At long last, the exasperating miss had piqued Kamran’s interests. He regarded her carefully. “Get you into trouble how?” he asked.
Miss Huda took a bracing breath. “Well, I’d quite stealthily engaged the services of Miss Alizeh—”
“Don’t,” he said sharply, clenching his fists through a fresh bolt of pain. “Don’t say her name.”
Miss Huda took a startled step back. She blinked at him a moment, then studied her hands. “Very well, sire. I won’t say her name. But I had engaged her services,” she said, swallowing, “to design me several new gowns, for Mother is always forcing me to wear some monstrosity she’s commissioned, and as I have a little pin money from Father, I thought perhaps I might circumvent these little tortures inflicted upon me by finding my own modiste.”
“Once again, Miss Huda, I will remind you that the young woman in question worked as a snoda, not a seamstress.”
“Oh, but she did, sire,” Miss Huda said eagerly. “She did both.”
“That’s impossible. She worked, at minimum, twelve-hour shifts at Baz House—she was in the employ of my ownaunt, I saw her working there—”
“Yes, sire, quite true. But she came to me at night, after her shift was done.”
Kamran stared at her, dumbfounded. “If that is true, when did she sleep? When did she eat?”
These were such strange questions that even Miss Huda fell silent. She stared curiously at the prince, and Kamran, realizing too late that he’d exposed something essential about himself, quickly appended his questions with another, this one more damning:
“When did she find time to conspire with the Tulanian king?”
The spell broke.
Miss Huda nodded, her eyes lit now with a new fervor. “That’s just it, sire. She—that is, the young woman I shall not name—could not have conspired with him. She didn’t even know who he was.”
Kamran’s spark of interest evaporated.
“Not only is what you allege impossible,” he said unkindly, “it also contradicts what you yourself told the paper—for you claimed on record that she’d been betrothed to the Tulanian king for some time.”
“I did think it possible, yes,” said Miss Huda, taking a step toward him before remembering herself and drawing back. “She did confess to be some manner of forgotten nobility, and often such matches are made in infancy. Royals are all the time betrothed to people they do not know.”
“Not in this case,” he pointed out. “The two were well-acquainted.”
Miss Huda shook her head vigorously. “I was there the first time they met—I saw the way the two looked at each other, and they were strangers.”
“Where was this?”
“In my room, sire, the night of the ball. Aliz— That is,shewas meant to have finished the aforementioned gown—which you will discover buried in her luggage—ahead of the festivities, but had come to me that evening in a bit of a panic, claiming she could not complete the job in time. Only after I pressed did she admit she was running for her life from some unnamed entity—shortly after which the southern king all but magicallyappearedin my room, and, Your Highness, she hadn’t the faintest idea who he was. Neither of us did. He wouldn’t even tell us his name; he insisted she call himNothing—”
“What a convenient way to protect his identity,” said Kamran, leveling Miss Huda with a dark look. “Yes, I’m sure they both did a fine job pretending not to know each other in your presence.”
Miss Huda paled. “Oh, no, I assure you, even when she opened that strange box of shoes—which had been delivered to me ahead of her arrival—she was entirely shocked, you must believe me, her manners were quite unrehearsed—”
“What strange box of shoes? What on earth are you talking about?”
Miss Huda bit her lip; wrung her hands. “I do apologize, sire. I’m more than a little nervous and I fear I’m telling the story entirely out of order...”
Kamran was forced to listen then, with mountingirritation, as Miss Huda described the delivery of a mysterious package, which had only revealed its contents to Alizeh herself, and had contained in its depths a disappearing note and a beautiful pair of shoes, whose matching gown Alizeh had already possessed upon arrival at Follad Place.
“Enough.”
The prince squeezed his eyes shut, his headache threatening now to split open his skull. The proof of Alizeh’s traitorous behavior was almost too much to bear. He felt sick at the revelations, at the descriptions of her thoughts and movements prior to the ball. While he had been replaying their stolen moments together, dreaming of her like a lovesick fool, she’d been plotting all the while against him, no doubt laughing at how easily he’d been brought to his knees by her beauty, her charm, her performances of grace and compassion.
Kamran hated himself then, hated himself so thoroughly he thought he might make himself ill.
With tremendous effort he composed himself, saying calmly, “The series of events you describe to me now present a trail of evidence so clear—and so incriminating—I cannot imagine how you might misunderstand it. Altogether these details paint the verypictureof an elaborate scheme and, contrary to what you might believe, the young woman was—is—conspiring with the king of an enemy nation who wishes to destroy me. There can be no questioning this fact.”
“I do question it, sire— Forgive me, but I do question it, for I spent many hours in her presence and I am unconvinced she is, as you imply, an evil young woman. In fact, Iam convinced of quite the opposite, for she was terribly kind to me; she all but offered to defend me with her life, sire, even in the midst of her own life-threatening trials, which I’m sorry to say is a generosity no other person has bestowed upon me, and I cannot now in good conscience abandon her, not when I fear she might be in great danger, and if there’s any chance of finding her, I’d love to be able to assist—”
