A person can’t wear this thing. It’s ten feet tall, and two smokestacks jut up from behind the shoulders, like it has a diesel engine in it or something.
Then again, the armor he wore last night made noises when he moved…like little motors, and it was wired to provide electrical power to that sword he used. It heated the blade or electrified it, or something like that.
I swallow hard and rush back out, wondering if he’ll somehow know if I went in. This place has to be loaded with cameras I can’t see.
God, what if he watches me sleep? I shudder, and walk into another room.
I think I’m safe to go in here. It looks like an art gallery. Lots of paintings. Men that look like the prince himself, sometimes posing with women and families. In the older, faded portraits with cracked paint, they wear suits of armor, the same ones from the other room. In newer ones they wear uniforms.
I walk to the end and find the prince in a painting that looks so new, I’m surprised it’s not still wet. He stands on his own, looking younger, maybe fifteen or sixteen…next to his identical twin.
That can’t be right.
They’re exactly the same. The artist captures it so well, it’s like a photograph. The only difference I can see is a slight scar on one twin’s cheek. The prince doesn’t have it. It must mark his brother.
Where the hell is his brother? I’ve never even heard of him having one.
There’s another painting.
A tall, slender girl, of an age with the prince when the other painting was done, in a dress not unlike the ones in my wardrobe. Honey-blonde hair tumbles loose down her back, and she smiles warmly.
There’s only one painting of a woman alone in this room. This one.
Why?
I stand there contemplating that for a while, a thought nagging at the back of my mind while refusing to take shape.
Then I hear a commotion outside.
Running through the corridors, I follow the noise, lifting my skirts so I don’t catch them under my toes. I run faster, until I’m starting to puff for breath, following the sounds.
Somehow I manage to find a staircase that takes me out into the courtyard. I stop dead in my tracks.
The prince is in his armor, but it’s dented and torn up, the enamel scratched in long, jagged lines across the chest, the big shoulders dented in, and he’s limping, the armor quivering and seizing up as it moves. He lurches forward and stops.
The whole thing unfolds open. The helmet lifts up, the chest plate splits along a seam I couldn’t even see, and the the arms just…falls off. The prince struggles out of it, falling to the dirt almost at my feet, panting on all fours. He slowly stands up, swiping at blood from a split lip.
The look he gives me freezes the blood in my veins. I feel like a rabbit staring down a hungry fox, hoping if I stay stone still he’ll pass me by and not eat me up.
“Get it inside,” he roars in Kosztylan, his voice so loud it shocks me out of my stupefied stillness.
“Oh my God, what happened to you?”
“It’s nothing.”
As two men struggle to lift one of the armor’s arms onto a steel cart, I lean over and my eyes go wide.
“Are those bullet holes?”
“Not bullets. Twenty-millimeter shells.”
I turn back to him, staring.
“Are you hurt? You’re bleeding.”
He touches his forehead and his fingers come away red. He rubs them together and flicks them contemptuously.
“It’s nothing, I’m not injured. Just a scratch.”
Before I even think I rush over to him, grab his chin in my hands, and turn his head to look for myself. I can feel everyone in the courtyard sucking in a silent breath, waiting.
He isn’t wearing one of those uniforms, I realize. He must have to wear some kind of special suit inside that armor. It’s like a wetsuit, only thinner, and it clings to every sweeping line of his body. I can see veins through it, even. He’s even more ripped than I realized, solid muscle from head to toe. He smells like sweat and leather and blood.
He pushes me back, gently, and swipes at his mouth with his hand, leaving a red streak on the sleeve of his bodysuit.
“Go back to your room. Dinner is at seven. It’s five thirty.”
“What happened to you?”
“That is not your concern.”
“Are you alright?”
He sounds almost confused that I would ask. “I am fine. Do as you are told. Now.”
I flinch and, almost without thinking, bolt from the courtyard. Somehow I find the way back to the right corridor and follow it around to my room, head inside, and almost collapse onto the bench at the foot of the bed, my heart pounding a fluttery rhythm in my chest.
It hits me hard when I realize, yeah, I’m worried about him. Last night on the goat trail, it was like he didn’t even notice that those resistance men were shooting at him. No, shooting him, they were hitting the armor, I remember it. What were those big marks on the chest and arms of the armor?
Matters of state? Matters of state? He could have been killed!
I sit back and stare at nothing.