“Oh indeed,” Valka sneers, and turns on her heel. Her gaze falls on Maralinde and me, and I find myself stepping back from the glittering wrath in her eye. I hope, oh how I hope, Maralinde and her family leave in the morning.
Valka doesn’t speak as she nears, she just strides right between us, giving Maralinde a shove to the side as she passes.
“Mother?” Maralinde asks uncertainly as Valka disappears through the doorway. I take my friend’s hand, and that seems to bring her back to herself. She crosses to the table with me in tow.
Emmanika breathes a sigh as we join her. “It’s nothing, dear. But I do hope your father will be ready to leave tomorrow. The less time you spend around that child, the better.” She glances at me and smiles faintly. “Ah, Alyrra. Will you be sitting with us this afternoon?”
“Perhaps,” I say, as I always do. “If Mother doesn’t come.”
“Of course,” Emmanika says, and hails a servant to ask if the queen will dine in the hall this afternoon.
The following morning, I make absolutely certain I will not be late for my lessons. I send for a breakfast tray as soon as I wake, and am dressed and ready for it by the time it arrives. Since Mother takes breakfast in the main hall only when all our vassals are present, it’s relatively safe to assume she’s dining in her rooms this morning, or perhaps in a withdrawing room with a few chosen nobles. Either way, she doesn’t require my presence.
One slice of hearty brown bread with a serving of cheese and a boiled egg later, I slip out, padding softly past my brother’s room and through the halls to the other wing where my tutor will be. If he has forgiven me yet.
I pass Maralinde and her parents on their way to the hall for breakfast, as well as a handful of other nobles, one of whom detains me to ask if my mother will be joining us—as if she truly did not know—and then, much more to the point, if I can say why Maralinde’s family has stayed back, and surely I must know something?
I duck my head. “‘Fraid not,” I say apologetically. “Perhaps Lady Emmanika can tell you?”
My questioner rolls her eyes, pats me on the head, and finally lets me go. I turn the corner, pass the open doors of the temple, and take the stairs up to the hallway above. Here lie the remaining nobles’ bedrooms, as well as the meeting rooms, and there, in the very middle of the hall, stands Valka, her head tilted as she studies something in her hand. A bauble of some sort, no doubt. Her father is always gifting her small pieces.
She doesn’t notice me at first, and so I am only a few paces away when she hears my footsteps and looks up with a start, her fingers curling over a glitter of gold and blue. A sapphire? That’s a pricey bit of jewelry indeed.
“Oh, it’s you,” she says with evident relief, and stuffs the trinket into her skirt pocket. “What are you doing here this early? Everyone’s at breakfast.”
“You’re not,” I point out helpfully.
“I’m going, silly.”
“I’ve already eaten.”
Valka shrugs, an elegant and yet contemptuous shift of her shoulders, and starts past me. “Can’t be helped if you won’t eat with the rest of us. Perhaps you’ll grace us with your presence at lunch.”
“That’s not—” I bite off the rest of my words with a grimace as her laugh rings through the air. I should know by now not to take her words, her mockery, seriously.
“You’re such a goose,” Valka says, and disappears down the stairs.
I stand a moment, listening as the pat-pat of her slippers fades away. Valka’s rooms aren’t in this hall; Lord Daerilin is one of Mother’s most important vassals and his family has rooms beside ours. So what was she doing here, looking at her jewelry? Had she come to show it off to someone? But no, then she likely would have shown me too.
I glance around once, but the doors are closed, the hallway quiet. The only sounds are the faint murmur of voices and the occasional thump from the main hall, filled with diners.
Never mind. Whatever little intrigues Valka is playing at she can keep to herself. I don’t want her secrets, told to me or discovered on my own.
“I want every servant who has set foot in this hall called here at once!”
At the sound of the voice, I look up from the map I am studying under the jaundiced eye of my long-suffering tutor. It depicts a rather over-large vision of Adania, and the rocky, mountainous borders we share with all of our neighbors—middling kingdoms to the north, south, and west, all bigger than our own, and then the much larger kingdom of Menaiya to the east.
“Continue,” my tutor says at the same time as the woman outside in the hallway exclaims, “It is gone, I tell you, and I shall not allow such a theft to stand.”
There are other voices, low and garbled, and I can hear a number of doors opening along the hallway as people poke their heads out to see what’s amiss. I think of Valka’s story yesterday, the reality that my brother cost the hostlers some of their already paltry pay, but shake the thought loose. This has nothing to do with that, even if there are servants involved.
“Your Highness,” my tutor says with a heroic attempt at patience. “Our northern borders . . . ?”
“Were secured through the marriage of Great Aunt Larimi to their crown prince at the time,” I say dutifully as the woman in the hallway says something else, and the level of noise from the assembling crowd rises another
