Quatrain (32 page)

Royven was waiting for me at the breakfast table—or the cleared patch of ground that served as the breakfast table here. His hair was so bright that for a moment I mistook him for a patch of sunlight.

“Your uncle says you require entertainment,” he said. “Will you let me supervise your activities?”

I laughed. “I don’t know that entertainment is what I want so much as activity,” I said. “I am willing to be useful as long as I am occupied.”

“We’ll go through the forest to gather food,” he said. He gestured at my clothing, another of those soft, mossy dresses that Rowena had conjured up for me upon my arrival. “You might want to wear something more practical.”

So I changed into one of the outfits I had borrowed from Keesen and put on my sturdy walking boots. Royven, I noticed when I returned downstairs, wore shoes that looked more like slippers, soft as pith or linen. I expected that he would bruise his insoles if we did much clambering over rocks and fallen trees.

“Alora is completely sustained by the forest,” he told me as we set off into the dappled woods. “It supplies our food, our shelter, the materials we use for clothing. You will often see aliora down by the Faelyn River, but that is only because we love the fast current. There is plenty of water to be found inside the woods.”

“How many aliora are there?” I asked. We were hardly ten minutes from Rowena’s tree house and I was already hopelessly lost. Clearly I could not deviate from the main pathway if I was ever wandering through Alora on my own.

“It’s hard to be certain,” he said. “A few thousand, my mother thinks. There are some who live so deep in the woods that even she has never seen them.”

“That’s not very many.” I replied. “Are they—are you—is there any fear that someday there won’t be any left?”
Any chance you might all die off?
Exactly how did you phrase a question like that?

“That’s always a fear,” he said quietly. “It is one of the reasons my mother was so determined to stop the humans from stealing aliora. There are so few of us already. We could not afford to lose one more.”

“No,” I said. “Well, now that my father is king, it will never again be acceptable for men to enslave aliora.” I did not mention the thought that instantly presented itself.
What if Brandon becomes king? Might the young upstart prince have a different perspective?
I shook my head to chase the thought away. Awful for too many reasons to contemplate what might happen if the pretender took the throne.

We had come across a pretty big deadfall in the woods and there was no easy way around it. “Looks like we’ll have to climb over,” Royven said. Nimble as a wild cat, he scaled the first few tumbled logs, then turned around to offer me help up. I had almost laid my palm in his when he suddenly snatched his hand away.

“Gold,” he said, when I looked at him in astonishment. “I could feel its heat.”

A different kind of heat rose in my cheeks at my thoughtlessness. “I’m so sorry. I forgot.”

“Can you make it up and across without my help?”

“I think so. Let me try.”

Much less gracefully than Royven, I crawled and clambered up the mound of fallen branches, then back down the other side. I acquired a few scratches on the way, including one that welled with blood, but nothing to be concerned about.

Royven was pointing. “There’s a stand of dayig trees not too far ahead of us. That’s what we’re aiming for.”

“Dayig,” I repeated. “Then I don’t care how many cuts and bruises I get!”

Still, this deep in the forest, pushing through the undergrowth was like breaking through hip-deep snow—treacherous, heavy going laced with hidden hazards. I took an unsteady step and felt a loose branch snap under my foot, and my arms started flailing as I went down.

“Zara!” Royven called, and made an instinctive grab. Then he howled and flung my hand away, nursing his arm to his chest while I plopped down straight on my bottom.

I leapt up again as soon as I caught my balance. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have reached for me,” I cried. “Are you all right? Did you burn your skin?”

He had put his hand against his mouth and was licking his scalded fingers. “I’ll get a blister, I think. Don’t worry about it,” he said.

“You just have to remember not to touch me,” I said in a scolding voice.

He smiled. “But what if I want to touch you?” he teased.

“Now is not the time to be flirting,” I said.

“Any time is the time to be flirting,” he returned with a laugh. “But seriously, if I see you slipping down, I can’t
not
try to help you. And if you were to break your leg or twist your ankle, I’d have to carry you back, gold or no.”

“Surely I won’t break my leg,” I said. I glanced around. “How dangerous
is
this forest?”

“But you might fall again,” he said. “If you were to take off your gold—just your bracelets—at least I could hold your hand and help you up.”

I thought about that for a moment. I wasn’t supposed to remove any of my gold, for any reason whatsoever, even while I slept or bathed. But it would just be the jewelry on my hands. I wouldn’t remove the earrings, of course, and I
couldn’t
take off the necklace. And I could always slip the bracelets back on once we were safely back at Rowena’s.

“I’ll put them in my pockets,” I decided. “That way I can at least take your hand if I need to.”

I unsnapped the bracelets and tucked them in the front pocket of my trousers. Royven held out his hand again and I laid mine in his. He made a great show of bowing, just like a human courtier, and kissing my fingers.

I almost swooned from the sensation. This was a sharper bliss than the drunken contentment I had felt so far when an aliora touched me. This was more like . . . fever. But a deliriously exciting fever.

I laughed shakily as I pulled free of his hold. “Somehow I don’t feel like you’re rescuing me from the consequences of a fall,” I said.

He laughed back at me. In the light-spattered forest, with his dark eyes and white hair, he looked like a patch of scenery suddenly gone mobile. “Just expressing my happiness at having you to myself for the day.”

“Let’s go pick some dayig,” I said.

The tree branches were heavy with the big ripe fruit, red as a persimmon but shaped more like a pear. Proving he had operated with some foresight after all, Royven produced a couple of large cloth bags, and we each started tugging pieces off the trees and storing them in the sacks. We stopped maybe five times to slice open a particularly plump dayig, scrape out the seeds, and cram the pieces in our mouths so greedily that the juice ran down our chins. No dayig purchased in Faelyn Market had tasted half as good as that fresh fruit plucked directly from the tree.

“If you lived in Alora, you could eat dayig every day,” Royven said in a coaxing voice.

This was so far from being subtle that I had to laugh. “Only when it’s in season, I would think,” I said. “Only a few months out of the year.”

“There are other fruits that grow well into winter or ripen early in spring,” he said. “Almost as good as dayig. Things you’ve never seen back at the castle because they cannot travel any distance before they bruise and shrivel.”

“Maybe I’ll get a chance to taste them, if I’m here that long,” I said.

“I hope you do.”

“No,” I said, “I hope I’ll be home before long.”

He slanted a sideways look at me. “I keep thinking you’ll forget,” he said.

“Forget my
home
? Forget my
family
?”

“Forget that they’re in danger. If you knew they were all safe, that war no longer threatened, could you let them fade a little? Could you be happy here?”

I put my hands on my hips. “You’re not supposed to ask me that. You’re not supposed to try to convince me to stay.”

“But I’d like you to stay,” he said whimsically. “Why shouldn’t I say it out loud?”

I picked up my heavy bag, lumpy with its harvest, and turned to go. Except I couldn’t precisely remember which direction led back to Rowena’s. “You don’t even know me,” I said. “You have no reason to think you’d like me to live here forever.”

“And how will I get to know you if you go back home too soon?”

It was almost like arguing with a child. I gave a rueful laugh and shook my head. “At any rate, it’s time to go back to the place
you
call home,” I said. “I have no idea how to get there, so please take the lead.”

The forest was no less treacherous now that we were both weighed down with awkward burdens, and more than once I skidded on loose piles of twigs or he slipped on slick patches of mud. Twice he caught my hand to steady me across some insecure footing, and twice he released me. The third time I almost fell he had to haul me upright with more than a little force.

After that, he did not let go of my hand, and we completed the rest of the hike with our fingers interlaced. By the time we returned to Rowena’s open cottage, it was hard for me to remember why it might be a good idea to let him go.

I was a little hazy during dinner, pleasantly weary from the exertions of the day, still replete with dayig, fuzzy with happiness. Jaxon laughed more loudly every time I yawned, and Rowena promised to forbid Royven to take me on any more exhausting excursions.

“I had a good time,” I said through yet another yawn. I was just finishing up a dessert confection that looked like rose petals and tasted like molasses. “But I don’t think I can stay awake much longer. Good night, everyone. I’ll see you in the morning.”

I practically floated up to my room, no longer disconcerted by the stairway made of tree branches or the corridor constructed of rope. I had changed into my nightshirt and curled up on my bed before I realized I had forgotten to drink my nightly potion. For a moment, my head comfortable against one of those deep pillows, I debated skipping the ritual—just until the morning!—but then I grumbled and sat up. I had promised my mother. One vial every night.

I reached for the nearest one and gulped it down. Only after I swallowed it did I register that it carried a different taste from the first two—in fact, had it not been flavored with cinnamon, it might have carried no taste at all. It was just like my mother to mix up a range of concoctions, all a little different, each one suited for a different purpose—without warning me that she had done so. What would be the effect of this one? I wondered. What were the ingredients, and why had she thought I might need them?

I ran my tongue across the roof of my mouth, searching for clues to the tonic’s composition in the faint residue left behind. The consistency was familiar—this was something I had sipped once before in my life—but it took me a few moments to place it. And then I was even more confused.

She had blended a love potion for me, but not the sort of draught that would make me tumble head over heels. This was the kind of brew that wakened your senses, heightened your awareness, revealed to you someone’s true qualities. She had first made me a sample four years ago, when I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with Keesen, when just the sound of his boisterous laugh made me clench my hands and hunch my shoulders in disgust.

“All girls your age hate their younger siblings, but you’re the princess, and you don’t have that luxury,” she’d told me calmly as she’d handed me a glass half filled with liquid. We were in the sitting room attached to her bedroom, where she stored all kinds of interesting herbs, most of them securely locked away. “Drink this. You’ll see him for the child he is and not the embarrassment you think he’s become.”

Still fuming, I’d done what she told me. Then I’d folded my arms across my chest and waited to prove to her that the potion didn’t work on me because Keesen really
was
a loathsome child.

Moments later he careened into the room, chasing a frolicking black puppy that I had taken an instant dislike to the day Keesen brought it up from the stables. They skidded across the room and bounced off a low table, knocking three books and a brass paperweight to the floor. The dog barked and Keesen pounced on it, laughing uncontrollably. The dog was squirming in his arms, frantically licking his face. It was hard to tell which one had the most energy. Both of them were covered with mud, and their assorted footprints made a smeared track across my mother’s freshly washed floor.

I watched them, my mouth half open so I could draw in air. My heart was so full of love that for a moment I couldn’t speak.

“Zarabara!” Keesen cried—the nickname he’d had for me since he was a toddler, the name I absolutely abhorred. “Look, I taught him tricks! You want to see?”

And I laughed and dropped to my knees right there on the dirty floor and I said, “Yes, show me what he can do.”

From that minute on, I adored him. Oh, there were days I wanted to hand him over to the castle guard for a quick and efficient death, but most of the time I loved him. If someone else teased or belittled him, I sprang to his defense. I even argued with my father once when I thought he was too harsh on Keesen—though, of course, arguing with my father was rarely worth the breath. And Keesen
had
borrowed the royal scepter to use as a bludgeon in a fight with the groom’s oldest boy. But if I was nearby, no one else could harm or punish Keesen and get away with it.