I must have really ticked off Jem, because instead of stalking me like an angry shadow, he only checked that I had returned to his tower room before disappearing. That was fine by me. Now that night had fallen and the streets were deserted, I had a plan to enact.
He hadn’t even locked the door, but then again, we both understood I couldn’t escape the ice walls. But I needn’t leave for this.
I descended into the castle, attempting to follow the path Jem had brought me through. The Lumians were simple in both head and villages. While Nuriya was a maze of shaded alleys in which even the people born to the city lost themselves, Lumi was all straight streets. The bridges added intricacy, but only on a superficial level.
But when it came to building palaces, the word was incompetent. Well, unless one wanted shifting and counter-intuitive add-ons all over the place, where even the same floors didn’t line up properly. I had to backtrack down several different corridors. The path Jem had brought me down twisted like a serpent mating ball. Although for all I knew, Jem had done it on purpose in order to keep me trapped in the castle. I shook my head. No, that was far too clever for him.
The corridor I currently stalked seemed familiar, but then all of the corridors looked the same. Bare stone floors and stone walls fitted with iron doors. I passed an open door, the room bare except for hazelnut brown and otter grey-striped cloth hanging from the ceiling to trap in the heat from the unlit hearth. Proof that at least one person in the entire history of Lumi had realised they lived in a bitterly cold wasteland.
But apparently not many, as most rooms I passed were laid bare. Nor did they seem to possess the imagination necessary to create art, not even stick figure murals to add a little variety. But really, what did I expect from a backwater town that didn’t encourage commerce or creative endeavours but instead simply shoved villagers into a pit thinking they should be grateful for the vague hope of being tossed a piece of hard bread?
I almost pitied them for what I was about to do. I would have, if Dajana hadn’t shown me the woodcuts of what they intended to do to me.
I glanced up and down the empty corridor, then grimaced. Not the right corridor after all, I was pretty sure. Of course, I had very little way to prove it either way, except to listen to my intuition.
The bare floors had one advantage, however. As I headed back the way I’d come, footsteps rang ahead of me. I swore quietly and darted into the nearest open door to wait for them to pass.
I should count myself lucky. In the palace back home, I couldn’t have made it three steps without encountering a servant or slave.
Turning into the room, I paused and stepped back. Flames flickered in the fireplace, the first lit hearth I’d found. If the room wasn’t in use, Lumians didn’t seem to care to keep it warm, or, as I more appropriately called it, barely habitable.
But no one was there, the room empty except for the lit hearth, a couple of threadbare armchairs, the dust-covered shelves and a rectangular gold—
Wait, gold?
Across from the hearth, velvet hung like a cloak around a gold box the length of a man. Not just gold, either. I drank in the turquoises, and reds, and greens, and rich blues, as blue as the ocean back home. All made of metal, it seemed, but unlike anything else I’d found in Lumi, which seemed pleased with its drab grey and boring black fixtures.
By the gods, staring at the colours filled me with warmth and light and everything that was good in the world, not traitorous little brothers and deceptively calm jailers and bloody gore.
It was so good just to see something besides monochromes.
My breath came heavily in my chest, and I drooled, as if they’d laid out a feast for me. Stuffed dates and rosewater biscuits and flatbreads stacked high. And tea, minty and fresh and sweet, a rich green as colourful as the rest of Nuriya.
My hands rose and hovered over the gold box, as if shy to touch something so magnificent, so otherworldly.
I pressed my hands down, and the metal was warm, thanks to the blaze. I stroked my hands along the side, and indeed, all of those heavenly colours were wrought from metal. I inhaled, and they even smelled like colour. Not even in Nuriya was there such a thing. It was like a miracle.
“You’re not supposed to fondle that,” a voice said in the trade language.
I growled at the interloper. “Let me guess. I’m not even supposed to look at something so beautiful, because what is the point of making anything beautiful just to look at it? Like your fucking obelisk, except that is as ugly as a used chamber pot.”
Two gasps followed my words. I finally turned around. Two boys around the age of ten stood in the open doorway. They both wore the same robes as Jem, drab greys and light blues, with scarves wrapped around their necks because unlike Jem, they knew it was freaking cold in here.
One boy, brown-haired and red-cheeked, stood in front of the other as if protecting him. Their clasped hands linked them. The other boy, more meek or ashamed of my harsh words, ducked his blond head to avoid looking me in the eye. I mentally cursed, having been so wrapped up in the box to see them coming, but it was such a pretty box.
The brown-haired boy started to laugh, as if I’d delighted him. “No, you can look.”
I crossed my arms and leaned against the box. That seemed to delight him even more, and his friend tried to hide a smile at the boy’s antics.
“But fondling a coffin is just bad manners,” he continued.
I froze. “A coffin?”
The boy nodded.
I jumped away, staring down my side to make sure no offal had soaked into my robe. I exhaled. I seemed to be safe. Why could nothing in Lumi just be beautiful? But no, it had to be like Jem if it must be anything but ugly.
“Did someone just die? Recently?” I stared at it, as if the corpse were about to burst out of the coffin, dripping rotting flesh.
“No…”
“Then why would you keep a coffin around?” I demanded. “Why would you make it so beautiful?”
And how could I order one for my own funeral? Mehdi would die of envy.
“No one really talks about it,” the boy said. His friend tried to shush him, but the boy waved him off.
The colour drained from my face. “You don’t mean it’s my coffin.”
It was the only reason the Lumians would bother with splendour. The coffin for whatever remained of me, after the Dark God was through. One final message of contempt from the superstitious peons of Lumi.
But the boy shook his head in the trade symbol for no. He grew solemn, the grin disappearing, leaving only a serious young man looking very much like Jem. It must have been the sheer lack of emotion. “It’s Hemi’s.”
That earned a shocked cough from me, the name driving itself straight into my gut. “Prince Regent Hemi?”
The boy nodded.
“He’s in there?” The boy started to make a shrugging motion, but I had already moved on. “He, as in Prince Regent Hemi who’s ordered me to be horribly murdered so he can take over the peninsula, is dead?”
“Hemi would never do that!”
“Then what am I doing here?” I demanded. I knew it was unfair. He was just a boy, he didn’t actually know anything. Even if in Nuriya, a princeling his age was expected to recite the latest political machinations. “What am I doing here if not to build him an empire?”
“You’re here to save us all.”
I gaped at the boy. He sounded so much like Jem in that moment. So sure of himself, as if this fate was all for the best.
But wait, the boy hadn’t spoken. He was only giving me a confused look, as if he couldn’t imagine why the stranger from a foreign land pinned aghast eyes on him.
I wrenched my eyes away to the door while the boy’s friend stepped closer to whisper into his ear. Jem stood stiffly next to the door, hands clasped in front of him, while he looked not at me but at the boy. Or rather, six inches to the boy’s left.
“Right.” As if I had believed that. “It’s not because you’re claiming to take orders from a dead prince, hmm?”
He blinked and shrugged, watching over us all, but looking at nothing.
Not denying anything either. Prince Regent Hemi had ordered this, Prince Regent Hemi wanted that. All lies, because Prince Regent Hemi was dead in a gold box worth more than all of Lumi and their mines.
I stepped forwards, searching for a crack to pry it open. I wanted to see this Prince Hemi. I wanted to look upon his rotting face and spit in it. Spit in his face for ruining my life over and over and over again and not even being alive so I might kill him.
Jem didn’t stop me, but hovered with a nervous energy in the corner of my eye, as if he wished to tackle me to the ground, but he must not approach the holy resting place of his former master. Good.
But another hand slapped me. The boy. “I told you it’s rude to fondle a coffin.”
I glared down at the boy. “I’m not…” Not acting like the royal prince heir of Nuriya? Yes, indeed. I flung my hands up in the air, then shrugged. “And who are you to tell me what to do?”
Now Jem decided to intervene. “Prince Haori, your mother must be looking for you.”
The prince rolled his eyes.
I glanced from the boy to Jem. Jem, who refused to look at the coffin, refused to accept the fate of his master. His faithful servant, selling himself into slavery to fulfil his dead master’s wishes. My fists tightened.
“Prince Haori,” Jem repeated.
“Yes, I know.” Haori turned away from me, facing Jem. Jem seemed to curl away from the boy. “But I wanted to meet him.”
“Most people start with ‘my name is,’” I told him. The boy had waltzed in, without a single guard, even though he shared the same title as me. No wonder he had a prince regent. Even a dead one was smarter than this boy.
“Oh, right.” He grimaced at me without a speck of guile. “My name is Haori, and this is my sweetheart, Ari.” He motioned to the shy blond boy, who blushed at the words.
My jaw dropped, and I quickly stared at Jem, waiting for his explanation. Princes didn’t have lovers, unless they were female courtiers, respectable enough to marry and likely to slit one’s throat if one’s fortunes turned. But they never had uncastrated males. And yet, I’d been drooling all over Jem since I first saw him kneeling in my harem.
“Prince Haori,” Jem said, but not in warning.
“You should never say such a thing,” I told Haori and myself. “You should never do such a thing. It’s unbecoming of a prince heir.”
“Ilyas,” Jem hissed.
Haori’s sunshine switched off, replaced by an anger seething under his skin, attempting to escape through his snarling lip or his flaring nose or his trembling fists. “How dare you.”
“Someone must teach you how to act like a prince,” I said. “And for some reason, I don’t think a dead regent will be of much use.”
“I know that it’s rude to walk into someone else’s kingdom and tell them what they can’t do.”
“Disgusting is disgusting, no matter where one wanders.”
“What’s disgusting is you.”
“Perhaps you should have thought of that before Jem abducted me from my home to drag me here to be sacrificed to your god.”
Haori went quiet, if not stunned. Then he straightened, pulling together a facade of princely dignity. “Something incapable of love is not even human. It’s just a big, dumb animal.”
A big dumb animal? I was capable of love. But no one around me deserved it. They schemed behind my back, pressing up against me when they wanted favours and selling me out to my brothers when they wanted theirs.
What in the seven infernos did Haori even know about life at court? About ruling a kingdom?
Haori held out his hand to Ari, who gave me a wide-eyed look before accepting. Ari squeezed Haori’s hand, his knuckles whitening. Haori led him out the door. Jem bowed to them as they passed, but Haori, lacking all princely manners, blushed and slowed his steps. “You don’t have to do that, Hemi — I mean, Jem.”
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