Empress of a Thousand Skies
Rhoda Belleza
Part One:
THE BETRAYED
“After a series of tragedies befell them, it was believed that the Ta’an family was cursed. This made the sole survivor of that legacy, the young Princess Rhiannon, even more precious in the eyes of the public. When a reporter dubbed her ‘the Rose of the Galaxy,’ the moniker stuck. She was seen as something delicate, a thing to be preserved and protected until she came of age to rule. But Rhiannon had other plans.”
—Excerpt from The Iron Star: A History of the Ta’an Dynasty
ONE
RHIANNON
RHEE tore a path through the bustling marketplace, kicking up dust that fell slowly in Nau Fruma’s low gravity. The foreign tourists coughed and complained as she passed, but Rhee ignored them, scanning the fairgrounds for Julian as she clutched his miniature telescope to her chest. She wasn’t accustomed to being in a crowd; so much of her life had been spent looking down at one from a balcony, urged to wave and smile and look as ladylike as possible. But now, among the people, there was a jostle and roughness to it that Rhee found thrilling.
It was the golden hour, and the sun dipped just below the horizon. Risking a quick glance behind her, Rhee spotted one of the Tasinn plowing through the ebb and flow of bodies, headed in her direction. His khaki fitted uniform and polished badges stood out amid the sea of vibrant linen robes. His skin was ashen and pale, unlike the men who’d grown up on this desert moon and knew the heat of the sun by its true distance—not through the refracted beams and domed cities on Kalu. From here she could see that his hand hovered above the stunner strapped to his belt.
The Tasinn were the royal guard—her royal guards, technically, but they felt like a relic of her father’s era, wholly separate from the life she’d led here on Nau Fruma. They were an elite group of fighters plucked from the ranks of UniForce soldiers and trained in personal security. This guard was one of many men sent to find her so she could return home to Kalu, to the planet of her birth.
Rhee had been six when she left, just after her entire family had died in a crash—“an accident,” the authorities called it, a tragedy Rhee had supposedly been lucky to avoid. But she knew better. There were two things for certain: that her family had been murdered, and that she was supposed to have died at their side.
A homemade firework screeched into the darkening sky, its high-pitched fury petering out into a low whistle. It exploded in the distance. She wondered if her family’s ending had been that instantaneous and merciful.
Rhee slipped the telescope in her pocket and pulled her hood lower to hide her mismatched eyes, one brown and one hazel. She tucked back her jet-black braid and cut left between two rows of tents, squeezing past two laughing men. Dodging a tall woman carrying a cage, she flinched when the white bird inside flapped its wings—then felt silly.
“Stay at the ready,” Veyron had always said as he’d held up two calloused hands for her to box and kick. She’d cycle through combos until all she could hear was her heartbeat drumming in her ears. In the dojo she wasn’t a girl or a princess. She was simply a series of intentions: dodge, strike, block, kill.
Kill.
Now her stomach felt twisted, like the cactus trunks she and Julian would find when they snuck past the palace walls. The smell of smoke and charred meat from a nearby market stall nearly made her gag. A Derkatzian girl with yellow eyes sat perched on a stool, fanning herself with one hand and holding out a root vegetable with the other. “Grown from real soil,” she called to those who passed.
Everyone was out: travelers and dealers from the fringes of the universe, local families, wealthy tourists. Tonight marked the eve of the Kamreial meteor shower, which came every 149 years. “Once in a lifetime,” the holos had said. “Never to be seen again.”
Which was precisely why the Crown Regent had arranged this night for Rhiannon to travel back to the capital of Sibu. The beloved Rose of the Galaxy, returning to Kalu in a shower of stars. It was all image and spin: a big fat lie wrapped up in a pretty bow. There was no love lost between Rhee and the Regent Seotra, who’d taken control of the throne until Rhee came of age. He’d been her father’s childhood friend, and a decorated war hero before he’d entered politics to become one of the Emperor’s closest advisers.
Until Regent Seotra had betrayed her family.