Thirty-One
THREE HOURS LATER, they had explained the situation to Nalani, and she, in turn, had filled them in on what had happened with their allies after Charis’s ship had sailed from Solvang.
It was as bad as Charis feared.
The retired admiral had made a battle plan, coordinating with admirals from Solvang, Thallis, and Verace, and enough ships had been committed to the cause to truly qualify as an armada. However, once Orayn and his crew returned with the moriarthy dust without knowing how to use it and word spread that Charis had offered herself as bait to the pursuing Rakuuna ship and hadn’t been heard from since, the rulers of Calera’s allies had kept their ships in port.
The pallorens Charis had tasked Lord Thorsby with sending would have arrived in Solvang by now, provided he’d been able to get out of the city before Ferris and Bartho alerted the Rakuuna to his whereabouts. But even if Charis’s messages had been received, it didn’t change her situation or her plans. Yes, her allies would know how to use the moriarthy dust, but they wouldn’t have had enough time to reach Calera yet.
And that’s if they were even coming. It was smarter for them to consider Calera a loss, divide the poison among them, and shore up their own defenses while praying the Rakuuna never decided to pay them a visit.
Either way, the result was the same. Charis and her people were facing their enemies alone.
Lanni served lunch, and when they were finished eating, Charis insisted that everyone get some rest. Whatever happened at the feast that night, they all needed to be alert and ready.
Nalani joined her in her bedroom, the two of them curling up on the wide four-poster bed. As soon as they were settled, Nalani spoke.
“So Tal is back.”
Charis blinked. “Um, yes. I guess we skipped that part of the story.”
“The fact that Ferris and his family are going to try to frame us for their own treachery and then kill us was important information.” Nalani flipped over to face Charis and snuggled into her pillow. “But now I’m desperately curious to know how Tal is part of the picture again, why Holland hasn’t killed him, and how you feel about all this.”
Charis’s cheeks grew warm as she told the story of reuniting with Tal on the Rakuuna ship and how it had made sense to work with him since he understood his father.
“I think you’re leaving out all the good parts.” Nalani poked Charis’s shoulder. “Tal must have had a very good explanation for his actions, because I know for a fact Holland was ready to gut him the instant he saw him, and I was pretty certain you were never going to speak to him again.”
“I didn’t speak to him—or at least, I didn’t say much, for a long time. And Holland was prepared to slice him open as soon as we entered the cabin, but Tal stopped him.”
“How?”
Charis smiled a little. “By telling Holland that we needed Tal’s help getting our kingdom back and that once all of this was over, he wouldn’t fight back because nothing Holland did to him would be worse than how it felt to know he’d hurt me.”
“All right, I know you don’t want to hear this, but I think that proves Tal is who we thought he was all along. Only his name is different.” Nalani stretched and then caught sight of Charis’s face. “Or maybe you do want to hear nice things about Tal.”
“It took a long time, but I was able to forgive him.” Charis pulled the blanket up to her chin. She didn’t expect to sleep. Not when every move she made and every word she said tonight had to be choreographed as precisely as a ballet. But Nalani looked like she needed days of sleep, not just the few hours they had before they had to dress up in wedding finery and fight for their lives.
Nalani smiled a little. “I forgive him, too.”
“Try to get some rest.” Charis closed her eyes to encourage Nalani to do the same. It was hard to lie still. She wanted to pace. To hold a sword in her hand and swing it at a target. To throw her head back and scream at the unfairness of it all.
How could she rest when, in a matter of hours, she would either manipulate and bluff her enemies into a corner or she would die, along with those she loved?
Nalani gave a wet sniff, and Charis’s eyes flew open. Her cousin was huddled against the pillow, tears streaming down her face.
“Nalani?”
“I’m sorry.” She hiccupped and then cried harder.
“It’s all right.” Charis scooted closer and wrapped her hand around Nalani’s. “You can cry if you need to.”
“I’m not ready to die,” she whispered.
Charis’s throat closed, and she had to swallow twice before she could speak. “I’m not, either.”
“I haven’t seen Mother and Father in months. They won’t know that we’re innocent. What if they aren’t even there tonight to say goodbye?” She sucked in a sharp breath. “Or what if they are there, and they have to watch us die?”
“We can’t think like that.” Charis tried to sound firm, but her voice shook.
“I’ve never even been kissed.” Nalani sniffed again. “I know that’s a stupid thing to think about right now, but I want so much out of my life. I loved being ambassador to Solvang. I was good at it.”
“You’re good at a lot of things.” Charis blinked as tears stung her own eyes.
“So are you. I had dreams for the two of us. I wanted to live a long, useful life and be remembered as a strong, smart woman who changed our kingdom for the better.” Nalani squeezed Charis’s hand. “I wanted you to be remembered as the best queen Calera has ever known. And together, we would be unstoppable.”
Charis used her free hand to gently wipe tears from Nalani’s cheeks. “Who says we aren’t?”
Nalani choked on a laugh that sounded suspiciously close to a sob. “We’re surrounded by traitors and monsters, but you don’t waver. You don’t break.”
“I can’t.”
“Even if you need to?” Nalani lifted tearstained eyes to hold Charis’s gaze.
“Even then.” Charis blinked before her own tears could fall.
“I want you to know that I have faith in you.” Nalani’s voice was earnest. “I know I’m a mess right now, but I won’t be tonight. I’ll be proudly standing next to my queen, ready to help you take back our kingdom. I won’t break when it counts.”
“I know you won’t.” Charis soothed, feeling raw and unsettled. She wanted to crawl into Father’s arms and believe everything would be all right just because he said it would be. She wanted to follow Mother into the dining hall, taking her cues from the fiercest queen Calera had ever known.
She didn’t want to find the strength to carry the weight of her kingdom’s fate on her shoulders.
She didn’t want to, but she would.
It was her job to tell others it would be all right and make them believe it. Her time to become the fiercest queen in Calera’s history.
Nalani’s eyes fluttered shut, and she slid into sleep. Charis lay still, eyes wide open, thoughts racing as she considered every possible scenario that might happen at the wedding feast and chose the best countermove. Tonight was the final chess match between her and her enemies. She couldn’t afford to lose.
Hours later, as the sun was disintegrating into fiery ribbons across the horizon, Lanni brought clothes for each of them and set them out. Nalani had chosen to get ready with Holland, who’d taken to pacing again while strongly advocating for simply breaking the Everlys’ necks before they ever had a chance to leave their rooms.
Someone knocked softly on her bedroom door as Charis surveyed the clothing laid out on the bed. “Come in,” she called.
Tal entered wearing a formal dress coat, trousers, shirt, and cravat. He stared at her bed, where a frothy, pale blue confection of a ball gown lay. It had long sleeves that still left most of her shoulders bare, and delicate swoops of lace and ribbon decorated the skirt, which glittered with tiny bits of sea sapphires woven into its threads.
Tal pointed at the dress. “Isn’t that—”
“The wedding gown my seamstress was creating for me before the invasion? Yes.” She moved to the bed and brushed her hand over the skirt. A pair of silver dancing heels rested on the floor. “Getting fitted for this seems like a lifetime ago.”
“That was the first time Bartho tried to have you killed,” Tal said, coming to stand beside her. “Seems appropriate to punish his bosses tonight while wearing this.”
“I’m going to need help getting into it.”
His eyes widened. “Do you want me to—”
“Get Nalani for me? Yes.”
He cleared his throat. “That’s exactly what I was going to say.”
An hour later, Charis was in her gown, and Nalani was in the sitting room talking quietly with Holland.
“Look at you, dressed up for a ball but without a hairstyle to match.” Tal came up behind her as she sat in front of her vanity, his brown eyes warm when they met hers in the mirror, though there were shadows of worry within.
“I seem to make a habit of that,” she said, reaching for one of the small bottles of perfume that were clustered in the corner of the vanity. It was the same scent Father had given to her on her seventeenth birthday.
If she was going into battle, it was only fitting that the man who’d loved her unconditionally should be part of her armor.
“Why the pageantry?” Tal gestured at his outfit and then hers. “If Ferris is going to accuse us of treachery, why clean us up as if we still have power?”
Charis dabbed the fragrance behind her ears, a pang in her heart at the delicate scent of plum and thesserin flower. Father was the only person in the world who had ever seen Charis as delicate.
“For the benefit of the audience.” Charis set the perfume bottle down with care and reached for a stack of hairpins. “The Everlys will present your father and the Caleran nobility with what they expect to see. Ferris and his father can’t afford to look like they have more power than I do.”
“It would make people nervous.”
Charis nodded and selected a hairpin that looked like a sapphire dagger. “If Ferris seems like he’s reluctantly revealing the truth, building a case against me and the Farragins, then it will look like he’s worthy of the power the crowd will confer on him, rather than appearing to have stolen it when no one was looking.”
“Do you want to talk through the plan again?” he asked.
She drew in a cleansing breath and pushed it out again. “I have to goad the Everlys into revealing that they were working with Lady Channing. The simplest way to do that is to get under Ferris’s skin until he gives Queen Bai’elsha an order.”
“Even if they’re working together, what makes you so sure the Everlys would dare order Queen Bai’elsha to do anything?” He frowned as he took the hairpin from her hands.
“Lord Everly wouldn’t.” She shook out her curls. “But Ferris thinks everyone’s beneath him. He’s the one I have to focus on. If he slips up, the nobility in the room will see the truth. That will silence the rumors about me, and then I can tell Queen Bai’elsha that I will honor the deal she made with your father. I marry Vahn—” Her voice shook, and she cleared her throat. “I marry him, and Alaric pays the serpanicite ransom. If she accepts that, the Everlys have no support, no power, and no way to avoid being punished for treason.”
His eyes met hers. “And if Bai’elsha won’t listen to you?”
She clenched her fists and then forced her hands to open. “Then I use the moriarthy dust on the closest Rakuuna and convince her I sent ships to kill every living thing on Te’ash unless she works with me instead of against me.”
They were silent for a moment, their expressions grim. Anything could go wrong tonight. Everything could go wrong. And those she loved would pay the price.
“It’s going to be all right.” Tal’s hands came to rest on her bare shoulders, warm and steady. “Just breathe.”
“I am.”
“Liar.” He said it tenderly.
He was right. The air felt too thick, her lungs too thin, and the boulder on her chest grew heavier. If Mother had been here, she’d have told Charis that she was raised to be faster, smarter, and stronger than anyone who dared come against her. If Father had been at her side, he’d have hugged her and said he loved her and not to forget to rely on others who loved her, too. She’d rarely taken Father’s advice—mostly because Mother’s expectations were the standard Charis was striving to reach—but this time he was right. She needed to be faster, smarter, and stronger, but to do that, she needed support.
“Charis?” Tal squeezed her shoulders gently.
“What if I fail?” She forced the words out before she lost her courage.
He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, all she could see was his faith in her.
“You won’t. You’ll read the people around you and gain information no one realizes they’ve given up. You’ll find a gap in Ferris’s plans, and you’ll exploit it. He ought to know this about you, so he’s a fool for even letting you in that door.”
She drew in a shaky breath. “But I could still fail.”
“Yes.” He leaned down so that his face was beside hers and they were looking at each other through her mirror. “But you won’t fail alone. We’re all in this together.”
She swallowed, her heart beating a little faster as the scent of his soap enveloped her.
He knelt beside her, turning her chair slightly so that she was looking down into his upturned face. “I believe in you. I know we’re up against tremendous odds, and there’s no one else I’d rather trust to get us through it.”
She stared at him, her whole world narrowing down to the way his eyes lingered on her face and the tremble in his hands when he reached for hers.
“You are the best person I know.” He swallowed hard. “You still take all the air out of a room for me when you enter. I think about you far more often than I should. I even dream about you sometimes—”
“You do?”
“I— Yes, but I’m not going to tell you about those, so don’t even ask.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re the one who brought it up.”
“A decision I regret.” His eyes softened. “I have a lot of regrets, Charis, but you aren’t one of them. I love you, and I’m with you every step of the way.”
She bent swiftly and pressed her lips to his, swallowing his words as she kissed him. He froze for an instant, and then his arms came around her, and he crushed her against him.
Everything else faded away until all that was left was his lips, his hair in her fists, and her desperate need for him. She kissed him as if she meant to conquer him, and maybe she did. She wanted his surrender. His loyalty. The way he made her laugh and the way he understood her before she even said a word. She wanted every part of him to belong to her, and the sword at their backs left no time for hesitation.
When she finally pulled back, her heart racing, her breath catching in her throat, she felt as if the torch he’d lit in her heart had spilled into her veins, wild and delicate.
“I don’t want to go into tonight without telling you that I still love you, too,” she said, and he gave her his crooked smile before kissing her again.
Then he let go of her and stood. “I could kiss you all night, but we don’t have that luxury. We need to do something about your hair.”
She turned to face the mirror and found her curls in a wild halo around her face. “Have any ideas?”
His smile widened. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
When the Rakuuna guard opened the door to summon the Calerans, Charis was standing in her silver heels, her gorgeous gown glittering in the lamplight, pieces of her hair twisted into small rosettes above her ears and secured with hairpins that looked like snakes. The rest of her hair fell free down her back. Nalani was glowing in a sea-blue gown, Holland looked dashing even if he’d refused to give up his battered duster for a dress coat. Even Reuben looked more like he used to in his freshly pressed palace uniform.
Tal turned and offered his hand to Charis. “Ready?”
She lifted her chin and called on the fury in her heart to be her shield. “Ready.”
Together, they followed the Rakuuna from the room.