Chapter 58
The carriage windows sat pane-less and open. Hadrian, Diara, and I sat inside. As we rounded the final curve taking us out of the city, the horses sped ahead, the wind crisp in my hair.
Diara had accepted my invitation with some hesitation. A week in a private castle with the royal family was not high on her list of desires. Seated across from Hadrian, I didn’t miss the way she avoided his eyes.
A gnaw had entered my belly over the question of Kye, growing and churning. I briefly considered asking Hadrian if he knew anything—and pushed the thought away. I’d wait and ask him in private. I didn’t need Diara worrying about me. I wasn’t sure I could handle her playing a moon-forsaken mother hen for a week.
The views of the country, though beautiful, offered only field after field of green agriculture, interrupted by small herds of cows. The hills rolled like the waves of the sea. Homesickness tugged at me. I looked away and found Hadrian watching me, his chin tucked into a hardened fist.
“Do you enjoy the country?” he asked casually.
I nodded slowly. “I’d never seen it before coming to Calder. There”s nothing like this on the island.”
“I imagine you grew cropson the island.” He crossed one knee over the other, reclining into the cushions.
“I did, yes.”
“You did?”
“Yes. I grew taro mostly. But sugar cane and breadfruit as well. Coconuts. Tapa for clothing and tools.” My list could’ve gone on. Strawberries, eggplant, kava, turmeric.
“Mmmm,” he mused over my answer. “Tell me about Leihani.”
My eyebrows raised in surprise. Across the bench seat from me, I felt Diara’s gaze on us both. “What would you like to know?”
He adjusted his weight, leaning further into his seat, closing his hands around one knee. “Were your parents both born there?”
“My father was. My mother was shipwrecked there. She had difficulty with speech, no one ever worked out where she was born.”
“What do your parents do?”
“My father works—owns the fishing boats. On our estate,” I quickly amended, remembering my father was a lord. “My mother died in an accident when I was very young.”
“My deepest apologies.” Hooves clattered from outside. He coughed and cleared his throat. “What sort of fish does your father catch?”
I sighed, impatient with his sudden interest in my history, and reminded myself to behave. Hadrian was the future king. “The daily catch is tuna, but shark when we”re lucky.”
“Whales? Is your father more likely to catch whales in the colder seasons?”
I frowned. “Whales appear at the height of the rainy season, winter for you. We have no winter. We have dry or wet seasons.”
“And fishers use a giant hook to haul whales back to land, correct?”
I sent him a sharp stare. He was testing me. Assessing the depth of my knowledge of Leihani.
Why would he do that? Unless—
Kye. Kye had warned him I wasn’t who I said I was. He’d warned him to be wary of me.
“We don’t enjoy the taste of whale meat. It”s… fat and blubbery.” I chewed my lip for a moment and continued. “Sometimes the body of a sperm whale will wash ashore. We could sell the bones. They’re rare. Traders offer high prices for them. But they’re too precious.”
We faced each other in silence. Diara shifted in her seat, eyes narrowing in Hadrian’s direction. My brows gathered, my chin set. I waited for another prompt. Hadrian leisurely uncrossed his legs and recrossed them the other way. He picked at his nails.
“What kind of grass do you weave into baskets in Leihani?” It was phrased as a question, but I understood the challenge posed to me underneath.
“Pili grass.”
“How tall are the beds?”
I started, mouth already open, and offered him a strange look. “We sleep on mats.”
“And what do you use for a pillow?”
“Hollowed logs.”
“What are the smaller boats called?”
“Which boats do you mean? The smaller voyaging boats, or the one-man fishing boats?”
He tossed a shoulder into the air. “The one-man.”
“Canoes.”
“Outrigger canoes,” he corrected, lifting a brow as if he’d caught me.
Diara let out a snicker of indignation. She crossed her arms, glaring openly at the crown prince.
I leaned in close to him, my voice low and patient. “The correct word is va’a. The smaller voyaging boats have double hulls. They’re called Hokule’as.”
He laughed without humor, then coughed into the skin of his forearm before turning to Diara. “You’re from Pirou, Lady Diana?”
Pale green eyes flared at the mistake. “Yes.”
“Beautiful mountains in Pirou.”
A muscle feathered in her jaw, though like me, etiquette demanded she retain her manners, whether or not he condescended to us. “Have you been, Your Highness?”
“Once, when I was ten. You were very young, but I remember you.” His lips curled in humor. “You were playing with dolls on the grass outside the stables. Your mother called for you to come in and ready for bed, so you took off into the trees, barefoot like a little fire nymph, your hair a riot of curls behind you.”
I glanced at Diara, frozen across from him. She hadn’t moved, but I caught the twitch of her fingers. “I’m sure I didn’t,” she said politely.
He chuckled. “You did.”
Her lips flattened. Unable to argue with an heir, she glanced out the window, ignoring him instead.
Resolving to call him a string of offensive names in my head, I turned away as well, curling my feet under me in a position that would have set Selena’s teeth on edge. Across from us, Hadrian exhaled. I couldn’t decide if he was insulted by our refusal to speak to him, or amused.
Digging Selena’s journal from my bag, I rested my temple against the carriage wall as I squinted at the coded markings.
We didn”t speak for an hour, though I could feel Hadrian and Diara sneaking intolerant glances at each other.
I turned page after page, searching for letters I recognized. Sometimes a folded note fell out, written in the same code but by someone else’s hand. A feminine scrawl messier than Selena’s. A masculine one as well, boxy and thin.
“What are you doing?” Hadrian asked me.
I frowned, opting not to look at the prince. “Finding a way to waste my time.”
He groaned softly, and the springs of his seat groaned as he stretched onto his feet. With a grand sigh, he settled on the bench between Diara and me. She raised her eyebrows at him, immediately vacating her place to take his with a glowering stare.
“Decoding your spy manual?” His tone was playful, but I wondered if a part of him was serious.
Who brought you here? Where are you really from? I’ve checked the registrars, they’ve been forged. It’s been very well covered, I have to admit I’m impressed at the lengths someone went to plant you.
“Yes,” I said, my own tone as playful as his, though I threw daggers as our eyes met.
He pursed his lips, glancing side-long at me as he held out his hand. “May I see?”
I stared at him. Even under my flash of annoyance, I supposed it couldn’t hurt—I’d poured over the journal all night and hadn’t found a single word written in Calderian. The pages rustled as I flipped the cover shut and handed it to him.
He leaned back, crossing one leg over the other and licking his thumb to turn a few pages. “What language is this?”
“I don’t know.”
He smiled down at the journal as if he didn’t believe me.
Another flash of irritation, this time stronger, and I stifled the urge to roll my eyes.
“Do you have a pen?”
Sighing, I leaned into my bag, offering my fountain pen to him.
He stared at it for a second, studying the little tool, then took it from me. Tearing one of the blank pages from the back, he began copying markings onto the page. I watched him work, head tilted in curiosity, my long, dark hair tickling the curve of my arm. Marking his place with his index finger, he skipped past markings he’d already copied, adding a new one to his list when he reached it.
After flipping through several pages without adding anything, he smiled. “It’s not written in modern Cyprillic Alphabet. Our alphabet has twenty-six letters, but there’s thirty here. But good news, it is written in Calderian.”
“It is?” I glanced down at the pages I’d obsessed over since the night before. “What do you mean?”
He lifted a shoulder. “I study languages, and I recognize patterns. You have your vowels, your common letters, and then these markings, which I think translate to two letters fused together to make their own sound, like CH.” He narrowed his eyes at the paper, eyeing it the way a fisherman watches a school of tuna swimming under his boat, wondering how best to make his catch.
I watched him traverse the pages, sometimes flipping back to the same secret word, making notes and then crossing notes out, rewriting them below. By the time his page was more black ink than white paper, we’d long since passed the farms and fields, the carriage winding along the ragged coastline. Diara watched him as well, split between interest and dislike.
“It’s a cypher,” he said, running his fingernail below his version of the markings for us to follow and then handing the ink-riddled paper to me. Twenty-seven of the letters were identified by his hand. He ripped out a second clean page, copying a random coded line from the journal, and pointed to the first character. “What’s this symbol?”
I glanced at the inked cypher in my hands. “C.”
“And this one?” he pointed at the next.
“E.”
We worked together, fleshing out the line as Diara watched. Hadrian darted a curious glance at her, then raised a brow at me.
Ceba, my love. I fear I will ne_er forgi_e you.
“These must be V’s,” he said, reaching over my lap to add the letter to his cypher. “Who is Ceba?”
I shook my head. I had no idea, yet the name was familiar enough to leave a small pinch in my heart.
Hadrian studied me with warm brown eyes. “Well, if you’re translating that whole thing, I’d say you have your work cut out for you.”
“Thank you,” I breathed, tucking Hadrian’s cypher into the journal and wrapping my arms around it. I met Diara’s inquisitive gaze and offered her a small smile, promising to explain later, though I’d have to figure out what to say.
I couldn’t very well share the contents of the journal, sure that I was it was filled with mentions of Naiads.