In the end, Lina chose a shaft that angled downward slightly, and she wiggled through it. She was pleased that her hips fit in the narrow space, though every now and then she rubbed her injured shoulders against the sides of the shaft and had to bite back a hiss of pain.
She crawled up to one of the metal grates and peeked through, hoping to get a good view into Fredrick’s quarters. The room was slightly larger than the typical archivists’ quarters, certainly bigger than Lina’s modest room. She could make out a bed pushed against the far wall, with a wooden nightstand next to it stacked with books. A candle burned beside the bed; Lina smelled the beeswax as the smoke drifted up to tickle her nostrils. She clamped a hand over her nose. She’d come too far to let a sneeze give her away.
Fredrick stepped into view then and sat on his bed. He perched on the edge with his hands resting on his knees, shoulders slumped. Lina didn’t see Nirean, but she heard the chamelin’s deep voice soon enough.
“You can’t ever do that again, Fredrick. Do you understand?” she asked. “That was incredibly reckless. What if you had been seen?”
There was a long pause before the boy spoke, but when he did, he’d once again adopted a cheerful tone. “You’re right, of course,” he said. “I was just feeling a little cooped up, and I wanted to get away by myself for a while. Nobody saw me,” he assured Nirean.
“By sheer luck. Half your bandages are gone. What happened to them?”
“I tripped and fell,” Fredrick said. “I’ll put new ones on tomorrow.”
Nirean moved into view beneath the grate, then moved away. She was pacing, agitated. “You can’t leave this room, not until I do a search of the area. We have to be sure no one saw you. After that, you can go to Zara’s office or my quarters if you need something, but you have to stay out of the common areas.”
“For how long?” The cheerfulness in the boy’s voice was gone.
“I don’t know,” Nirean said. “But we have to—”
Suddenly, the boy jumped to his feet as if he’d been stung. “You can’t keep me in here forever!” he burst out.
“Lower your voice,” Nirean commanded.
“You can’t speak to me that way!” Anger made the boy’s voice unsteady. “I’m a prince of the Merrow Kingdom. True, I might be the least important prince that ever lived, but I’m still part of the royal family, and you can’t keep me locked away like this!”
Up in the shaft, Lina had to cover her mouth to keep from releasing a shocked squeal. She dug her fingernails into her cheeks, clasping her face tight as she let Fredrick’s words sink in.
Oh boy. Oh boy, ohhhh boy. This was big. Huge. A prince of the Merrow Kingdom? Here, in Ortana? No, it had to be a terrible mistake. The archivists didn’t take sides in the war. They would never hide a prince of the Merrow Kingdom here. Doing that would be as good as declaring they’d sided with King Easmon.
With an ominous feeling in her gut, Lina wondered just what she’d stumbled into this time.
—
“You can’t ever do that again, Fredrick. Do you understand?”
For a second, Ozben didn’t respond. He thought Nirean was addressing someone else. Fredrick. Who had come up with that name, anyway? As fake names went, it was uninspired. If his family was going to force him to conceal his identity, they could have at least let him pick his own name, something grand like Titan or Nicodemus. But that would defeat the whole point of blending in. Not that he’d been doing a great job of it so far.
Pretending to be a refugee with his head wrapped up in fake bandages. Ozben shook his head in disgust. It was an insult to the refugees who really had been hurt, and the soldiers, like his sister, who were out there in the field right now fighting for their kingdom.
Ozben realized then that silence had fallen in the room. He’d barely been listening to what Nirean, his bodyguard, had been saying. Guilt tugged at him. He hoped the chamelin wouldn’t get in trouble with Zara for letting him slip away from her. “You’re right, of course,” he said. “I was just feeling a little cooped up, and I wanted to get away by myself for a while. Nobody saw me,” he assured her.
Except for that mysterious girl, he didn’t add out loud—the one who’d left a girl-sized dent in his chest when they’d collided in the Heart of the Mountain. What had she been doing there so late at night? He hoped he hadn’t hurt her when he’d knocked her down.
“Half your bandages are gone,” Nirean was saying. Ozben heard the worry and annoyance in her voice. “What happened to them?”
Ozben reached up and touched his bare cheek. He hadn’t even realized the bandages had been ripped off. “I tripped and fell.” That was true enough. “I’ll put new ones on tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. Of course, he’d have to rethink his plans now. First, he would apologize to Zara, and he’d have to be on his best behavior for a while as he planned his next escape attempt. But it would have to be a good one. When he ran off earlier that night, he’d claimed he just wanted to be alone, and that excuse would only work once before his hosts caught on to his true intention.
Zara was already suspicious of him, Ozben thought ruefully. They’d be watching him closely for the next several days. The best thing he could do was lie low, explore the stronghold, and look for a better way out than the museum entrance. It was too far from his quarters, and he got turned around easily in the dark.
“You can’t leave this room,” Nirean said then, snapping Ozben’s attention back to the chamelin. His stomach plummeted. “Not until I make a search of the area. We have to be sure no one saw you. After that, you can go to Zara’s office or my quarters if you need something, but you have to stay out of the common areas.”
“For how long?” he asked. She had to be joking. Stay here, trapped in this tiny, freezing room, buried in tons of rock, while thousands of miles away his parents and sister fought a war without him? No, they couldn’t do that. Waves of helpless anger bubbled up inside him.
“I don’t know,” Nirean said. “But we have to—”
Ozben couldn’t listen anymore. He jumped up from the bed. “You can’t keep me in here forever!” he shouted. He was shaking, all the emotions he’d been trying to suppress these past few days pouring out in a mess.
“Lower your voice,” Nirean told him sternly.
“You can’t speak to me that way!” Ozben tried his best to sound imperious and commanding like his grandfather, but his voice trembled. “I’m a prince of the Merrow Kingdom. True, I might be the least important prince that ever lived, but I’m still part of the royal family, and you can’t keep me locked away like this!”
He’d expected Nirean to shout back at him, as his grandfather might have, so Ozben was surprised when a flicker of fear passed over the chamelin’s face. Seeing it, Ozben immediately regretted losing his temper. Nirean was just trying to protect him.
“I’m sorry,” he began. “I didn’t mean to—”
But Nirean raised a hand. “Be quiet,” she snapped. Her fear was gone, replaced by wariness. She glanced around the room, head cocked as if listening. “Did you hear something?”
Confused, Ozben looked around. “I didn’t hear anything. What’s wrong?”
Nirean didn’t reply. After another minute, she said, “I think it’s all right.” Then she glared at him. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” she asked tersely.
“Of course not!”
“Do you know,” Nirean continued, speaking slowly, as if she were trying to contain her temper, “how many people have risked their lives to keep you safe these past few days? All our careful planning, the lengths we went to in order to get you here, keep you hidden, and protect your identity? Tonight, you threw all that away on a reckless whim, and now you’re shouting your secret to the world.”
“There’s no one here,” Ozben said, circling the tiny room and gesturing to the four empty corners. “No assassins are going to follow me here.”
“Your mother and father thought the same thing about the
palace in Ardra. They were protected by a dozen of the best-trained guards in Solace,” Nirean said quietly. “Four of those guards are dead now.”
“I know. I was there when they died.” Ozben hated to think of that day, when his world had been turned upside down. His anger drained away, and worry filled his gut. “You’re right,” he murmured. “I shouldn’t have exposed myself like that. I’m sorry.”
“I know you feel like a prisoner here, Fredr—” Nirean stopped. Ozben gave her a small smile, grateful that she hadn’t finished the name. “If you want to help your parents, the best thing you can do is to stay hidden and stay safe. This war can’t go on forever,” she said.
Tell that to my grandfather, Ozben thought. He wished he could share Nirean’s hope. “You should go to bed,” he said. He tried to make his voice light. “I promise to be less of a pain in the neck tomorrow.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Nirean said dryly. She moved to the door and paused, casting one last glance around the room. “I’ll check the area to make sure everything’s quiet. Remember, my quarters are just down the hall, and I’m going to put a guard at the end of the opposite hall. Call on either of us if there’s trouble.”
Ozben watched the door close behind Nirean, then sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the floor. Guilt and frustration churned inside him. He knew Nirean was right. His family owed the archivists an incredible debt for the risks they’d taken on his behalf. But he hadn’t asked for any of it, and he’d certainly never wanted to put anyone in danger. His father and mother hadn’t given him a choice. He missed them and his sister so much, but at the same time, Ozben was furious with all of them. He picked up his pillow and clenched it in his hands. Being locked away like this was making him go crazy. He sat day after day with nothing to do but stare at the walls, imagining the worst happening back home.
“Careful, you’re going to rip that pillow in half.”
Ozben didn’t know quite how it happened, but when the disembodied voice suddenly filled the quiet room, he found himself on his feet, halfway to the door, the hairs on the back of his neck all standing on end. His heart pounded hard against his ribs, and he whipped around, looking for the source of the ghost voice.
Then he happened to look up.
The girl he’d clobbered in the Heart of the Mountain was hanging upside down out of a ventilation grate in the ceiling. Her short, curly brown hair flopped around her head in a wild halo, and her dirt-smudged face was already turning red as the blood rushed into it. She looked at him with one eyebrow cocked curiously.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” she said.
Ozben raised a shaky hand, waving it off. “Oh, don’t worry, you didn’t scare me.”
Her eyebrow arched a bit more. “You looked pretty scared.”
“That’s just my face,” he assured her.
“You’re kinda pale,” she observed.
“Again, just my face.”
“You let out this weird yowling noise when you jumped off the bed. Sounded like a carnelian cat.”
“I don’t know what that is, so I’ll have to take your word for it.” He looked up at her, smiling sheepishly. “Okay, you did scare me a little bit, but let’s be honest, I wasn’t expecting anyone to pop out of the ceiling like that. You turn up in the oddest places.”
And then a cold hand of dread clamped on Ozben’s heart, and he swallowed hard. The oddest places. She’d been in the ventilation shaft. Directly above him.
Listening.
“How long…have you…been up there?” he asked, hoping, impossibly, that she would say, Oh, I was just passing through, didn’t hear a thing, not a thing, well, goodbye now, and everything would be all right.
The girl bit her lip, and her eyes shifted away from his face. Ozben was all too familiar with that kind of guilty look. His heart sank.
“Well…I guess I’d curtsy if I wasn’t hanging upside down,” the girl said. “Um, Your Highness.”
Hearing the title, Ozben broke out into a cold sweat. This was bad. Very bad. How could he have been so stupid, shouting out his identity like that? Nirean was right. He was reckless. Now he had to deal with it and make sure the girl didn’t tell anyone else.
He put his shoulders back, trying to look serious and confident, and crossed the room to stand underneath her. “All right, so, you already know who I am,” he said. “What’s your name?”
The girl’s guilty expression melted into a tentative smile. “I’m Lina,” she said. “Lina Adelia Winterbock.” She reached her hand down to him, and the whole situation seemed suddenly so ridiculous that, despite his worry, Ozben couldn’t help matching her smile. He reached up and shook her hand.
“Well, Lina Adelia Winterbock, why don’t you let me help you down from there?” he said. “I think we have a lot to talk about.”
“This tastes amazing,” Lina said, taking another sip of the kelpra juice. She had to drink it slowly, but once she’d gotten used to the face-puckering tartness, she’d discovered that the thick, pulpy liquid was rich with flavors that reminded her of cherries and grapes mixed together.
Ozben swirled the red liquid in his own glass and looked at her in surprise. “You don’t have kelpra juice here?”
They sat on the floor of Ozben’s room, the glasses of juice between them. At first, Lina had been worried that Ozben would be furious with her for discovering his identity, but he hadn’t looked angry, nor did he shout at her. That was a good sign. Lina was even more shocked when he invited her into his room and offered her juice. That wasn’t the sort of behavior she would have expected from a prince of the Merrow Kingdom. She’d never met one, of course, but she pictured princes and princesses as being haughty and cold. Ozben wasn’t like that at all.
He did seem preoccupied, though. His eyes kept darting warily from her face to the door and back again. Lina wondered what he was thinking.
She shook her head in answer to his question. “It’s too expensive to get enough juice for everyone in the stronghold. Did you bring yours with you?” she asked curiously.
“My mother sent it,” Ozben said. “Back home, whenever I was upset or got in a fight with Elinore—my sister—she’d pour me a glass to make me feel better. I keep it in the ice chest so I can make it last.”
“You miss your family a lot, don’t you?” Lina asked.
“I’m all right. Listen, Lina,” he said, frowning, “you can’t tell anyone about my being here. It’s important. I know I should never have said who I was, but I didn’t know anyone was listening. I should have been more careful.”
“I’m not going to tell anyone,” Lina assured him. Was that what had made him so preoccupied? That she would tell other people he was here? Lina bit her lip. Ozben had no idea that if she told anyone she’d discovered him by listening in the ventilation shafts, then she’d be in as much trouble as he was. She kept that part to herself.
“Why are the archivists protecting you?” she pressed. “I thought we were supposed to be neutral in the war.”
“You still are,” Ozben said. He swallowed the last of his juice and laid his glass aside. “I don’t know all the details, but my mother and father made some kind of deal with your ruling council. You protect me until the war is over, send me home, and the Merrow Kingdom will never tell anyone that I was here.”
And in exchange, the archivists would still be allowed to ship in objects from the meteor fields, even with the war going on. Lina put the details together from what she’d overheard in the council meeting. But if something went wrong and King Aron found out that the archivists were hiding a prince of the Merrow Kingdom—even if it was just for his own protection—they might decide to declare war on the archivists too. Why would they take such a huge risk? Lina wondered. Dozens of questions burned inside her, but she didn’t want to make Ozben more nervous.
There was one thing she was desperately curious about, though. “Were you really attacked by assassins?” she asked. “That’s why your family sent
you away?”
Ozben’s expression darkened. “Yes. Someone from the Dragonfly territories hired them—maybe King Aron himself, for all we know. There were two of them—they took my family by surprise one night while we were sleeping. I never saw them—the guards killed one before they could get to our rooms, and the other escaped. But I heard they were dressed all in black, with their faces covered, except for their eyes.” He toyed with his glass, then plunked it down hard on the floor, making Lina jump. “I told my parents I wasn’t afraid, but they wouldn’t listen to anything I said. They’re convinced that the other assassin will come back and try again. Grandfather was the only one who stood up for me, said I was old enough to make my own decision.”
At the mention of his grandfather, Lina again felt a jolt of apprehension. Ozben had assassins after him. Ozben was important. He was royalty. Lina crawled around in cave tunnels and regularly got mouse nests stuck in her hair. Should an apprentice like her even be talking to him like this? Yet it felt so natural, and for the most part, Ozben seemed like an ordinary boy. Because he was so normal, it had made Lina forget that his grandfather was King Easmon, the one who’d provoked the Iron War to begin with.
When the war began, Lina told herself that since the archivists hadn’t picked a side, she wouldn’t either. And in many ways, she blamed both kingdoms for the conflict that had caused so many innocent people to lose their lives and brought suffering to all of Solace. The Merrow Kingdom’s aggression and stockpiling of weapons had made the people of the Dragonfly territories afraid it was going to launch an invasion, and Lina didn’t blame them. Nobody should have to live with the constant threat of an attack looming. But King Aron’s response to the threat—cut off trade and hoard all the iron for his own kingdom—had just made the situation worse.
The Secrets of Solace Page 7
