Queen of the Unwanted

by Jenna Glass

  “Did you request this audience merely to point out to me that I’m a childish ninny, or was there something else?”

  He grinned at her—though the grin lacked its usual brilliance, and there was still that unaccustomed caution in his regard. “Those are your words, not mine.” He looked away. “And I cannot claim to be entirely blameless. I wanted to protect Princess Elwynne—and myself—from any possible retaliation from my uncle if he found out I told you. But I could have told you about the affair and my possible daughter without naming them. I was being a coward, and I am sorry.

  “However, if you plan to forgive me—or at least look past my bad decisions—then I have information I should share with you before you are blindsided by it.”

  Ellin all but groaned. “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “It won’t sound good to your council in general or Lord Kailindar in specific if they hear about it, but I guarantee you it is just one more bluff.”

  “What is?”

  “I’ve received word that my uncle is in discussions with King Delnamal to establish an exclusive trade agreement with Aaltah.”

  The blood drained from Ellin’s face. For all that she and her council—and her grandfather before her—had been fretting over the renewal of the trade agreements, the fear had always been that they would lose the favorable terms of their present agreement and be forced to accept something far less advantageous. Everyone thought it possible there’d be a temporary iron embargo used to force Rhozinolm to accept the terms, but no one had considered that Nandel would cancel the agreement altogether.

  What would King Delnamal do if Aaltah had access to iron and Rhozinolm did not? It might take him a while to stockpile enough weapons to gain the overwhelming advantage, but once he did, he would crush Women’s Well, and there would be nothing Rhozinolm could do to stop him. And given how Ellin had already committed her kingdom to that alliance with Women’s Well—and made an enemy of Delnamal—it wasn’t hard to imagine that he would cast greedy eyes upon Rhozinolm as so many kings of yore had.

  “It is a bluff,” Zarsha reminded her. “Waldmir is trying to put pressure on you to sweeten our marriage arrangement. He has likely heard about Kailee’s engagement to Lord Tynthanal and is unhappy with what that means about your commitment to Women’s Well. He likely hopes he can pressure you to give up your alliance with Women’s Well in favor of our marriage arrangement and renewal of the trade agreements. He knows the best way to do that is to give you reason to believe he has other, more appealing options.”

  She frowned at him skeptically. “I may not know Prince Waldmir personally, but I imagine he would find an alliance with King Delnamal much more to his tastes than one with Queen Ellinsoltah. Why should I not believe he is negotiating with Delnamal in earnest?”

  “How are Nandelites generally regarded throughout Seven Wells?”

  Her frown deepened. “What do you mean?”

  “Be honest. What word is most often used within all the other kingdoms and principalities to describe us?”

  Ellin squirmed as the obvious answer popped into her head.

  “You can say it,” Zarsha said softly. “I promise I won’t be offended.”

  She sighed. “Barbarians.” She couldn’t swear she herself had never referred to them that way, especially in the days when she’d thought she’d be forced to marry Zarsha and live in Nandel as his property.

  “Exactly. We’re useful barbarians—barbarians sitting on the world’s greatest source of iron and gems—but barbarians all the same. We dress strangely, we have different color skin, different color hair, different color eyes. Our customs are not your customs, our language is not your language…We are unlike any other people in Seven Wells. When my uncle became sovereign prince, no one imagined a daughter of his would be deemed good enough to marry into a royal family outside of Nandel. It was an epic coup when Shelvon was wed to Delnamal and all the world thought Waldmir’s grandson would one day sit on Aaltah’s throne. He was all set to change our place in history, to make of our ‘barbarian’ principality a legitimate and well-respected equal.”

  “And then Delnamal went and divorced Shelvon,” Ellin said thoughtfully.

  “Yes. That could have been the end of Waldmir’s bid for respectability. But if he can’t have his grandson sit on the throne of Aaltah, he still has a chance for his grandnephew to sit on the throne of Rhozinolm.” He leaned forward, placing his hands on her desk and staring at her with an almost palpable intensity. “I know my uncle, Ellin. As much as he hates me personally, he is well aware that I can give him the legacy he so desperately wants. He will feign reluctance. He will try to extort any advantage he can get out of a marriage agreement between us. And he will try very hard to scare you into thinking he has the upper hand. But I am confident that in the end, he will agree to our marriage—and the renewal of the trade agreements.

  “Assuming you agree to our marriage, that is.”

  Ellin found herself chewing on her lower lip, a nervous habit she’d thought she’d gotten the better of long ago. She was trying to forgive Zarsha, was annoyed with herself for the continuing throb of her wounded heart—which had no right to be wounded in the first place—but she had not yet gotten over the idea that he had a daughter. Maybe. A daughter being raised by a man who hated her for her dubious origins and had shown himself endlessly cruel to the inferior beings he considered the female sex to be.

  “What happens to your daughter if we marry?” she asked.

  Zarsha grimaced and shifted in his chair. She expected him to remind her once again that he was not certain the girl was his—and she expected to counter that the girl was deserving of protection and consideration even if she was not. But she should have known better—Zarsha had never truly acted like a Nandel-born man, never acted as if females were somehow beneath his notice.

  “I don’t know, Ellin,” he said, his eyes filled with anxiety. “But I don’t know what will happen to her if we don’t marry, either. She is only four years old, and I doubt she has spent more than a few hours in Waldmir’s presence since she was born. But that will change as she grows older, and I shudder to think how he will treat her when she reaches adolescence.”

  Zarsha heaved out a sigh and rubbed his hands on his legs. “I make him sound like a monster, I know, but he is more complicated than that. He would happily hurt me in any way he could, but though he will be cold and unfeeling toward Elwynne, he will not actively seek to harm her while she’s still a child—unless sorely provoked.”

  “For instance, if he should find out you’ve told me about her?” Ellin asked gently, for the first time allowing herself to accept that he’d had a good reason for keeping at least part of his secret.

  Zarsha nodded grimly. “The moment Lord Kailindar broached the subject of our possible engagement, I received a flier from my uncle warning me in graphic detail what the consequences would be should I speak too freely with you. He reminded me that as a member of the royal family of Nandel, my first loyalty must always be to my homeland, even if I should marry outside it.”

  Ellin tilted her head to the side. “And will it be?”

  “I am loyal to people, not places,” Zarsha said decisively. “And obviously Waldmir has not had my loyalty for a long, long time. The only reason I keep his secrets is to protect Elwynne and myself and the rest of the people I care about from his wrath. I assure you, it is not out of loyalty to him.” The look on his face was one of disgust.

  “And will he believe you if you claim not to have told me?” she asked. “Will he believe you will keep the secret even if we marry?”

  He shrugged. “I can be convincing when I want to be. He’d never believe any protestations of personal loyalty, but I can argue that I would not want to risk triggering a war of succession. In fact, I have argued that. Waldmir has no surviving brothers or uncles, but except for my father, they were
a prolific lot while they lived, and I have scores of cousins who would happily challenge him for the throne if his manhood were to come into question. My little brother would happily cede his own claim—he has always sought after a simpler life—but he would likely be one of the first casualties of any struggle.

  “Waldmir will worry. Of that I have no doubt. But however much he dislikes me, and however much he distrusts me, he knows that I am the key to the glorious legacy he wishes to build for himself. I believe he wants that more than anything, and that therefore he will eventually agree to our marriage and the renewal of your current trade agreements without any further concessions from you. All you need do is stand firm in the face of his bluster and bluffs.”

  “I will ask Kailindar to resume negotiations,” she said. Her voice came out sounding resigned, which was not how she intended to present her decision.

  Zarsha closed his eyes, his expression somewhere between relief and regret. Her conscience grumbled at her, for she was cognizant that she had hurt him yet again, and that he did not deserve it. But she could not take back a tone of voice, and she had given as much ground as she could bear.

  She let the silence hang, and hated herself just a little for it.

  * * *

  —

  Mairah glanced over at the other bed, where Norah lay still, her chest rising and falling with silent breaths. She fought against the almost unbearable urge to snatch a pillow and press it to the old bitch’s face. Thanks to the sleeping potion she’d slipped into Norah’s wine, it would be oh-so-easy to rid herself of her nemesis. But even if tonight’s experiment worked, Mairah knew she couldn’t afford to draw attention to herself with a mysterious death that could be laid at her feet. She would have to settle for making the bitch sleep through the experiment so that she would not see Mairah’s suffering—or witness a failure, if it came to that.

  Mairah had always considered herself a careful strategist. Her revenge against Linrai and Granlin had been formed over the course of several months, and she had planned it all out so meticulously that everything had happened exactly as she’d expected. The same was true of her intricately constructed plot to rid herself of Mother Wyebryn and become abbess in the hag’s place. But when she had described her fictitious vision to Jalzarnin, she had not realized the position in which she’d placed herself. She’d told him she’d seen herself drinking a seer’s poison, and with that, she’d trapped herself. She had no choice but to develop a modified seer’s poison, and that meant she had to test her handiwork.

  Her stomach clenching with nerves and dread, Mairah opened her Mindseye and activated the seer’s poison she had formulated over the course of the last several nights. She had started with a base of the weakest seer’s poison available—so weak it could not possibly be fatal, even to a non-seer—and then added a new spell for memory enhancement using Ved, a feminine element that existed only in Women’s Well.

  Mairah smiled faintly even as she shivered miserably in anticipation. Kailee was always careful during their conversations, doing her best not to reveal any contraband information. Mairah had gently pushed a couple of times and been impressed at how artfully Kailee had managed to deflect her inquiries. Even so, the lessons in Continental that Kailee had so kindly offered to provide had turned into an unexpected boon in more ways than one. Mairah had tried—and failed—to re-create a memory potion for which she’d once known the formula, grumbling to herself that she needed a memory potion to remember exactly what the formula had been. She quickly realized that there might be another way to get access to a conventional memory potion that she could use as a jumping-off point for the enhanced version she needed.

  It was not hard to pretend to Kailee that she was frustrated with her inability to remember the Continental she had learned in her youth. And she hadn’t even had to work very hard to lead Kailee to the idea of giving her a memory potion in an attempt to help her along.

  “I couldn’t find any conventional memory potions to give you,” Kailee told her. “Not without arousing suspicions, at least. But this is a formula they’ve been working on here in the Academy. It can help you remember your lessons, but you will forget again as soon as it wears off. I figure you can write down whatever you remember while it’s active. Or, you can perhaps experiment with it after hours to see if you can find a way to make its effects permanent.”

  Mairah had forced a smile, tamping down a surge of guilt at so using this young woman whom she had genuinely come to like and admire. She tried to comfort herself with the knowledge that Kailee’s offer was borne of more than just kindness. “Hoping to keep me out of mischief when I am out of your sight?”

  Kailee’s face revealed nothing but guileless innocence. “I merely figured you must be bored to tears being confined to the inn at night.”

  “Yes,” Mairah agreed dryly. “The nights are quite tedious.”

  The potion proved to work remarkably well, despite its limitations. When Mairah had tested it, she’d found herself able to remember in perfect detail the text her tutor had used in her attempts to teach her Continental, the extensive vocabulary lists so clear in her mind she could remember which pages had creases or ink spots on them. And true to Kailee’s warning, within fifteen minutes of having drunk the potion, the memories faded back into obscurity.

  Fifteen minutes would be long enough to last through any vision, though even if the potion worked the way she hoped when combined with seer’s poison, there was a very real chance the vision itself would fade from her memory when it was all over. Still, the only way to find out was to try.

  Mairah bit her lip as she stared at the potion—which she had prepared while out of sight of any possible spying eyes by once again draping a sheet over the writing desk—trying to stave off the dread. If she’d had sufficient time to plan and prepare for this journey—if the king hadn’t been in such a damned hurry—she would have arranged for one of the more powerful seers in the Abbey to accompany her. Not Melred, of course. Melred would never be the same after the inquisitor had finished with her. But someone who could withstand a stronger poison and therefore trigger more powerful visions. Yet there was no one else who could test the poison, and she was already almost halfway through the month the king had allotted for her visit to Women’s Well.

  Twice she raised the potion to her lips, and twice her courage failed. But all she had to do was remind herself how terrible her other options were to finally find the willpower she needed.

  Pinching her nose and closing her eyes, she tossed back the potion, grimacing as it burned its way down her throat. She splashed some wine into a cup and gulped it in the vain hope that it would kill the bitterness of the poison. Then she sat down on her bed, back against the wall, as she wrapped her arms around her knees and tried to brace herself for what was to come. If, as Mairah suspected, the room was being watched—either through a spy hole or through magic—her observers would guess that she’d just taken a seer’s poison, but she couldn’t bear to suffer through the vision sitting on the floor in the smothering dark under the sheet. Besides, she’d likely thrash around so much the sheet would be useless.

  Norah would say that the pain of the seer’s poison was the Mother’s way of preventing Her daughters from overusing their powers for prophecy. To Mairah, it seemed more like a punitive measure, torturing those seers who dared to ask the Mother for help. If Mairah truly believed the Mother existed, she would have cursed the bitch with every foul epithet she could imagine as the burn of the poison intensified, stealing her breath and making her heart hammer as if trying to break out from behind her ribs. With Norah lost in her drugged sleep, Mairah did not have to try to hide the agony, so she let the tears run freely down her face as she huddled on the bed, curled around the pain.

  It was so unfair that she should have to suffer like this! All she wanted was to live in comfort, to be free of the cruelty that had been her companion since the m
oment she’d stepped through the Abbey’s gates. If Mother Wyebryn and Norah and their cronies hadn’t decided that making Mairah miserable was their life’s work, she never would have found herself in this terrible position. She might have been just an ordinary abigail under those circumstances, but she was certain she could have borne that fate with dignity. She gasped out a sob and let herself sink down into the fury and hatred that had helped her survive her years of torment.

  She hated Norah, wished the older woman would spontaneously die in agony. She hated Jalzarnin for tacitly encouraging her to eliminate Mother Wyebryn and then failing to convince the king to make her the abbess for the rest of her life. She hated the king for making her only interim abbess and for sending her to Women’s Well on this impossible mission.

  But her hate ran so much deeper than that, back to those who had caused her to be sent to the Abbey in the first place. She hated her parents for disowning her—though she’d known that was exactly what would happen when she’d planned her revenge. She hated Lord Granlin for using her and promising her marriage then tossing her aside. And most of all, she hated Lady Linrai, who had once been her best friend and had gleefully destroyed her when they had both set their sights on Granlin.

  Her mind traveled back to the night of the poisoning, the night that had sent her life careering down the path that would lead to her ruin. Lady Linrai—Miss Linrai, back then—had come to Mairah’s home before one of the biggest balls of the season, the two of them excitedly preparing together. They’d exchanged fantasies of being swept off their feet by the most handsome eligible bachelors in all of Khalpar, Lord Granlin being the most swoon-worthy of the lot. What Linrai had not known at the time was that Mairah had already won Granlin over—at least, that was what Mairah had believed.