33. Idrilia
IDRILIA
“Myth is born when the world presents a riddle and refuses, for a time, to yield its answer.”
—Professor Lou Haldren
Isat in the back of the hover-car with my satchel on my knees and watched Tarina's countryside pass by. Half an hour into the drive, the terraced pastures, goat herds, and the stone-walled fields gave way to urban dwellings, and we entered the outskirts of Tarina's capital city.
It was called Margada, after Tarina's first queen, the one my mother had been named after, but to call it a city was an act of generosity. Catonia's villages were larger than that.
Thinking of Catonia and Cardilia's upcoming betrothal still twisted my stomach two days after she'd confided in me that the former heir of Catonia was being retired to Tarina as her husband because of some unspecified injury or illness.
What made me most uncomfortable was that Cardilia was grateful to have a broken prince for a husband. As if she was some second-class princess and had to be satisfied with the discards that no one else wanted.
Cardilia was the future Queen of Tarina, which was an honorable position even in a poor province like ours, and it carried a lot of responsibility.
I hadn't been able to put the conversation out of my head since.
The shameful little flicker of relief I'd felt when she left, the thank-Elurion-it-wasn't-me. The guilt and unease made me restless, so I'd done what I always did with feelings I didn't know what to do with. I'd buried them in work.
The trouble was that my work had hit a wall.
The Silver Princess was alive and stable thanks to the chiller, but that was all she was ever going to be.
Stable. Dim. Surviving and nothing more.
I could keep her like that for years and learn nothing, because everything worth knowing about her lived in the mineral-veined slope where I'd found her, and that slope was across a border I'd promised never to cross again.
I needed help, but the only person who'd written anything about her was dead, and he'd died before completing his research.
Even if I broke my promise and went back for a second specimen, I could only hope for a repeat of what had happened with the first, since I didn't know enough to make it thrive.
The best and probably only solution was to build a research station in its natural habitat in the Elucian Mountains, which was as likely as me becoming a dragon rider.
As absurd as the thought was, a wistfulness settled over me. I would have loved to fly on the back of a dragon, but I didn't have any Elucian blood in me, so my secret obsession with the magnificent beasts would have to be set aside.
The only time I'd flown on a dragon was when my team and I had been rescued after the avalanche that had claimed the lives of two porters.
I'd sat behind the rider, strapped in, but I'd been so weighted by the tragedy that had befallen our team that I hadn't enjoyed the ride as much as I would have under different circumstances.
Not that there would be different circumstances. The only time a civilian sat on the back of a dragon was during a rescue operation, and I had vowed never again to put myself or the people working for me in the kind of danger that would require a rescue.
"Should I deliver you to the Botanical Department as usual, Your Highness?" Raufel caught my eye in the rearview mirror.
He'd driven me to and from the university for years, and most of the time the Botanical Department was my destination, but not today.
"I'm meeting someone at the university café, the one by the science library."
His eyebrows shot up, and I watched a grin spread across his face in the rearview mirror. Raufel was old enough to be my grandfather, and when we were alone, he treated me as if I was one of his many granddaughters.
"Meeting someone, are we?" he said. "A new fella?"
"Don't be ridiculous." I gave him my flattest look. "I'm not in the market for anyone new. I'm with Gavon."
"Mm." He let that single syllable carry an entire editorial.
I shook my head at him. "I'm meeting Professor Lou Haldren, the son of the late Professor Lorento Haldren, who happened to be the only botanist to research the Silver Princess.
Everything I know about her came from his research.
I hope his son has journals that his father didn't share with the university.
That's what the meeting is about, so get your mind out of the gutter and pester your granddaughters about their fellas. "
"Oh, I do, Your Highness. What other joy remains for an old man like me? Needling my grandchildren is my favorite pastime."
He was still grinning when he pulled the hover-car to the curb outside the café.
It was an ordinary vehicle with no royal insignia, so no one paid it any notice.
I didn't want to draw attention, and I was successful most of the time because people didn't recognize me without the elaborate makeup and hairdos.
On the rare occasion that I appeared on television, it was in full paint and lacquered hair and a gown in the pale blue and silver of our house.
The woman who stepped out of the hover-car bore almost no resemblance to the televised version of me.
I wore loose slacks, a soft shirt, and flats, my hair was gathered in a single plain braid, and my face was clean of makeup.
No one spared me a second glance, not even appreciative looks from young men, which was a little disappointing even though I was not supposed to care. Most days I counted it a blessing.
I went in and scanned the place for the professor.
The café was the usual midday crowd of students hunched over notes and cooling teas and caffs, all of them young. Professor Haldren was in his fifties, and since no one there looked that age, he must be running late. I found a table near the window and ordered a caff.
I'd read every paper the late Lorento Haldren had ever published on the high-altitude flora of the Tarina-Elucia border, and there was a great deal of it, decades of rigorous research.
The man had cataloged dozens of rare species, and together with Professor Lubina Graff, the famous pharmacologist, had derived many uses from them.
The Elucians had a long tradition of healers who knew how to use their native flora to treat all kinds of afflictions, but they were recluses who didn't share their knowledge freely, and, in truth, we Elurians were too conceited to ask.
I had studied all his writings, but nothing had caught my interest like the Silver Princess.
He'd written that a tincture drawn from her silvery roots appeared to ease melancholy and the gripping kind of fear, the affliction the physicians called anxious prostration.
If it were true and could be made reliably, it would mean a better life for a great many people who currently had no good options.
The medications we currently had for those afflictions came with difficult side effects, trading one kind of suffering for another.
The problem was that he'd died without leaving a record about how to keep the Silver Princess alive, or even whether he'd managed to grow her this side of the border, and if so, how.
He'd had living specimens, that much was clear from his descriptions, but he could've conducted his experiments up in the mountains where the Silver Princess grew and thrived.
His son, whom I was meeting today, was a historian, not a botanist, which made him an unlikely source of cultivation notes, but he'd inherited his father's estate, and if Professor Haldren Senior had kept any journals at home, I hoped the son had preserved them.
I didn't know much about him even though we worked in the same university. We'd never even crossed paths, or if we had, it hadn't been memorable. The history faculty was located on the far side of the complex, and I never ventured there.
When I'd telephoned and explained that I was researching the Silver Princess, he'd agreed to come to my side of the campus.
I'd told him who I was, because it was the decent thing to do, but I'd explained that most students didn't know who I was and I liked to keep it that way.
I asked him to keep it quiet, and he'd promised he would.
He came through the door and stopped, peering around the room, and I knew who he was instantly because he was his father's photograph come to life.
The same round middle, the same balding dome, the same spectacles pushed up a nose that had clearly been built to hold them.
He scanned the tables, and his eyes slid right over me without the faintest snag of recognition.
I smiled and lifted my hand, and he hurried over, already apologizing before he reached the chair.
"Your Hi—" he started, caught himself, glanced around, and dropped his voice to a flustered murmur.
"I'm so sorry to keep you waiting. I was caught by a pair of students at my door with questions about their dissertations, and I simply cannot send students away, it's a genuine failing of mine.
" He sat, a little out of breath. "I do apologize. "
"Please don't." I gave him one of my most charming smiles in an effort to put him at ease. "You are a good teacher who cares about his students. That's nothing to apologize for. You are a rare find."
He went pink to the top of his shining head. "That's very kind, Your...Very kind." He fussed with his spectacles. "I confess I didn't expect, that is, I was looking for, well…" He gestured vaguely at the air, where presumably the gown and the silver slippers were hovering.
"The woman you've seen on television doesn't come to cafés.
" I lifted my caff. "In fact, she doesn't exist outside of those televised events.
" I leaned forward. "This is the real me, and I'm very happy nearly no one knows this version so I can move around freely without people stopping me and asking what I'm doing having an actual life outside of court. "
He nodded sagely. "I understand. Completely."