Aleksey's Kingdom (A Royal Affair #2)(47)

Aleksey was not there.

I must have wakened even the family in the cabin, so loud did I shout. I certainly woke all the men in the barracks with me. I heard a faint reply and followed the direction of the sound.

Aleksey was in the other building, staring at the marks on the wall. I could have strangled him. Instead I embraced him. He ruffled my hair and said cheerily, “Did I wake you? How are you feeling?”

I said nothing. My throat was raw from the shout and my heart still coming back to its normal beat.

“Say the words, Niko.”

“Here, now?”

“What?”

“You want me to tell you I love you now?”

“No! Not those words! You are so stupid sometimes. These words.”

I answered a little testily, “I have already said they are not words.”

“Yes, I know that, but they can be said. Say them over and over.”

“Oh God, it is not even light, Alek—all right! Eye, cross, eye, cross. There, are you happy?”

“Faster.”

“Eyecrosseyecross….” I saw the direction of his gaze and suddenly got what he had seen. He was looking in the direction of the river—or, more to the point, the island. “Island. Cross. They have crossed to the island?”

“Yes, and I think that is the sound we heard last night—I think people were shouting on the island.” He shrugged. “People should learn to read and write, Niko. It is frightful that everyone is so ignorant. You are the only person I know who can read. Isn’t that shocking?”

He was babbling. I knew why. I knew what he was going to say next, and he knew I knew. “No. Absolutely not. We are leaving now. Do not argue with me about this, Aleksey, for you will not win.”

“I have no intention of arguing with you.”

I sighed in relief and made to turn away just as he added, “I will do exactly as I please and not waste time quarreling with you about it.”

I think we might have got into a real fight about this, but our companions arrived, more decently dressed than I, for I had run very fast in just my shirt when I had heard Aleksey’s call. He immediately told them what he thought the symbols meant and also what he intended to do about them: he planned to cross the river onto the island.

There was universal relief at first that we had not heard poor souls in perdition begging for mercy. Then, to relieve embarrassment, they were more than willing to turn to practical matters such as how we were to actually cross such a fearsome body of water—indeed, how the colonists had done so and, more to the point, why? Why, indeed. The most popular theory was that they came under attack from natives in the forest and took sanctuary on the more easily defendable island. It was a terrible theory, but I could not come up with a better one I was willing to share (mine tended more along the lines of beasts wearing the faces of men and carrying the devil on their backs).

So I was then forced to listen to plans for the conquering of this great river—the river that was flowing faster than a horse can run and that only a few feet farther downstream dropped off the face of the earth. Their plans were not helped by the fact that even when the sun came up, we could not see the island for the density of the cloud that hung over the place from the falls. It was the most miserable, sodden, horrible place I had ever encountered, and when you remember that I had spent some time in a dungeon being tortured and had nearly been impaled upon a stake, and had spent three months on a ship being sold amongst the crew for their sport, you will understand just how much I did not want to be there and how much I did not want to listen to discussions about crossing the river.

I was not feeling well at all.

I could not help thinking about Mary Wright and poison. Had she had opportunity to poison my food? It was not impossible, but then Aleksey usually ate half the food off my plate, and he was not sick. He was very not sick. He had seized on this idea of crossing to the island because, of course, if he did not find the colonists (or at least the solution to their disappearance), then Faelan’s death was meaningless. I knew this.

He was as a man possessed with the need to make something good out of something so awful. I would have said yes, it was appalling, so let us not make it worse, but he was not listening to me. He clearly thought my illness was making me uncharacteristically fretful or something. But when Aleksey wanted something badly enough, he had a habit of getting it. It was as if the universe occasionally agreed with his sense of entitlement and looked down upon a king being thwarted in his desires and altered its course to set things right for His Majesty King Christian Aleksey Frederik Mountberg. I was going to be interested to see how it fixed this.

Unfortunately, Captain Rochester had been a military engineer when in the ranks. Typical. He knew a lot about such things as the safe traverse of flowing bodies of water.. I knew there was a reason why I had taken such a dislike to the man at our first meeting. He cleared one of the tables of dishes and other detritus of a general living area and drew with a piece of charcoal how he intended for us to proceed: we would make a ferry of the cart bed and with the aid of ropes slung from a tree on our side and a tree on the other make our way over.

I excused myself and went to check on Xavier and Boudica again. I was extremely glad that I did, for Martin Wright had just that moment opened the gate to let his father into the fort, and David made a beeline toward the stable. He was staring at Boudica when I ran in. I almost wished he would try something again, for this time Xavier, warned, would attack. He was a warhorse, and he had killed far more men than I assumed this child had.