“Oh, right. Let’s go.”
I sound stupid, even to my own ears.
She shifts from foot to foot, aware of my stare. “I must look awful right now.” Her forehead is smudged with sweat and dust.
I try to think of a compliment, but I’ve never done this before. What’s too forward? What’s proper? She looks terribly pretty even like this, but saying it now feels wrong and not saying it feels even worse. I still don’t know what she thinks of me.
“Not as bad as me.” I grin, pointing again at my bruise.
The dark eyes falter with disappointment, and then I feel disappointed, too.
“Come on.” I nod up the trail. “We must be nearly there.”
AURELIA
The open-face ridge appears just as I think my legs will fail me. I’ve made a good show of keeping up with Athan, but this is farther than I’ve ever hiked and my lungs ache like stones in my chest. Far below is the palace, surrounded by the rolling valley, and in the distance, the spiraled roofs of Hathene, the city cream-coloured against the green. I pause to admire it. An excuse to take in a few more greedy breaths.
Athan hops onto a nearby rock, balancing on one foot. He’s been doing these silly things the entire way up—hanging off branches, scaling outcrops. I consider pushing him off the rock when he’s not looking, but motion him closer instead. “I’ve remembered something very important.”
He tips forward, still balancing. “Which is?”
“First to the top of the ridge wins.”
Before his genius mind can comprehend the challenge, I sprint across the hard ground. The wind-roughed summit glitters ahead in the sun.
He races after me, but I crest the rise first.
“That was cheating,” he complains, hands on his knees.
I grin, equally exhausted. “That was quick thinking.”
We plunk down in a spot sheltered from the wind, stretching out our legs and retrieving lunch from our bags. Mine’s rather meagre, and Athan dangles his fresh bread and meat in front of me.
“Do you want to get down from here later?” I ask.
“No,” he says with a smile, but he surrenders some to me anyway.
While we eat, he tells me about flying in an aeroplane, what it’s like to explore the cloudy realms above. I close my eyes and imagine the feeling. He makes it sound very lovely, like the plane is alive and a friend, the world a much better place at 15,000 feet. After a while, I pull some paper and a pencil from my bag, and, to my surprise, he produces a sketchbook.
He gives me a sly look. “You don’t think the Safire enjoy art?”
“I suppose you have the creativity for it,” I say, “if your lies are any indication.”
But it’s a good feeling that spreads inside me, the sense we’ve found common ground at last.
We work in silence. He understands the quiet, the peace, and his hand moves without pausing, eyes focused on the paper. I outline the palace below. When we share our pages at the end, my heart does a little trip. It’s me. He’s drawn me—my face turned towards Hathene, hair tossed in the breeze. He hardly glanced my way once.
“You don’t like it?” he asks hesitantly, trying to cover it with his book.
“No one’s ever made a sketch of me before,” I say.
“Really? You don’t make your servants do that in their spare time or something?”
I reach over and snatch it from him with a grin. “You have such a terrible impression of us. But did you do this from memory?”
He shrugs. “Everything in my life moves quickly, there and gone. I’ve learned to remember well.”
“But not directions,” I tease.
“I remember what I want to remember,” he says honestly, and there’s a tingle of warmth on my nose.
I hide it by studying the way his lines are soft and shadowed, more an impression. “You draw like my father did.”
“Your father was an artist?”
“Yes. He died when I was young, but I remember watching him paint. He’d sit in the garden for hours.”
“You’re more like him than your mother, then?”
It’s yet another bold question, but I’m not even surprised by it this time. There’s a sense of refuge high up in this secret place, away from the world and its usual patterns. “I’m not sure,” I admit. “I know him mostly through the stories told by others, things I think I remember about him. But then I never know if I’m making those memories up. If I just want them to be true.” I pick at the charcoal pencil. “And my mother’s an equal mystery. She’s from Resya, you know. She never talks of her life before she came here, since she can’t, really. You know how it is these days. And … Well, sometimes I feel torn between the two. My mother and father. I want to honour them both equally and I’m not sure I know how. Does that make sense?”
His grey eyes watch me. “You might be surprised.”
I don’t mention the protesters who question my mother’s loyalties, who hate her and long for the days of my father. I don’t mention this, because Athan’s uniform is the source of their contention, and I don’t want to go there. “Tell me about your family,” I say, deflecting the attention away. “You said you have a brother?”
“Oh God, I have two.”
I laugh at the face he makes. “And your father’s a farmer?”
He erases a smudge from the portrait. “Yes.”
“What does he think of you off round the world in uniform?”
“He’s very proud. It’s a more noble life than that of a farmer, don’t you agree, Princess?” He grins. He has a way of saying things with such candor, so effortlessly, and yet his eyes tell a different story. That shadow that looks older than it should on seventeen years.
“And what does your mother think?” I ask.
His eraser stops, but it seems a logical question. I wait. I need to see the full picture of him.
“I don’t know. She … she’s dead.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
He waves it off, eyes on the rocks at our feet. “How could you have known?” He waits a moment, then says, “And I don’t know what she thought. She never expressed herself well.”
This, I believe.
“It’s been ten years for me,” I say. “It still feels like yesterday sometimes. How long for you?”
“Two months.”
I bring a hand to my mouth. “Stars! I should never have brought it up.”
“No, it’s fine. It doesn’t matter.” But he looks scattered, and now I know why. It’s too fresh. It’s still raw inside him. “I should be the one apologizing,” he says. “The other night, that girl—your friend—she sang one of my mother’s favourite songs. I couldn’t bear it. It was as if someone chose it just for me, and I had to leave. It was rude of me.”
Something guilty lurches in my stomach. I don’t want to accidentally hurt this boy I hardly know. He already has a dark bruise left behind from yesterday, the weariness of a life already lived, and this unintentional wound from the song feels even deeper.
I want to take it away.
I want him to trust me.
“My father was murdered,” I say, the first time I’ve ever spoken the words aloud, certain he won’t judge. He looks up sharply, and I add, “But it’s a secret. I didn’t even know until this spring.”
His eyes flick over me, like he’s seeing for the first time. “That’s terrible. Why?”
It’s another logical question, one I should have seen coming, but the words still fumble off my tongue. “I … I don’t know. They never found who did it. I suppose if the kingdom knew that, the fear would spread.” That’s close enough to the truth.
Athan frowns. “No one was brought to justice?”
“No.”
“Then you should tell someone. Let the world know. It’s not right what happened.”
His certainty catches me off guard. Also the awareness that he won’t just accept my reasoning. He’s too stubborn and Safire for that, so I raise my chin. “It’s not right to frighten an entire kingdom and chase revenge your whole life,” I tell him. “What happened was my father’s fate.”
He leans back on his hands. “Well, that’s an interesting perspective.”
“You don’t agree with me.”