Third Daughter (The Dharian Affairs, Book One) (29 page)

She barely caught hold of the final car, clutching the iron skeleton and hauling herself up onto the wooden floorboards. She rolled on her back, lying low on the floor as it shook and bounced underneath her, barely daring to lift her head and see the harbor workers tumble out into the bright morning sun.

They stood, watching her go. But they didn’t come after her. She thunked her head back down on the floorboards and tried to calm her pounding heart.

Aniri was a half-minute out of the rail station, eyes shut tight against the burning in her palms and the beating sun, before she remembered the prince. She raised her head and scanned the rocky wall of the ravine for the narrow pathway, then glanced back along the rail line, afraid the workers had decided to follow her after all. They might find the prince if he tried to meet her on the train. But the harbor had slid from view around a corner. 

Shading her eyes—the sun was all light but no heat—she looked ahead for the prince. He was half tumbling, half scrambling down the steep, rock-strewn embankment alongside the rail. She tried to get to her feet, but the rocking of the train brought her flat to the floor again. The biting cold whipped through her clothes and numbed her body, making it even more difficult to think of standing. She managed to push up to sitting, then tried to button her cloak. On top of the shaking cold, her hands were burned, a white heat against the frozen wind. She couldn’t get them to work properly.

The prince was running now, trying to match speed with the train even as it chugged ahead faster and faster. She gave up on the cloak and crawled across the floor on fisted hands toward one of the skeletal girders that framed the car. Her hands screamed in pain. Once she reached the steel post, she pulled herself to standing, steadying against the swaying by wrapping an arm around the girder. The prince raced alongside. She wanted to help him, but her hands were useless. He caught hold of the edge of the floor and hauled himself aboard. He stood, flinging his arms out against the rocking of the train, and stumbled to where she stood.

His first words were harsh against the wind. “Queen’s breath, Aniri, what are you doing?”

“Es… escaping.” Her teeth chattered, breaking her words.

He looked her over. “What happened to your overcoat?”

“N… no time.”

He looked frustrated. “Well, at least button up your cloak. You’ll catch your death with it open like that.”

She held out her gloved hands, the burns even uglier than they felt. Brown stains seeped at the edges, which were torn and ratty from their encounter with the steel cable. Was she bleeding? Her head suddenly felt woozy. She clutched her arm tighter around the girder to keep from losing her fight to stand.

The prince spoke harshly in a language she didn’t understand, maybe the ancient Jungali tongue he spoke of before. Probably a curse, by the way the anger rolled off him in puffs of steamy breath. He roughly pulled the hood tight around her face and started buttoning her coat.

“Why didn’t you wait out your shift? You could have been hurt—” He stopped, biting his lip as he worked her buttons. The cold still rippled in waves through her, but not quite as bad.

“Too busy… sabotaging the ship.” The prince froze in his progress down her coat, then resumed even more quickly than before, finally rising to look her in the eye.

His face was impassive. “You sabotaged the ship?” The wind whipped the fur of his hood and the loose strands of his dark hair. It brought a chill into the close space between them, but his amber eyes were even colder.

She shuddered. “Just a small hole, Ash.” She focused hard on not stuttering with the cold. “They’ll repair it. I was in need of a distraction.”

He nodded, and the corners of his eyes crinkled. It took her a moment to realize he was smiling. She wanted to smile back, but the cold sank deeper, suddenly reaching her bones, and a tremendous shudder took hold of her. It shook loose a scattering of thoughts. The skyship was real. She had seen it. It was an undeniable threat to Dharia. Devesh had lied to her. Her brain picked at the thoughts like a bird trying to snatch seeds from the dirt, but she couldn’t get hold of them. As if the wind had frozen her mind along with her body.

She tucked her hands under her arms and blinked to attempt to focus her thoughts.

The prince’s face drew serious. “You’re too cold.” He worked open the buttons of his own fur lined coat. “You need to stay warm or you will succumb to it.” He wrapped his arms and the coat around her, holding her in an attempt to shelter her from the wind and lend his body’s heat to hers. She tucked into the warm harbor that was his body. Her arms rattled uncontrollably against his chest, and he clamped her tighter.

She remembered what he’d said, so long ago, about his mother succumbing to a chill. Was this what he meant? They never had this kind of cold in the plains of Dharia. She tried to think of the warm fireplace of her room, the bright sun of summer, the cozy blankets of her bed… anything to keep the chill from working its way farther into her body.

After many, long minutes in silence, the shaking of her body quieted. The prince whispered to her. Even his breath brought puffs of warmth to her ear. “They will no doubt be looking for us at the train stop ahead in town.”

Aniri just nodded.

“Once we break from the foothills, we’ll need to jump from the train. Are you warm enough to attempt it?”

She nodded again.

It was painful, and she was clumsy, needing his help on several occasions, but they managed to get off the train, back to the village, and aboard the cable car. None of Garesh’s men spotted them. Aniri and the prince didn’t speak of the airharbor or the ship the whole way, but as her body and thoughts thawed, she worked through the implications of what she had seen.

Her heart sank further and further.

The skyship was real. Garesh was in control of it and would use it against Dharia unless the prince secured the throne and control of his kingdom. The prince was right: now that she knew, there was nothing she could do but help him with his plans. An empty ache in her stomach felt the truth of it, but she was having a hard time facing what that would demand. What it meant. Devesh had lied to her—had probably been lying all along. That thought was bitter in the back of her throat. It didn’t start with the skyship. It had started from the first moment in the fencing hall, when he challenged her with those deep brown eyes to a dance of not just swords, but hearts.

Eventually, Aniri and the prince arrived at his hideaway in Mahet. They had to discuss what came next, but she was loathe to do it, like poking at a wound that was still fresh. That she knew would hurt like nothing else before. The prince seemed to notice her dark mood. The room was cold just like the first time they arrived, the day before, and he busied himself with building a fire. She unbuckled her father’s saber and laid it on the bed. She sat next to it, huddling under thin blankets draped across her shoulders, pretending the chill was deep in her body, not her soul.

The prince brought a bowl of water, a small copper tin, and some strips of cloth to the bed. Wordlessly, he took her hands from under the blankets and gently pulled the gloves from them, careful to keep her bracelet around her wrist. He dabbed at her palms. They were still raw and red, but no longer bleeding. He dipped his finger into the tin and put some kind of salve on her wounds. The coolness alone eased some of the fire; she didn’t know what medicine might be in it as well. He carefully wrapped the white strips around her palms, tucking the ends in a practiced way.

“This should help with the pain,” he said. “But if it’s still a torment for you, I can send for a healer.”

Aniri didn’t know what more a mountain healer could do, but the salve already made it tolerable. “No, I’m fine.” She let her hands fall limp in her lap. Her shoulders drooped, the heaviness of the blankets feeling like all her future burdens had come to rest there.

“Are you certain? You seem... unsettled.”

The worry in his voice forced her to look up. His amber eyes seemed warmed by the firelight—not the iciness of before, when he thought she had sabotaged the ship, but ringed with concern instead.

“You’ve been very quiet since we left the airharbor,” he said. “I expected you to be angry, perhaps, that the skyship was real. Or maybe afraid of the threat it poses to Dharia. I thought you might even intentionally get caught, maybe spark a war, so your mother would come to rescue you.”

Aniri just shook her head and dropped her eyes back to her hands. “My mother, the Queen, would do what is best for Dharia. Which may include leaving me in a foreign top secret military facility, if I was foolish enough to be caught there.”

“I can’t imagine that is true.”

“It’s what happened with my father.”

He frowned. “Your father… I thought he was set upon by robbers in Samir?”

She nodded. Of course Ash would keep informed of the deaths and changes in power in the royalty of other countries. “That much is true. My mother says she couldn’t keep him caged, that he loved to travel, and she had to allow it because she loved him. But when he was lost, she never held the Samirians to account. She never even looked for the murderers. She simply asked for his body to be shipped back to Dharia.” She touched the blade by her side, but her hands protested, so she left it alone. “Janak brought my father’s saber back with his casket a week later.”

“I’m sure there was an investigation—”

“I was only ten, Ash,” she cut him off. “But I wasn’t a fool. The Queen never sent so much as a guard over to Samir. She chose peace with Samir over justice for my father. I am sure she deemed it in the best interest of relations between the nations at the time.” Aniri couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “Believe me when I say it is quite possible the Queen would leave me to rot in a Jungali mountain prison if it served the best interests of Dharia.”

The prince frowned and said nothing for a moment. “Is that why you’re... sad?”

Aniri sighed and spoke to her hands. “I think I will have to marry you after all, Prince Malik.” Then she raised her gaze to the prince’s concerned eyes.

He winced. “And
that
is what makes you sad.”

“No.” She studied the tattered drapery, so she didn’t have to see the look in his eyes. “I understand what you’re doing now. I see how Garesh has built this weapon—this beautiful weapon—and you see it only as an instrument for peace. I’m not sure what the butterfly does, but—”

“The butterfly?” the prince asked, eyebrows raised.

“The device on top,” Aniri said. “I’m not sure what to call it. Where the shiners work.”

“The shiners?” The prince looked even more confused.

“You
have
seen the ship, haven’t you, Prince Malik?” Aniri said, a little annoyed. Had he lied about that, too?

He gestured with his hands to show his exasperation. “Yes, but the last time I saw it was before the Queen died. Garesh has been far too suspicious for me to chance a visit. When I last inspected the skyship, they were striving to mine enough gas to fill the balloon. I worked with my brother on the original plans for the ship. I know the tinkers who designed it. There was never any…
device
on top.”

“Oh.” Aniri’s annoyance evaporated, taking what little strength she had with it. “Well, I think they’ve nearly finished with the gas, although perhaps less so now that I’ve let some of it loose. And now there’s a giant mechanical butterfly on top, with shiny brass wings and a crystal at the center. I don’t know its purpose.”

The prince frowned. “I doubt it is peaceful.”

“I know,” Aniri said. “The skyship alone is a threat to Dharia. With the skyship sailing high above the reach of any Dharian weapons, conventional bombs could be dropped with impunity. But with this butterfly… I don’t know what it’s capable of, but I am certain the only way to keep it from being a weapon of war is to have it safely in your hands, Ash. For that, you need the crown. And to gain the crown, you need me to marry you. The only alternative is for Dharia to immediately go to war with Jungali, and even then, even knowing the capabilities of the weapon, even if we could strike before the skyship is ready to launch, I cannot be sure we would win. The airharbor is so remote… the mountains are virtually impregnable… the losses on both sides would be extreme. I can forestall all of that by forging a bond between our people. By becoming your Queen. I understand that now. It’s what’s best for both our nations.”

The prince’s face brightened while she spoke. “Then why—”

“Because the skyship is
real
. And that means Devesh lied to me. He’s been lying all along.”

The prince’s face fell again. “Your lover.”

Aniri nodded, her gaze falling back to her hands. Her fingers lightly turned the thin, braided bracelet her father had given her. “Devesh promised to help me find my father’s murderers. He promised we would marry and run away, leave the court behind and seek the things that mattered to my heart.” She glanced at her father’s saber. “I was going to have my vengeance on the vermin who killed my father. I would have found them and killed them with his own sword.”