“And?”
“She’s coming!”
Isa curses under her breath.
“Why is that significant?” Zenia asks. Then her eyes slit with suspicion. “And why do you suddenly look like you expect a ninki nanka to rush in through the door?”
If only it were a ninki nanka. Quickly, Isa slips the white note back into the book and closes it. “I’ve got to go. Come, Suye.”
Zenia’s confused gaze tracks Isa as she leads Suye toward the wide exit opening out into the White Lily Garden with its gushing marble fountains. “Isa, what’s going on? Why the devil are you avoiding your mother?”
Isa turns around. “Because, Zenia, it turns out she knows about him. She heard a rumor somehow, and now it’s all she’ll talk about. I wonder who babbled.”
“Oh.” At least Zenia has the decency to look abashed. “Go on, then. I’ll cover for you.”
That’s what I thought. Shoving down a spike of annoyance, Isa brushes past the filmy curtains by the threshold and into the lushness of the garden beyond. Suye’s laughter trails behind her as they hurry along a stone path through well-kept beds of white lilies glistening with droplets from an earlier cloudburst. The Summit’s brightly painted limestone walls and glazed bamboo domes loom largely all around them, pregnant with the history of the thousands who’ve walked its halls before, reminding Isa, as they always do, that she is but a footnote, an insignificant player, in the story of a dynasty that has endured for centuries.
Faraswa gardeners and patrolling Sentinels in patterned green tunics and aerosteel armor bow to the duo along the way. As they turn onto a marble-columned gallery, Suye races to catch up, her little silver sandals pitter-pattering on the tiled floors. “Cousin Isa, where are we going?”
“Somewhere my mother won’t find us.”
“Oh. Oh.” Suye slows down, hesitating. “Cousin Isa, I don’t know . . .”
“It’ll be fine.” Isa keeps walking determinedly, giving the girl no choice but to follow.
A minute later they sweep up a flight of winding stairs, through a glazed bamboo rotunda, past a pair of silent guards in aerosteel armor and blue tunics patterned with elephant motifs, and then into a grandly appointed study. The four people already inside—the king, his two sons, and his herald—give them only passing glances before returning to their animated conversation.
“Don’t mind us,” Isa says, even though she knows she’ll be ignored. “We’re just here to join the furniture.”
A set of coal-black couches takes up the center of the oval room, and beyond it a pair of open doors leads out to a balcony with a view fit for a king. A gold-leafed colossus of a young warrior can be seen rising on the far side of the palace’s manicured lawns and palm trees, and in the distance, the twin waterfalls gushing beneath the Red Temple appear as turbulent white ribbons. Isa pulls Suye to the couches, almost wincing as the impossible red jewel hovering above the distant temple briefly glares, its facets catching the afternoon sunlight. The Ruby Paragon seems almost like a star where it hangs, caught in an eternal lateral spin between the thin black towers of the temple’s Shrouded Pylon.
Suye’s wide eyes slowly take in the study and then fix nervously on its four occupants, who are seated around a mahogany table at the front of the room. She isn’t a shy girl by any means, but for some reason the king makes her nervous, and the crown prince even more so. Isa suspects a girlhood crush might be the culprit for that last one.
She smiles in amusement and begins to tug idly at Suye’s braids while she picks up the threads of the conversation she intruded on. Technically, the king’s study is no place for a young princess, but the king has always been permissive with his children, and he’s never once complained about Isa coming and going as she pleases. Her mother, on the other hand, never sets foot in here, which makes it the perfect hiding place.
“What about the reports of increasing violence against our clanspeople in the crocodile province?” Kali, the crown prince, says. “Some of the things I’ve heard, the language being used against us—it’s outright genocidal propaganda.”
The crown prince, Isa would say, is far too serious for his own good, certainly more serious than any twenty-one-year-old man has any right to be. Unlike the typical Saire prince, Kali served with the King’s Sentinels and dresses in the blue tunics of the Saire Royal Guard, with nothing but a single golden chain to indicate his princely rank. Isa misses the much less austere brother she knew growing up.
Prince Ayo—a better-looking if slighter version of the crown prince, possessing all of the ego and none of the humility, in emerald robes as princely as his brother’s are plain—leans back in his chair with a smirk. “That’s nothing new, though, is it? And I doubt it’s restricted to the crocodile province. Every other clan has always hated us, and why wouldn’t they? The Saires own all the banks, the entire transport infrastructure, not to mention stakes in practically every mine and grainfield in the kingdom. On top of that, we get to be kings.” Ayo shrugs unworriedly. “Resentment is inevitable, but it’s nothing we can’t handle.”
Isa rolls her eyes. Trust Ayo to be smug about Saire predominance and absolutely blind to why that might not be such a good thing.
“Your overconfidence concerns me, brother,” Kali says to Ayo, then turns to the man across the table. “And it’s especially concerning that you’re not more worried about this, Great Elephant. Kola Saai is conscripting every young crocodile into his legion. He’s almost doubled his forces just this last comet. How can you not wonder what he’s up to?”
King Mweneugo Saire, portly in his middle age, with eyes that can be as soft as they can be unyielding, strokes his thick beard. The many gold and ivory chains of his office seem to add more bulk to his chest, glittering in tandem with the gilded elephant mounted on the wall behind his large chair. “I can wonder and worry until I’m a wrinkled corpse, my son,” he says, “but at the end of the day what matters is what I can prove. Can you prove the Crocodile is up to no good?”
“Well, he did just marry that foreign woman,” Ayo says. “Dulama, I think, or from somewhere else up north. I heard he had to put her up in his Skytown palace because she found his clanlands too, and I quote, ‘rustic.’ Isn’t that a little strange? A woman who won’t live in her own husband’s princedom because it’s too ‘rustic’?”
“Strange, maybe,” the king says, “but some people find it hard to part with the comforts of this city. I can’t say I see any malice there.”
“Neither do I,” Kali says, “and all of that is irrelevant in any case.” He briefly shoots his brother an irritated look. “I’m talking about the size of the crocodile legion. Specifically, why Kola Saai has doubled it.”
The herald, Princess Chioko Saire, a shrewd woman in a matching golden caftan and head wrap whose eyes always seem to twinkle like she knows everyone’s secrets, chimes in with her characteristically diplomatic voice. “I suspect he’d remind you that Umadiland kisses the southern edge of his province. To anyone looking, he’s only doing what needs to be done to secure his borders. We all know how rapacious those southern warlords can be. More so now than ever.”