Mirage (Mirage #1)(8)

Eventually, we came upon another courtyard. There was little grass, and what shrubbery was around was potted and foreign. A fountain murmured in the center, and just to its left was a table, high off the ground. The Andalaan comfort and luxury had finally given way to sanitized Vathek splendor. No life, no warmth—only stone and water.

A woman with gleaming silver hair, the trademark of the High Vath, sat behind the table, a stack of tablets on one end, and a holoreader in front of her. Her features were sharp—sharp cheekbones, sharp nose, and a thin mouth that seemed ill suited to smiling.

“Your Ladyship,” Tala said in Vathekaar. “I’ve brought the girl.”

Her Ladyship, Nadine, said nothing, and continued to work.

Tala stood perfectly still, as though this were routine to her. Minutes and then tens of minutes, and then what felt like hours ticked by. I struggled to stay standing, my nerves fraying as time wore on, my thoughts cycling through the stories I’d heard in ever rising panic.

Near the end of the war, our moon had been a protectorate held by one of the High Vath. The mountains ringing our valley sheltered some of the last rebels, and the High Vath had hunted them down systematically, making examples of them. I wasn’t born, but the scars of his tenure had remained. Adil’s maimed foot. The empty village two miles south of us. The village to the west with its sole Kushaila inhabitant and her daughter, silver haired and blue eyed.

“Do you speak Vathekaar?”

I nearly jumped at the sound of Nadine’s voice. My mouth opened and closed as I tried to bring myself back to the present. “Yes.”

“Where did you learn?”

“School,” I said at last.

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“Do you speak any other languages?”

“Kushaila,” I whispered.

It had been our moon’s common tongue before the Vathek occupation. Here in the capital it had been the royal language. Now, if one were caught speaking it, they risked the ire of what ever Vath was in their path. If a droid or a member of the Garda caught you, your chances of being beaten and thrown into jail were high. Galactic law meant they couldn’t outlaw an indigenous language outright, and all of Andala’s various populations took pride in their mother tongues. But the Vath seemed determined to beat our language out of all of us, and the Kushaila in particular, no matter the cost.

Nadine snorted in derision.

“Do you have any skills?”

I heard Husnain’s voice, telling me to practice poetry. Saw my father bent over the plants in his greenhouse as he taught me how to cross breeds. My mother’s face, red and sweating in the kitchen as she taught me to make bread.

I couldn’t close my eyes—I couldn’t show weakness. So I took each memory, folded it over and over again, and put it away.

I shook my head. None that would matter to her.

Nadine folded her hands on the table and leaned back as though she didn’t believe me. I could not say if she took pleasure in her questioning, in seeing me so openly afraid, but it certainly seemed that way. When I didn’t offer an answer, she said nothing, and the silence stretched between us.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter,” she said, and stood. “We will find out one way or another. Cover her face, Tala. The seamstress is coming.”

Tala rushed to secure a veil across my features, and soon a seamstress hurried into the courtyard and began measuring me. I was to live then. The idea brought me no relief. Why should I need new clothes? Who was to see me in them? Why must my face be covered?

What did they want with me?

“See what Agron’s schedule is like in the coming days,” Nadine instructed Tala. “The ball season is approaching—he may be booked for weeks.”

“Yes, Your Ladyship.” Tala’s face remained impassive, and she refused to meet my eyes.

“You may go. I will send for you when I’m ready for you to collect her.”

Tala did not look at me as she walked out, the seamstress following soon after.

I stood alone in the courtyard as Nadine worked through a series of tablets and passed them on to the droid behind her. It had been early morning when I was summoned, but time crawled forward as I waited to be dismissed.

I was not dismissed.

The minutes stretched into hours, and the shadows in the courtyard stretched with them. I knew patience, was used to the backbreaking work of picking fruits in the orchard, which we often did from sunup to sundown. But before long my back and feet began to ache. I hadn’t slept or eaten since the majority night celebration had come to an abrupt end, and I felt dizzy, disoriented by the veil that shielded my face and narrowed my field of vision.

And then all at once it seemed that even the whirring of the droid stopped. Nadine set her stylus down, then straightened up. I straightened along with her just as footsteps, quick and precise, echoed in the courtyard.

Nadine rose from her seat and swept past me.

“You will remain here,” she said, clipped and sharp, and then disappeared behind the shrubbery at the other end of the courtyard.

“As ever,” I heard, “it is a pleasure, Your Highness.”

My heart thundered in my chest. I could hear them murmuring with each other—Nadine and one of the royal household. There weren’t very many members. The Vathek king, King Mathis, had only had one child with his Andalaan bride: Princess Maram, who was rumored to be as cruel and Vathek as her father, despite being half Kushaila. King Mathis’s queen had died of illness during the Purge—the systematic extermination of the Salihis, the most powerful Andalaan family, who had resisted the Vathek takeover.