The princess chuckled. “Not without spirit, I see. That’s a good start. Now, let’s go, Mother will be furious if we’re late.”
While they walked down the corridor, Melia dared to ask, “Have you seen Amron this morning, after the—” She didn’t know what to call it.
“The spectacle our father made of him?” the princess asked, her long stride forcing Melia to run. “No. He’s licking his wounds in private somewhere, I’d wager.”
“Is he all right?”
The princess paused so abruptly Melia almost stumbled. “No, he’s not all right. Would you be?”
“No, I—”
“But that’s what our father does. He’s done it to all of us, but to Amron the most because the two of them are like two wild dogs who just can’t let one another go. Amron refuses to bend and Father refuses to stop trying to break him, and they’re both worse off for it.” She resumed her stride. “Men and their pride.”
No one has ever talked to Melia with such bluntness. “What could I do to help him?”
“Pretend it never happened,” the princess said as they stepped into the queen’s chambers. “He’ll be grateful.”
The ladies were just pinning the veil to the Queen’s braids with tiny diamond stars. She turned when they entered, beautiful in icy shades of the palest blue, yet her face was distracted and worried. “Someone get a chair for the princess,” she said. “You should rest.”
“Oh no, I’m fine. We can go if you’re ready,” Amielle said.
“Stubborn as the rest of them,” the queen muttered. “Let’s go, then.”
A long procession formed in the corridor and descended into the yard, where the king’s party already waited for them. Melia looked for Amron in vain—she couldn’t spot his golden head anywhere in the crowd.
“What are we waiting for?” the princess muttered, just as an odd silence spread throughout the crowd.
Melia stood on tiptoes, trying to see what was happening at the gate, but the men from the king’s retinue blocked her view. Whatever it was, it didn’t last long, and the procession moved,meandering towards the harbor. Passing through the gate, she saw a bloody, roughed up girl being held by two guards. For a brief moment, she wondered what the girl had done to deserve such treatment. Then she remembered the royal wedding must have attracted all kinds of madmen and troublemakers, and averted her eyes.
• • •
As the bellsrang the eleventh hour of the morning, the Seragian fleet carrying Carevna Aratea and her entourage sailed into the Bay of Abia. Melia watched them from a wooden dais, shaded by a blue and gold canopy, crammed in with the members of the royal household. Princess Amielle stood beside her. Amron had materialized behind his brother at some point between the palace and the harbor, perfectly poised and immaculately dressed. She tried to catch his eye, but he kept close to Amril, whispering and laughing in a rare display of brotherly intimacy.
Melia stood on her toes, trying to get a breath of fresh air. The sky was blue as the royal livery, with feathery white clouds sailing fast across it. The day was windy, but it was still too early in the year for the wild gales that lashed the coast in the winter. The three imperial galleys sailed smoothly into the bay, lowered their red sails in a series of fast, precise movements, and rowed into the harbor. Their long, slender hulls cut the waves like sea snakes, with eyes and gaping maws filled with sharp teeth painted on their prows.
“My, my, are they planning to eat us?” Amielle muttered.
The remark was light, without a trace of premonition, and yet Melia felt cold dread spreading through her veins. Despite living her whole life on the border, she had never met real Seragians, seen the true face of the Empire. Up until that moment, shecould only imagine them as brigands, scrawny, desperate men attacking in small groups, hiding in the mountains, freezing and starving in the caves and abandoned villages. When her father talked of them, they were nothing more than vermin to be flushed out and destroyed.
She knew, in theory, that the Empire was vast, and that the Elmarran border was just a nuisance for the emperor, one of the many wars that smoldered on the edges of his lands. She knew that those unruly tribes were no more than grains of sand on the imperial map. The conflict that shaped her life, that took away the people she loved most, that had left her empty and dead, and turned her father into a flaring husk of hatred, was just a small, irritating note in the margin of the Empire’s history.
Amris the Golden-Haired defeated the Seragians in Elmar three hundred years ago, wiped them off the map, sent them running over the mountains with their tails between their legs. After that, all the Seragians could do was harass the people along the border, sending the most desperate, angry bandits with nothing to lose to pillage and burn. No emperor had tried to lead an army across the border again, to conquer Elmar, to take Syr once more. As a child, Melia was taught to believe it had been so because the Elmarrans guarded the border so well, and the Empire had never dared to escalate the skirmishes into a full-blown war.
Looking at the galleys in the harbor, three out of the three hundred the emperor supposedly had at his command, Melia realized the history she’d been taught was a child’s tale. Yes, the Elmarrans fought hard, yes, Elmar was a narrow, deadly strip of desert protected by some very sharp mountains, but it was nothing when compared with the size and might of the Seragian Empire.
Seragians poured out of the galleys as soon as they docked. First the guards in their uniforms, armor gleaming in themidday sun. Then the servants in black and gold liveries, bearing gifts. Then musicians, clerks, diplomats, noblemen—a mass of foreign people, perfectly orchestrated on the stone piers.
They reminded Melia of a clockwork mechanism, they were so smooth, so perfect, so deadly. Their order, their coordination, the sheer beauty of their perfect disembarking surpassed any army she had ever seen. The emperor who commanded such obedience, who had such skill at his disposal, could do anything he pleased. What if he decided to attack Abia from the sea and send an army over the mountains at the same time, with this level of discipline and dedication? What if all the might of the imperial army turned upon this little kingdom? They had no Amris now, no half-mad, half-divine hero whose unmatched talent was to conquer and triumph. Who would defend them now?
Watching the imperial grandeur unfold under the eyes of the whole court and thousands of common people, she could not help feeling overwhelmed. She tore her eyes away from the magnificent guests to watch the reactions of the people she knew. The king, fidgeting on a makeshift throne, looking far more anxious than triumphant. Amril, with an immovable smile plastered on his face, and Amron behind him, pale, with his eyes wide open.
Her gaze then slipped down to where the nobles stood, to the familiar crowd in red and black. Her father was too far away for his expression to be readable, and from Melia’s high position on the dais, he looked small. All his schemes, all his anger.…In this sweeping historical moment unfolding before their eyes, her father seemed like a puny troublemaker, a reckless farm boy prodding a sleeping dragon with a sharp stick.
The thought almost comforted her. After all, what could Roderi of Elmar do to spoil this? There were hundreds of guards around watching the crowd. Captain Darin stood on the pier with hismen, each one armed to the teeth. Together with the Seragians, they were an army. What could Roderi of Elmar do to provoke them?
Little page boys walked around the dais offering refreshments, and Melia snatched a glass of iced lemonade from the tray. It was so cold her teeth ached.
“Do you think we’ll stand here until sundown?” she asked the princess, watching the galleys spit out their precious cargo as if there would be no end to it.
