Chapter Seventeen. In Which the Prince Is Incapable of Listening to Easy Instructions #2
The princess pointed in the general direction of the setting sun. “There is a market down by the river. At the seventh clock strike, find the stall with the man selling small cakes. I will meet you there.” She removed one of her daggers from her hip and held it out, still in its sheath, to Risa.
Risa answered with a bewildered series of blinks. The princess sighed and turned toward the prince.
“Please tell me one of you knows how to use this.”
Javi responded by tucking the sheath through his belt. “Yes, yes.”
“If you find yourself inclined to flirt, flirt with Risa.” Then Amina disappeared between the row of buildings with Brunie in tow, dark cloak turning her into a shadow.
Javi sidled up to Risa the moment the princess was gone. She watched as his fingers hovered over her shoulder and slid down her arm. He cupped her palm, thumb reverent as it kissed her knuckles, then placed her hand in the crook of his elbow.
“Can’t get lost,” he said, a little breathless. “Amina’s orders.”
Oh no. The fluttering in her stomach was back. An alarming fire was igniting along the path he’d followed down her arm. She was going to burst into flames beside him. If not at this moment, then certainly before they made it to the market. Would serve him right to be stuck with her burned corpse.
What was wrong with her?
Javi was oblivious to her inner turmoil.
He led her along according to Amina’s vague instructions, chattering away about how he was looking forward to trying Monpira small cakes, and how the last time he’d been in town, he’d fallen in love with a librarian’s son and hoped that wasn’t who they were meeting.
While his incessant talking did not banish the fluttering in her belly or extinguish the flames still marching down her spine, she did experience something akin to ease.
She liked the way his voice was rounded and warm, the cadence a song whose harmony she could follow.
She liked that he enjoyed filling the silence she was so accustomed to, having spent an entire childhood alone.
In just a matter of days, his presence had come to feel as natural as her own shadow.
The air turned sour as they arrived at a ledge overlooking a wide stone path that ran the length of a putrid river.
Tents, stalls, and wagons dotted the walkway, selling a variety of questionable wares.
There were carts laden with spices, wooden stalls overrun by silks, propped tents stuffed with scarves in preparation for a carnival.
Merchants hawked their wares and argued with their customers while their neighboring merchants did the same, a cacophony of noise drowning out the prince’s ramblings.
He led her down some stairs, steered her through the bustle of people, pulled her closer when someone would barrel past on some unknown market mission.
He advised her under his breath to not linger too long at any one stall in case they were accosted by an overeager seller.
But he failed to take his own advice when one specific booth caught his attention.
Risa was grateful for the reprieve. Disentangling herself from his arm, she hid her discomfort by leaning over a table and letting the frizzy curtain of her hair—long freed from its hold at the nape of her neck—fall over one side of her face as she inspected the booth’s wares.
Masks of every color and shape and size were splayed across the surface.
Most were simple renderings of the same blank expression, to be further customized by the buyer.
Some were half masks. Others featured complicated shapes with metallic colors, expensive lace and ribbons, or protruding appendages like horns and exaggerated beaks.
Javi hovered on the opposite side of the table. He reached for a pitch-black mask painted in intricate swirling patterns of gold with a grin so wide, it nearly split in two. He held it up to her face. “The only time you’ve been happy to see me.”
She cocked her head to glare at him from around the mask and found him wearing a grin that matched it.
They moved on to consider pretty baubles of glass in an array of colors that Javi compared to her eyes (“dirt”), or his eyes (“sunshine on a bright summer day”), or Brunie’s eyes (“a lightning strike against a stormy sky”).
To a wagon overflowing with overripe lulo and guanabana, the smell sharp and cloying.
Sellers tried to entice them, but Javi shook his head without saying a word and steered them toward a new tent, or new cart, or new stall each time she started to feel overcome by the noise and sights.
Under the cover of a crowd, without his circlet or other trappings of royalty, Javi was just a handsome man taking a stroll in the early evening.
His usual arrogance was folded away. His strut was subdued.
There was an easy air about him, and when he flashed her a lazy smile, she couldn’t even blame Brunhilda’s spell for her stuttering heart.
She swallowed, forcing her gaze away. It caught on a small blue tent ahead.
Dangling from the poles were intricate stick figures, some tied together with ribbons and string, others with twine, and the more complicated ones with stalks of grass. Some had snow-white feathers tucked into their knots and joints; others had smoothed pebbles incorporated into the design.
Risa shivered. It was strange to see them outside Barrow.
The ones trapped beneath her floorboards had been created by the clumsy hands of townsfolk.
Simple renditions made to ward off the Bad Thing in town.
While she knew the ones in that stall would be just as useless at stopping her and her bad luck, she couldn’t help but feel uneasy.
“Witchtraps,” explained a merchant who slid out from some dark corner of the tent.
He fingered a small trap made of white sticks and ribbon in the shape of a pyramid.
“If you have a pesky little witch trying to steal your beauty, hang this in front of your door and you’ll be rid of them by the morrow. ”
“We have plenty of beauty to give,” Javi said, starting to move along.
The man offered up a more intricate trap made of several sticks still bearing the dirt and grime from where they’d been scavenged. It was tied together by a withered vine. “This one’s for envy.”
“Life’s not very fun if no one is jealous of me.”
A wind blew past. The witchtraps rattled, and Risa’s unease burrowed deeper.
The man scowled at them and stomped off to attend to a new customer who came in a blustering hurry to explain their situation.
Javi traced a slender finger over an ivory witchtrap made of three pieces of smooth bone in the shape of a triangle, the joints held together by rough twine that still contained bits of debris.
“I used to make these when I was little. Called them friendtraps. I thought I could put them around the palace and find a friend.”
Risa must have looked at him with surprise, because he gave a breathless laugh in response.
“Silly, right? As if a prince needs friends.”
That was how Risa learned the prince didn’t always get what he wanted. When he had mentioned being without friends that first night, she thought it was because he didn’t want them.
Risa didn’t know if she needed friends, but she had wanted them once, too. Before she knew what witchtraps really stood for, she had also fished through mud and sat in the dirt, tying sticks together to make a sorry trap, whispering a wish over each joint and knot.
Finger still caught in the witchtrap, Javi turned to the merchant, who had returned to glower at them after his other patron disappeared. “How much?” Javi asked.
The merchant made a face at the request. “Free. That story was sad.”
Javi paid with a smile and took the piece. He pulled Risa into the crowd and through the market until they were tucked beneath a set of stone steps that led back up to town. There, half hidden from the hustle, under the cover of shadow, he pressed the trap into her hands.
“Risa.”
She refused to look at him. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
But her head tipped back, and her eyes met his, golden hue resplendent.
“I hope this witchtrap works,” he whispered, too close.
Her heartbeat thundered in her ears. Brunhilda’s spell unleashed an assault in her chest and stomach, small wings fluttering against her ribs and up her throat.
If she let him continue this foolish endeavor, if he wormed his way into her brittle heart, then her curse would not stop until he was battered and bruised or dead at the bottom of a well or a river or a desert dune.
She had to keep him, and Amina, and Brunie, and her parents, and everything she ever wanted to love, as far from her as she could manage.
No matter how desperate she was to be seen, she was far more desperate to have them live.
Enough was enough. She needed to tell him the truth.
She wet her lips to speak. Tried to ignore the way his eyes followed the movement of her tongue, the darkening of his gaze, the hitch of his breath. A feverish rush of heat followed the path of his thumbs as they brushed the tops of her wrists.