Chapter 15
Fifteen
I shoulder through the door and stagger not into the darkness of a secret tunnel but into a room even brighter than my chambers.
It’s like emerging from the hillock palace after spending a week belowground.
I shield my eyes and steady myself against the door, but I can’t stop blinking, even as the details come into focus.
The room is made entirely of glass. So open and exposed. The last place anyone would come to plot or spy.
Cautiously, I move to the nearest wall and raise my fingers to the glass, marveling at the endless blue sky and intense mountain sunshine.
Ancient pine trees fill each window, and birds with red-tipped wings nest in the crags of the tallest cliffs.
Far down below, a meandering stone wall encloses the bustling fortress city, full of shops and houses no bigger than seed packets, with scores of tiny people who march along like ants.
I don’t want to admire anything about Vanzador, but like my glittering bedchamber and the breathtaking courtyards, I’m left without a choice. Everything about the kingdom is stunning. Mesmerizing. The opposite of the cold gray dungeon Rowenna described in her letters.
Technically, I suppose there are walls separating me from the outside world, but they’re so clear, I feel like I could step through the glass and bound into the clouds. It’s like flying but without the punishing wind and biting cold.
The thought makes my toes tingle inside my boots. I feel suddenly compelled to tilt my head back and raise my arms like wings, pretending to be one of those enormous birds, wheeling between the snowcapped peaks.
“Careful, or someone might catch you enjoying Vanzador….”
I shriek and whip around.
Prince Alaric leans casually against the wall in the opposite corner. Watching me.
“What are you doing here? How did you get in here?” I glance back the way I came. I didn’t see or hear him follow me in, but I wasn’t exactly paying attention.
Stupid! Careless! This is how you end up dead at the bottom of a cliff!
I don’t know if Rowenna is scolding me or if I’m scolding myself this time. Either way, I have to be better than this. Smarter than this.
“Are you spying on me?” I demand, suddenly plagued by images of Alaric hiding in my rooms. He could have been watching me for hours. He could have ambushed me at any moment.
Alaric rolls his eyes. “I have a country to run. I don’t have time to waste spying on you.”
“But—”
“If I was spying with the intent to kill you, why would I wait for you to find this hidden room? Which you may not have discovered for ages? If ever?”
While I bumble over these inconvenient facts, Alaric pushes away from the wall and crosses the room.
The sunlight streaming through the windows makes his curls shine like wet ink, and his freshly shaved jaw looks carved from granite.
His midnight blue waistcoat fits him like a second skin and paints the perfect contrast to his pale skin and storm-gray eyes.
Elodie wasn’t wrong about his looks—he’s as impressive and intimidating as this room—but no amount of outward beauty can hide his rotten, maggot-eaten core.
“If you’re not spying on me, what are you doing here?” I finally demand.
“This is our solarium.” Alaric nods over his shoulder, where the outline of a second door is barely visible in the glass.
Beside the door, there’s a desk cluttered with quills, inkpots, and a low bookshelf.
I was so taken with the view, I didn’t notice any of it before.
“My chambers are just through there. I often work in here,” he says as he slides behind the desk.
“We have adjoining rooms?” I sputter.
“Most married couples do. Is that a problem?”
“It was clearly a problem for Rowenna,” I snap.
“How so?”
“How do you think? She turns up dead, and you just so happen to have private access to her chambers?”
“Ah, back to accusing me of murder.” Alaric picks up a stack of papers and begins to read. “I knew it wouldn’t take long.”
“Because it’s the truth—I’d bet my life on it!”
“It isn’t wise to be so flippant about one’s “You shouldn’t be so flippant with your life.”
“Why? Because you plan on ending mine?” I challenge.
Alaric flips the page without looking up. “I don’t need to plan anything. I’m confident you’ll take care of that on your own—just like your sister.”
“We both know Ro didn’t fall off that cliff,” I say, glaring at his forehead with the burning intensity of the sun.
But he doesn’t glance up, and after several excruciating minutes, it feels like a furious swarm of bees are buzzing around my head.
“You can’t be serious! We’re really supposed to just sit in here together? Did you do this with Rowenna?”
Alaric finally regards me with a beleaguered sigh. “As I’ve told you several times, I rarely saw your sister. She never even discovered this adjoining room.”
“You’re lying,” I automatically argue, even though Rowenna never once mentioned this glass room in her letters.
There could be a thousand reasons for that, though.
Maybe she rarely came because the view of Vanzador’s prosperity made her sick, or maybe she never crossed paths with Alaric here, so it wasn’t worth mentioning.
Or she could have been worried the Vanzadorians were reading her letters before sending them.
Maybe that’s why she excluded so many details—she was writing in a sort of code.
“How could you possibly know how Rowenna spent her time here?” Alaric presses.
“Ro was the shrewdest, most observant person I’ve ever met,” I retort.
“If you thought she didn’t know about this solarium, it was due to her brilliant subterfuge and your lack of awareness.
Or because you used this secret room to access her chambers and kill her before she could discover it. ” I shoot him a pointed look.
“Isn’t it exhausting to invent so many gruesome and outlandish tales?”
“No. But do you know what is exhausting? Having to constantly fight for my family, people, and land. But I’ll never stop. I’ll never—”’
“Plot and scheme all you’d like,” Alaric cuts me off. “But I strongly suggest you get busy growing bagrava while you’re at it. Otherwise, my father will stop asking nicely.”
Alaric points over my shoulder to a collection of gardening supplies arranged beside my own door. I must have stumbled right past them before my eyes adjusted to the brightness.
There are pots of soil, watering cans, hand shovels, rakes, and a few small bagrava fruit to harvest for seeds.
Under any other circumstance, I would have leaped headlong into the freshly churned soil and palmed every glistening trowel and spade.
Even now, my entire body fizzes, desperate to feel a bit of Tashir in this horrible place.
But I turn my back on the supplies and face my husband, arms tightly crossed.
“Expecting me to perform on command isn’t nice,” I retort. “There’s nothing nice about your father. His merry laughing-ruler act is even more transparent than these glass walls. He showed his true nature when he smirked through Rowenna’s funeral and allowed Tashir to burn.”
Alaric raises a brow. “How do you know that cruel, blustering tyrant isn’t the act? Maybe this is his true nature, and he only has ruthless moments.”
I bark out a laugh. “Of course you’d make excuses for dear doting Daddy. But your opinion doesn’t count. You know Soren Alaverdi the father, not the ruler. I doubt you’ve ever even heard him raise his voice.”
“You’d be surprised,” Alaric says, averting his eyes. “But that still doesn’t explain why our people love him. They wouldn’t adore a merciless tyrant.”
“They would if they knew the cost of displeasing him. People will do shocking things when they fear for their lives.”
The papers crinkle in Alaric’s hands, and his voice takes on a steely edge.
“No one in Vanzador fears for their lives. Our people are safe, happy, and prosperous. My father is far from perfect—believe me, I’m aware—but he’s a good king.
Sometimes we must overlook minor flaws and failings for the greater good. It’s called compromise.”
“In Tashir, we call that denial. And last I checked, enslaving an entire nation and killing their crown princess are hardly minor failings. Your father is a monster—and you’re just like him.”
Alaric slams his papers down on his desk. “What have I done that’s so monstrous?”
“Where to begin?” I muse, my confidence growing the more his unravels. I expect a list to pour from my mouth like summer rain, but as I actually think back on our interactions, Alaric’s crimes are irritatingly few. Other than a handful of winks and verbal jabs, he’s been rather civil.
Accommodating, even.
He convinced Soren to let me walk up the mountain instead of riding in that contraption.
Then he carried me a good portion of the way when I got altitude sickness.
As soon as we entered the Fortress, he took me to my rooms instead of forcing me to comply with Soren’s demands for a bagrava demonstration.
And he didn’t argue, like his father did, when Queen Tessa excused me from growing bagrava in her salon yesterday.
“That’s what I thought,” Alaric says, leaning back smugly in his chair. “I’m not the monster here.”
“You might not be a monster, but I’m not foolish enough to think you’re a friend.
This is just another tactic, another coordinated effort by you and your parents to bombard me from every angle and convince me to grow bagrava.
But no amount of flattery or coercion will make me forget how you killed my sister and enslaved my people.
As if I’ll forget you killed my sister and enslaved my people.
I won’t be tricked. I’ll die before I grow bagrava for you. ”
I expect Alaric to make a snappy comment about how he’d be happy to help me along with dying, but instead he asks, “Who said the bagrava is for me?”
“For your father, then. Same difference,” I grind out.
“Interesting…” Alaric cocks his head and studies me. “Is that what you’ve been told?”
I bristle with cold despite the sunshine blaring through the windows. His reaction is so similar to what Queen Tessa said in her salon—about the bagrava having nothing to do with her husband.
“You really don’t know?” Alaric continues.
His words tunnel beneath my skin like termites. Everything inside me wants to shout, Don’t know what? But I hold my tongue. I won’t be lured into his trap.
After a few interminable minutes, Alaric shoves to his feet with a dramatic sigh. “If we’re done here, I’ll leave you to hunt for killers that don’t exist. Or whatever it is you plan to do while the rest of us work.” He tucks his papers beneath his arm and strides toward his door.
“You can’t honestly consider bedding half the ladies in the kingdom work,” I call after him.
Alaric chokes on a pop of laughter. “Is that jealousy I detect?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Then how I spend my time is none of your concern,” he says as he opens the door.
I’m so exhausted and irritated, I’m tempted to let him go. Let him win this one small battle. But that’s not what Rowenna would do, and despite how confused and exasperated I am with her, I know there’s a reason she led me to this hidden solarium.
I dart past Alaric and wedge myself in his doorframe.
He glares down at me. “Stand aside, Indira.”
I brace my arms against the glass and try to ignore the fact that his bare chest is just inches from my face.
“How you spend your time, and who with, is definitely my concern, dearest husband, since one of the brokenhearted maidens you callously tossed aside could have killed my sister in a jealous rage.”
“Except we’ve established that no one killed Rowenna.”
“Or maybe you and your secret lover plotted Rowenna’s death together,” I continue spinning. “To ensure she didn’t keep you apart.”
“I swear, in the name of the kings, I had nothing to do with your sister’s death. My hands are clean.” Alaric holds both palms out, just like my maid in the stairwell, and another thought occurs. One so obvious, I don’t know how I didn’t think of it before.
“You weren’t working with a former lover. You were working with my maid!”
Alaric touches his fingers to his temple with a grimace. “Your theories are getting more and more outlandish.”
“It seems pretty straightforward to me,” I argue. “You hired the serving girl to kill Ro—to technically keep your hands clean—and now you’ve ordered her to do the same to me.”
“Do you honestly think my father would let me kill you?”
Once again, I scowl at his bothersome logic. “To frighten and unnerve me, then. Make me more cooperative.”
Alaric scoffs. “Nothing on this continent could make you more cooperative. And I couldn’t distinguish your maid from any other employee in the palace, so I don’t know how I could possibly be in league with her.
” He shoulders past me but then pauses before he vanishes into his rooms. “I am curious, though, what she did to frighten and unnerve you so much? Just in case I want to follow her lead,” he adds with an acidic smile.
It goes against all of my instincts, but I decide to tell him. Sometimes the body says more than the tongue ever will.
“I found her sleeping in a closet in my washroom, which was disturbing enough. But then I discovered menacing inscriptions covering the walls from floor to ceiling. Grisly things about blood, flesh, and bone along with my sister’s name.”
“‘Blood, flesh, bone’?” Alaric says with a roll of his eyes, but I swear a bit of color leaches from his cheeks, and he abruptly turns to go.
I jam my boot into the door before it closes, wincing as the heavy glass smashes my toes. “Those words clearly mean something to you. Tell me what you know.”
Groaning, Alaric attempts to nudge my boot out of the way. “I don’t have the time or the energy to do this again.”
I catch him by the wrist and dig my nails into his velvet sleeve. “Make time.”
His eyes flare, even though my bitten nails are too short to inflict any real damage. “Unhand me,” he snaps.
I squeeze tighter. “Maybe you didn’t physically carve those words or shove Ro off the cliff, but it’s obvious you had something to do with it. An innocent person is dead because of you. Doesn’t that bother you?”
Alaric reels back as if I slapped him. “You know nothing about the blood on my hands or how it haunts me,” he says in a low, shaky whisper. Then he slams the door so hard, the panes of glass rattle behind him.
In the sudden quiet, my nerves rattle too.