by Lucy Tempest
And she loved it because it was. She could easily be a storybook princess if she wanted, but she was against taking the easy way out, which had chased her through multiple eliminations.
Not that she’d let being a princess be easy. She’d reinvent what it meant to be one. And as Cyrus had said he wanted a princess he could entrust his kingdom to, no king would fear leaving his to Cora. Apart from the eclectic things she knew, from how lands were run to how people behaved, she would scare any ambitious ministers or enemies into groveling submission and personally swing the axe at traitors’ executions.
I shuddered at the thought. “You know, until you, I didn’t know anyone can be so against becoming a princess.”
As I said that, I thought of Cyrus’s mother and his aunts and their apparently unhappy marriages. As for what Fairuza had said in the mountain, that she had nothing to look forward to, that her entire life hinged upon a prince marrying her… It made me reconsider my escapist fantasy, where I was in Fairuza’s place with her lineage, family, dresses and confidence. It no longer sounded fantastic.
Cora set her bare cob down, took another. “A born princess? Maybe. A princess consort? Certainly not.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Power.” She chomped another mouthful. “Precisely power over your own life.”
“How so?”
“If you were born into a royal family, you have a huge advantage over any clueless girl who marries into your family. You have power of your own stemming from your birthright not from your marriage, and you know the place, people, culture and family and how to deal with them all. It’s why royals marry their relatives so often. It makes things easier when both sides know what to expect.”
Though in Marzeya’s house my assumptions about Cyrus’s mother and aunt had swung from branch to branch up a tree of theories, Cora now made me consider the difference between them.
As a king’s daughter, had Loujaïne have power over Jumana, a mere princess consort? Had she abused that power? If so, what would she do to the girl Cyrus picked, if she wasn’t her choice?
Not wanting to dwell on that, I asked, “How do you know so much about this?”
“My aunt Junia married a merchant-prince in one of Campania’s oligarchies.”
I leaned in, thinking back to Lord Dufreyne, the only merchant-prince I knew, the one whose house I’d robbed the day Nariman found me. “And?”
“And she was stupid to do so,” Cora said venomously. “She didn’t even know him! He saw her at a wedding and proposed to her on the spot. She agreed and left with him to his city. Now not a month goes by without her running back, and her visits are depressing. She complains all the time about how much she hates him, how his mistress, who is from his kingdom, and their bastards get better treatment than her and my cousins and how she can’t stand living in the city.”
That was not helping my conflicted feelings. In fact, it tangled them up even more.
I changed the subject. “What will you do when you go home?”
“What I’ve been doing till now. Work. I have chores with the others, activities with my friends, festivals to set up, then I’ll see if I can find a man who has no issue being outranked by me so I can do what all the women in my line have done.”
“Which is?”
“Have a girl or two and later succeed my mother as Mistress of the Granary.”
I regarded her, trying to picture her future. “That’s what you want to do?”
“It’s what I was born for, brought up in and trained to do.”
“Is that any different than the girls whose expectations are set for them from birth, who came here to marry…him?”
Her scrunched-up expression plainly said, ‘Are you stupid?’
Then she put it into words, emphasizing each one. “Of course, it’s different. I’ll be in charge of a place I know, with people I know, who will answer to me and respect me. Whereas the alternative is my family getting rid of me and benefitting from marrying me off to a stranger in a foreign land where I have no respect, power or experience. Where I’ll have to learn everything from scratch and forever remain an outsider. There’s just no comparison.” She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “I don’t want to be trapped in a strange place, with people I don’t know, who don’t care about me, and will be in control of me because they’ve been there longer. And that’s why I always wanted to leave.”
“Then why didn’t you take Loujaïne’s offer to leave at the start?”
“Because I’m really here on business on behalf of my region,” she said. “I’ll be selling them my exports and buying theirs for a good price later. So I wanted them to disqualify me, and owe me for it. I couldn’t say I quit and burn bridges on my way out.”
“You swung a ghoul head at Loujaïne.”
She snorted a laugh, waving off my point. “What’s she going to do about it? Tell everyone in the kingdom and beyond that she knowingly sent us into a volatile area rife with witches and that two of her charges were almost ripped apart by monsters because of it?”
I shuddered, gulping the last mouthful of coffee. “How are you so sure of everything? How do you not worry about things going wrong?”
“I’m not, and I do.”
“You sure seem unsurprised by every situation.”
“That’s my face.” She stared at me with a grim expression.
For a moment, I thought I’d upset her, what only Fairuza had managed so far.
Then she cracked a wry smile. “Joking. Nothing here surprises me because I’ve seen it before or heard many similar accounts, all the same throughout history with the same results. And it’s not the first or even twelfth time a noble threatened me. The novelty wore off by the time I understood how much influence most actually hold.”
“Ever been threatened by a witch or magical creature though? You held your ground quite well yesterday.”
“The Granary is full of magical oddities and people, and both ends of Campania is rife with magic. I’ve travelled around all of them since I could toddle and asked as many questions as I could.” She paused to pick kernel coats out of her teeth with her fingernails. “As for nobles, mages, and monsters, I’ve learned about which I’ll likely deal with in my life and how to exploit their flaws and limits.”
“So, you’ve dealt with ghouls before?”
“Not exactly. But lamiae aren’t too different, more reptilian but still toothy and eyeless and dumb. They have a habit of stealing our goats and draining them of blood when they can’t find children to eat.” She talked as if about a common pest rather than a man-eating monster. “Usually I behead them with shovels, but when worse comes to worst, you can smother or strangle them.”
“You’re not afraid they’d bite your arm off?”
Deadly serious, her green eyes narrowed with contempt. “The last one that tried to do that got my entire arm shoved down its throat. It choked before it could chomp it off.”
I couldn’t help gaping at her, awe and disbelief swirling in my head like smoke on still water. No matter how experienced and confident she was, it didn’t seem like she experienced fear the same way I did.
I’d thought Fairuza was inferior to me as a self-reliant person. But Cora was the true superior being among us.
“What are you?” left my mouth before I could hold my tongue.
“A homesick farmer who has no care to spare, especially for the idle rich.”
My mouth curled with fondness. “But if it’s about establishing business relationships, did it have to be you? Aren’t there other daughters of merchant-princes and oligarchs that could have represented Lower Campania?”
“My mother is the closest thing to a queen in our region. If I said no and sent someone else’s daughter in my place we could have lost allies or potential trade deals.” Cora considered a thought then snorted humorously. “Imagine if we sent my cousin Chloë!”
“Chloë is your Aunt Junia’s daughter, right? Or was that Cassia?
”
She raised her brows at me, pleased. “Nice to know you listen to everything I say. But it’s Chloë. She’s what nobles would call third-in-line for the title of Mistress of the Granary.” When I just stared at her, she huffed. “You know what a line of succession is, right?”
“Sort of?” I sounded as uncertain as I was.
“In a family with hereditary titles, if one heir dies, they have an ordered line of relatives that should follow as new leader. Sometimes it gets complicated, if there are no direct relatives like the Shamash family.”
My attention locked onto her words. “What do you mean?”
“I mean the king has only one son and no brothers, so, if something happens to Cyrus before he has children, there are too many relatives who could qualify as his next in line, and you’ll have a divided kingdom on your hands. That’s how the Avestan Empire fell.”
Before I could process this piece of momentous information, she gave me an expectant look with brows raised, a handless nudge. “You?”
All of the sudden, I found the inside of my empty cup interesting. I stared into it, unfocused, mulling over all that I heard from her now, from Fairuza yesterday, and from Nariman at the beginning of the week.
“Ada.”
“You already know,” I mumbled.
“I know you’re not who you say you are, not from where you claim to be and barely know what you’re doing.” She scrutinized me for a moment, an intrigued smirk pulling at her lips. “You’re a spy, aren’t you?”
I jolted, finding “spy” even worse than “thief.”
But now that I considered it, that must be the specific suspicious vibe I’d been giving off to her and possibly Loujaïne. “You’re not wrong about the first part, but no…” I sighed heavily. “…that’s not what I’m here for.”
“Then what?” Cora set her chin in her palm, surveying me with serene amusement. “Because it’s not for him.”
“It used to be that way.” I admitted quietly, then made a gesture outside the room. “What are you going to do with that ghoul’s head?”
“Get it embalmed. And don’t change the subject. Let’s start with where you’re really from.”
“Ericura, it’s—”
“You mean Hericeurra?” She looked astounded, an expression I didn’t think her capable of. “That place exists?”
“You know of it?”
“In myths and legends, yes. They say it’s a land that drifted far from our world and into the fairies’ realm, but few believe it to be real.”
“It’s real, and I’m from there.” She whistled in wonder. After a moment of letting her digest that, I had to ask her what I’d been wondering about since day one. “You’ve been covering for me since we first met, basically feeding me lies that got me out of many tight spots. Why?”
She simply shrugged. “I thought you’d be good fun.”
I gaped at her. “What?”
“You were shifty yet inexperienced in whatever you were sent here to do, so you were going to bring a lot of excitement to this stuffy competition.” She laughed slightly. “And you did, but not how I expected you to.”
“How so?”
“You did the opposite of all operatives I’ve come across. You didn’t sabotage anyone’s chances or harm them, you’ve gotten more attention than everyone, both good and bad, but you didn’t use that to manipulate anybody. All that made your presence here even more puzzling.”
“You kept my secret because I entertained you?”
“There’s that, then there’s the fact that I liked you on sight, which is rare.” She patted my shoulder. “So, I started sort of helping, to make sure you’d stick around longer.”
I couldn’t help returning her smile, a warm fondness unwinding my tension. “I don’t know if I should be touched or concerned by your priorities.”
She winked at me playfully. “Both. Both is good.”
I giggled tiredly, scratching at my itching bandages. “Thank you, for everything.”
“Anytime.” She handed me another ear of corn, boiled and buttered this time. “So, what are you really here for?”
I took a deep breath then told her everything.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
When Cora left, I found a green box of sweets by the door.
The note on top instructed me to “Have a sweet after each dose of medicine.”
The elegant handwriting was the same as the poetic responses in the metal boxes.
Cyrus’s handwriting.
As told, I cleaned my tongue with the sticky sweets in between cups of pungent pain-numbing draughts and soothing teas. Their combined effect kept knocking me off the dock of wakefulness and into more turbulent depths with only one exception. An ambiguous dream involving bird feathers, a floating carpet and a fountain.
It was interrupted by Cherine barging in, and as usual hassling me up and out of bed.
Supplied with more bitter concoctions, and a cane to limp on, I was too drowsy to remember how I got dressed or got to the dining room for lunch.
It was an awkward affair. Cyrus and Ayman were missing. Miraz must have been with them, as Aurelia showed up alone, ate in silence as she watched us, then left without saying a word to anyone.
I faded in and out of focus, catching wisps of the smalltalk Cora and Ariane made about Campanian and Orestian culture with Cherine’s interruptions. Farouk and Loujaïne whispered among themselves while Fairuza stared at the wooden clock on the wall.
She watched every swing of the pendulum with an empty, pale face. A haunted air hung about her like she was counting down the minutes to a dreaded event. It was like she expected the swarm of ghouls to burst through the walls like they had in the mountain.
I wanted to talk to her about it, because she was now the only person I could relate to in that ordeal, but I didn’t have the capacity to do so. I couldn’t even find the words to offer her some of the numbing solutions Master Wisam had prescribed me.
Drowsiness amplified with the medicines coursing through my bloodstream, the hour set for lunch dragging on for what felt like a week. In between one trip into dazed distraction and the next, Cora spoon-fed me. My return to the present began when I began digesting, the food soaking in my painkilling solutions.
The nightmare about the Hornswoods loomed back into view, replaying every instant of Bonnie’s terror as we fled the ghouls. If my mind was trying to remind me of my duty to her, it wasn’t like I could forget my deadline. It was all I could think about…
No. I hadn’t thought about it as much as I should have this week.
It wasn’t that I’d forgotten what I was here for. That wasn’t even possible. But I’d been too caught up with life here, with the girls and the tests. With Cyrus. With my feelings for him, what he meant to me.
But I had two days left, and I still hadn’t figured out a contingency plan if I didn’t win and managed to steal the lamp while being congratulated by the king.
Which brought me back to the same old question: how was I supposed to do that?
That question had raked tracks in my brain by now, with no reliable answer in sight. For what level of distraction could I invent this time to be able to steal such a conspicuous object, in such lofty and dangerous company? Another fire?Faking being under a curse or an infection to make them take the king away and leaving me quarantined in his quarters until I fulfilled my mission? How would I then get past everyone and leave the palace?
Whenever I came to this part, I could only find one solution. To turn into a shadow and slip past people without being spotted. And this always brought me back to Ayman.
When not masquerading as Cyrus’s personal guard in full armor, Ayman had mastered the art of sneaking around unseen and used the tunnels to pop in and out all over the place. If there was a trap door that led to the king’s quarters and out of this palace, he’d know it.
I’d wanted him and Cyrus to take me through there the night the Final Five had been announced. Then it
had become impossible to tell Cyrus, and I hadn’t thought I could ask Ayman without it getting back to him. But—now I felt I might be able to ask him to keep it a secret.
I was dying to tell Cyrus the truth, the urge to come clean a dagger slowly sinking deeper into my chest. But I’d asked myself this a thousand times: Would his feelings for me survive the truth? Could I stake the Fairborns’ lives on them doing so?
It always brought me back to one answer: No. I couldn’t tell him anything. Not now. I couldn’t afford the distraction or the upheaval if things went wrong with him. Not until I got back the Fairborns.
One gamble at a time.
Until then, I had to continue playing the role of Lady Ada of Rose Isle.
I had to continue deceiving him.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Next morning was notable for two things. I had a rendezvous with Cyrus. And Fairuza didn’t come to breakfast
Prince Miraz sat in her vacated spot, on Cyrus’s right, and I’d given Aurelia my seat on his left. They were the only two who still stayed from our second test guests.
“Where is she?” Cherine asked, mixing heavy cream and apricot jam in her bowl.
Cora paused her open-mouthed chewing. “Probably hiding in shame.”
“Did she finally realize she’s a horrible person?” Cherine suggested amusedly.
“More like she finally realized she isn’t the best thing since horseless carriages.” Cora snuck a spoon of Cherine’s mix for her bread. “Imagine, after all that money and all those years of training, you find out you’re completely useless.”
“What do you mean?” Cherine asked, now very interested.
Cora aimed her spoon at me, splattering me with sticky droplets. “Ada embarrassed the pearls off of her twice in a row. She did all the talking and negotiating with Aurelia and Marzeya. It doesn’t help that she now owes Ada her life.”