The King's Menagerie (Tales of Tavamara #4)

The Mongoose

Nadir would kill for a good night's sleep.

Instead, he'd be lucky to catch even just a couple of hours before his mother wanted him up to attend her at temple, and then when he got back there was work to do for his father, lessons to give his sisters, his own lessons in music and dancing, and he was too tired to remember what else.

He walked-stumbled through the quiet halls, carrying books and papers that felt as heavy as boulders, his shoulders and arms aching, head throbbing from exhaustion and hunger.

Gods, what would it be like to not have a day that was crammed full of work that kept him so busy things like food and sleep were the stuff of daydreams.

He'd kill for just one day where he could rest, relax, not have a hundred worries preying on his mind.

Where he could eat—

The books and papers went flying as he slammed into someone, and Nadir hit the ground hard, his right arm from elbow to shoulder taking the brunt of it, though his head still smacked the floor hard enough to worsen his headache and put tears in his eyes.

Damn it.

"I'm so sorry," Nadir said, fighting a stupid urge to cry as he shoved his hair from his face.

Where had his ribbons gone? How had he lost both of them? Oh, there was one.

He fumbled to grab it and then rose unsteadily, finally looking at the unfortunate bastard he'd slammed into.

And promptly wished he'd died.

"Your Majesty!" He immediately dropped to his knees, bowing his head, biting his lips against the sob of pain that tried to escape.

"My most humble apologies for my carelessness, my king.

I hope I have not brought you harm."

"I think the only hurt was done to you.

Tima, help him up, check him over, if you please."

Nadir tried to protest that no one should be wasting time on him, let alone one of the king's bodyguards, but there was no arguing with a man roughly the size and mass of one of the nearby support columns.

Tima hauled him to his feet and looked him over with surprisingly gentle hands.

"He seems well, Your Majesty, though I advise rest and that he see a healer in the morning to double check all is well."

As if Nadir had time for that.

His mother would scream loud enough to wake the dead if he weren’t there to provide a suitable escort for her, even though she could ask her brother or a guard or simply go with his sisters and some of her friends.

He looked at the floor, heart pounding in his ears.

Oh, if his parents heard about this moment of gross stupidity, he would be flayed alive and his remains dumped in the sand for vultures.

"How do you feel, Lord Nadir?"

Nadir's head jerked up, too surprised to hear his name to check the reflexive action.

The king knew his name? How? He was lucky if he caught a glimpse of King Shafiq at dinner or around the palace.

The closest he got was when he happened to be attending an audience session, since there was so much to learn from how His Majesty and his clerks handled the myriad problems brought to them by people from all over the kingdom.

He flushed at the intensity of Shafiq's eyes, so dark a brown that in the weak light they could easily be mistaken for black.

His skin and hair were dark too, a legacy of his mother, who came from the opposite end of the country, where skin tones ran darker than most of the rest of the country.

"I'm fine, Your Majesty, and so deeply sorry I have bothered you." One of the guards along the wall finished gathering Nadir's scattered belongings, and dumped them into his arms before fading back smoothly into his position.

"Um, thank you."

"I am not without blame," Shafiq said with the barest ghost of a smile.

"If I'd been paying any attention myself, we might both be in bed already.

I'm glad you came to no real harm.

Do speak with the healer in the morning, so I know you are truly well."

"As you wish, Your Majesty.

I appreciate your gracious concern, and bid you goodnight and pleasant dreams."

"The same to you." Shafiq walked on, his bodyguards falling into place around him, Tima pointedly walking in front of him this time.

Nadir would find it funny if he wasn't consumed with the sudden stress of having to tell his mother he'd been ordered to visit the healer, and it wasn't exactly an order he could ignore or 'forget'.

Once she heard why the king had ordered him to the healer… Well, she'd probably ensure it was not a wasted trip, that was for certain.

Drat it all, here was a chance to actually properly meet His Majesty, and Nadir had ruined it before he'd known it existed by doing the stupidest, most cliché thing in the world.

His parents really were going to kill him.

After they tortured him for hours.

Worse, for the rest of his life, he would have to live with the knowledge that whenever his name came up in Shafiq's presence, it would be as 'that dumbass who crashed into me' rather than as… Well, he'd have settled for 'that interesting young lord following in his parents' prestigious footsteps'.

Anything else was pure fancy, and he wasn't going to waste time he didn't have on daydreaming about things so fantastically impossible, he stood a better chance of becoming a published poet.

Gods above, he needed sleep.

When he finally reached the suite where his family lived, at the very end of one of the wings allotted for permanent residents, he crept quietly through the front room and down the hall to his bedchamber.

Depositing his books and notes to sort out later, he gathered what he needed and headed off to the bathing room they shared with the suite next to theirs.

Though he would have loved to linger, really let the hot water soothe his aches and pains, Nadir washed quickly and soaked only briefly, then wound his damp hair up into a knot and hastened back to his bedroom.

There, he dressed in lounging clothes and finally settled to work sorting out the mess he'd made of his papers.

Thankfully, only one of the books had landed on its pages, and the damage was minor enough that if he smoothed the pages out and then let the book rest at the bottom of the stack, the pages would be good as new by the time he returned it to the library.

Digging out some dried fruit, bread, and a small square of carefully hoarded chocolate, he fixed a pot of tea and got himself settled.

Sipping at the tea between bites of food and nibbles of chocolate, he sunk into his work.

His parents were both deeply involved in law—his father as a legal counselor, his mother as a judge.

They'd begun in their small towns, worlds apart from each other, and each had moved to the royal capital for greater opportunities.

The right combination of luck and contacts had gained them positions in the royal palace, his mother as a judge of the lower courts, his father one of many who represented the throne in all sorts of minor matters.

Those positions provided opportunities for even greater things.

Opportunities they would not let their children squander.

It was a tale older than time: the child must follow in the footsteps of the parent, or the world would end.

It was a good career, reliable, fairly predictable, always needed.

He would want for nothing if he studied, worked hard, and listened to his parents.

If his future seemed dreary and devoid of color, well, plenty of people did jobs they disliked, even detested.

He was fortunate to have all that he did.

He could not help, though, taking a break from a chapter on tax laws, to jot down a few lines of the poem that had come to him earlier in the library.

The lines were rough, but workable, and he'd enjoy refining them later into a solid four by four.

Before he could go back to work, though, the lines of another poem came to him, about soothing dark amidst too much painful brightness, and how sometimes you only found what you needed by crashing into it.

Ugh.

He was embarrassed of himself.

Thank the gods no one else would ever see this drivel.

Found what he needed.

As if.

What exactly did he think King Shafiq would give him?

That sent his thoughts places they definitely had no business going.

Mercy of the divine, though, he wasn't blind.

Shafiq was gorgeous, and that deep voice… Everyone had commented how even for a royal couple the king and his new queen had produced a child remarkably fast, but if he'd been in the last queen's position, the children would have come one right after the other.

Sadness washed over him, recalling Queen Baran.

The daughter of a powerful noble, the title old and prestigious, and she had not been the quiet, demure sort.

The counsel had advised a more tractable queen who would not rile people up so much, but Shafiq had been adamant in his choice—and a shadow of himself ever since she'd died, when their son, Kajan, was not quite a year old.

Nadir didn't know how he coped.

Certainly in Shafiq's place he would be a complete and utter mess.

But though quieter than usual, and rarely given to smiling anymore, Shafiq was still stoic, elegant, graceful… and always so kind, to even the most awkward, fumbling farmer with a rustic accent near impossible to understand.

Shafiq understood them all, though, and treated every last supplicant like they were nobles in his palace.

A pity more of those nobles—more palace residents, period—did not follow his lead.

Including Nadir's parents, who rather than remembering the poverty they came from, decided the fact they'd overcome it meant they could look down on everyone who'd proven too weak to do the same.

Sighing, Nadir shoved away the scraps of paper with his poetry and tried to focus once more on tax laws.

There were so many of them, each more complicated than the last, especially when they started to combine, overlap, and clash, he could specialize in that alone.

His parents, however, would never tolerate such small thinking.

If his mother had made it all the way to judge of the lower courts, then their son owed it to his family to become a judge of the higher courts.

Even better, he should secure a prestigious marriage that would allow him to someday join the royal council.

Nadir had never heard of anything more dreadful, except maybe his mother's attempts at making tea.

How anyone could struggle so much to properly soak leaves, he would never know, but gutter water would taste better than his mother's tea.

Argh.

His concentration was gone.

Maybe if he tried reading something else.

Normally he would just go practice his knives for a little while, but he'd just showered and after cracking his head on the floor he wasn't in a hurry to possibly make matters worse.

Knowing his luck, he'd slip and crack his head a second time.

Putting away the law books, he pulled one of the history books close instead.

He'd be starting a class on international law soon, and was trying to prepare by brushing up on his general knowledge of at least the major foreign countries that helped, alongside Tavamara, form many of those laws, and the related history.

At least this was interesting, where the tax law was about as thrilling as sitting in a box of sand.

He'd get through this chapter, and then resume…