Ilyas
Jem remained silent, but his shoulders stiffened. Haori flicked him a concerned look, lips pursed, but then noticed me. He narrowed his eyes and hurried Ari out of the room.
Had the princeling really called him Hemi?
Jem straightened, keeping his eyes pinned to the other side of the room, but I had no doubt his attention rested squarely on me.
I folded my arms. “Prince Hemi.”
Jem didn’t answer to it, but neither did he deny it.
“Hemi.” My fingernails scraped my skin as I clutched my arms. “That’s what he called you. Hemi.”
“Prince Hemi is dead,” Jem said.
“So if I pried open this coffin, I’d find his body?”
Jem’s silence was answer enough.
I paced against the far wall under a window that, like all windows in this god-awful place, looked over nothing. Nothing, and nothing, and nothing.
Jem was Prince Regent Hemi. When Jem had said Hemi had ordered me to be sold into slavery, well, there was no part of that which wasn’t a lie. Telling me Hemi had ordered this, and Hemi had ordered that, so I wouldn’t know where the true orders came from. Why?
I should have guessed it myself. I should have guessed who Haori was as soon as he entered, even though he acted more like a spoiled brat than a prince. I’d seen the resemblance between the two. Looking like brothers, or cousins, except that Jem appeared the perfect Lumian, leached of every bit of colour.
And Jem. Jem had claimed he was perfectly obedient to his prince. Someone actually loyal to another, even though he possessed the power to seize the village and the throne, or so Dajana had intimated. Someone who had cared for me. Someone a prince could trust. Someone who was my equal. Someone I had always yearned for at my side.
But no, Jem only looked out for his own best interests. He wanted to rule the peninsula, but was too weak to even admit it. Too weak to admit he was the one trying to kill me, and not some distant, faceless prince regent.
“Prince Hemi is dead,” Jem said.
I stopped and pointed at him. “But you’re right there!”
“But I’m not…” He winced. “It’s difficult to explain.”
“It’s not difficult at all. You lied to me. You lied. And you had no reason to lie. What do I care if the orders to kill me come from some distant prince or you? You, who can summon snow monsters! So why?”
“I didn’t. Prince Hemi died a long time ago. He left me to watch over this body and to enact his plan.”
“To escape responsibility? Mince no words!”
He quirked his head, but I didn’t really care to explain how proper language worked. I returned to stomping my fury into the ugly, stone floor.
As if it mattered if Jem was Hemi. It changed nothing. Nothing except Jem’s loyalty.
I turned on him again. “And then you let the prince heir go around calling other men his sweetheart!”
Jem — Hemi didn’t flinch. “Such relationships are common here. I beg you to refrain from repeating your comments. They are not welcome.”
“What shouldn’t be welcomed is—”
“What does it matter to you?” he asked. “Rape isn’t welcomed either, if it’s your own chastity you worry about. Haori has a friend. They hold hands, they kiss. Which doesn’t hurt you.”
“He should be busy siring his heir.”
Jem laughed. “He’s thirteen.”
I grimaced. “It doesn’t matter. Encouraging him to indulge himself without regard for his station is begging for trouble.”
“You still know nothing about Lumi. I showed you. I showed you what it’s like to live here, and you still can’t figure it out? We don’t have enough to feed any more mouths.”
“So that means he can—”
“Love whomever he wants?” Jem asked. “Yes, it does. The old king loved a woman, and they bore too many children. The people will be happy their prince has a love which will not bear more mouths to feed. Happiness is too hard to come by to make up excuses to deny it to others.”
“Because they’re idiots!”
“Because that’s the way of life here.”
Jem might have been right. I turned away, blinking rapidly against the moisture in my eyes. There must be a draft making my eyes water like that. “And if it should make it easier for you to usurp him, all the better.”
“Ilyas, we are not in Nuriya.”
“I gathered that.”
“I serve Prince Haori,” he said. “I’m doing all of this so Haori can live to take the throne. I’m sacrificing everything I might have been so that when he takes his throne, he has enough to eat. So that he still has a kingdom to rule. This isn’t Nuriya.”
My shoulders shook. “You don’t give a damn about Haori.”
He meant to take the throne himself. He must, so why did he maintain this act, when we were the only ones present?
“He means everything,” Jem said, as if he were Haori’s true tawam rohi. As if despite his indomitable snowmancy, as if despite his position as regent, he actually did give his fealty to the prince heir.
How could he say such things and mean it? Why did he have to be so damn perfect? The one person in the entire world who gave up everything for another, his brother, his prince. The one who might actually be a tawam rohi.
Even meeting a worthy candidate counted as a miracle in Nuriya, and even more to be bound. Poets had written thousands of accounts about those precious few meetings, before and after the ritual. Scrolls and scrolls detailing the profound trust and admiration between the two. The magical bond that tethered them in life and death. If one died, so did the other, and neither would ever wish to survive. In the thick of the Nuriyite court, no one else could ever safely indulge in such trust.
Yet here was a man capable of outwitting Nuriyite intrigues, a man capable of manipulating even me. Someone who had tended me when I was ill without recompense or threats, who had held me so close to his chest, dozing as he spooned me, as if I were precious to him. Someone who blushed when I flirted instead of jumping into my bed. Someone who couldn’t keep his eyes from flicking up and down my body, as if I were more beautiful than all the riches of Nuriya.
To meet such a man unbound was incredible, and yet despite all of that, he couldn’t be for me. He wasn’t mine. He lied to me. He hadn’t even told me his real name, his real identity. I clenched my fists together, not seeing the ugly stone walls but the fire in my mind.
But he wasn’t entirely Haori’s, either.
Jem stood sentry at the door, resolute and so tawam rohi–like. I couldn’t stomach him any longer and stormed out of the wake room.
I expected him to corral me back to his prison tower room, a room more befitting a scullery maid than a prince, even a dead one. Picking the direction that seemed to lead away from the tower, I stormed down the corridor, but he lingered at the open door, staring inside the wake room. Why bother, when he couldn’t even bring himself to look at his own coffin?
According to Haori, it was all right to stare at the coffin, but not at Jem. But Haori had looked up at him, even as his friend pinned his eyes on his own feet. Haori would have even met Jem’s eyes, if Jem hadn’t kept his gaze stubbornly skewed.
The one Lumian who even looked at Jem.
I squeezed my fists, resisting the urge to pound them into the stone wall until blood ran down my arms. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair.
Dear gods, now I sounded like my brothers, whingeing about how unfair it was I outwitted them at every turn. It wasn’t fair that I would rule over Nuriya while they jostled for position.
It was fair, because I’d spent every waking moment since I’d been born protecting my rank, never trusting anyone, never showing anyone who I really was. Never even allowing myself to find out, but sinking behind the cloak of the profligate and cunning prince.
Just like Jem, pretending to be a slave while he architected his kingdom’s rise to prosperity, all for Haori.
Meanwhile, I would just be dead. In pieces. Without a fancy coffin.
I wouldn’t let that happen. I found the right turn, marked with a black iron lamp I promptly borrowed. As if the lamp proved a magic charm, I found the next turn, and the next, until I burst into the courtyard. Fat snowflakes wafted to the earth.
The cold air slapped me in the face. I wrought my own future. I wasn’t tiny Prince Haori, blessed with a tawam rohi candidate to protect my future, without having done a single thing to deserve him. I had kept my inheritance through my own wits and schemes. And if I wanted Jem, if I wanted the tawam rohi candidate dangling himself in front of my eyes…
“But he’s not!” I screamed. “He’s not a tawam rohi. He never could be. I’m not losing—”
I slapped the scarf tightly over my mouth. Biting the cloth, I screamed. Only a faint moan escaped the scarf until the scream died on its own. I shook in the silence.
If he was a tawam rohi, he was another’s, and I could never have him. A tawam rohi, even unbound, never switched loyalties. He would be forever out of my reach, even if he had turned tender eyes and gentle hands towards me.
But he couldn’t be Haori’s. Not completely, like we could be, since they were brothers.
No, if he switched loyalties to me, he wasn’t a tawam rohi. I would prove he wasn’t clever enough to be mine, that I wasn’t missing out on my dream because it had never existed.
I’d destroy everything he’d built, and at his devastation, I would laugh and laugh and laugh at the joke that was Jem, the man who thought he could be a tawam rohi and thought he could reject me. He wasn’t one and I would prove it.
Comments (0)
See all