The Shu party was entirely female. Princess Ehri Kir-Taban wore emerald silks embroidered with silver leaves, her long dark hair caught up in jeweled combs. She was known as the least beautiful but the most beloved of the five royal sisters. The Tavgharad marched behind their charge, expressions fixed in the hard, empty gaze Isaak had mastered during his own tenure as a palace guard. But these were no ordinary soldiers. They were elite fighters, trained from childhood to serve the Taban dynasty. They wore black uniforms, the screaming beak of a falcon carved from garnet on the left epaulet, square black caps set at a sharp angle over their tightly bound hair. Tamar had said one of them intended to defect. But which? Isaak wondered, scanning their faces. They looked like falcons with their stern mouths and gleaming golden eyes. Why would one of them turn her back on her country and betray the women she’d been trained to protect? Did one of them really intend to defect, or was this some kind of trap for the king? The princess wobbled slightly in her curtsy, a light sheen of sweat on her upper lip, and Isaak saw the face of the guard directly behind her harden even further. He knew he shouldn’t, but he felt for the princess as she rose from her curtsy and gave him a tremulous smile. He had gotten the barest taste of what it meant to be royal, and he didn’t like it at all.
Isaak hadn’t really understood what it would mean to wear the king’s face, to walk in his shoes. Tolya and Tamar had spirited Isaak out of the palace the previous night to the estate of the notorious Count Kirigin. He would have liked to see the grounds of the infamous Gilded Bog, but at dawn, with Isaak now dressed in the olive drab coat King Nikolai favored, they’d set him atop an exquisite white gelding, and the party had turned back to the city for a staged ride to the capital. They’d been joined by a group of guards and soldiers in military dress—the king’s retinue—and that had been Isaak’s first test. But no one had done more than bow to him or salute. He’d been safely tucked between the Bataar twins and a crew of Grisha soldiers, including Tamar’s wife, Nadia, as they rode through the countryside and then back through the lower town.
He’d been reminded of the first time he had glimpsed Os Alta, how awed he’d been by its bustle and size. It looked no different now that he was seeing it through the eyes of a king.
“Stop that,” whispered Tolya.
“What?”
“Gawking at everything like some kind of wide-eyed yokel,” said Tamar. “You must look at the world as if you own it.”
“Because you are the king, and you do,” added Tolya.
“As if I own it,” Isaak repeated.
“You could order this city and every building in it burned to the ground.”
Was that supposed to make him feel better? “I should hope someone would stop me?”
“Someone might try,” said Tamar. “And he’d probably be hanged for it.”
Isaak shuddered.
“At least he can seat a horse well,” grumbled Tolya.
But Isaak managed to get that wrong too, because a king did not leap from his horse and take his mount to the stables; he waited for the groom. A king tossed the reins to him with a smile and a bob of the head and a “Many thanks, Klimint” or a “How’s your cough, Lyov?” Because of course Nikolai Lantsov knew the names of every servant in the palace. If he’d been a lazier sovereign this might have been easier.
The way everyone gazed at Isaak frightened him. Isaak had been a nobody, a First Army grunt and then a palace guard. In the lower town, people had addressed him with respect or resentment when they saw his uniform. He remembered the pride of putting on the white and gold for the first time, the bizarre experience of people stepping out of his way or offering him a free glass of kvas, while others spat in the street and swore beneath their breath when they saw him and his comrades pass. It had been nothing like this. Had he looked at the king the way these people did—full of open gratitude and admiration? And what about the others, who looked on the king with suspicion and, sometimes, outright fear?
“Why do they stare so?” he whispered. “What do they expect to see?”
“You are no longer one man,” said Tamar. “You are an army. You are the double eagle. You are all of Ravka. Of course people stare.”
“And them?” Isaak said, bobbing his head toward one of the windows where girls had perched themselves, arrayed in their best dresses, hair curled, cheeks and lips pinked. “The king is not … he’s not one for dallying with commoners, is he?”
“No,” said Tolya. “Nikolai is not a man to take advantage of his position.”
“Then what do they hope to accomplish?”
Tamar laughed. “You’ve read the old tales of princes falling in love with commoners and kings taking peasant queens. Nikolai is without a bride. Can you blame them for hoping one of them might catch his eye? That he might not fall instantly and unequivocally in love with a girl’s beauty or the curve of her neck or her auburn hair, as kings in stories are wont to do?”
“You needn’t be quite so good a study of all the lower town has on offer,” said Nadia tartly.
Tamar gave no apology, only flashed a knowing smile that sent the blood rushing to Nadia’s cheeks. “I may peruse the gaudy wares, but I recognize true quality when I see it.”
Now Isaak looked out at the crowded throne room and wondered if he could just run back to the stables, get on that fine white horse, and ride until he was captured or shot at.
Tolya gave the throne the lightest nudge of his toe, and Isaak realized it was his time to speak.
He rose. “My friends—” His voice cracked, and he saw Genya close her eyes as if in pain. He cleared his throat and tried again. “My friends,” he began in Ravkan, repeating himself in Shu, Zemeni, and Fjerdan. “I welcome you to Ravka and thank you for taking this small step toward a peace that I hope will be profitable and fruitful for us all. In this moment, we are not nations; we are friends who will eat together—” Here Isaak paused just as he’d been instructed and let a bit of Nikolai’s rakish grin touch his lips. “And drink together. Let this night mark the start of a new age.” And let me get through dinner without choking on a lamb chop or causing a war.
Isaak nodded, the doors on either side of the throne opened, and the crowd parted to let him pass.
He hadn’t even made it inside the dining room before disaster struck. The footmen threw open the doors, and Isaak, focused on how sweaty his hands had become in his gloves, did what he had been trained to do and had done for years—he stepped aside, slipping into attention, eyes in the middle-focus stare that had been taught to him by his elders along with the method of shining his boots and the proper technique for sewing on a button, since “no servant need be troubled by the likes of us.”
Guards always gave way for those of higher status, and in a palace, almost everyone was of higher status—including many of the more valued servants. But no one was of higher status than the king of Ravka.
Isaak felt the gasp as much as he heard it and had the sudden lurching sensation that the floor had dissolved beneath him, that he would fall and keep falling until he struck hard ground. At which point, Genya would stand above him and kick him with her slippered toe.
“Your Highness?” asked the Shu princess, who would enter the dining room first since her delegation had given their presentations last. She looked almost as panicked as he felt.