gone and it shocked me to realize how much I cared. I’d seen the fear in her eyes when she grabbed me. She was sick, isolated, and I had no clue how to help her.
“I suspect so, Highness. Bial replaced Ven after the accident.”
“Convenient.”
“He was on the short list, Highness.”
I made a face and didn’t look Emmory’s way. Every Ekam had a short list of replacements that could be trusted to take over if they were killed in the line of duty. Given how few people he trusted, I wondered if he had more than just one. “Doesn’t mean I have to trust him, too. Ven’s dead, Bial could be responsible.”
“Bial picked the three Guard replacements for those who’d died with Ven. Then either he or your empress-mother replaced her other Guards one after another. She is extremely ill.”
“She’s slipping into paranoia.” I tried hard to keep the tears out of my voice. Now wasn’t the time to remember the scared little girl whose mother had suddenly become empress and left her alone. “She said she couldn’t trust anyone around her.” I recounted her words.
“I know that paranoia can manifest at the end, Emmory, but she didn’t seem sick. If anything, it was the most lucid that I’ve seen her since I got back. It doesn’t make sense.”
“What are you thinking, ma’am?”
“I don’t know. Something is off.” I squinted out at the ocean. “I can’t put my finger on it.” Shaking my head in frustration, I crouched to examine the shimmering gray sand. I tugged off my glove and stuck my fingers into it. The cold burned, a thousand slivers of glass, but even that pain didn’t ground me and I couldn’t wrap my head around whatever was bothering me.
The desperate pleading in Mother’s voice during that brief moment of sanity had jammed a knife into my chest and twisted it sideways. She’d given up any hope of surviving, laying all her faith on me instead. The one gods-damned daughter who’d failed her time and again.
“That doesn’t give me a lot to go on.” Emmory crouched at my side, dark eyes still tracking the space around us, ever alert for any sign of a threat.
“I know. I’m sorry.” I looked up from the sand. Emmory’s face was expressionless, and I knew anything I told him would be calculated and analyzed with the speed and precision that only a Tracker could manage.
But there was something else, a flicker of concern in the depths of his eyes that gave me the strength to bare my soul to him. He was my last link to Portis—if I couldn’t be honest with him…
“I saw an old friend at the lamp lighting.” I swallowed. “Taz was in the crowd. I spotted him just before the shooters appeared.”
Trust was a double-edged sword here. Tazerion Benton Shivan had been my best friend and the man Mother wanted me to marry. Of course, if she’d suspected he was a member of the Upjas, I doubt she’d have been so excited about our marriage.
“I don’t know why he was there. He wasn’t one of the shooters.” The words tumbled out of my mouth as I watched suspicion cloud Emmory’s face.
“I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Neither do I, but he wasn’t pointing a gun at me, Emmory. And he seemed just as surprised as everyone else when the shooting started.” I shook the sand off my hands. “You think I’m stupid for defending a man I haven’t seen in twenty years.”
“I think,” Emmory replied, clearly choosing his words with care, “you are quick to discount the Upjas when you haven’t been home for a long time. There is no doubt of their goals, Highness. All their propaganda for the last year has been about removing your mother from power.”
“He helped me find Father’s killers; did Fenna mention that?” I looked away and changed the subject with the kind of ruthless disregard only a royal could get away with. “Mother and I had a decent relationship up until she was crowned. Even after, it was strained by the necessities of life at court, but we still managed to get along well.”
I wasn’t ready to talk about the Upjas with Emmory. I wasn’t ready to admit to him that my sister had been in love with one of their leaders, or that both of us had been involved with the rebels before I ran.
“When Father died… things got bad. I was”—I dragged in a breath—“I was unmanageable.”
“I remember the day we lost him, and I’ve seen the footage. You reacted with astonishing calm, Highness.”
“He made me leave him. I should have stayed until the end.” The confession was hoarse and I blinked back tears. “I idolized him. It drove me crazy the way people
treated him. Even after everything he’d done, he was still nothing more than the empress’s husband.” I couldn’t believe the bitterness in my voice. “He was a hero. A genius. We would have beaten the Saxons if he hadn’t—” The words lodged themselves in my throat. I surged to my feet, needing to be on the move, and started down the beach with my skirts held in my hands.
“I wanted to follow in his footsteps. I wanted to join the Fleet. Join ITS. Anything to get me out of the damn palace and the bullshit restrictions that were strangling me. All the politics and lies. But Mother didn’t want me in the military. She wanted me married and out of her hair.”
“Highness, can you see it from your empress-mother’s position? She’d just lost her husband. Perhaps she wouldn’t send you into the war because she couldn’t risk losing you, too.”
Whirling on him, I threw my arms out wide in an extravagant gesture. “She lost me anyway! I thought if I hunted down the bastards who killed him, she’d at least let me live my life, but it wasn’t good enough. Nothing I ever did was good enough.”
I dropped my arms, my anger vanishing so abruptly my knees almost gave out. I locked them, smiling sadly at Emmory. “Did you know Mother never said ‘I’m sorry’? From the moment Daddy died, she never said those words again,” I murmured. “Until today. I can’t help her. I can’t save her. I can’t fix this. I’ve failed her again.”
“Not your empress-mother, no. But you can help your people, ma’am. You can fix what’s wrong here. Or at least get things started.”
“She’s going to get worse, Emmory.”
“Most likely.”
“I need some allies in court. Whom do you trust?”
He shook his head with a slight smile. “I don’t trust anyone except Zin.”
I gave him my best hurt look. “You still don’t trust me?”
His smile grew and he dipped his head. “Maybe just a little, ma’am.”
It was just the thing I needed to shake me out of my misery. “That’s something, I guess.” The laughter snuck up on me, spilling out of my mouth and into the freezing air. I bumped him with my shoulder, still giggling, and was rewarded with a little answering chuckle from my BodyGuard.
“Well, you’re kind of stuck with me, seeing as how I’m the heir and all,” I said once my laughter died out. Emmory didn’t say anything to that declaration and I felt oddly vulnerable for a moment.
“I need your help, Emmory, especially if Mother is going to keep me out of the briefings. I need your help navigating this mess. You’ve been around court more than I have. Everything I know I learned from gunrunners and criminals…” I trailed off, uncertain how to continue.
“It’s not true, ma’am. You learned plenty before you left and…” Emmory shrugged. “I’d deny it in public, but you weren’t far off the mark when you said there wasn’t much of a difference between a princess and a gunrunner.”
“Yes, but I was trying to persuade you to give me a gun at the time. I’m not sure I really meant it.”
“Lying, manipulation to get what you want; see, you’re already more than prepared for everything this planet can throw at you.”
“If I didn’t need your help here, I’d suffocate you in the sand.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I tugged my gloves back on. “I guess we’re stuck with each other then. I’m freezing. Let’s get back to the palace.”
15
The sun rose over the horizon as I sat curled up on one of the chairs in my room, blessedly alone for the first time in what felt like forever. I’d followed Mother’s edict about not leaving my room since the flame ceremony, but it hadn’t prevented me from having an endless parade of visitors to my room for the past four days. Admiral Hassan had been by to see me twice and Matriarch Desai had caught me up on the council meetings I was barred from. There had been a dozen other meetings with various people in the palace and two short interviews with carefully selected members of the media.
The remains of my breakfast were on the coffee table, and a fresh cup of blue chai threw steam up into the air. The fire Stasia had thoughtfully built up before she left roared in the grate.
I wrapped my hands around the mug, inhaling the sharp spice until it brought tears to my eyes. The sweet scent of clove reminded me of better days; of trips to the far North, where there were snowdrifts deep enough to bury myself in, of long days playing with my sisters in the snow and coming back inside to warm ourselves by the fire.
I put my cup down on the delicate glass table to my right, noting in a kind of detached amusement that my hand was shaking. Fiendishly difficult didn’t even begin to describe this situation. Death trap might be more accurate in the long run, and I still had no way to get free of it.
The burst of clarity in my room last week and my mother’s desperate plea continued to haunt me. I’d pored over Dr. Satir’s reports, trying to find something that would explain my nagging doubt. I didn’t have a reason for it, which was the messed-up part.
Between my conversations with Clara and the admiral, plus all the information Alba was feeding me on a daily basis, it was clear the empire was in trouble. There’d been riots and unrest before my sisters’ deaths, and they had only gotten worse since then. Things seemed to have died down somewhat with my arrival and the approaching holiday. It was almost as if the whole empire was holding its breath and waiting to see what I would do.
My standoff with Mother over the baby wasn’t helping matters. Despite Clara’s best attempts, she’d continued to insist Ganda be the official liaison with the heads of the three councils. Until we got this sorted out, I couldn’t meet formally with the Matriarch Council and receive their confirmation of my position. This meant that even though my public stock had risen after the assassination attempt, within the palace I had less power than Mother’s cats.
They got to go out whenever they felt like it.
Unless I fixed that, consolidating my position was going to prove difficult. Of course, I could just walk into a meeting and see what happened, but I wasn’t certain going head-to-head with Mother was the wisest idea. I had learned a thing or two about diplomacy in the intervening years, no matter what anyone thought.
My hiss of frustration echoed over the crackling fire, and I shoved myself to my feet to pace. I wasn’t going to challenge Mother outright for the throne; things were bad enough without adding that to the mix. We had to wait for her to come around to the idea of abdicating again.
But I wasn’t going to get married either. I’d loved Portis too much, and even though we’d never gotten married, I couldn’t just up and marry a total stranger. The very idea of it made me ill. I rubbed the heel of my hand over my heart.
Because that was the crux of the issue, I realized. I didn’t want to forget Portis. I didn’t want to marry someone else and have their baby like a gods-damned holy cow.
Even if I could.
The idea sprang into my head, awful and perfect all at once. I pressed a hand to my stomach, sinking to the ground with a silent gasping apology to a dead man for using his love as an excuse.
I didn’t stay down long. One of my BodyGuards would notice the spike in my readings and come to investigate. It was better to move, better to be on the offensive. Grabbing my gold skirts in my hands, I scrambled to my feet and marched out the door.
“Let’s go, boys. I need to speak with Mother.”
Zin was already on his feet, had probably been on his way to check on me, but even he had trouble keeping up as I headed out of my rooms and up the hall to Mother’s.
I dropped into a curtsy in front of the door Guards. “Princess Hailimi requesting an audience with Her Majesty.”
There was a beat and then another as requests were issued and orders shot back over the smati comm lines.
“Granted, Your Highness. Please go in.”
I nodded my thanks, sure that this was going to be the subject of a hell of a lot of gossip in the thirty seconds it took me to get to the door of Mother’s bedr
oom.
Bial stood just outside, a frown marring his handsome face. “Highness?”
“I need to speak to my mother about the wedding,” I said. “How is she?”
Zin didn’t quite suck in a breath, but I saw him stiffen. Bial raised an eyebrow, opened the door, and started to precede me through.
“Alone, please, Bial.” I didn’t have to force my awkward smile. “It’s family business.”
“Of course, Highness.”
I was glad only my BodyGuards had access to my vitals so Bial couldn’t see how hard my heart was hammering as I passed by him and pushed the door shut behind me.
“What is it, Hailimi?” Mother was still in her dressing gown, her skin paper thin in the morning light.
“Mama?” It was with cold deliberation that the little girl quaver wafted through the room. I was counting on Mother’s instability to smooth the way for my lies.
Her haughty look melted and I felt doubly damned for the deception when she smiled. Swallowing back the guilt and my pride, I dropped to my knees at her feet. The tears that leaked out were real and my mother tilted her head to the side with a frown.
“Child, what is it?”
“Mama, I can’t get married yet,” I whispered, continuing in a rush when her face started to harden. “I can’t, because I was already married—to Portis.”
Mother blinked. “Oh, Hailimi, you didn’t.”
“I didn’t know who he was!” I dropped my voice with a wince. “We were in love, Mama. I just—”
“You have been mourning. You went to temple. You offered prayers for your sisters.” There was a dangerous flash of fire in Mother’s black eyes and the cup in her hand rattled oddly as she set it down in its saucer. “All the while sullied with a marriage to a commoner!”
I scrambled to keep things on a sympathetic level. “I know. But I didn’t think you’d want anyone to know so I had to play along. I was afraid it would embarrass the family.” I wrapped both my hands around hers. “That’s why I can’t get married, Mama. Why I have to wait to have a child. You know it wouldn’t—”