KAMRAN STOOD IN THE SHADOW of a shuttered storefront, the hood of his cloak whipping in the wind, snapping against his face like the leathery wings of a bat. The snow had softened to rain, and he listened to the drops pop along the awning overhead, watched as they pelted the white drift frosting the streets. Long minutes passed, piles of snow perforating, then dissolving at his feet.
He should not have come.
After their meeting, the king had taken Kamran aside to ask further questions about the suspected servant girl, questions Kamran only too gladly answered, having felt validated by his grandfather’s concern. It was in fact at the king’s behest that Kamran was to continue his inquiries into the girl’s whereabouts, for Zaal, too, had seemed perturbed upon hearing a more detailed accounting of the morning’s events. He’d dispatched the prince into town to fulfill various obligations—among them a visit to the Fesht boy—and to then surveil the city.
Naturally, Kamran had obliged.
A focused task was precisely what he needed, as it would allow him a reprieve from his own mind, from the weight of all that his grandfather had recently imparted. The prince had thought to see the mobs for himself, in any case; he wanted to hear the commotion he had caused, to bear witness to the consequences of his actions.
In the end, it had led to this: darkness. No, he should not have come at all.
First was his visit to the street child, who’d been installed at the Diviners Quarters in the Royal Square. The king had made it clear to Kamran that to ignore the boy now would make his earlier actions appear rash and hotheaded. Subsequent actions of care and compassion toward the boy would not only be expected, Zaal had said, but anticipated, and as Kamran already owed the Diviners a visit, it had not seemed too great a waste of his time.
Instead, it had been infuriating.
As it turned out, magic alone had saved the boy from the brink of death. This revelation, which should have been a relief, was to the prince grim news indeed, for it had been upon his perceived orders that the Diviners had acted—and rarely, if ever, was magical assistance offered to any outside the imperial family.
Vast though Ardunia was, magic as a substance was exceptionally rare. The unstable mineral was mined from the mountains at great risk, and as a result existed only in small, precious quantities, meted out only by royal decree. Kamran’s call for help had been interpreted as just that; marking yet another reason why his actions toward a thieving street urchin had been so significant, and would not be easily forgotten.
He sighed at the reminder.
Though the boy was healing still, he’d managed to flinch when Kamran arrived in his room. The child had inched backward in his bed as best he could, scrambling out of reach of his unlikely savior. They both knew it; knew that the scene within which they’d been trapped was a farce; that Kamran was no hero; that there existed no amity between them.
Indeed, Kamran felt nothing but anger toward the boy.
Through the careful dissemination of new rumors, the crown had actively sought to distort the story of the street urchin; King Zaal decided it would be more difficult to convince an audience that the prince had done good by saving a murderous child, and so had modified the tale to exclude any mention of harm done to the servant girl. This bothered Kamran far more than it ought, for privately he felt the rascal deserved neither the efforts made to spare him, nor the care he received now.
Carefully, Kamran had approached the boy’s bed, claiming a small victory as fear flared to life in the child’s eyes. From this he gained impetus enough to hone his frustration, which gave his visit focus. If the prince was to be forced into the company of this disgraceful child, he would use the opportunity to demand answers to his innumerable questions.
By the angels, he had questions.
“Avo, kemem dinar shora,” he’d said darkly. First, I want to know why.
“Why did you beg me not to hand you over to the magistrates?” The boy shook his head.
“Jev man,” Kamran had said. Answer me.
Again, the boy shook his head.
Kamran stood sharply, clasping his hands behind his back. “You and I both know the real reason you are here, and I will not soon forget it. I have no interest in forgiving you for your actions today merely because you nearly died in the effort. You would’ve murdered a young woman just to steal her wares—”
“Nek, nek hejjan—” No, no, sire—
“And were willing to kill yourself so you would not have to stand trial
—so you would not be turned over to the magistrates and pay the price for your debased actions.” Kamran’s eyes flashed with barely suppressed anger. “Tell me why.”
For the third time, the child shook his head.
“Perhaps I will turn you over to the magistrates now. Perhaps they might be more effective at yielding results.”
“No, sire,” the boy had said in his native tongue, his brown eyes large in his sunken face. “You would not do that.”
Kamran’s eyes widened a fraction. “How dare y—”
“Everyone thinks you saved my life because you are compassionate and kind. If you threw me in the dungeon now, it would not look good for you, would it?”
Kamran’s fists clenched, unclenched. “I did save your life, you ungrateful wretch.”
“Han.” Yes. The child almost smiled, but his eyes were strangely distant. “Pet, shora?” But, why? “After this, I will be returned to the street. To the same life as before.”
Kamran felt an unwelcome pang in the region of his chest; a flicker of conscience. He was quite unaware that the edge to his voice had gone when he said, “I do not understand why you would rather kill yourself than go to prison.”
“No, you do not understand, sire.” The redheaded boy would not meet his eyes. “But I have seen what they do to kids like me. Being turned over to the magistrates is worse than death.”
Kamran straightened, then frowned. “What can you mean? How can it be worse than death? Our prisons are not so foul as that. You would be offered a daily meal, at the very least—”
The boy was now shaking his head hard, looking so agitated Kamran feared he might bolt from the room.
“All right—enough,” the prince said reluctantly, and sighed. “You may instead tell me what you know of the girl.”
The boy froze at that, the inquiry unexpected enough to have disarmed him. “Know of her? I do not know her, sire.”
“How, then, were you able to communicate with her? Do you speak much Ardanz?”
“Very little, sire.”
“And yet, you spoke with her.”
“Yes, sire.” The boy blinked. “She spoke Feshtoon.”
Kamran was so surprised by this revelation he failed to mask his expression fast enough. “But there are no servants in the royal city who speak Feshtoon.”
“Begging your pardon, sire, but I didn’t know you were acquainted with all the servants in the royal city.”
At that, Kamran experienced a swell of anger so large he thought it might break open his chest. It took all he had to bite out the words: “Your insolence is astonishing.”
The boy grinned; Kamran resisted the urge to smother him.
This redheaded Fesht boy had the uncommon ability to move Kamran to a swift, discomposing anger—an anger of the most dangerous variety. Kamran knew this, for he knew well his own weaknesses, and implored himself to defuse what he knew to be an irrational reaction. There was no reason to scare away the child, after all, not now that the boy might provide him with information he needed to hunt down the duplicitous servant girl.
“I beg you will help me understand,” Kamran had said flatly. “You claim that a servant girl with little education—a servant girl who is likely illiterate—somehow spoke to you in Feshtoon. You claim she gave you bread, which you di—”
“No, sire. I said that she offered me bread.”
Kamran’s jaw tensed. This was the second time the child had interrupted him. “I see little difference,” he’d said. “Gave and offered are interchangeable words.”
“No, sire. She told me to come to the kitchens at Baz House if I was in need of bread.”
Here, Kamran experienced a moment of triumph.
“Then she lied to you,” said the prince. “I know Baz House, and that girl is no servant there. In fact, if it has not yet been made obvious to you, you should know: that girl was no servant at all.”
The child shook his head. “You’re wrong, sire.”
Impertinent, disrespectful, shameless boy. Kamran found he no longer cared that the child had nearly died; he seemed well enough now, with the audacity of an impudent street rat, speaking to a member of the royal household with so little deference. And yet—Kamran was now shackled to him in this strange way, compelled to be kind to the precocious imp.
Omid. His name was Omid.
He was the son of saffron farmers in the south. His parents had been imprisoned for failing to pay taxes on a meager harvest, and their official complaint—Kamran had since pulled the report—was that the taxes were a fixed amount, instead of a percentage. Paying the fixed amount, they had insisted, would’ve meant starvation for their family, as the season’s crop had been so small. They had appealed to the courts for leniency, but had contracted lung fever in prison and died days later, leaving the boy to fend for himself.
Twelve, he’d said he was. Twelve years old.
“You are either very brave or very stupid,” Kamran had said to him. “To disagree with me so readily.”
“But, sire, you didn’t see her hands,” Omid insisted. “And I did.” Kamran had only scowled.
In his haste to take his leave of the insufferable child, Kamran had forgotten, yet again, to pay his respects to the honorable priests and priestesses. He was instead intercepted by a halo of Diviners on his way out
—who’d said little, as they were wont to do—and accepted as payment but a moment of his time before they pressed a small parcel into his hands. The prince offered his many thanks, but his mind, full and disordered as it was, bade him tuck away the untitled gift, to be opened at a later date.
The parcel would remain forgotten, for some days, in the interior pocket of Kamran’s cloak.
Unnerved by his conversation with Omid, the prince had gone straight from the Diviners Quarters to Baz House, the home of his distant aunt. He knew exactly where the kitchens were; he’d spent a great deal of his youth at Baz House, sneaking belowstairs for snacks after midnight. He considered going through the front doors and simply asking his aunt whether she’d employed such a servant, but he thought of his grandfather’s warning that his actions were now under intense scrutiny.
Kamran had many reasons for seeking out the girl—not the least of which was King Zaal’s confirmation that Ardunia was destined for war— but he did not think it wise to over-hastily spread word of this to the happy public.
In any case, Kamran was good at waiting.
He could stand in one position for hours without tiring, had been trained to practically disappear at will. It was no trouble at all to him to waste an
hour standing in an alley to capture a criminal, not when his aim was to protect his empire, to spare his people the machinations of this faceless girl
—
Lie.
True, that he found her actions suspect; true, too, that she might be a Tulanian spy. But there was also a possibility that he was wrong about the girl, and his unwillingness to accept this fact should’ve concerned him. No, the unadulterated truth, which he was only now willing to admit, was that there was a grain more to his motivations: something about this girl had burrowed under his skin.
He couldn’t shake it.
She—a supposed poor, lowly servant—had acted this morning with a mercy he could not understand, with a compassion that enraged him all the more for its inconstancy. The young woman had entered his empire, ostensibly, to do harm. Why should she have been the more benevolent actor this morning? Why should she have inspired in him a feeling of unworthiness?
No, no, it made no sense.
Years of training had taught the prince to recognize even the slightest inconsistencies in his opponents; weaknesses that could be mined and promptly manipulated. Kamran knew his own strengths, and his instincts in this instance could not be denied. He’d seen her contradictions from the moment he laid eyes on her.
She was without question hiding something.
He’d wanted to out her as the liar he knew her to be; to uncover what seemed to him one of only two possibilities: a treasonous spy, or a frivolous society girl playing pretend.
He had, instead, ended up here.
Here, standing in the dark so long the mobs had begun to disperse, the streets littered now with the drunk, sleeping bodies that dared not drag themselves home. Kamran had let the cold brace him until his bones shook, until he felt nothing but a large emptiness yawn open inside him.
He did not want to be king.
He did not want his grandfather to die, did not want to marry a stranger, did not want to father a child, did not want to lead an empire. This was the secret he seldom shared even with himself—that he did not want this life. It was hard enough when his father had died, but Kamran couldn’t even begin
to imagine a world without his grandfather. He did not think he was good enough to lead an empire alone, and he did not know who he might rely upon instead. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure he could trust Hazan.
Instead, Kamran had distracted himself with his anger, had allowed his mind to focus on the irritations of the Fesht boy, the false face of a servant girl. The truth was that he’d been forced to return home against his will and was now running from himself, from the counterintuitive burden of privilege, from the responsibilities laid upon his shoulders. In moments like these he’d always consoled himself with the reassurance that he was at least a capable soldier, a competent leader—but today had disproven even that. For what good was a leader who could not even trust his own instincts?
Kamran had been bested by this servant girl.
Not only had she proven him wrong on all counts, she’d proven him worse. When she’d finally appeared in the alley behind Baz House, he’d recognized her at once—but had the privilege now of inspecting her more closely. Right away he noticed the angry cut at her throat, and from there he followed the elegant lines of her neck, the delicate slope of her shoulders. For the second time that day he noticed the way she carried herself; how different she seemed from other servants. There was a gracefulness even in the way she held her head, the way she drew her shoulders back, the way she’d tilted her face up at the sun.
Kamran did not understand.
If not a spy or society girl, she might perhaps be the fallen daughter of a gentleman, or even the bastard child of one; such circumstances might explain her elegant carriage and knowledge of Feshtoon. But for a well- educated child of a noble to have fallen this low? He thought it unlikely. The scandals in high society were most everyone’s business, and such a person in his aunt’s employ would doubtless have been known to him.
Then again, it was hard to be certain of anything.
In vain he’d fought for a better look at her face and was given instead only a mouth to study. He’d stared at her lips for longer than he cared to admit, for reasons that were not lost on him. Kamran had arrived at the frightening realization that this girl might be beautiful—a thought so unexpected it nearly distracted him from his purpose. When she suddenly bit her lip, he drew a breath, startling himself.
She seemed worried.
He watched as she searched the alley, all the while clutching a small parcel to her chest. Kamran remembered what Omid had said about her hands, peered closer, and was dealt at once a powerful blow to his pride, to his fragile conscience. The girl’s hands were so damaged he could see the injuries even from his distant vantage point. Her skin was painful to look at. Red. Blistered. Raw.
Without a doubt the hands of a servant.
Kamran rocked back on his heels as this truth washed over him. He’d been so determined the girl was a liar, had so eagerly anticipated the moment her ugliness would be uncovered. Instead, he’d made a discovery about himself.
He was the villain in this story, not she.
Not only had the girl kept her promise to Omid, but she’d made preparations; it grew increasingly obvious that what she sought in that alley had been the street child himself.
Twice in one day this faceless girl had inspired in Kamran a shame so vast he could hardly breathe around it. She’d reached into his chest and broken something essential inside of him, managed it all without even acknowledging his existence. Was Kamran so weak as to be dismantled thus by a stranger? Was he so unworthy?
Worse: how would he explain this embarrassment to his grandfather? So enthusiastically had Kamran added to the king’s worries with his poorly supported suspicions, and now the prince’s arrogance would prove only his own idiocy; an instability of mind that would further substantiate the king’s fears for his grandson. In a single day Kamran had made himself into a joke, and he wanted to sink into the earth.
It was his single thought, repeating like a drumbeat in his head, when Hazan finally found him
