"I'm a botanist, Mother. It's a known fact that shouldn't surprise anyone. I climbed a mountain. The hands heal."
"You are a princess first, and a botanist somewhere down the list, far down, after a dozen things you find tedious and do anyway because you were born to them. That is the order of it. You have it backward, you always have, and one day it is going to cost you more than nasty gossip."
To her, being a princess was the foundation everything else was built on. To me, it was a stone tied to my ankle, a thing I was forever swimming against to get an hour at a bench or a week on a slope. The same life looked at from opposite ends, and neither of us would ever want to stand where the other did.
"Do you know what I am holding together? Do you have the faintest idea? And when I hear that my youngest daughter defied me and went up the mountain, I said a prayer to Elurion, hoping she'd at least had the sense to wear gloves and a hat to protectherself from the sun. But when I find a window to come and see how my daughter is faring, I find her sitting with her feet in a basin of healing herbs, looking like she lost a fight with the mountain, because she could not, for just a few weeks, behave as though her family's name were worth more to her than wild weeds and even wilder tales."
Somewhere in the back of my mind I wondered how she'd found out about the wild tales surrounding the Silver Princess, but I was too angry to devote any serious thought to it and too busy composing my retort.
"Then don't spend your windows on me," I said. "Spend them on your politicking and your scheming and matchmaking."
I wasn't supposed to let on that I knew about Cardilia's betrothal, and I hoped I hadn't said too much because I was angry and frustrated and had not guarded my tongue.
She threw her hands in the air. "Even my best scheming, as you call it, won't help to find you a suitable match. You've made yourself impossible to match well. I won't humiliate myself by trying and hearing refusals." She turned for the door. "All you can hope for is the second or third son of a duke glad of the connection and not too particular, and you'll take him, and we'll all pretend it's a wonderful pairing. I'm done courting better on your behalf. I wash my hands of it. You've worn me out."
She reached the door.
I wasn't wounded, not the way she'd meant me to be. In fact, I wasn't wounded at all. I was relieved.
"Good," I called after her.
She stopped.
"I mean it, Mother. Stop looking. It's the kindest thing you could do for me. I'll be grateful."
She didn't turn around. She stood a moment with her hand on the handle, her back very straight, and then she went out without another word and shut it behind her.
Ursa peeled herself off the wall, came back, and resumed her work on my feet without a word.
I was grateful for her silence.
I sat with my feet in the cooling water, closed my eyes, and thought of the unnatural shimmer in the snow that no one but I had seen.
The next morning, we left for Vedona.
It was the same journey I had made every year since I was a child, though I hadn't been made to attend the ball itself until I turned eighteen. I actually enjoyed the days of travel across the width of the Federation, with nearly the entire household strung out in a convoy with our wardrobes stored in heavy trunks lashed down, and my mother leading it like a general. I loved stopping at inns along the way and meeting new people, but I absolutely detested the annual ball itself and all the official luncheons and dinners during the days preceding it and the ones following it. It was hours of standing in shoes that hurt my feet, smiles that hurt my cheeks, all while being looked through by people who had decided long ago that I was no one worth looking at.
48
ALAR
“A drowning man does not ask whether the rope is clean.”
—Elurian proverb
We had ten days until the ball, until my father stood up in front of the ruling families of the seventeen provinces making up the Elurian Federation, and named me his new heir.
Arlen was not doing well, and I had run out of options.
The work that had been slowly and painfully gaining ground had stalled and slid back, and the breathing and the grounding that had once pulled him out of the dark were now doing little good. They barely managed to keep him from sliding further down into the abyss.
I had hoped for a miracle, but the truth was that the Vedona healer's list of remedies had never been meant as an instant cure. The healing was supposed to take months, even years.
I had ten days.
Out of utter desperation and lack of options, I returned to Healer Lemil, the only other person in the palace who carried this with me.
"There's nothing more I can do for him," he said before I'd even finished asking. "I've done all I could with what I have. Rest, quiet, and the work you've been doing with Prince Arlen. There is no draft for this, Your Highness. I wish there were."
