Horns for the Harem Girl (3 page)

The eyes.

Every single eye was on her, every woman of the harem was watching her movements, her steps. And Helena knew they were all judging her at once. Sizing her up, trying to figure out if she was a threat to their position. If politics in the front of the palace were dangerous and tricky, politicking in the harem was a careful chess game of backstabbing, maneuvering and jostling for power. Not a day passed without someone suffering some indignity and someone else taking advantage of it to take a piece of their influence.

This
is what made her uncomfortable. And it wasn’t just discomfort – the jockeying for position, the fighting and backbiting... it made her wish to be back at the farm, barely surviving. No number of diamonds or silks or leering princes could replace the sedate routine of home. Helena was
not
one for competitions like this.

“Here! Good lord, woman, you’d think I asked you to learn to juggle and then come toss some torches for me. Take your note, I need to get out of here.”

Helena accepted the note with a trembling, outstretched hand. She didn’t notice her fingers were shaking until she heard a giggle behind her, and a comment about her nervousness. “She’ll get over it someday,” the woman said. “Either that, or she’ll grow old and barren and useless and end up the king’s yarn spinner.”

“That’d be too good for a body like hers,” another said. “She’s so awkward, so unwieldy.”

“All right!” Maret clapped her hands together like two cymbals made of ham hocks. “Everyone to your quarters. Dinner service is in two hours and you’ll be expected to be at your best. Mara, get your harp tuned, Leta, clean the food off your cheek and treat your throat – you’ll be singing tonight.” And with a few words, the two women harassing Helena had been sent away.

“Helena!” the matron called. “Go read your note in private and prepare your oils. You won’t be performing tonight. The king has requested you specially after the party, though.”

A hush fell over the crowd. Helena’s stomach hit her feet, then bounced back up into her throat. “The... the king?” she asked. “But... but why?”

Maret smiled. When she smiled like that, her full cheeks made her jowls stand out a bit more. “We don’t question him,” she said with a note of mischief in her voice.
At least outwardly
, Helena though. “We just do as he asks. Though, he doesn’t much care for stuttering.”

Helena blushed and nodded. “Will he want—”

“Whatever he wants, you’ll provide. But... I wouldn’t worry about it being anything outside of your training. The king has his favorites.”

By which you mean he won’t try to get between my legs because he’s got you for that
, Helena thought – and correctly. “Oils, you said?”

Maret nodded. “He’s been riding today. Hunting and, whatever else he does while he takes his recreation. When he comes in from a day of exercise, he likes his legs massaged. Keeps him vigorous.”

“Why would the king want
her
?” she heard someone whisper. “Why would he want that stump of a girl when he could have anyone he wants?”

The other woman shook her head in disbelief. Gold coins were tied into that one’s hair, and they tinkled as she shook. Before either could say anything else, Maret clapped again. “Now, ladies! I’m not yelling for my own good. We have a job to do!”

“Go,” she said to Helena, urgently. “Go read your letter, and prepare. If it’s from Crane, it must be important. Or, he’s drunk,” she said, knowing well the Englishman. “It’s hard to tell with that one.”

Bodily, the older woman turned Helena in a half-circle so that she faced her room, and then gave her a swat on the backside. “Go on now, quickly!”

*

“I
can’t read it just yet,” Helena said to herself. “I’ll save it until I’m ready. Or maybe until after my time with the king? It’ll give me something to look forward to.”

Ever since she was little, she’d had the habit of chatting herself through her days. As a youngster, it was because she was too young to interest her siblings. She’d come five years after the last of her sisters, and was a supreme surprise. So, she learned to yammer to herself if she needed human conversation and couldn’t find anyone with which to have it.

“I’ll need something to look forward to,” she told herself, as though bargaining against her own temptation. “But then again, if I leave it, I’ll be distracted... and that’s no good. This is a great opportunity, Maret said so. I’ll need all my wits when I’m with the king if I want to make a name for myself.”

As she blabbed to herself, she swept her purple eye pencil underneath her eyes, and rounded it off with a smudge of shadow that trailed off the side of her eyelid with a decorative tail. She hummed tunelessly as she finished the other one. All while she was working at herself, she kept glancing at the letter, which she’d propped against the makeup mirror on her desk. Her silks were bunched up around her waist as she sat, and each time the breaths of wind kissed her body, Helena felt a little quail of excitement curl through her.

“What could it say?” she asked, changing her approach to teasing herself. She pinned back her hair and went to gather her massage oils from the cabinet where she kept them.

Of all the duties of a harem woman, the massage was the one she’d taken to. Helena had always been good with her hands, and had always rubbed out her father’s sore muscles when he asked, or when he didn’t, but obviously needed help. And with the addition of the expensive, beautifully fragrant oils, she didn’t just do her job, she
enjoyed
it.

She checked the clock. There was still another hour until dinner service, and since she was the after-event entertainment, she had at least three hours to kill. When she held the note up to the light on her mirror, she saw it had only a few lines written. She drew it across the underside of her nose, inhaling the scent – spicy, leathery – no doubt, this was the prince’s cologne. A trill of excitement worked its way through her, starting with the hollow of Helena’s throat and snaking all the way down to her belly, and then to the place between her legs.

Her fantasy was so sweet, so achingly impossible, that she just laughed at herself until the flush and the prickling dissipated. “The dreams of a stupid girl,” she chided herself. “Not anything that could ever happen, not in a million years.” She looked back to her mirror and saw a little hint of sadness in those perfectly done eyes.

Is this really all there is to me?
She asked her reflection.
A hidden life, shrouded by veils and silks and massage oils? What about what’s inside me? What if I don’t want to be a courtier obsessed with backroom intrigues and harp plucking?

By the time her attention returned to the letter, she was heavily into the throes of self-doubt. Helena hadn’t ever been one to panic, but now, staring at a future she never chose except in the most desperate of places, and only to save her family from starvation... she started to feel the pangs of regret. Her whole life, lost into the soft, carpeted halls of this palace. In a life she never knew, and never wanted.

“But then there you are.” She regarded the note.

Taking the small, square envelope in her hand, she ran her finger along the seal. It was wax, and in the old style. The envelope itself was rough parchment – the king spared no expense, even for stationery. She took a step out into the common room and found it empty, and unceremoniously tore the envelope open with a heavy sigh.

Her eyebrows arched at the first line –
“I had to ask my friend your name. Your beauty stunned me, your silhouette captured me. When he told me your name was Helena, I thought I’d never imagined something so beautiful in all the world.”

That’s all it took for her to need to take a seat. A quick glance to the bottom of the note revealed it was from Arad – at least that’s how he’d signed it. She’d only ever known him as the reluctant crowned prince. His father hadn’t wanted him to be king, if only for his impetuous nature and reputation for enjoying the finer things in life a bit too much.

Her hands shook as she continued.
“Whatever your responsibilities tonight, I will find you when they are satisfied. Don’t wait up, don’t make any appearance of meeting someone. Anything outside of the ordinary – except your beauty of course – will attract attention. Our meeting will be secret, but Helena, I must see you. I must know you.
”

Her breath came in short, sharp bursts as she read the last line.

“I must have you. No – I Will – have you.”

The signature was careful and neat, but the feelings that reading it put into her stomach were anything but.

She collapsed backward into a heavily cushioned seat. “This is going to be a long, long night.”

––––––––

“D
id you poison her?”

Crane had a wry grin on his face that Arad wished he’d stop flashing. “You’re the one who delivered the letter,” the prince said. “All I did was write a note. Anyway, she’s probably just got different work this evening. At any rate, I can’t handle another of these damned parties. Come on, Jon, let’s take the air.”

“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt,” Jon said with a glance around the room. “If your father can’t bother to appear, then I see no reason I should have to endure these obnoxious hobnobbers.”

In truth, Arad only came to the feast tonight to see if he could catch another glimpse of his surprise beloved. He felt silly about the whole thing – he’d never even spoken to her – but as silly as he felt, he was equally certain of his heart.

His lips had told a thousand lies.

But Arad’s heart? Not a single one.

It was almost a chronic problem, really, because when the heart never lies, ever, then it usually ends up getting its owner into a whole lot of problems. For Arad? That was definitely the case.

From one love to another, one passion to the next, he bounded through life, leaping high and crashing low.

Funny thing – that’s exactly what he did when he needed to “take the air.”

Jon was used to the transformations, but he never had – or probably ever would – get used to his old friend talking to him through the lips of an ibex.

“Does that hurt?” Crane asked as Arad’s skull seemed to disjoint on the sides as his glorious, rippled horns grew and twisted and curled. When his friend’s legs got all gangly and the knees bent backwards, he winced, but it was more out of habit than anything else.

Salomana, after all, was a kingdom of
many
strange things. Princes who took on the form of ibexes were one of the least bizarre, truth be told. The fact that Arad frequently locked horns – literally – with his father? Slightly stranger. Especially since the king took such powerful exception to anyone saying anything at all about his authority.

“Hurt?” Arad said, his voice twisted by the strange shape of his ibex mouth. His letters weren’t quite pronounced right, given the lack of lips, and anything with a ‘t’ in it was almost comically over pronounced. “Only for a second. And then, I can run like the wind. When you can do that, you forget a lot of pain.”

His friend blasted, rocket-like, off on muscles that were so tense and tendons so taut that they could have exploded at any second. “Sure,” Crane said as he watched the prince tear across the desert. “And then you meet someone who wants to fight.”

*

T
alcum-soft quartz sand that shone with the quicksilver light of moon danced across Arad’s vision as his hooves pounded through the stuff like it was the fringe of surf on a beach at night. Stars blazed overhead, resplendent in the blessed nothingness of the desert outside of the city.

I could live out the rest of my days under these skies
, he thought.
But only with my Helena. Even now my heart aches, my body longs to call to her, my soul burns to embrace her and be one with her
.
If I could only touch her shimmering hair, smell her intoxicating scent one more time, I could die happy
.

He shook his mighty head, horns reflecting the light.
No, not die. I want to live with her by my side. Damn Crane and his sensibilities, damn my father and his need for a royal family... damn all of it to hell. I’m tired of the politics and the games and the sacrifice... and for what?

These runs were the way he worked through his anger, through his sadness and moods. Moods like this struck him more and more the older he got. He thought less of power and wealth and more of having a big family to surround him when he was old and feeble.

And now I’ve found her
, he thought.
Helena
. He relished the way her name felt as he rolled it around his mouth like the finest Damascus wine. And he’d seen nothing of her but eyes behind a veil. His heart raced as much at the thought of the rest of her as it did at his cresting yet another dune. The burning in his huge thigh muscles pleased the prince, mostly because it meant he wasn’t thinking about
her
, at least not for the moment.

As he topped another mountainous dune, he paused to take a moment to stare at the moon. Her loving beams surrounded him, comforted him, as they always had, but there was an unease in the quicksilver shimmer that night.

And then he felt the points.

Flames of pain ripped through Arad’s body, drawing blood.

“Father?” he hissed, as he twisted to the left and hooked his horns underneath whoever had attacked him. With a swift move he snagged the aggressor and turned his head so that he could see what had assaulted him.

Two eyes caught his attention; glittering gold, flecked with ivory. “Why did you attack me?” Arad asked, gasping for breath.

“Because you’re a damn fool, boy,” his father hissed back. His voice was craggy with age, but worn a bit smooth from the shape of his mouth. “You have a duty, a tradition to uphold, and you’re willing to give it all up for some peasant? Some peasant from
my
harem?”

Arad shook his head. “What are you talking about? I can have anyone in the entire kingdom. Any woman in Salomana will open herself to me. Why would I bother with one of your harem girls?”