The Queen's Assassin (The Queen's Secret #1)(22)
He puts himself to sleep recalling tales from his childhood. His favorite was the one his father used to tell him about Omin of Oylahn, the origin of all magic, blessed by Mother Deia Herself. According to legend, Omin was the most powerful mage who ever lived, a master of both the physical and ethereal arts, and served the ancient Queen Alphonia during the time when Renovia was still a tiny, weak dominion of Avantine.
Nobody knows who Omin’s parents were—if they were even human. At that time, people still spoke of the fae folk, before their kind either went into hiding or became extinct. Omin was found as an infant in the woods, so some stories said the great mage simply sprang from the dirt itself, a creature too divine to be human and too human to be a spirit.
“Of course,” Cal’s father would say, “this is just a story, and stories are always a little bit true and a little bit false; we just don’t know which is which.”
Young Cal chose to combine them all and believe that Omin was both human and fae—a being part heaven and earth—and that version satisfied him.
He can still hear his father’s deep, melodic voice, recounting the same scenes over and over from memory. Omin was an unknown orphan, a nobody, and grew up to establish a mighty kingdom, to become a great monarch with a loving family, loyal liege lords and knights, adored by thousands. Cal closes his eyes in his prison cell and pretends he’s six years old, when life was simple, before he knew what the future held for him and before he was left adrift and alone in the world. Those days, his father would tuck him in under his mother’s faded quilt and Cal would listen to the story, picturing each heroic character as he drifted off to sleep.
He does this now and recalls the words he always heard last:
The lesson, my son, is that we alone, no matter how skilled or how smart or how rich, are but spokes, and cannot move the wheel alone; only together can we do that.
CHAPTER TEN
Shadow
BY MID-MORNING TOMORROW I’M SUPPOSED to be officially on my way to Violla Ruza in a carriage provided by the queen. Supposed to be.
I have my own plans for transportation, my own destination—the prison transport to Deersia. If only I were a boy, then maybe I’d have a better chance of carrying it out. Or if I could just get my hands on an official work order from the palace . . . If I think about the obstacles ahead, what seemed so promising at first will begin to feel close to impossible.
Missus Kingstone visits with two of the completed gowns for a final fitting, a regular day dress and one for my first evening at the palace. She’s had her whole team of apprentice seamstresses working around the clock this entire week. The rest, she tells me, will be delivered to the palace ahead of my arrival.
One of the gowns is pale pink and frothy, full of frills and lace and bunches of fabric, with round puffy short sleeves. “Stunning!” Missus Kingstone claps her hands with delight when I model it for her and my aunts.
I turn to the full-length looking glass she brought for the fitting. I look absurd. Like a feral cat forced into a wedding gown.
My aunts don’t look convinced either, but they play along. “Yes, stunning. Quite a sight indeed,” Aunt Mesha says, holding her hand to the side of her face. Aunt Moriah has a similar reaction: “I agree—can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like it.”
The other dress isn’t much better, but at least it doesn’t make me look like a bowl of strawberry mousse. I like the color, which is a pale, almost silvery, blue, and the long draping sleeves make it sleeker—and a little less reminiscent of a noblewoman’s overly manicured poodle.
Regardless, I don’t intend to wear any of these gowns if I can help it. But I’m quickly running out of time, and no matter which way I look at it, I still don’t know how I’m going to make my plan work.
When the seamstress finally says goodbye late in the afternoon, my aunts begin saying things like, “You know, we will still see you, and you can write, and if there’s any problem . . .” All the assurances seem to be more for them than me, though. They can’t complete a single sentence without getting teary-eyed, though they try to conceal it. I’m pleased to see that they don’t want me to go. That they’re nervous about it.
After a light dinner (none of us have much of an appetite), they begin testing my knowledge of palace etiquette while we wash up the soup bowls and put them away. I’m subjected to an endless stream of pointless questions with even more pointless answers. “When does a formal meal end?” and so on. (Answer: when the queen is finished eating—whether the rest of the dinner guests are finished or not.)
We’ve gone over palace etiquette this way every night, such as who is obligated to bow to whom and which of your dinner neighbors you should turn and speak to first, or when you shouldn’t speak to anyone at all. I’d learned of many of these confusing rules before, in training manuscripts from my aunts’ library (three small shelves in the sitting room, and another of my own in the attic), so I am already familiar with much of it, though judging by how many I answer incorrectly, a refresher is sorely needed. Even if it is a waste of time. I should be learning something useful—combat, magical energy management—anything other than which fork is for seafood and which is for salad.
“I don’t want to spend tonight being torture—er, tutored,” I tell them. Though I don’t say “my last night here,” the words hang in the air.