by Maya Motayne
“Tiago,” Alfie said, tilting his chin up. “It truly has been too long. I’ve been far from home and yet, even at sea, I did hear of you squandering half your inheritance gambling over the summer.”
An embarrassed flush bloomed on Tiago’s face.
Luka’s eyebrows rose and with a moment of eye contact they were communicating as seamlessly as they always had.
Take him down, Alfie’s eyes said.
Naturally, Luka’s replied.
But Tiago beat Luka to the punch. “Prince Alfehr, it’s wonderful to see you back, safe and sound, but one must wonder,” Tiago said, cocking his head as if in thought. “If you have no future, then what will become of our beloved Castallan when you rule it?”
Alfie froze where he stood, hot anger pooling in his stomach as Tiago’s lips unfurled in a satisfied smirk.
At the age of five, all royals were taken to the royal diviner, where she would glimpse their future and speak of what greatness their lives would bring. Dezmin had been told that his legacy would be eternal, a sign that he was to become the king that their parents had hoped for. When Alfie’s mother took him to his own divining, he’d hoped to hear the diviner speak of a future of conquests, like the stories he’d been read. He feared that she would say his life would be full of cowardice or bereft of glory, a life his parents would not be proud of, but what she said was much worse.
“I cannot divine him,” the diviner had said, snuffing out Alfie’s hopes. “There is a piece missing, an important one. Without it I cannot see the prince’s future.”
How could his parents think he was the one to lead this kingdom when he didn’t even have a future to speak of? When he wasn’t whole.
If Tiago had thought of this, how many others were tittering about it behind their hands, wondering if Alfie’s rule would spell the end of their kingdom? A stunning wave of embarrassment twisted through Alfie as he sputtered for a response in the face of Tiago’s sneer.
Alfie was saved when Luka stepped forward, his narrowed eyes on Tiago. “You would do well to hold your maldito tongue. Like your prince said,” Luka uttered, reminding Tiago of his station, “you failed in the gambling dens; I wouldn’t press your luck with us either. Make yourself scarce, Tiago, like your inheritance.”
Tiago gaped at them, his face pinched tight with humiliation before he turned on his heel and walked away. Luka and Alfie looked at each other for a moment before bursting out laughing. But when the laughter died, Luka looked away, as if remembering that he was still angry.
“That doesn’t change anything, Prince Alfehr.” It was strange hearing his full name and title in Luka’s mouth.
Luka’s tone aside, Alfie’s heart lightened all the same. If Luka had defended him, then maybe they were closer to going back to the way things were. “You know me well enough to call me Alfie.”
Luka cut his eyes at him, his practiced smile faltering. “Do I?” Luka plucked a goblet of sangria from a passing servant’s tray.
“Yes,” Alfie insisted. Luka took a generous gulp of sangria. “Careful,” he said, his voice low. “You know you don’t do well with the sweet stuff.”
Luka raised his eyebrows before motioning for another servant to come his way. Luka downed his sangria goblet and handed the servant his empty glass before taking a fresh one.
“And you don’t do well with sneaking in and out of the palace with contraband,” Luka hissed over the lip of his glass. “But I’m not lecturing you now, am I?”
Alfie’s shadow moved away from Luka warily. “Luka—”
“What?” Luka went on quietly, his polite smile still on. “Are you afraid that if I drink too much I’ll tell everyone about your new hobby? How would I even phrase it?” Luka cocked his head and tapped his chin, as if he were thoughtfully contemplating. “I suppose I could start with: ‘Did you know that when everyone is asleep, Prince Alfie here gets a doorknob—’”
“Luka,” Alfie said, his voice snapping like a whip. He kept his face composed, a careful smile to match Luka’s. “I know you’re angry with me. You have every right to be.” Luka snorted. “We have to talk about it, but that time can’t be now.”
“I can’t promise I won’t kill you before then,” Luka muttered, sipping his sangria.
“You could,” Alfie said, hoping that Luka’s joke meant he was a little less angry. “But then you’d be left alone at this boring party.”
“Then I’ll kill you right afterward,” Luka quipped.
Alfie nodded at that. “We’ll compromise, then.”
Luka’s lips quirked up into a genuine smile, and Alfie couldn’t help but grin back. Maybe everything really would go back to normal soon. The queen walked toward them, the voluminous skirts of her tiered gown skimming the polished floor.
“And how fares the night for my favorite boys?” She stood between them and gripped them each by the shoulder. “It’s so nice to see you both together again, getting along.”
Luka stiffened at her words. He stepped away from her touch, and her smile wavered.
“It is nice,” Luka said, conjuring a smile so brittle that Alfie could spot the cracks splintering it. “Would you excuse me?” Luka said with a bow.
Mother meant well, Alfie knew, but it had been too soon to say something like that.
“Of course,” Queen Amada said, her eyes bright with concern.
She nodded at Alfie, silently telling him to follow as Luka made for the doors.
Alfie followed Luka out of the banquet hall and into the hallway. As soon as the doors shut behind them, Luka let out a growl of anger and ran a hand through his dark hair.
“I know you’re angry—” Alfie began, but Luka silenced him with a furious look.
“Yes!” he said, nearly shouting. Alfie was thankful that the walls were soundproof. “I know that you know! And I know that you keep pretending that everything’s going to be fine now that you’re back, even as you’re sneaking out of the palace, risking your life on a fool’s errand! And you have the gall to think things can just be nice again? You left, Alfie. Three months and not a single maldito letter!”
Alfie swallowed hard, unsure of what to say. “I know. And I’m sorry. I needed time. Please just listen—”
“No,” Luka hissed, closing the space between them, his eyes glassy. “No, you listen. You left me here! You left me here to look at his empty place at the table, alone!”
Alfie felt a pang in his chest as Luka wrung his hands in frustration. He’d left because he couldn’t take seeing the places where Dez once stood, where he should still be standing, but he hadn’t even thought of what his leaving would mean for Luka. He’d thought of no one but himself.
Alfie’s shadow stretched forward toward Luka, but Luka only stepped away. “Luka, I’m stopping now, I promise. It’s over, all of it.” He was telling the truth. He’d promised himself he would stop should those Englassen books lead him nowhere, and not a one of those books had anything to offer to save Dez.
Luka stared at him, his unfocused eyes narrowing. “I’m not a fool. I don’t believe you. Why is it that when you choose to be reckless you decide to do something that will get you killed? Why can’t you just drink and sleep around like every other rebellious royal?”
Alfie’s hands curled into fists. “I handled my grief in my own maldito way, Luka. Not everyone is you.”
“Not everyone is next in line to be king, Alfie,” Luka shot back.
“Why does everything have to come down to that?” Alfie said, feeling the walls closing in on him. He knew he would have to be king, but the reality of it still weighed too heavily on him, like an anchor dragging him down into unfathomable depths.
“Because it’s important! And this is foolish. Dez is gone. You can’t bring him back. And the worst thing is you seem to think you’re the only one here who lost a brother,” he seethed. “Dez was mine too. And you made it feel as if one brother was taken and the other left!”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I don’t care about what you meant,” Luka snapped. “And maybe you’ve forgotten, but you were important to Dez. Your maldito life was important to him! This kingdom, this family’s legacy, was important to him too. He wouldn’t want you to get yourself killed and throw it all away. And I won’t watch you do it.”
Alfie’s face burned with shame as Luka stormed off without giving him a second glance. He was far too drunk to believe him now. If he needed space, he would give him that. He owed him that much. But the flush in Luka’s face and the subtle sway in his steps told Alfie that all the sangria he’d had was hitting him.
“Please just go to your room and sleep it off,” Alfie said. “We can talk tomorrow.”
Luka waved a hand dismissively over his head without turning around and disappeared around a corner. Alfie wanted to follow, but his mother would have his head if he left the party. If he was to be king, he needed to make an impression at these events. That was what Luka wanted him to do, wasn’t it? Commit to his royal duties? Still, he longed to go after him.
Alfie shook away that urge. He walked to the double doors to the ballroom, pasted a smile on his face, and went back in.
10
The Vault
Finn counted to one hundred before she rolled out from under the bed, righted the secret compartment in the drawer, and hesitantly stepped back into the passage.
What had just happened?
She thought of the sound of the bottle being shaken and the girl weeping. It felt wrong. Poisoning took malice, and Finn could hear only regret in the girl’s cries. Beneath her gnawing curiosity flashed a question—did the prince deserve to die? She peeked into the slat again and saw the neck of the bottle on the prince’s bedside drawers. For a moment she considered dumping it out. Then she snorted. What did she possibly owe a prince? She was here to rob him, not save him.
What kind of person are you if you just sit back and let someone get killed? she thought.
Finn pressed her forehead to the stone wall. Letting someone get poisoned certainly wasn’t the worst thing she’d done. What was the point of turning back now?
That thought sat in her stomach like a stone.
You are exactly what I’ve always said you are, Mija. A monster.
Ignacio’s voice rang in her head like a gong. Her fingers itched to dump out the bottle, to prove that voice wrong. But what did one good deed matter? It was foolish of her to even think that one good thing would save her from all the bad. This wasn’t some children’s story.
She was who she was.
For a moment she sank into that memory once more, the memory of the first time she’d taken a life. She could see the girl bleeding out beneath her, could feel something dark and crooked take root inside of her. Her palms were sweating, her breaths ragged and uneven.
After three countdowns she quieted the part of her mind that echoed with guilt for things long past. She was too far gone to drown in guilt. She’d learned to swim in those waters long ago. She needed to focus.
Finn shut the slat, the key to the vault secure in her pocket. Whatever was going on, it had nothing to do with her. She was here to get the cloak.
Now that she’d retrieved the key, she needed to travel back down to get to the royal vault. It must’ve taken nearly an hour to go through the tangle of passages and ladders into the depths of the palace. She felt the air shifting, becoming danker. She wondered if the palace really had dungeons like she’d heard. Curious, she checked the map. Yes, it did.
She’d be avoiding those, thank you very much.
Finally, she made it to a passage that opened into the hall where the vault’s floor-to-ceiling silver doors stood. Of course, there was no direct passage into the vault. She wasn’t that lucky or the palace architect wasn’t that stupid. Through the slat she could see two guards sitting at a table before the vault. The table was scattered with playing cards. It looked like they’d been playing a round of cambió. She grimaced. She’d had more than enough of that game.
One of the guards was already nodding off. The other was staring at the ceiling as if he could will himself to float up to the party upstairs.
Out of her bag, Finn pulled a stoppered vial full of five gray quilbear quills as thin as a fingernail and as long as her middle finger. She pulled off the stopper and with a beckoning motion of her hand, the quills rose to her eye level.
Quilbears were massive beasts covered in sharp, venomous quills that they shot at enemies and prey. The quills themselves were strong, threaded with a great deal of metal. And what was metal but a type of stone?
With a flick of her fingers, Finn poised two quills at the slat’s opening. She needed to do this right the first time. If she missed, they might spot the quills and realize someone was trying to knock them out. But if she could hit them, she could get into that vault without a hitch.
Finn held her breath and eyed her targets. Neither was moving much. Now was the time. With a purposeful flick of her fingers, the quills zoomed out of the slat.
Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move, Finn thought fervently.
The quills buried themselves in each of the guards’ necks, and their heads lolled forward as they fell fast asleep. Finn put her fist in her mouth to stop herself from shouting in victory. Her shadow swirled triumphantly around her.
She exited the passage and plucked the quills out of the guards’ necks, then pushed the key into the slot of the great door. The lock gave a resounding click. Finn looked back at the two guards whose heads were resting on the table, still fast asleep. Quilbear venom knocked people out for a good ten minutes. Fifteen, if she was lucky. She needed to find the cloak and get out before then. She pushed open the great doors and closed them behind her. Her jaw dropped.
The vault was bathed in the golden glow that came only from treasures too expensive to comprehend. Everything shined, calling out to her fingers for thieving. There were dummies draped in the most beautiful gowns and headpieces she’d ever laid eyes on. They must’ve been the wedding clothes of former queens. There were preserved documents that even Finn recognized as historic: Castallan declarations, sacred texts from before Englassen occupation, and marriage contracts between princes and princesses. She opened chests and found more gold pesos than she’d known existed and necklaces so heavy with jewels they might snap her neck. Beside a neatly arranged pile of tapestries was an undressed dummy in a glass case. Something beautiful must’ve once been kept in it. Finn wondered what, but then her eyes fell back on the gold. Before she could stop herself, she was shoving fistfuls of pesos into her pockets.
“Stop,” she told herself. She wasn’t going to get out of the palace unseen if she was lugging around a chest of gold. She emptied her pockets.
Well, she emptied most of them.
Then she set about finding the vanishing cloak. What the cloak actually looked like, Finn wasn’t sure. Every Castallan child had been told the story of the great rebellion that began with a single vanishing cloak. But in every tale it changed in color or description. Some said it was light as a shadow, others said it was weighty with history. Some said it was the rich red of the Castallan flag. Others claimed it shimmered with every color known to man and all the colors that weren’t. Finn didn’t know what to look for. She figured she’d know it when she saw it. But she tried on fancy cloak after cloak and none made her invisible or looked particularly special.
With a growl of frustration, Finn plopped herself on top of a dark wood chest, her arms crossed. How the hell was she going to find something when she didn’t even know what it looked like? She rolled her neck from side to side, feeling the tension cording through it. As she searched the vault in vain, she walked past a pedestal topped with a velvet pillow. On the pillow sat what looked like a severed piece of a statue—two thickly muscled arms and hands carved from dark, smooth stone. The work was so painstakingly detailed that it didn’t seem carved at all; it looked as if it’d sprung from some mountain face just as it was.
The stone
hands were interlocked, the long fingers laced together. Probably a piece of some famous sculpture she knew nothing about. Finn was hardly one for art, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from it. It even had fine hairs sculpted onto the arms. She’d never seen a statue with that kind of detail. Whatever sculpture the arms came from, Finn knew it was a towering, imposing one.
Finn reached for it, and just before her fingertip grazed it she felt a zap of magic crackle through the air, shooting from her fingertip through her body. She wrenched her hand back.
“Coño! What the hell was that?” she said before rolling her stiff shoulders. The stone arms sat there, unbothered, seemingly unimpressed by her attempt to grab them.
Finn made a crude gesture at them with her hands. “Make a statue out of these,” she hissed, catching her angry reflection in the glass case.
In that moment, something clicked into place in her mind. What if what she really needed was a cloak that she couldn’t see?
Finn turned back to the glass case with the empty dummy inside. She pulled the glass door open and reached for the dummy’s shoulder. Where her fingers should have brushed a bare sturdy frame, she felt something light and textured, a patchwork of tiny scales. With both hands she tugged the invisible garment off the dummy.
She pulled it over her own shoulders and felt for the sleeves. At first it seemed like it would be too big for her, but as her arms slipped through, the sleeves shrank and tightened comfortably. She felt the hem come up so that it wouldn’t drag on the floor. But when she looked down at herself, her body was still visible.
“Really?” she said, annoyed. What had she done to make her luck this sour? When she turned back to the glass case, intending to return the cloak, she felt the hood of the cloak swish behind her neck. It was worth a shot. She pulled the hood over her head.
Her body disappeared before her eyes.
She’d done it. She’d found the vanishing cloak.
“Amazing,” she breathed.
Everyone knew the story of how this cloak had saved Castallan from enslavement. Englass believed that magic was a privilege that only they should enjoy. All others were seen as primitive, unworthy of the gift of magic. And if a people’s mother tongue was wiped out, if their connection to their past, their ancestors, their history, was forgotten, then they could no longer call upon magic.
