I, however, remained separate from my animal, remaining stiff, and bouncing and lurching uncomfortably. My body fought the motions of the beast beneath me, resistant to its gait.
In truth, they terrified me, the horses. All of them. They were large and unpredictable and far too powerful.
Yet another reason I could never truly be warrior. What kind of soldier couldn’t manage her own steed?
Stretching my back and preparing for the ride home, I reached up to the saddle’s horn and balanced one foot in
the stirrup as I hauled myself up, throwing my other leg over the smooth leather seat. Once I was settled, Zafir handed
me the reins, and as he did, my stomach tightened. I hated this part. I hated that it was in my hands to command this beast.
A country, sure. An animal larger than my royal guard, no thank you.
When we returned, Sebastian was already waiting for us in front of the stables. He rushed out to take the reins from me, and held the mare steady while I dismounted.
I glanced around, searching for Brooklynn. “Is she here yet? She promised she’d be here when I got back.” I hated the edge I heard in my own voice. “She’s late, isn’t she?”
Zafir took great care to stifle a yawn.
Sebastian frowned and bowed low, clutching the leather reins in his hands. I stared down at the top of his head, envious that any man could be blessed with such lustrous curls. They were the color of polished mahogany, matching his eyes to perfection. It was unfair, considering that I’d been born with hair and skin so fair they were nearly transparent, not a single curl in sight. “Your Majesty. I’m sure she’s just running . . .”—he lifted his head and scowled upward at the sky, noting the sun’s location, completely unable to mask his worry about the time—“. . . behind schedule.” His last two words sounded less than convinced, and I fought the urge to giggle at his attempt to assuage me.
Zafir was less composed, and his laughter boomed like a thunderclap across the meadows, making the poor stable master jump. “Knowing Brooklynn, she’s probably off causing trouble. Probably getting you into a war, if I had to wager.”
I cast a warning glare in Zafir’s direction; Sebastian didn’t deserve to be laughed at. “Don’t worry, Sebastian, I don’t blame you for Brook’s absence.” I sighed heavily, not wanting to do this alone, and unwilling to admit why. “I suppose we can start without her,” I muttered.
Sebastian perked up at the idea, and I was reminded that this was his true passion. This was why he’d been made stable master after barely reaching the age of legal consent. At eighteen, he was the youngest stable master the palace had ever had. No one knew his way around a horse the way Sebastian did.
Plus, he was patient—assuring me I would grow more comfortable, that my skills would improve. That time would give me the confidence I so desperately needed.
But Sebastian was serious about his instruction, and training with him was as physically exhausting as my fighting lessons with Zafir. It wasn’t simply about sitting in a saddle—anyone could do that, he’d repeated time and time again. He wanted me to learn the finer points of horsemanship: riding bareback, emergency dismounts, jumping, and groundwork. He worked both the horse and me until we were unable to work a moment longer.
“You won’t be sorry, Your Majesty,” Sebastian vowed, pulling his red bandana from his back pocket and tying it around his head, something he always did before my lessons. “With a little more practice . . .” He hesitated, as if trying to convince himself and not me. “With a little more practice, you’ll be riding like a champion.”
I bit the inside of my cheek at the thought of me as a champion rider. “That sounds . . .” My lip quivered ever so slightly. “. . . wonderful.”
Sebastian’s face lit into a huge, triumphant grin as he dipped his head once quickly before straightening and spinning on his heel, his shoulders high.
“Oh, and Sebastian?”
He stopped and turned back around. “Yes, Your Majesty?”
“Will you please just call me Charlie?”
Sebastian’s brows crumpled, uncertainty clear in every feature.
But it was Zafir who answered. “No.” His voice was like iron. Unyielding. And then he looked down on me from his horse, and his gaze was equally obstinate. “He will not, Your Majesty.”
brooklynn
Brooklynn stood on the street, staring up at the scarred sign that hung above the door. She hated the pang that coursed through her, the ache of nostalgia that betrayed her as she questioned whether being here was wise or not.
Still, wise wasn’t her reason for coming. And neither was nostalgia.
She had a job to do. An important one. Longing had no place in her world. . . . Not today, anyway.
She tamped down the emotions and shoved her way through the battered wooden door. Even the weathered brass of the door handle beneath her fingertips was entirely too well-known to her.
Inside, she scowled at the man behind the counter. He looked older now than she remembered, more haggard. The skin around his eyes was lined and leathered, as if he were a man accustomed to a life of hard labor. As if he’d spent years working in the fields rather than inside the walls of a butcher’s shop. She watched as he rubbed his grizzled beard, graying in places it surely hadn’t been before.
It was his eyes, though, that held her attention as he noticed her standing there—they were as sharp and focused as ever, and filled with spite. She’d always hated that physical similarity between them: the dark brown of their eyes.
He wiped his hands on his stained apron, and Brook was reminded why she’d never been bothered by the sight of blood. She’d grown up with it.
“I need a minute,” he grumbled in Englaise to the older man behind the counter with him.
“I’m almost off work,” the man responded in a firm voice, as if he was accustomed to having this conversation. “Five minutes. And then I leave, whether you’re finished or not.”
Brook watched as her father’s face drained of all color. She could tell that he wanted to scream, that his rage was bubbling so close to the surface that even she was cringing inside as she waited for the explosion that was surely coming. But when he answered, his words were quiet. Controlled. “It’s my store, Anson. Do I need to remind you again? You work for me.” The muscle at his jaw flexed, jumping spastically. “I make the rules here.”
Anson just shook his head, as if the notion was absurd. “But I shouldn’t have to remind you that I have rights now.” And then he repeated, “Five minutes.”
Her father untied his apron and threw it on the floor as he stormed into the backroom, leaving Brook to either wait or follow.
She was comfortable with neither, but she was already here, and they had only five minutes. She might as well get this over with.
Casting an apologetic look at the older man, she slipped behind the counter and went through the doorway that led to the chilled room where her father was holding a cleaver and slicing—pointlessly—into the remains of a carcass that had clearly already been carved, its usable meat already packaged.
“Can you believe him? Six months ago he was mopping blood off the floors and discarding entrails. He wasn’t even permitted to speak to me. Now I have to pay him a wage he doesn’t deserve and allow him to interact with my customers. Now, he thinks he can tell me what to do.” He hacked into a section of rib cage and pieces of bone and flesh sprayed outward. “This is your fault. You and your queen!”
Brooklynn walked toward the familiar carving-block work surface and ran her fingertip over a section in which she’d carved her name when she was just a girl, back when she still made all of her B’s backward. The wood had been new then, shiny and polished, yet her father hadn’t chastised her for marring it. He’d simply marveled at her handiwork, boasting that his daughter might have a future as a woodworker or an artist.
He’d never imagined she’d become a soldier.
Or that she’d turn against him.
/>
“You need to tell them to back off. What you’re doing is foolish,” she insisted, ignoring his complaints about the New Equality. “All you can hope to accomplish is to get yourselves killed.” She glanced up to watch his reaction.
His face twisted into a sneer. “Is that what your queen tells you? That we can’t gain enough power to overthrow her?” He took a step closer, still clutching the bloodstained cleaver in his fist, and Brook recognized that both his language—the all-too-familiar guttural intonations of Parshon—and his stance were meant to intimidate her. “If I recall correctly, we wouldn’t be the first to challenge a queen . . . and win.”
Brooklynn’s eyes narrowed at the close-minded coward who stood before her. She drew her fingers away from her childhood carving, disgusted that she’d allowed herself to remember the man he’d once been. It was hard to imagine why she’d so desperately yearned for his approval for so many years, why she’d craved his notice.
Because he’s your father, she silently chided herself. Of course she’d wanted his approval; she’d been a little girl without a mother and he was all she’d had.
Maybe if he’d spent more time with her after her mother had died, made her feel like something other than a housekeeper, she wouldn’t have found a home with Xander’s rebel army. Maybe she wouldn’t be a commander in the queen’s army now.
“You can’t win, is all I’m saying,” she spat back at him, speaking only in Englaise—the voice of the people—and knowing that it galled him that she did so. He preferred the old ways: a class system in which he was better, by birth, than nearly half the country. But what he conveniently forgot was that, by that same system, he was classified as a Vendor, and there’d been those who’d looked down on him, in the same way he looked down on Anson.
Brook, however, would never forget what the class system had meant: a lack of free will. “How many supporters can you possibly have? Three, maybe four hundred? To do what, go backward? To undo the good Queen Charlaina is trying to do? To give up the freedoms her reign has offered? Are they willing to give their lives for your cause?” She gave him a look that said exactly what she thought of his cause: not much. Then she glanced down casually at her fingers, examining a hangnail. “Besides,” she explained, “we’d crush you in a matter of seconds.” Her lips parted slowly, spreading into a grin as she glanced up again. It was daring, filled with intentional defiance as she baited the man before her, watching as the color rose in his face.
His lips tightened and his jaw flexed. Not a flattering look for him, she noted.
“You don’t know the half of whose support we have. What would you say if I told you that you’re outnumbered? That I could stop you from leaving here today if I gave the order? That me and my little insignificant band of protesters have the queen’s best friend at their mercy?” The meaning of his words was crystal clear. He would sacrifice his own daughter to send a message to the queen.
Fortunately for her, Brooklynn didn’t back down that easily. “What if I reminded you that you don’t have the queen’s best friend at your mercy, but rather the commander of the First Division of the Royal Armed Forces? What if I were to tell you that to harm me would be considered treason, and that the mere threat that just passed your vile lips could send you to stand in front of a firing squad? Or worse, get you sent to the Scablands?” She took a step toward him, closing the slim gap that remained between them, until they stood—father and daughter—nose to nose.
“You don’t have the authority,” he challenged in Parshon.
There wasn’t a trace of tolerance in her hardened expression. “Try me.”
He studied her for a long moment. He laughed then, a tight sound. Brook could taste the foul flavor of tobacco on his breath, lingering with the rancor inside him. The skin around his eyes wrinkled, like crumpled paper, but the eyes themselves remained flat. Emotionless.
“I was only jesting, dear daughter. You know I’d never harm you.” And suddenly he was the father who’d bragged of Brooklynn’s wood-carving skills. The same man who’d held her up on his shoulders to watch street performances and had given her sugar-covered fruits and sweets when her mother wasn’t looking. He reached out to stroke her cheek. Brook jerked away when his fingers—so cold they felt as if they belonged on a corpse—grazed her. “We’re flesh and blood, you and I,” he cooed. “If we can’t depend on each other, who can we count on?”
ii
I crept as silently as I could into the kitchens, which weren’t nearly as quiet as I’d hoped they’d be. It was hard enough to sneak around with a giant by my side, and it only became harder with everyone bowing to me and whispering words of respect, and then whispering some more when I passed. Gossip mostly.
This was one of the hardest things to get used to: people noticing me. I’d spent my entire life trying to go unobserved.
Funny, though, how convention tried to dictate my actions now, when once it was simply convenience. I’d merely worn the clothing available to any girl of my status—the Vendor class—and never thought to complain. Now that I could wear whatever I wanted, now that class was no longer an issue, I hated being told what was—and wasn’t—proper for someone of my stature.
And pants most certainly were not considered queenly.
I ignored the strange looks I received for my attire—gapes and stares whenever I donned trousers. But it made no sense to try to sit sideways on a horse when I could gain much better balance by sitting astride, something a skirt would never allow me to do.
Plus, the fighting lessons. I couldn’t possibly fight in a dress, could I? Not with any amount of decorum, anyway.
Of course, my father could never know that. He didn’t approve of me doing anything that put me in harm’s way . . . and hand-to-hand combat would most certainly fall under that category, lessons or not.
The rest of it, taking my place on the throne, hadn’t been nearly as hard as I’d imagined. I’d adjusted quickly, or at least I’d adjusted quickly by my standards. Considering that I hadn’t wanted the position in the first place, I thought I was doing pretty well.
In fact, there were things I actually liked about my new role.
Like seeing my country released from the tyrannical rule of an oppressive queen and her antiquated notions. Hearing the words of Englaise spoken everywhere I went, while never having to pretend I couldn’t understand what was being said. And the fact that my parents no longer had to work from sunup to sundown to provide for us.
I grinned as I caught a glimpse of my father, his arms buried all the way to his elbows in a thick pillow of bread dough as he concentrated on kneading and pulling and twisting the mass, forcing it to conform beneath his insistent hands. Some things, it seemed, would never change.
A woman in the kitchen staff caught me standing in the doorway and dropped into a curtsy. “Your Majesty.”
My father glanced up from his task. “Spying now, are we?”
I stepped all the way into the immense kitchens, Zafir remaining silent by my side.
The palace kitchens were a far cry from the kitchen my father had once worked in—the one in our family restaurant. Here, he had seventeen ovens, five enormous sinks, and an endless stretch of counter space on which to work.
Yet even though he refused to stop working in the kitchens, he had acclimated to this life much faster than I had. He looked younger, healthier, happier than he had in years. Maybe ever. Even the callouses on his hands had grown less coarse during the weeks since he’d stopped toiling at our family restaurant.
I smiled. “Just wondering why you can’t find something else to fill your time. A hobby or something. Maybe you should take up horseback riding. We could take lessons together.”
Wiping his hands on the well-worn towel that draped from his belt, he met me in the center of the polished marble floor, finer than any of the stone tiling found in the vendors’ part of town. “Yes, I can see that’s working out so well for you.” He reached out and plucked a leaf from my hai
r as he examined me with a worried expression, surely inspecting the bruise on my cheek that had nothing at all to do with riding. “Are you certain this is something you should be doing?”
I shrugged. It’s not as if I enjoyed the lessons. “That’s what I’m told. If I ever plan to leave this realm, the train lines only extend so far, and until we can establish trade with the other queendoms—those with access to fuel—we don’t have a lot of other options. Sabara’s resistance to technology and change has left us stunted.” Her name tasted like bile on my tongue, leaving a bitter aftertaste that turned my stomach. “Ludania will progress if I have any say in the matter. Even if it means I have to learn to ride a horse. . . .” I shrugged again.
He laid his hand on the side of my face, pressing it to my cheek like he had when I was just a girl. “Well, be careful. It’s admirable that you feel such a strong desire to tend to your country, but you need to take care of yourself as well.” He glared at Zafir, not caring that the guard stood several heads above him. “Your country needs its queen.”
“I’m fine,” I said, and I wondered which of us, exactly, I was trying to convince. “Besides, I think I’m getting better at it. The horse is starting to like me.”
Beside me, Zafir chuckled beneath his breath.
I turned to scowl at him. “What? You don’t know. You weren’t even there.”
Riding lessons were one of the rare occasions Zafir left me in someone else’s hands, mostly, I assumed, because he didn’t care for the horses and only rode when absolutely necessary. Each and every time, though, he told Sebastian that he was under the threat of dismemberment should any harm fall upon me. And although I was sure Zafir was only joking with the boy about injuring him, Sebastian took the giant guard at his word, keeping close watch over me during those lessons.
“I hear things,” Zafir answered. “And the things I hear sound nothing like the things you just said. If it’s possible, I hear you’re actually getting worse.”
The Essence Page 2
