But happily ever after felt as far away now as once upon a time.
How I longed for the strength and safety I’d felt when Torden held me. How I missed the sense of possibility I’d felt with Daddy at my side, before I’d known I’d be forced to leave him.
No matter how much I told my heart that it was the right choice to venture east, I still felt lost. Adrift, here on the Frisian Sea, making for the Canal Route that would carry us to Katz Castle, where more things than another would-be suitor waited.
Lang and Yu had intelligence that said the Waldleute—the Shvartsval’d branch of the rebels working against the Imperiya—were active in the region near the castle. They were the reason we were adhering to my stepmother’s schedule: we were going to arm them with the weapons the zŏngtŏng, the president of Yu’s home country of Zhōng Guó, had given Yu and Lang to smuggle inside the Imperiya.
I had my own intelligence, too.
I’d been listening to my godmother one day on her radio when I’d accidentally stumbled on another frequency—on another conversation altogether.
Hansel and Gretel, they’d called themselves. They’d been making plans.
“Burg Cats?” he’d asked. His voice had been cool and sharp, his accent almost English, with v’s like z’s. “Or Burg Rhein—”
She’d asked him if he was crazy. Told him anyone could be listening in.
She’d been right.
I had thought more than once to tell Lang and the others what I’d heard. But something had stopped my mouth before, had kept me from telling the others that they were right, and that the Waldleute were perhaps even working with someone inside the castle. Now there was no mystery to what had kept me quiet: I was too angry to share my secrets. They’d certainly taken their time sharing theirs.
Even having overheard Hansel and Gretel, I faced a great unknown on the map. Hic sunt dracones. Hic sunt lupi.
Here be dragons. Here be wolves.
Not only monsters awaited us in Shvartsval’d, inside the gray boundaries of the Imperiya Yotne. We would meet plots already in motion, characters in masks designed to deceive.
The courts I had survived thus far would be nothing compared to what lay ahead. Danger awaited us, and the days loomed long and fearsome as the teeth of the wolves the Imperiya’s tsarytsya loved so much.
Looking at my marks scratched out in pencil, wobbling from one edge of the endpaper to the other, I felt doubt creeping cold up my spine and wondered if I had chosen wrong.
Swallowing hard, I set my godmother’s book aside and dug deeper into my trunk.
I sat back on my bed and ruffled the pages of the folder in my hand—the folder Alessandra had thrown in my face the day we’d left Potomac so many weeks ago, my father weary and sick, most likely poisoned at her hand, my position as Potomac’s seneschal-elect teetering on the edge of a knife. But it was more than a dossier on the suitors ahead of and behind me; it was the story of where I’d come from and how far I had still to go.
Bertilak, prince of England, Duke of Exeter. Firstborn son of the king of England was first inside the file. He was England’s crown prince, Oxford-educated, thoughtful and wise, and I’d been horrified to find him close to Daddy’s age.
The folder didn’t contain details on my real suitor—Prince Bertilak’s son, Bear. He had gotten to know me disguised as a guard, and I’d fallen for him. I’d discovered their deception in front of the entire court and left completely humiliated.
I wasn’t angry at Bear anymore. He’d done what he had to do, just as I had. But my sigh rustled the pages as I turned past his profile.
Torden’s eyes stared up at mine.
When Perrault had first related Torden’s profile information—his height and hair color and his rank among Konge Alfödr’s sons—I’d asked if Norge was proposing courtship or selling horses. I didn’t feel any of that cynicism or anger now as I looked at Torden’s portrait. Sparse though it was, the artist had somehow captured the determined square corners of his jaw, the earnest set of his mouth and furrow of his brows.
With Torden at my side I had felt broad as the sky and solid as the earth. Utterly invincible, the future clear before me.
I knew where I was headed now. But thoughts of the future filled me with an uncertainty that shook my bones.
I thumbed the illustration, my throat tight, and turned to the next profile.
Reichsfürst Fritz of the Neukatzenelnbogen. Brown hair, brown eyes, medium height. Age: twenty-seven. Oldest son of Hertsoh Maximilian of the Imperiya Yotne, Reichsfürst of Terytoriya Shvartsval’d.
Then Perrault’s note: Clever.
“Twenty-seven.” I shook my head again—though, at least this time, I’d been informed of my suitor’s age.
Lang and I had exclaimed over it together, a lifetime ago, when I thought he cared about what happened to me. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t headed for the Shvartsval’d in search of love or a husband. I was going there to honor a mission, to help people defend themselves against a tyrant whose cruelty I’d heard of in whispers and stories since I was a child.
I bit my lip, thinking of everything Homer and Lang and Yu had told me about the tsarytsya and her Imperiya. Of the mosques and churches and temples shuttered and left to ruin, the books burned, the punishment for those who dared flee the villages she controlled. Of spies, and children taken from their families.
I swallowed hard and turned the page again, my forehead pinching as I scanned the remaining profiles. Prínkipas Theodore, only child of Déspoina Áphros and Despótis Hephaistios of Páfos, a smiling young man with dark curls; Perrault had scribbled philanderer below his description. Baltazaru Turchinu, a young prince in Corse searching for a seventh wife after the first six had mysteriously perished or disappeared, to whose profile Perrault had added only the word terrifying. And dukes and barons and other nobles besides.
So many men to visit. So many men appointed to ensure I did so. So many who had lied to me and used the cause of my pain for their own purposes.
I had been lonely before; the feeling was an old friend. But I had never been so angry.
It burned.
4
It was late when a knock came at my door. “Selah?” Anya’s voice was soft, but I tensed.
“It’s not locked,” I called, not moving.
The door creaked open, and Anya came and crouched at my side, moonlight from the porthole washing her fair hair pale as silver.
“I can’t sleep,” she whispered.
I swallowed, searching her face for questions about why I’d left dinner early—questions that would mean uncomfortable answers and truths about how bitter I felt. But I found none.
Maybe Anya was too content to wonder.
“Hammock no good?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Their room’s crowded already. And Jeanne’s lovely, but . . .” She paused. “I don’t think Cobie likes me. She’s never nice to me.”
“Well, Cobie isn’t nice to anybody.”
“She’s nice to you.”
“She isn’t, really,” I said, my brow furrowing. Though I was still angry at the crew, my ire burned a little cooler at Cobie, and I finally understood why: she had never pretended to be friendly to me. She hadn’t smiled and acted like she cared about me while plotting behind my back, as the rest of them had. Cobie’s behavior had never changed, and I found comfort in that consistency.