He was the son of saffron farmers in the south. His parents had been imprisoned for failing to pay taxes on a meager harvest, and their official complaint—Kamran had since pulled the report—was that the taxes were a fixed amount, instead of a percentage. Paying the fixed amount, they had insisted, would’ve meant starvation for their family, as the season’s crop had been so small. They had appealed to the courts for leniency, but had contracted lung fever in prison and died days later, leaving the boy to fend for himself.
Twelve, he’d said he was. Twelve years old.
“You are either very brave or very stupid,” Kamran had said to him. “To disagree with me so readily.”
“But, sire, you didn’t see her hands,” Omid insisted. “And I did.”
Kamran had only scowled.
In his haste to take his leave of the insufferable child, Kamran had forgotten, yet again, to pay his respects to the honorable priests and priestesses. He was instead intercepted by a halo of Diviners on his way out—who’d said little, as they were wont to do—and accepted as payment but a moment of his time before they pressed a small parcel into his hands. The prince offered his many thanks, but his mind, full and disordered as it was, bade him tuck away the untitled gift, to be opened at a later date.
The parcel would remain forgotten, for some days, in the interior pocket of Kamran’s cloak.
Unnerved by his conversation with Omid, the prince had gone straight from the Diviners Quarters to Baz House, the home of his distant aunt. He knew exactly where the kitchens were; he’d spent a great deal of his youth at Baz House, sneaking belowstairs for snacks after midnight. He considered going through the front doors and simply asking his aunt whether she’d employed such a servant, but he thought of his grandfather’s warning that his actions were now under intense scrutiny.
Kamran had many reasons for seeking out the girl—not the least of which was King Zaal’s confirmation that Ardunia was destined for war—but he did not think it wise to over-hastily spread word of this to the happy public.
In any case, Kamran was good at waiting.
He could stand in one position for hours without tiring, had been trained to practically disappear at will. It was no trouble at all to him to waste an hour standing in an alley to capture a criminal, not when his aim was to protect his empire, to spare his people the machinations of this faceless girl—
Lie.
True, that he found her actions suspect; true, too, that she might be a Tulanian spy. But there was also a possibility that he was wrong about the girl, and his unwillingness to accept this fact should’ve concerned him. No, the unadulterated truth, which he was only now willing to admit, was that there was a grain more to his motivations: something about this girl had burrowed under his skin.
He couldn’t shake it.
She—a supposed poor, lowly servant—had acted this morning with a mercy he could not understand, with a compassion that enraged him all the more for its inconstancy. The young woman had entered his empire, ostensibly, to do harm. Why should she have been the more benevolent actor this morning? Why should she have inspired in him a feeling of unworthiness?
No, no, it made no sense.
Years of training had taught the prince to recognize even the slightest inconsistencies in his opponents; weaknesses that could be mined and promptly manipulated. Kamran knew his own strengths, and his instincts in this instance could not be denied. He’d seen her contradictions from the moment he laid eyes on her.
She was without question hiding something.
He’d wanted to out her as the liar he knew her to be; to uncover what seemed to him one of only two possibilities: a treasonous spy, or a frivolous society girl playing pretend.
He had, instead, ended up here.
Here, standing in the dark so long the mobs had begun to disperse, the streets littered now with the drunk, sleeping bodies that dared not drag themselves home. Kamran had let the cold brace him until his bones shook, until he felt nothing but a large emptiness yawn open inside him.
He did not want to be king.
He did not want his grandfather to die, did not want to marry a stranger, did not want to father a child, did not want to lead an empire. This was the secret he seldom shared even with himself—that he did not want this life. It was hardenough when his father had died, but Kamran couldn’t even begin to imagine a world without his grandfather. He did not think he was good enough to lead an empire alone, and he did not know who he might rely upon instead. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure he could trust Hazan.
Instead, Kamran had distracted himself with his anger, had allowed his mind to focus on the irritations of the Fesht boy, the false face of a servant girl. The truth was that he’d been forced to return home against his will and was now running from himself, from the counterintuitive burden of privilege, from the responsibilities laid upon his shoulders. In moments like these he’d always consoled himself with the reassurance that he was at least a capable soldier, a competent leader—but today had disproven even that. For what good was a leader who could not even trust his own instincts?
Kamran had been bested by this servant girl.
Not only had she proven him wrong on all counts, she’d proven him worse. When she’d finally appeared in the alley behind Baz House, he’d recognized her at once—but had the privilege now of inspecting her more closely. Right away he noticed the angry cut at her throat, and from there he followed the elegant lines of her neck, the delicate slope of her shoulders. For the second time that day he noticed the way she carried herself; how different she seemed from other servants. There was a gracefulness even in the way she held her head, the way she drew her shoulders back, the way she’d tilted her face up at the sun.
Kamran did not understand.
If not a spy or society girl, she might perhaps be the fallendaughter of a gentleman, or even the bastard child of one; such circumstances might explain her elegant carriage and knowledge of Feshtoon. But for a well-educated child of a noble to have fallen this low? He thought it unlikely. The scandals in high society were most everyone’s business, and such a person in his aunt’s employ would doubtless have been known to him.
Then again, it was hard to be certain of anything.
In vain he’d fought for a better look at her face and was given instead only a mouth to study. He’d stared at her lips for longer than he cared to admit, for reasons that were not lost on him. Kamran had arrived at the frightening realization that this girl might be beautiful—a thought so unexpected it nearly distracted him from his purpose. When she suddenly bit her lip, he drew a breath, startling himself.
