CHAPTER FIVE
“Ah, Ryu, you look gorgeous.” Queen Elise held out her arms wide as Ryu came into the dining room later that evening for the familiar ritual of their formal dinner.
“This is a new suit, isn’t it? I’ll have to thank Helbert.
He does such a wonderful job as your steward.
” She made a production of kissing Ryu on the top of his head – careful not to smear her lipstick, of course – then returned to her seat, leaving Ryu drowning in a cloud of expensive perfume.
Omegas, particularly those who hadn’t yet been matched to their soulmate, often wore perfume to avoid attracting unwanted attention from alphas.
But as the queen, keeping her moods to herself was of paramount importance, hence the dozen or so bottles of perfume lined up on Elise’s dressing table.
Trying to subtly clear his nose, Ryu headed for the table, where a butler held his chair out for him.
“Actually, Kentario chose this one for me,” he told his mother.
He hadn’t seen Kentario since the end of that bizarre meeting after he’d got back from the school.
Instead of talking about Kentario’s dismissal from his post as bodyguard and how Maro intended to capture the rest of the group of would-be kidnappers, they’d had a fruitless discussion on democracy, and any questions on Ryu’s safety during the incident had been firmly swept under the rug.
Felix had kept him occupied all afternoon with an endless flood of maths equations, and then he’d had to dress in a hurry, ever wary of being late for dinner.
But despite his ongoing unease at the afternoon’s events, Ryu still found himself fidgeting self-consciously with the pale grey suit.
He’d been reluctant to wear it, not really sure why Kentario had insisted on him buying it when they’d made the visit to the tailor two weeks ago.
His bodyguard had got an odd look of consternation on his face when Ryu had emerged from the changing room, stating simply, “Yeah, that’s a good one,” when Ryu had asked what he’d thought.
But he’d refused to leave the shop without the suit, and Ryu hadn’t been in the mood to argue.
“Kentario? Really?” his father asked, from the other side of the table. “I wouldn’t have thought he’d know the first thing about fashion.”
“Oh, ignore your father.” Elise said, beaming at Ryu. “It looks fantastic. It brings out the colour of your eyes.”
The vast majority of the Galandanish population had dark brown eyes, along with dark brown-to-black hair.
While Ryu had inherited his father’s jet-black hair, his bright blue eyes were an anomaly, though one he was frequently complimented on.
A handful of times over the past few hundred years, the soulmates of the various crown princes of Galandeen had been Arctesian – ninety per cent of whom were blond – and Ryu supposed there must have been a few recessive genes lurking around in their gene pool.
A waiter arrived, bearing the entrées for the evening.
Ryu eyed his plate apprehensively. It appeared to be sliced chicken, zucchini and eggplant, arranged in a delicate pyramidal structure that he was sure was going to collapse the instant he touched it.
What he wouldn’t give for a simple bowl of rice with grilled fish and mushroom soup.
Instead, the palace chef seemed to have been experimenting of late, coming up with more and more weird and wonderful creations.
Unfortunately, his mother gushed her praises over each and every one, which was probably why the chef kept doing it.
“Now, Ryu, sweetie,” Elise began, tucking into her entrée.
Somehow she managed to pick out each individual sliver of vegetable without destroying the rest of the stack.
“We need to talk about the program for the Festival of the Goddess. The Priestesses at the Temple of Selene have been asking for the final program, so they can make sure the prayers to the Goddess are all completed at the appropriate times.”
So that was it, then? No more discussion about a bunch of lunatics trying to kidnap him?
No questions about how security at the Festival was going to be handled when pro-democracy agitators probably wanted to disrupt the celebration?
The Festival of the Goddess was the most important holiday of the Galandanish calendar, paying appropriate homage to the Goddess Selene to ensure her blessing over the coming year.
The Festival consisted of a full day of ceremonies at the temple, interspersed with banquets at the palace, performances of music and dance, and a formal ball in the palace gardens to round off the evening.
The second deity of Galandeen was Odin, and while Selene was credited with humanity’s creation, Odin was the guardian of its destruction.
He received their souls into the afterlife and was responsible for winter, for decay and death, and for the darkness of the night.
All things in balance, Ryu had been taught from a young age, though ironically, there was no equivalent festival to honour Odin in their culture, as there was for Selene.
“We’ve decided to include the traditional Dawn Celebration this year,” his mother went on, oblivious to Ryu’s disquiet.
“I know we haven’t done that one for a while, but the Crown Princess of Iderheil is going to be visiting this year, and Iderheil has always seen the Dawn Celebration as a pivotal part of the day.
You’ll need to be up bright and early, as we’d like you to read the dawn prayers and proclamations, along with Her Highness. ”
Ryu fought not to groan, at the exact same time as he tried to take his first bite of chicken and watched the miniature tower of food collapse all over his plate.
A Dawn Celebration meant he was going to have to be up and dressed by no later than 4:30 – an absolutely hideous hour for someone who was most certainly not a morning person. And aside from that…
“You do realise that putting me and Princess Jasmine on a podium together is going to start a dozen rumours about me and her being soulmates?” Jasmine had recently turned nineteen and had not yet announced her soulmate, leading to plenty of speculation about who the lucky gentleman might be.
“Her and I,” his father corrected him immediately. Ryu was only partially mollified to see that he, too, had failed to eat his vegetables without making a mess.
But his mother just rolled her eyes. “You’re seventeen.
You haven’t announced your soulmate yet, and this is, after all, the Festival of the Goddess Selene, who gave us our soul marks in the first place!
Everyone wants to know who she’s gifted to you as your life partner.
At this point, I could get you to stand on that podium beside pretty much anyone in the world and people would still speculate about that person being your soulmate. ”
“You know, here’s a crazy idea,” Ryu said, knowing he was treading on increasingly thin ice.
“How about I just register my mark with SoulWorks, and they can tell me who my soulmate is, and then everyone can stop wondering about it.” SoulWorks was a massive multi-national company that had shot to fame some thirty years ago when they’d managed to create a computer algorithm that automatically checked and matched the soul marks each person was born with, providing results in as little as twenty-four hours after a mark was registered.
Ryu’s own mark was small and simple, looking much like a stalk of clover, with three curving leaves and a small stem arching away from the centre.
It sat on his hip bone, conveniently hidden by both trousers and underpants, so there wasn’t the slightest chance of anyone outside his immediate family ever having seen it.
According to the teachings of the High Priestess, the mark was placed there by Selene herself at the moment of each person’s birth, and there was exactly one other person in the entire world with a perfect match to the mark.
Elise automatically put her hand to her right shoulder – her soul mark was located just below her collarbone.
“We’ve had this discussion, and you know exactly why we’re not allowing you to register before your eighteenth birthday.
You have quite enough pressure on you already without trying to fit yourself into the box of whatever your soulmate expects you to be,” she said, though Ryu had heard their reasoning dozens of times before.
“You are being trained to be a king and a noble and every aspect of your life will be subject to the scrutiny of the nobility, the media, and international governments. We simply want you to have one area of your life where you’re allowed to just grow up and learn how to be you.
Please, Ryu.” She placed her hand over his.
“You don’t need to rush into everything.
You’ll have fifty years or more to spend time with your soulmate, when you eventually meet them.
Try to just enjoy the time you have now. ”
Ryu pulled his hand away. “You and Dad found out you were soulmates when you were only fourteen. And you moved out of your family home and into the palace when you were sixteen! And you still manage to spend an hour a day crowing about how generous the Goddess is and how blessed you and Dad are to have each other, so where the hell do you get this idea that meeting my soulmate is going to be such a terrible thing for me?”
“First of all, you are going to watch your language at the dinner table,” his father said.
“And aside from that, we are not going to discuss this any further. Your mother and I have made a decision, and until you’re an adult and responsible enough to make your own decisions, you are going to abide by it. ”