Chapter 27
27
I felt sick. “Surrender his firstborn? Wait, what?”
Lucas studied the parchment closely. “Hmmm. It sounds like the king made a deal with the mambabarang coven to end the war. That’s what they were called, the Kalahok of Mambabarang.”
“Not just to the coven but specifically to the head witch—the Babaeng Pinuno,” I said. “My father . My father made a deal to give me to the witches.” I felt dizzy.
“When were you born?” he asked. He pointed to a date on the contract. It was in the Biringan calendar.
I did a quick conversion in my head. “Almost nine months after that, exactly.”
“He didn’t know,” Lucas said. “He had no idea your mother was pregnant when he made this agreement. He probably had no intention of ever having any children.”
My father had sacrificed having an heir to end the war. I closed my eyes. The truth flooded over me. “That’s why me and my mom were hiding all along.” I grabbed the edge of the desk. I was an accident. And then they had to give up so much of their lives, all for me. They couldn’t even be together.
“Are you okay?” Lucas put his hands on my shoulders to steady me.
I nodded. “Just shocked.” I felt tears welling up in my eyes. It was overwhelming. Realizing this. Realizing how much danger my mother and I were in all those years. Running and hiding to keep me from falling into the witch’s hands.
“He thought he would outsmart the witch, but the mambabarang knew you had to come back to Biringan one day. The one true heir—you—would have to return when you came of age, or else the truce would be broken.”
“And now he’s dead, and I was brought back here, not even knowing I’d be closer to the danger my father was trying to protect me from.” My mother couldn’t have known the full extent of this bargain—she never would have let me come back here otherwise.
Temo was right. It’s time to tell her the truth. Was this what he wanted my mother to know? Was he trying to warn us with his last note? That the mambabarang had come to collect what was promised?
I picked up the book again.
“You want to do this later, maybe?” Lucas asked me. He looked at Nix for help managing me.
She leaned against the desk with her arms crossed. “You good, MJ?”
“No,” I said, in response to both their questions. “But I’ve waited long enough to know everything.”
There wasn’t much more in the book, except another contract with a smuggler—like one of the shady men in town—to hide me and my mother in the human world. So all this time, I thought we were running from these men, but they weren’t after us at all. They were helping to hide us. Our very names were written on the bottom: “Queen Consort Michelle Robertson-Rodriguez and Mahalina Jazreel, Princess of the Court of Sirena, Heir to the Throne of Biringan.”
I stared at the words on the page. Read them again. And again. And again. No one ever told me that was my real birth name. My encanto name. I always thought my name was Maria Josephina, but that was a lie, too.
Just another way they tried to hide me from the mambabarang.
“He wouldn’t have signed the agreement if he knew your mom was pregnant,” Lucas said.
I shook my head, still bewildered by my discovery. My entire life, I had been told that we were running because I was in danger from my father’s enemies. But in truth he was the one who had put the target on my back. He was the one who had signed me away, promised me to the dark witch. I wiped my eyes. “Maybe he didn’t, but he should never have made a promise like that—” I was interrupted by Nix.
“You guys! We have to go to the library,” she yelled. She was already making her way to the door.
“What’s happening?” I asked her.
“We need to know what this is,” she added over her shoulder. “Right now.” She waved the drawing of the strange plant that she had taken from me earlier.
“Guess we better go,” Lucas said. “Besides, I have a feeling we’ve been here too long already.”
***
Once we arrived in the palace library, I shut the doors behind us and set the latch in place, to avoid any potential interruptions.
“Won’t that draw more attention?” Lucas pointed out. He was probably right. Should anyone come by, it would be hard to explain why they couldn’t enter. It looked more suspicious, not less. As it was, we could simply say we were doing schoolwork. I unlocked the door. When I turned around again, Nix was already ankle-deep in a pile of books. She was yanking them off the shelves, flipping through the first few pages, scanning what I assumed to be the titles and tables of contents, then dumping them unceremoniously at her feet when she was through.
I walked over to join her, trying to avoid stepping on the pile, and began picking up the books and returning them to the shelf. “What are you looking for?” I asked her.
“I’ll know when I see it” was all she said. Then she returned to flipping pages and tossing books on the ground.
“Hey,” I said. “You’re making a mess. And, worse, ruining the books.”
She looked down at the growing pile and grimaced. “Right. Sorry.” She turned a few pages in the dark-green leather-bound book she was holding and then placed it back where she found it when she was done.
“Thanks,” I said. “Plus, someone’s probably going to notice if they’re all out of order. We don’t want to leave a trail of evidence behind us. What if the mambabarang is onto us? They can see which books we’ve been through.” Okay, that was highly unlikely, but I’d seen enough movies to know anything was possible.
And my heart told me the witch had been in the king’s chambers right before we were. They could be someone working in the castle... They could be watching us right now, in fact, maybe through the eyes of one of the portraits on the wall...
Nix flashed me a finger gun. “Right. Cover our tracks. Gotcha.”
Lucas had started on the opposite end of the shelves. He made his choices far more carefully, face scrunched in concentration, scanning the spines whenever they were labeled, gently pulling the ones from the shelf that were not and opening them to check the contents. If he decided they weren’t relevant, he returned them and continued on. I watched his finger trace the spines, the way he was totally absorbed in the task, contemplative, deliberate. I found it all too attractive, how mature and serious he looked. I hated that I couldn’t trust him, that Elias had put doubts in my head.
“Here,” Nix said, her face inches away from the huge dusty tome she held open in both her hands, titled The Mysterious Properties of Magical Herbs and authored by someone called Lady Elowina. Nix walked over to a table with it and sat down. I shook off my trance over Lucas and joined her. He was paging through a brown leather book.
“Check this out,” Nix said. She turned the book around to face me and pointed to a table of contents in the beginning of the book. I followed her finger to the chapter title: “Forbidden.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I said. I turned around in the chair and called out to Lucas, “Come see what Nix found.”
He pushed a book back into place and came over to the table to stand right next to me. He crouched down to see better, and I could feel the heat coming off his body. I cleared my throat, a nervous reflex, but he didn’t seem to notice. I scooched in the chair, and my leg accidentally brushed against his. “Oh, sorry,” I said.
He put a hand on my leg and rubbed it. “No need to apologize.”
Once again, when he stopped touching me, I felt it as a physical loss.
Lucas began turning pages in the book, looking for the ominously named “Forbidden” chapter. He stopped and turned back a few pages, then a few more, then began flipping forward again. “I don’t understand,” he muttered. He turned back and forth again, faster, frustrated. “It’s not there.”
“What do you mean?” I leaned over to look. He showed me one page, then the next.
“This is where the ‘Forbidden’ chapter should be.” He picked up the book and opened it wider. “It was cut out.” He showed me where the few pages that made up that section were cleanly removed.
“Holy...” Nix said under her breath.
Lucas put the book down. “Looks like someone was already here.”
“Now what?” I asked them. “I mean, I guess the good news is we were on the right track. But we’re a few steps behind.”
“We need to find another copy of the book,” Lucas said.
Nix clapped her hands together. “Guess we’re going to town. The bookstore will have it.”