by Willa Hart
“It’s the fate of the young man to always be hungry,” Cook says, and smiles. “Keeps me in a job.”
“You’ve got a job for life,” Sarkany says, stuffing a fourth muffin into his maw. While we have as much food as any one person in all the Roya Kingdom could desire, we three are hardly ever full, but instead have spent the last three years careening from meal to meal.
“By the way,” Cook says, lowering her voice, “your uncle said before he left you’re all three meant to be cleaned up and in his study by seven this evening. Are you three prepared for tomorrow night?’
“For fuck sake,” I huff out. “Tomorrow night is a sham. If you look at our Roya family history it’s not that the Tripsett agrees all at one ball on who the Roya Mate will be. Often it is a process over time and—”
“That’s nice, dear,” Cook says, and pats me on the shoulder. She shoots me her patient smile, the one that informs me that while she loves me and cooking for me, she doesn’t have the time nor the patience to listen to me recite the facts of the Roya Family History from an obscure text that my photographic memory has recorded.
I smile back and nod. Got it. I stuff another muffin in my mouth. Leo’s and Sarkany’s minds are open to me, as they almost always are. It’s been this way since before I can remember. According to Roya History, a Tripsett that is born together shares a mindlink since before birth.
I reach out and feel Leo’s and Sarkany’s thoughts; yes, we all three agree on this one bit of business, that believing we’ll find our Queen at this Goddess-forsaken ball is ridiculous. “Oh, for fuck sake,” I say. The surprise I wasn’t prepared for is that—instead of thinking of who the ideal mate is— we’re all three thinking about that gorgeous Ninaku Dreg. “She was but a Ninaku bird that we’ve never met before.”
Cook knows better than to say a word and scurries away.
I lower my voice and eye my brothers. “It’s illegal for an Eliterrati to be with a Dreg, and besides, I think the girl would gut each of us like a fish before she’d let any one of us touch her.”
“Ha! That’s where you’re wrong, brother,” Leo says, and stands. “I smelled the desire on her. And that blush? She was ripe and ready for me.” Leo winks and smiles. “She’d be mine.”
“The fuck she would,” Sarkany says. “She’d send you straight to the Goddess with a knife.”
I say nothing, for I know the truth. I could feel it…see it, that this girl needed no knife to send any one of us to the Goddess. That Ninaku Dreg—Meela—has the gift, or what those mind abilities for a Dreg are called: the Fatal Curse. Punishable by death to her and her entire line. She was much too clever to let me see proof of her mindslaying powers, but climbing through the piles of her memories—even the ones she doesn’t remember—was enough for me to know that whether she be Dreg or some other bloodline, she has the ability to mindslay and see. Deep breath. I won’t share this tidbit of information with my brothers; we do know how to make blocks that can keep limited bits of information from each other.
“Where’d Uncle go, Cook?”
“Ninaku,” Cook whispers, coming close to us again. She glances about the kitchen to see which pairs of ears are listening to her words. “They think they’ve found another Mindslayer amongst the Dregs.”
My heart lurches. I reach out to my brothers and…oh fuck yes. Not only can I feel their palpable fear and discomfort, but both of them share a facial expression of a tight mouth and squinting eyes. They know too! They felt her abilities as well!
“A Dreg with the gift,” Leo says. “In Ninaku?” Leo’s fishing for information and trying to play it cool. He’ll get away with that farce as long as he’s dealing with Cook or any other Palace Dreg, but not with me. Not even with Sarkany, who has the weakest gift of the mind between us three.
No, we’re all a bit panicked; I feel it. Which proves two things to me: first, Leo does believe that the Ninaku Dreg had the gift of the mind and chose to ignore it (who knows what he probed in her thoughts—he’s a sly one, my brother Leo) and two, we all have a shared desire for this Dreg, this Meela.
“Say she’s a butcher’s wife. With babies,” Cook says.
We all three sigh. I glance at each of my brothers, and I don’t even have to reach out my thoughts like tiny tendrils to know what they’re thinking. Fuck. We’re all thankful it’s not Meela—and what if it’d been the girl we’d met for all of five minutes but seems to have each of us fixated? What would we’ve done?
We’d have gone and saved her. Sarkany’s thoughts come through loud and clear which only happens when he feels particularly passionate. Is he passionate in his thoughts about this girl?
Yes, it would seem he is, you are, and so am I. Leo cocks one eyebrow and tilts his head. What of it, Taraz? What do we do now?
I close my eyes and shake my head. Nothing. We do nothing, not with Uncle and the ball and the expectations of every unwed female Eliterrati in all the Kingdom weighing on us.
“Fucking lecture to come,” Sarkany mumbles beneath his breath. All three of us stand. We know what’s to come once Uncle returns from Ninaku…and while thankful that it won’t be Meela facing Uncle and his garrison, we know the fate of the Ninaku Butcher’s wife. And while before today we might’ve thought of the Mindslay as the price a Dreg pays for the gift of the Fatal Curse, now…now that we’ve met a Dreg that has the gift—not one, not two, but all three of our heads turned for the girl…well suddenly the fate of the Butcher’s wife seems much closer to our Tripsett than it ever did before.
We trudge up the back staircase to our chambers to clean ourselves and prepare our minds so that we can sit and hear all that our Uncle needs to say.
“Where are the three of you off to?” Katya, our cousin, stands in the center of the main castle hallway with her hands on her hips. She’s blonde like Leo and a bit of a prim and proper sort of Eliterrati. Four handmaids, a lady’s maid, and a woman who I believe is her seamstress and laundress stand behind her in the main hall. It seems that Katya always has a gaggle of girls trailing her these days—not like when we were young and had tutors and we all rode horses and jumped from the Palace gates and the roof of the barn, chasing and yelling and dumping water upon each other.
No more.
Now Katya is prim and proper and has taken it upon herself to treat us brothers as though she’s an irritated mother trying to train her little boys. Which is galling since she’s actually younger than us. Now that she’s become a lady, you’d never see Katya climbing a fence and traipsing over forbidden lands to help a friend get his Whirleygig back. No, this mature Katya much prefers balls and gowns. Uncle has raised us as though she is our sister, and Katya has inhabited our life since Mother and Fathers died and Uncle became Regent.
“Really none of your business,” Sarkany says. He plucks at his teeth with a toothpick and winks at Tess, Katya’s most beautiful handmaid.
“You are an impudent bastard,” Katya says without so much as a smile.
“Bastard?” Sarkany continues, “I think not. I’m quite sure by the look of me, Mother knew which King was my father, but as for you cousin…with your fair hair and blue eyes, you don’t look much like your father or your mother.”
“You really think you’re something, don’t you?” Katya says, and smiles. “Well, we’ll see tomorrow night now, won’t we? The great Roya Tripsett must find their mate? Oh my, but the women will have their hooks in you like chum for sharks. Don’t forget you must find a mate or suffer the fate of the prophesy.”
“What fate?” Leo asks and presses his eyebrows together. “There is nothing about us mating within a certain period of time in a silly prophesy.” He looks to me. “Is there?”
“There is,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest. “But it’s a weak prophesy, one that the Goddess put little stock in, and I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it or not,” Katya continues, “the prophesy exists.”
“What’s it say?” Leo asks me, as I’m the smart brothe
r…or not necessarily smarter, but definitely the one who always did his studies, unlike Sarkany and Leo.
“It says that three brothers shall come to rule, but should they fail to find their mate before the second moon of the spring, then a great unrest shall split the Kingdom until the Lady of the Wasray clan, the Great Unifier, shall unite them all.”
“Wasray clan? The warriors from the north? But they’re all dead,” Sarkany says.
The one area he did excel in was warcraft and warrior history.
“So it’s been said.” I look at Katya. “Which means the prophesy is weak.”
“Or that the civil war and unrest will be eternal,” Katya says.
I sigh. “Right, unrest that just goes on forever.”
“Or you can find your mate as is required,” Katya says. “There are worse things.”
“I’d like for you to tell me what that would be,” Leo says. “I’m not mating for the rest of my existence with one woman unless I know for damn sure she’s the right one. And not because of some silly prophesy.” Leo’s eyebrows squish together, and he crosses his arms over his chest. “A prophesy, I might add, that not even Taraz thinks is legitimate. Because we all know that if Taraz doesn’t believe it, then it’s not true.”
“I’m not certain of your implication brother,” I say. “And I’m also not certain if the prophesy is legitimate or not, but what I do know is that if we do find our mate tomorrow night, there will be no more happier Roya than I. But I do agree with Leo, I’ll not be mated simply to be mated.”
“My lady.” A slip of a girl nearly quivering with fear walks up to us. Her head is ducked and her hands are clasped and she looks none of us in the eye. Her worn brown clothes tell us all of her background. Dreg, and not a Palace Dreg but a true Ninaku Dreg. And her mind…I probe…yes, there is very little there.
“You called for me, my Lady?”
“This dress,” Katya says, and her second handmaid, Breslin, hands over a gown to the girl. “Must be washed, mended, and pressed and returned to me by tomorrow afternoon. My intention is to wear it the second half of the ball. Is that understood.”
“Yes, m’lady.”
I look at her in profile. She takes the dress and…no, my mind’s played a trick in the light. This girl is fair-haired with freckles about her nose, and Meela was dark-haired and dark-skinned with…no, but something about this girl—
“Boys!” Uncle yells from his study.
All three of us sigh. Not even Katya, who lately seems to always take some form of pleasure in us being vexed, not even Katya looks pleased that we’re required to spend time with Uncle.
“Good luck,” she whispers, and she and her handmaids turn and scurry away.
“Ready?” I ask.
“For fuck sake, please Goddess let this go fast,” Sarkany says.
I press into his mind and sweep away his thoughts.
Thanks, he thinks.
Leo has already cleared his mind. No, listening to Uncle rant about our obligation to the Kingdom and the requirement that we find a mate is not how any of us want to spend the next hour, but we’ll do as we’re told because when you’re a ruler, your duty always comes before your pleasure.
Chapter Four
Meela
Ninaku has never been home. I arrived when I was eight, and even after a decade threading my way through foul-smelling streets where sewage and waste flows in the gutters and to the great river and to the sea, I still long for the life I had before Huali and I arrived. A life I don’t remember, but one I know had to be better than this.
Orut hobbles down the street toward us. She wears dirty and torn clothes and her right foot, lame from the attack, drags behind her. Her left arm is curled up and uselessly tucked against her body. I press my lips together and look down at the cobbles beneath my feet and walk faster.
“Hey, wait up,” Jix yells. He’s nearly running to keep up.
Orut was slayed by the Eliterrati when she was a child, and instead of dying as she was meant to, she survived. The Healer saved and hid her, but now Orut roams the Ninaku streets talking to herself and often yelling at me. Her eyes are milky—she should be blind—yet she can always see me.
“Slayer!” she yells.
I duck my head and keep cutting my way through the crowd. Keep your mouth closed, I think, pushing my thoughts into her mind.
“I hear you SLAYER!” she screams. The permanent grimace on her face floats through my mind. Her mind reaches out to me and her gaze is heavy on me, but I keep walking and weaving through the crowd thick with Dregs.
Do you want us both to die? I think.
They tried to kill me once, and failed, they shall never try again.
Well, I might not be so lucky, I think.
Slay. Slay to save us all.
I ignore her last thought and keep pushing my way through the street. Jix grasps my elbow as a way not to be separated in the crowd of Dregs racing through Ninaku. Everyone is trying to get out of the streets before dark.
“Slayer!” Orut yells, “I see you Slayer, you will save us all, it is destined Slayer, do not ignore your fate. You shall be tested, do not fail! SLAYER!”
“Is she yelling at you?” Jix turns toward Orut who now stands on the stone steps of the Temple. She points and yells.
“Really? You think I’m a Mindslayer?” I whisper the last word, because to even say it aloud can bring pain and death to a Dreg.
“No, I mean…” Jix creases his brows as though he’s remembering the two Landsmen guards dropping to the ground and writhing on the grass without me touching them. “Of course not,” Jix says. “I mean, we’ve been friends for more than ten years. I think you would’ve told me by now.”
I say nothing, because telling Jix my secret is the same as a death sentence. There’s no way the Roya Tripsett would’ve let us live. I still feel the traces of Taraz’s seeking tendrils in my mind. Jix has the same trails; like a slimy snail’s trail across the surface of Jix’s brain, and Jix doesn’t even know that Taraz was there.
I shudder and turn a corner trying to get us both as far away from Orut as fast as I can. We’re nearing the laundry, and only a block further is Jix’s house.
“Wh…wha…what do I tell my dad?” Jix stutters out as though fearful of how his father will react.
“What d’you mean?” I ask. “Are you kidding? He’ll be thrilled. Not only does he get rid of a mouth to feed, but you’re now a member of House Roya—your father and your brothers may be dumb, but they aren’t that stupid. How much money do you think they’ll give him for you?”
“Maybe ten gold?” Jix speculates.
“More like fifty gold, or maybe a hundred. Last year, when the Regent wanted Sashiela for House Roya, his parents were paid seventy-five gold and that was for a girl, so he’ll at the very least give your father fifty.”
We stop talking, knowing that once the House Roya guards took Sashiela from Ninaku, we never heard from her again. I reached out more than once, but where before I cold trace her mind…well once she was gone, there was nothing but cold empty darkness. Similar to what I felt when I tried to find my parents’ thoughts.
“Are you nervous?” I ask. We skirt around a cart filled with kinder children for sale. Too many mouths to feed, much like my sister Huali and I; in Ninaku, children are sold to the highest bidder. Huali and I were just lucky enough that we ended up together at the laundries.
“Yeah, I guess I am.” Jix looks at his drone. “I mean, if I mess up at the Palace then…I mean I’ve heard…” He slides one finger across his throat.
“Yeah, we’ve all heard that.” I turn down the alley that stinks of rotten fish and cow dung. Water and lye run in the street, and I hop over the stream. “Hopefully Dribble is already passed out drunk.”
Jix nods. Dribble owns the laundry, along with and my sister and me and two dozen other Dregs. We work and that’s all. If I’m caught by Dribble, I’ll be at best beaten with a cane, and at worst an eye plucked f
rom its socket. But Dribble doesn’t want to take one of my eyes, really, because while Dribble can’t admit it to anyone, Dribble can’t read and I can, and I’ve told him it takes two eyes to do so.
A crowd is at the opening at the far end of the alley where it meets the main street. A crowd that is standing between me and the back entrance to the laundry.
“What the Goddess?” I mumble.
We press forward through the crowd and to the front. A garrison of guards stand in front of Micheal the Butcher’s shop.
“Please sir, no, no, you cannot mean to take her, she is my mate, my wife, the mother of my children.” Micheal, bigger than a bull, pleads to no avail with the leader of the garrison.
“It’s the curse. You know the law.”
“No sir, it cannot be, I’ve known her my entire life and—”
“Mama!” Screams Dorrit, their youngest girl of no more than four years. She clasps her mother’s leg.
“No darling,” Sally, Micheal’s wife, says softly. “You must let go of mommy,” she pleads, for she knows that these guards, this garrison, will think nothing of slicing a Dreg child in two should she get in their way. The entire family will be lucky if they aren’t all killed.
“Mommy, no!” wails their son, nine-year-old Willem. Beside him, his sister Pearl, who is seven, stands with her face half pressed in his shoulder. Tears stream down her face. She is sobbing hiccupping sobs.
“Sir, please, I beg of you, she does not have the gift.” Micheal falls to his knees in front of the crowd, in front of the head of the garrison. “Please, please, she is my heart, my life, my children’s life, you must not, you cannot—”
“You dare tell me what I can and cannot do?” The head of the garrison pulls his saber from its sheath and brings it to Micheal’s neck. The crowd gasps, then not a sound is heard. “How close are you to leaving these children without a mother or a father? Best pray the bitch isn’t a Slayer, otherwise you shall lose not just her but her offspring as well. And if you die first and they’re not the children of a Slayer? What would happen to them without either of you alive? Do you wish for the children you so dearly love to find out?”
