The Library of Fates(8)

But Sikander dismissed my father. “Anything is possible if there’s a will. There must be a few we can persuade.”

“No one has even seen a Sybilline in centuries, Sikander!”

Sikander sighed, exasperation registering on his face. He looked at my father like he was reasoning with a belligerent child, one who didn’t know what was good for him. “You knew me all those years ago. Did you ever think I’d become emperor of the greatest kingdom there ever was? Did you ever think I’d become Sikander the Great?”

My father was silent.

“I learned quite a bit from you back then, Chandradev. Maybe now it’s your turn to learn something from me. You’re a maharaja of a kingdom. And you’re being pushed around by a gang of chamak farmers and Earth-lovers who live in caves?”

“Chamak is a temperamental substance, Sikander.” My father raised his voice. “It has the wiles of an infant. It can be tended to only by the Sybillines, or it’s just a powder.”

“Silver dust,” Shree added.

“You’ll be a part of our trade route, part of the modern world! Imports pouring into your kingdom, visitors coming in from across the world. Why fight this, Chandradev?”

“No one in Shalingar suffers from poverty. Everyone is taken care of here.” And then my father added the part that we all instantly knew he shouldn’t have. “Not like in your kingdom,” he said.

I glanced at Arjun, who looked back at me, startled. I knew right then that my father needed saving in that moment, and instinct kicked in, the urge to protect him. But I can’t say my own curiosity didn’t play a part in what happened next.

“Your Majesty, I’d love to learn more about your time at the Military Academy,” I said. I was looking down, but the moment the words were out of my mouth, I knew I needed to go on. I looked up, my eyes meeting my father’s. “What were you like? What was my father like? And my mother . . .”

Sikander didn’t look at me. His eyes were on my father, who sat at the head of the table, glaring back at him.

“Your mother was a magnet, a star, the sun to all our moons,” Sikander said, skipping to the information he seemed to understand I most wanted to know. “Beautiful, courageous, brilliant, compelling. Good at so many things that sometimes I wondered if she could possibly even be human.” Sikander’s face softened for a moment before he continued, his next words directed solely at my father. “Brother. We have history. Do you remember that time we snuck off campus together and went into town, drank bottles and bottles of wine into the night, just the three of us?”

But my father said nothing. He simply pursed his lips together.

“She told us that story, that parable . . .”

My head whipped back in Sikander’s direction. The Parable of the Land of Trees.

“She was quite a storyteller.” I could tell he was drunk from the way he slurred his words. I didn’t care.

“What was she like?” I whispered, my eyes fixed on him. Everyone at the table hushed, hanging on Sikander’s every word.

He leaned back in his seat and looked at me, his eyes tracing my shoulders, my bare arms. I looked away, uncomfortable, slightly afraid.

“Quite like you, actually. Brilliant, witty, very protective of those she loved. She had a fighting spirit, coming from that family she was born into . . .”

“Her family?”

“Your father really hasn’t told you any of it, has he?” He grinned, glancing back toward my father, whose silence was beginning to infuriate me. I avoided looking at him across the table, even as I felt a pang of disloyalty.

“I don’t know anything about her,” I said. And as I said it, I knew that I had chosen a side, but hadn’t my father kept everything about my mother from me my whole life? Wasn’t he simply standing by as Sikander marched into Shalingar to make me his bride, technically against my will? I was owed something. An explanation. That was all I was asking for. It wasn’t very much, I realized, and this realization made me even angrier.

“Your mother came from the aristocracy of Macedon. They were very liberal in their politics. Troublemakers, intellectuals, revolutionaries. The kind that don’t fight. The kind that talk.” He shook his head and laughed. “They were very outspoken about their vehement dislike of my father’s rule. None of them survived, of course.”

My heart stopped. “What do you mean?”

“There was a raid on their home, sometime before your father left Macedon with you.” He turned to me, pressing his hands together in a strangely watered-down mea culpa. “My father didn’t like his critics very much. It had to be done. Her parents—your grandparents—were taken in for questioning. Her brother too. They died in prison, as far as I know. But your mother, she escaped.”

“Escaped?”

“They weren’t able to locate her. She’s still on the loose, as far as I know. In hiding, I suppose. So your father never told you that you have criminal blood in your veins, eh?” He laughed, looking back at my father. “I’m sure she wonders about you too.”

“You mean she’s—” Alive. My mother is alive.

But Sikander was lost in his own thoughts. “Every man at that school was in love with her, but she was quite taken with your father,” he said, pointing his spoon at my father. “It was back in the days that the Academy accepted women. Not anymore. I find them to be an unnecessary distraction.”