Third Daughter (The Dharian Affairs, Book One)

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  And she would surely be caught.

  Garesh would parade her across Jungali as a Dharian spy, the prince’s plans to claim the throne would be ruined, and she wouldn’t be able to message her mother about the skyship, to warn her the threat was no rumor, but very real.

  Still, despite the risk, the temptation was great to do some kind of damage while she had the chance. Garesh had put his workers on extra shifts. He was rushing to get his skyship fully functional. Perhaps she could perform some sabotage without detection. Or possibly damage something on her way out. She might not stop Garesh, but she could at least slow him down.

  She set back to polishing, looking surreptitiously for escape routes. A stray beam of sun glinted off the steel line that anchored the navia pipe and crisscrossed the air between the ship and the dock. Past that, the crane caught her eye. Its dark cable and massive steel hook swung another cargo load from the depths of the rail depot to the lofty lattice of the skyship dock.

  The rail.

  All at once, she saw it in her head. But she would have to move fast.

  She ducked under the wing she was working on and crept away from the workers, edging along the platform to the corner by the steel cable. The shiners didn’t seem to notice, and no one was close enough to stop her, if they had a mind to. She pushed her goggles up on her forehead, so she could see better, then reached under the back of her shirt and drew out her dagger. She held it close to her body, hidden from the workers below. The crane had nearly reached the dock. It was now or wait—who knew how long—for another lift.

  With a quick movement, she knelt at the edge of the platform and plunged her dagger into the bright blue fabric of the balloon, dragging it in a foot-long gash. Navia gas blasted out, gusting against her face and forcing her to narrow her eyes against it. She raised the dagger and slashed again, cutting cross-wise to form a t-shaped vent in the surface of the balloon. This time, the gas surged even faster and suddenly the platform tipped underneath her. She gripped the edge with one hand and sheathed her dagger at her back. Cries rose up from the shiners as they were caught off balance as well. Aniri swallowed, praying to the gods the shiners all had purchase somewhere and wouldn’t tumble off, but she had no time for looking back. She looped her shiner cloth around the cable, wrapping each end around her hands as well, and leapt off the balloon platform.

  The slide down the cable wasn’t nearly as smooth as she expected. The jarring worked her goggles loose, and they tumbled past her dangling feet, disappearing into the hundred foot drop. Just as she was worried the steel of the cable might eat through her shiner cloth, her thoughts shifted to the dock rushing up at her. She managed to swing her feet in front of her to absorb the impact, but it took a long, twisting, pawing moment to get her foothold on the railing. She was gasping by the time she managed to grapple her way over and land on the dock itself.

  She lunged for her coats and her father’s sword. Shouts sounded from the direction of the gangplank. Most of the workers were pointing at the shiners and the bleating hole atop the skyship, but some had noticed her, including an overly tall, muscular tinker standing on the gangplank and staring at her.

  Karan.

  Aniri pivoted away, hiding her face, and sprinted for the crane. She wrestled on her hooded cloak, still grasping her shiner cloth and her sword, but the fur-lined overcoat slipped from her fingers. She had no time to stop. Clutching her saber and the shiner’s cloth in one hand, she scrambled up the side of the cargo container. The workman on top had just unhooked the crane. Aniri shoved him from behind and he toppled over, stunned. She leapt up to grab the thick cable of the crane line, bracing her feet on the bulbous metal hook at the bottom, and her momentum swung her out over the edge of the dock, into the free space above the harbor busily working below.

  The crane arm quickly lowered her down, returning for another load. Just before she dropped below the dock, she caught Karan’s brown-eyed gaze locking with hers.

  His frown felt like a dagger aimed at her.

  Aniri glanced at the rail station below. If they knew she was coming… if he alerted the workers… this plan might not work as well as she had hoped.

  She hooked her arm around the cable, careful to keep her footing on the slippery hook. Ignoring the twirling steamworks below her, she strapped her saber on and drew it out. She stuffed the shiner’s cloth in the pocket of her flapping cloak and breathed through the clench in her stomach as she neared the rail station. Several workers were dashing to and from a small wooden enclosure, and a smaller crane was still pulling up cargo from the rail. Aniri, and the hook she was riding, were rapidly approaching a line of containers that stretched in front of her like a very solid-looking wall.

  The station workers had definitely noticed her. Several stared wide-eyed even as the crane lowered her close enough to the floor to jump. She landed, saber ready, and ran straight for them, praying to the gods that none had a blunderbuss tucked in their grimy overalls. They scattered. She managed to reach the edge of the hole that led down to the rail tracks, only to hover there, uncertain how to get down.

  The train below had been relieved of cargo, all the half-dozen cars just empty frames where the containers had been. The whistle from the engine was drowned out by the screeching of metal on metal as the wheels started to turn. The drop was too far. She would break a leg at the least, with a high likelihood of not surviving at all. There was a ladder around the far side of the hole that she could use to climb down, but it was a dozen yards away. The line from the smaller crane—the one used to unload the train cars—dangled to the ground below, but it hung in the air, a yard out of her reach.

  A pounding of feet and shaking of floorboards behind her meant she had no time to decide. She sheathed her sword and leapt for the crane line.

  She grasped her gloved hands hard around the two-inch cable, trying to keep herself from tumbling to her death. After a heart-stopping drop of several feet, she wrapped her boots around it as well, slowing the plummet, but her hands burned as the cable slid between them, shredding her thin gloves and racing pain across her palms. Fortunately the cable was heavy enough to keep from swinging back to the platform. She loosened her grip, gritting her teeth through the pain, and hand over hand, she shimmied down the cable, quickly reaching the gravel next to the rail line. The train had already picked up speed, and she had to sprint to match it.

  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 fra
med 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 o
f 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.”