Читать книгу The Man Behind the Mask - Christine Rimmer - Страница 9

Sunday, December 8, 11:02 pm; the king’s palace, Gullandria. Snowing.

Before I drew the heavy window curtains and climbed into bed, I stood for a moment at the tall mullioned windows, watching the white flakes coming out of the blackness to hit the diamond-shaped panes.

Things I learned today

Offshore oil drilling: major Gullandrian industry since the 1970s. Country was poor before its discovery; now, prosperous.

kingmaking: the election ceremony in which the jarl elect the next king.

Gullandrian slate: all of Isenhalla’s outer walls are faced in this silvery gray and semireflecting stone.

bloodsworn: a vow of

I looked up and groaned, then bent my head again to the mini word processor in my lap.…

Trouble concentrating. Keep thinking of last night, of V. Know I shouldn’t. Clearly a case of inbred romantic impulses spiraling scarily out of control. Must keep firmly in mind that it was only a dance. One dance. He didn’t speak. Neither did I. He shushed me. Now that should tell me something—that he was shushing me when I hadn’t said a word.

No sign of him today, or this evening at dinner. I might have asked Brit about him, but, as usual since I arrived here, we hardly had a moment to ourselves.

I can’t help believing that he

I looked up again, blinking, shaking my head.

Oh, lovely. Obsessing over Valbrand. Again. Filling up my AlphaSmart with lovesick babble.

A few minutes on the dance floor with Brit’s long-lost brother and there I was, a slave to love. I’d stayed awake all night the night before, typing like mad, filling four whole files with V., V., V. Had to dump most of it. Drivel anyway and the Alphie only had so much space. Until I got home to my PC, I’d have no place to download it. And the point was to pack it with facts and observations about Gullandria—not endless yada-yada about a man I hardly knew.

That morning I had made a firm resolution: if I couldn’t keep myself from starting in about him, I would at least switch to longhand. Maybe longhand would stop me. I swear, at the rate I was going, if I put it all in longhand, I’d be sure to get writer’s cramp, end up with a hand like a twisted claw.

Which would serve me right. I mean, how could I have spent all night pounding the keys on the subject of a guy with whom I had not exchanged one word?

Don’t answer that.

And it wasn’t like the two of us were on the brink of something grand. I knew very well that the next time I saw him, it was going to be Hello, how are you? and walk on by. He’d as good as told me so—and I know what you’re thinking. How could he have told me if he didn’t even speak?

Well, he didn’t need to say it. I saw it in those beautiful haunted eyes of his: There was not, and never would be, an us.

And no, it didn’t help that I knew those haunted eyes were right. I mean, what were a recently-back-from-the-dead Gullandrian prince and Dulcie Samples, wannabe writer from Bakersfield, gonna have in common anyway? Couldn’t be all that much, even if we ever did get around to actually speaking to each other.

It was hopeless. I knew it.

And I didn’t care. That’s the way it is with love at first sight.

Sitting there, propped against the carved headboard of that antique bed, amid all the lush featherbedding, I let out a long, sad sigh. I was debating with myself. Would I get back on task with my “what I learned” list? Or was I on another Valbrand roll? If so, it was time to keep my promise to myself and switch to a pen and a notebook and—

What was that?

A flicker of movement. In my side vision, to my right. I glanced that way.

The doors to a heavy, dark armoire, shut the last time I looked, gaped open. My clothes were moving, a head emerging from between my winter coat and a little black dress.

I shrieked. The AlphaSmart went flying. I hovered on the verge of my first coronary.

About then, I realized that the head was Brit’s. “Sheesh,” she said. “Calm down. It’s only me.” She emerged in a crouch and turned to shut the armoire doors.

“Holy freaking kamolie.”Freaking was not the word I was thinking. It just proves what a model of self-restraint I am that I didn’t say that other word. “I coulda died of fright.”

“Sorry.” She didn’t look particularly contrite.

And that bugged me. I adore horror movies, but when it comes to real life—don’t scare me, you know? I have three prank-loving brothers and a devilish dad. They know I’m excitable. When I was growing up, they were always popping out of doorways, shouting, “Hah!” They found my squeals of terror hilarious.

Making ungracious grumbling noises, I kicked off the covers, flung my torso over the side of the bed and retrieved my Alphie, after which I dragged myself back up to the mattress and settled against the pillows again. I tapped a few keys. “At least it’s not broken.” I shot her a thoroughly sour look. “No thanks to you.”

She tried flattery. “Hey. Love your pajamas.”

I grunted. We both favored cartoon-character PJs. That night, mine were liberally dotted with widely smiling SpongeBobs. “How long have you been hiding in there?”

Brit dropped to a wing chair and raked her hair back out of her eyes. “I wasn’t hiding. There’s a door at the back of it.”

I blinked. “Oh, come on…”

She crossed her heart. “Hope to die.”

“A door. As in…to a secret passageway?” I was thoroughly intrigued. It’s hard to keep pouting when you’re intrigued.

She jumped up again and held out her hand. “Come look.”

I peered at her sideways, scowling. “Don’t be cranky. I really am sorry I freaked you out.”

“I’m not cranky,” I insisted. Crankily. “I just don’t see why you couldn’t come in through the door.”

She made an impatient noise in her throat. “Hel-lo, I’m a princess, remember? Around here, I have an image to maintain.” She opened her pink robe to display her own cartoon-character pajamas—Wile E. Coyote, as a matter of fact—then lifted a foot with a fluffy pink slipper on it and wiggled it at me. “I prefer not to go running through the halls once I’m dressed for bed.”

The reminder of her royal status put me right back into pouting mode. “You always used to say that being a princess didn’t mean a thing to you.”

We shared a long look. She said, softly, “I’m learning that it means quite a bit. That it’s an important part of who I am.”

Did those words surprise me? Not really. I could sense big changes in her. A whole lot had happened since she’d boarded the royal jet in L.A., back in June, for her first visit to her father’s land. In June, Valbrand had been missing and considered dead for almost a year; King Osrik, the father she now called “Dad” was a stranger to her—and she’d yet to meet the man she now planned to marry.

“Well?” she demanded, after a too-long pause. “D’you want to see the passageway or not?”

I shoved my AlphaSmart off my lap, jumped from the bed and padded to her side. Brit opened the armoire door and slid my clothes out of the way.

The whole back of the armoire was another door—it opened onto a narrow hallway of the same silver-gray slate as the palace facade. An electric lantern—Brit’s, no doubt—sat on the passageway floor just beyond the armoire, casting a golden glow, making strange, shimmery light patterns on the glossy stone. I could see straight ahead maybe a hundred feet. Then a dead end, a shadowed blackness to the right. A turn in the passageway, I guessed. “Amazing.”

Brit beamed. “Isenhalla is riddled with hidden hallways. They were included in the original construction, back in the mid-sixteenth century, when King Thorlak the Liberator built the current palace on the ruins of an earlier one destroyed by the Danes. It was a dangerous time. Poor King Thorlak. He never knew when he might need to duck inside a curio cabinet and get the hell outta Dodge. And there’s more…”

I loved this kind of stuff and Brit knew it. “Tell.”

“In the mid-nineteenth century, King Solmund Gudmond took the throne. King Solmund was, shall we say, more than a little bit eccentric—enough so that by the end of his reign he was known as Mad King Solmund. In the final years before his death, he would wash his hands a hundred times a day and wander the great halls at night wearing nothing but a look of total confusion.”

“And King Solmund had exactly what to do with the passageways?”

“Before he lost his grip on reality, he had them modernized, adding more hidden entrances and exits, improving the internal mechanisms within the secret doors.”

“Fascinating,” I said, and meant it.

“Yeah. It’s become a minor hobby of mine, to hunt down all the secret hallways and follow them wherever they lead.” Her face was flushed, excited. I’d never seen her look happier.

Or more at home.

“You love it here.” There was a tightness in my chest.

She quirked an eyebrow at me. “Is that an accusation?”

I shook my head. “I guess it just hit me all over again. You’re really never coming home.”

“This is my home.” She spoke gently, with only the faintest note of reproach.

I scrunched up my eyes. Hard. No way I was letting the waterworks get started. “I’ll miss you, that’s all.”

Her mouth kind of twisted. She patted my arm. “Don’t forget the royal jet. Flies both ways. And the phone. And what about e-mail? You know we’ll be in touch.”

“I know,” I said and gave her a big smile. I didn’t want to be a downer, but I was thinking that visits and phone calls and e-mails could never stack up with her living directly across the walkway from me in our charmingly derelict courtyard-style apartment building. In the months she’d been gone, I’d come to realize how much I counted on her friendship.

East Hollywood with no Brit. Could it really be happening?

She grabbed my hand. “I know I’ve been neglecting you.”

Wrong. Yes, I missed her. Yes, I hated that I was going to have to accept that her life was different now and our friendship would change. But I did not feel neglected. “Oh, come on. You’ve knocked yourself out checking on me every chance you get. You’ve been crazy busy.…”

“Still. We’ve hardly had a moment to ourselves since you got here. I’m fixing that. Now. Let’s go to my rooms. We’ll talk till our tongues go numb. Do the mutual pedicure thing. You can mess with my hair.”

I had a way with hair. Other people’s, anyway. Mine was wild and curly and I pretty much left it alone. I fluffed the sides of her blond mop with my fingers. The cut was fine, really. But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t try to improve on it. “Hmm. Maybe just a trim. Reemphasize the feathering around your face…”

“Who knows when we’ll get the chance again?”

I didn’t want to think about that. Hair, I thought. Hair is the question. “Do you have some decent scissors?”

“I’m sure I can dig up a pair.”

I bargained shamelessly. “You’ll have to tell me all your exploits since June. I get the sense it’s been action-packed.”

“One death-defying challenge after another.” She said it dryly, but something in her voice told me it wasn’t a joke. I thought of the scar on her shoulder.

Finally I confessed softly, “As if I’m going to turn you down, whatever we do.”

She caught my hand again. “Come on.”

“Let me grab my robe and slippers.”

It was cold in the passageway—all that stone, with no heat source, I guess. I shivered and pulled my robe closer as we hustled along.

Her rooms were in a different wing than mine, on the next floor up. At one point, we emerged onto a landing in a back stairwell. Brit shut the section of wall that had opened for us, leaving the wall looking as if the doorway we’d come through had never been. We climbed the narrow stairs. She opened a door—a real one, with a porcelain knob. On the other side was a main hallway.

She shot glances both ways, then turned a wide grin on me. “Let’s go for it.”

Giggling, we took off, racing along the thick Turkish runner as fast as our flapping slippers would allow. Around the next corner, with nobody else in sight to witness Her Royal Highness behaving in such an undignified manner, she led me through a door onto another back stairwell. We stood on a landing. She pushed a place on the wall—and yet another door opened up. We went through. She pushed another spot and the section of wall swung silently shut. I stared. The “door” was gone. All I saw was solid wall. It really was amazing.

Brit had already turned and headed off down the gleaming secret passage. I rushed to catch up.

Two more hallways, and she stopped to open another section of wall. She pressed a latch and the wall swung toward us. On the other side, a full-length mirror gleamed. Beyond the hole it left in the wall, I could see a bedroom even bigger and more luxurious than the one assigned to me.

We went through. She pushed a spot on the heavy gold-leafed mirror frame and the mirror swung silently back into place. “Wait here,” she commanded, and went out through a set of high, carved double doors.

I stood by the mirror and gaped at her gorgeous room. The heavy velvet drapes were drawn across the windows. Her bed was bigger than mine—could that be possible?—up on a dais, so much carving on the bedposts and finials, you could sit there staring forever, picking out the moons and suns, the longboats and dragons and mermaids with long, twining hair. Her bedding was crimson velvet, the sheets snowy white against the red. I mounted the dais and sat on the bed, pulling a round red velvet pillow into my lap. I was stroking the thick, soft pile when she returned.

“We’re alone,” she announced. “And look what I found?” She held up a pair of scissors, snicked them open and shut. “Also, my rooms are undisturbed.” I must have looked puzzled. She explained, “It’s my dad.”

I’d met King Osrik just that evening, at dinner. He was tall and lean. Good-looking, for an older guy. Distinguished, I guess you’d say. Dark hair going gray. Dark eyes—Valbrand’s eyes. Upon being introduced, I performed the Gullandrian bow Brit had taught me—fisted hand to heart, a dip of the head—and said how thrilled I was to meet His Majesty.

He gave me a regal nod. “It is my hope that you enjoy your brief stay in my daughter’s homeland.”

End of conversation. My sense was of a man very few people really knew.

The way she spoke of him, with such affection and humor, I guessed that Brit felt she knew him just fine. She went on, “You know I adore him, but he drives me nuts sometimes. He keeps tabs on me. He’s actually bugged my rooms more than once. Which means I’ve learned to seek out and neutralize all electronic surveillance devices on a regular basis. That leaves only my personal maid and cook and the ongoing fiction that the servants don’t spy for my father. Them, I give errands. Lots and lots of errands. Tonight is no exception. I’ve sent them off to do my bidding. No way they’ll be back before dawn. And since we came through the secret passageway, the guards at the main door to the suite don’t even know you’re in here. We have total privacy, a luxury I appreciate a lot more than I used to. It’s so rare these days.”

I was stuck on the part about the guards. “You have guards at your door?”

She nodded. “All the members of the royal family do.”

“You need guards?”

“Let me put it this way. The guards are there because it’s palace protocol. Of course, they’ll protect me, if a sticky situation arises—which it never has so far. In the meantime, they’re in a perfect position to report all my comings and goings to His Royal Majesty—” she grinned “—at least when I leave through the main doors.” I tossed the pillow back into the giant pile at the head of the bed. She added, “The life of a princess does have its little challenges.”

“No kidding.” I got up and took the scissors from her. “Fine-tooth comb?”

She held up her other hand and I saw she had the comb, too. “Let’s go in my dressing room,” she said. “It’s got better light, a good mirror and a swivel vanity chair.”

As soon as she’d got her hair wet and I had her in the chair, I asked about the scar on her shoulder.

“From a renegade’s poisoned arrow,” she said—renegades being seriously delinquent teenage boys who terrorized the Vildelund, the wild country to the north. She said she’d barely survived. She was delirious, near death for days, while her body fought off the poison.

I snipped away and she sucked a few peanut M&M’s—she’d always had a thing for them—and told me all about her quest to find Valbrand.

“They all swore he was dead.” She met my eyes in the wide mirror over the marble counter. “But he wasn’t dead. I knew it.” She put her hand over her heart. “I knew it here.” I’d never seen her so intense and passionate—well, except maybe when she looked at Eric. “So, since no one would believe me, I took a guide and flew to the Vildelund to find the mysterious Eric Greyfell, who had gone looking for Valbrand after he disappeared at sea.”

“And this was when—that you went to the Vildelund?”

“Didn’t I say in my letters?”

I shook my head. They were postcards, actually. There had been three of them. What can you write on a postcard?Hello, how are you? I’m fine. Wish you were here…

Brit said, “I went to the Vildelund in early September.”

“And at that point you still hadn’t met Eric?” “Nope. He was a hard man to meet. When he returned from his quest to find Valbrand, he came to Isenhalla just long enough to report to my dad that he was certain Valbrand was dead—and then he rushed off to the Vildelund, where he’d been hanging out ever since. I wanted to hear the story of what happened to my brother from Eric himself.”

“So you flew there and…”

“The plane crashed.”

I stopped snipping to stare. “With you in it?”

“That’s right. My guide was killed.” Her blue eyes, right then, looked nearly as haunted as Valbrand’s. “I was knocked out when we went down. I came to in the wrecked plane. The guide didn’t. The crash broke his neck.”

I sighed. “Bad, huh?”

“Yeah. Real bad. I crawled from the wreckage to find the renegade waiting. He shot me. Eric found me and took me to the village where his sweet aunt Asta lived. Asta took care of me until I got well. And eventually, I found my brother—right there, in the Vildelund.”

“With Eric?”

“That’s right. For a long time, Valbrand wasn’t…ready yet, I guess you could say, to come back here and deal with everything he’s dealing with now. He’d made Eric promise to stay with him in the north until he could bring himself to come home.…”

Our eyes were locked in the mirror.

It was a good opening. The right place to ask a few questions about her brother—and maybe even to tell her the way I felt. But she looked away and the moment got by me.

I finished trimming. I’d taken some off the sides, in layers, to give it more lift. I worked in a little styling gel, then grabbed the blow dryer she’d set on the counter for me.

“I love it,” she announced when I turned the dryer off. She fluffed with her fingers and turned her head this way and that. “It always looks fuller when you do it—now for the pedicures.” She dragged me into the enormous marble bathroom, where we soaked our feet in the sunken tub and then took turns in a paraffin bath.

She did me, then I did her, long sessions with a pumice stone and deep foot massage. We yakked the whole time. For polish, she had a rack full of Urban Decay, great colors with Goth names: Asphyxia. Freakshow. Gash. I chose Pipe Dream, a nice barely-there shade. Brit went for Toxin, a sort of Easter-egg purple that didn’t fit the name at all.

We wandered back to the bedroom, dropped our robes and stretched out on the bed, where we continued to whisper to each other.

Brit said she doubted she’d ever finish any of her novels now. That was how we’d met—a shared interest in writing. She’d started nine or ten books. About halfway through, she’d always get tired of them. She’d start something else or real life would beckon.

She grinned. “There’s a lot going on here in Gullandria. No time for scribbling, if you know what I mean.”

“Maybe later, huh? It’s not like you don’t have plenty of years ahead of you to get back to it.”

She made a noise of agreement, but her eyes had doubts in them. Whether the doubts were about her ever writing again or the number of years ahead of her, I couldn’t have said. I almost asked.

But she’d already begun the story of her adventures in the north. She’d stopped a rape and met a cousin she hadn’t even known she had. And she’d lived among the Mystics. Eric’s aunt, the one who had nursed her back to health, was a Mystic. The Mystics lived simply, by the old Norse ways. Eric was at home among them; Medwyn had been born a Mystic and Eric’s mother had, too.

She pulled a heavy silver chain out from under her pajama top and showed me the disc-shaped serpent pendant I had noticed the night of the ball. “My marriage medallion,” she said. “Among the Mystics, for each newborn son, they create a different medallion. This one was made for Eric. He wore it as a child. He gave it to Medwyn when he turned eighteen. And Medwyn gave it to me—as Eric’s chosen bride…”

I knew she wasn’t telling me everything. There were those moments when she’d get going on some part of the story and, out of nowhere, her voice would trail off. Her eyes would shift away.

I didn’t push her. I figured what she didn’t say was probably none of my business.

She wanted to know how my writing was going.

I told her I’d finished my fourth novel—a murder mystery with a female bounty hunter heroine. I was already thinking series. “And lately, I’ve been raking in the rejections.”

We both chuckled. It was a private joke with us. The more rejections, the closer to that first sale. She asked about my job in a boiler room, selling office supplies—toner, pens, inkjet paper, you name it—on the phone.

I groaned. “That was so last summer. I’m on to bigger and better things now. A Mexican restaurant on Pico.” Actually I wasn’t a hundred percent sure the job would be there when I got back. But such is the life of a struggling artiste. “Early shift,” I added. “Try not to be too jealous.”

“I am doing my very best.” She was grinning. And then she wasn’t grinning. “Dulce…” I knew by her sudden change of tone, by the shadows in her eyes, that something bleak was coming. “Last night, at the ball, I noticed you and Valbrand really hit it off.”

I made a sound that could have meant anything. “Um?”

“Well, I, um…” She was having real trouble getting around to it. I kept my mouth shut. Though I loved nothing so much as finishing other people’s sentences, right then, I made no attempt to fill in the blanks. She tried again. “That’s the first time I’ve seen my brother dance, did you know that?” I shook my head. She looked so sad. “They say he used to love to dance.…”

At that moment, I was absolutely certain that she knew how I felt—and that she was going to warn me off him. It was all there, in her worried blue eyes.

And yes, I’m aware that reading minds is not dependable, that you’re just too damn likely to get it all wrong. A girl should have sense enough to go ahead and ask.

But I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to hear her tell me how he was not the man for me.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t already know.

“I’m so grateful,” she said quietly, “that he’s back with us. But how can I tell you? Dulce, he’s…damaged, you know, by what happened to him? And I don’t just mean his poor face. He’s never going to be like your average guy.”

“What, exactly, happened to him?”

She was frowning. “I told you. A storm at sea. A fire. He was washed overboard.…”

Yes, she had told me.

When Valbrand went missing, Brit’s mother had phoned her with the news that the brother she’d never known was lost at sea and presumed dead. Brit had just moved in across the courtyard from me. She came over to my place and we drank strong coffee and talked all night.

It was really hard for her, to think that he was gone. She hated it so much—that she’d lost him when she hadn’t even met him yet. There had always been all those family issues that had kept her from ever getting to know him. Since her father and her mother split—when Brit and her sisters were ten months old—there had been zero communication between the two halves of the family. I say two halves because it was some kind of trade-off, I think. Daughters to Ingrid. Sons—Valbrand and Kylan—to King Osrik.

Kylan was dead within a year or two after the split, killed in a stable fire at the age of five. Which made Valbrand the only son left—and then he was gone, too.

I’d assumed at first that Valbrand must have been on some kind of cruise when he disappeared. That night in my apartment, sipping coffee, trying not to cry, Brit had set me straight.

In Gullandria it was tradition that any young prince who hoped to someday be king must accomplish a Viking Voyage. I instantly pictured wild men in horned helmets burning down picturesque villages and having their way with terrified women.

But I had it all wrong. There was no raping or pillaging involved, just a sea voyage in an authentic reproduction of a Viking longship. It was a symbolic trip, Brit said. A nod to Gullandrian history, to the time when kings went a-Viking and were unlikely to live all that long.

Valbrand had set off from Lysgard Harbor with a trusted crew of thirty. He made it to the Faeroes and set sail for Iceland. They’d heard nothing from him after that, though it was only a matter of days to Iceland and he had agreed to check in with his father when the ship made land there.

The rest we’d learned later, after Eric went looking for him and returned to report that he’d found the few survivors, all of whom told the same story about a storm at sea.

“The bit about the fire is new,” I said. “You never mentioned that until the other day.”

Brit pursed up her mouth. “It’s not a bit, Dulce. It’s what happened to him.”

“It’s vague. You know it is. Who started the fire? And what about these survivors? Who were they? Why did Eric have to track them down, if they were part of a trusted crew? I mean, why didn’t they come back on their own and report what had happened, if they were so trustworthy?”

She gave me another long look. “Dulce…”

I waited. She didn’t say anything else—I mean, beyond my name, in a weary sort of tone. Finally I said, “You’re my best friend. I know you. And I know when you’re not being straight with me.”

“I’m being straight.”

“Right.”

“I am.” She lifted up, punched her pillow, dropped back down. “There’s just…things I can’t talk about, that’s all.”

“Getting that. Loud and clear.”

We lay there, on our separate pillows, looking in each other’s eyes, both of us frowning. Finally she sighed. “I’ve said all I can say about what happened to my brother. So will you just please let it go?”

I could see there was no point in keeping at her. She’d made it painfully clear she wouldn’t say any more. “Yeah,” I whispered. “I’ll let it go.” For now, anyway, I added silently. I strove for a lighter tone. “Hey.”

“What?”

“You said that Valbrand was never going to be your average guy.”

“Yeah?” She was looking at me narrow-eyed—probably anticipating the next question she would have to evade.

“So. Was he ever your average guy?”

The corner of her mouth twitched. In relief, I was certain. Here was something she could be honest about. “No. No, he wasn’t. Once he was…everything this country needs in its next king.”

“And now?”

“Now…” She paused, considering. “Now, I don’t think he’s really sure who he is.”

I rolled to my back and stared up at the sculptured ceiling. “Maybe, over time, he’ll…get better.”

“I have a lot of hope for that. We all do. He’s come a long way already. You cannot imagine…”

I guess I couldn’t. And by her silence, I knew she wasn’t going to tell me. I rolled to my side again and propped up on an elbow. “Look. I think we’d better get it out there, much as it makes me cringe to do it. You’re telling me not to get interested in him, right? That there’s zero hope for any kind of…future between him and me.”

She shut her eyes and let out a groan. “Yes.” She looked at me again. “That’s what I’m telling you— Oh, Dulce. I’m so—”

I cut her off. “Do not,” I instructed, “say you’re sorry.”

“Okay,” she whispered. “I won’t.”

“And don’t look so worried. As of now, there is nothing going on between your brother and me. And nothing will be going on—or at least, I’m about ninety percent sure nothing will.”

“Only ninety percent?” She looked so irritatingly hopeful. She wanted my guarantee that nothing had, was, or ever would, happen between Valbrand and me.

I couldn’t give her that. “See, this is the deal. If your brother would give me half a chance, I would be on it. No hesitation. No looking back. Crazy as it probably sounds to you, considering I’ve spent a total of ten minutes in his presence, I have that strong a feeling for him. But as of now, things look seriously unpromising.”

She sat up. “What if I were to ask you right out to stay away from him?”

I held my ground. “Sorry. Won’t do it. I’m not going to avoid him.”

She flopped back down hard on her back and stared ceilingward. “Terrific.”

“Hey. Relax. I have the distinct feeling that he will be avoiding me.”

She rolled her head to look at me. “He’s right to avoid you. It can’t go anywhere.”

I said, with what I considered admirable tact, “I think we’re getting into repetition mode, don’t you?”

She rolled to her side and faced me again, reaching to brush my shoulder—a tentative touch, quickly withdrawn. “Bad move on my part, huh? To make such a big deal out of this…”

I caught her hand and only let go after I’d given it a good, firm squeeze. “See, that’s where you’re wrong. You’re my best friend in the whole wide world. You cannot make a bad move when it comes to me.”

Her wide mouth quivered. “God, Dulce. I have missed you.”

“Double back at ya.”

“There’s just so much going on.…”

“Hey, I’m picking it up.”

“So much I really can’t talk about.”

“You said that before.”

“Well, I feel like you’re not hearing me.”

“I’m hearing. I just don’t like it.”

“You have to know. Under ordinary circumstances, I’d be thrilled to see you and Valbrand hook up. But things are far from ordinary here. My father has big plans for my brother. Please don’t be offended, but they don’t include—”

“Brit.”

She stifled a yawn. “Um?”

“At this point what His Majesty would think about your brother and me getting together is seriously moot.”

“I’m only warning you that the rules are different here, that a king’s son is not going to—”

“Got it.” I was yawning, too. “We should get some sleep.”

She yawned again, this time full out. “You know, you’re right.” She closed her eyes.

I swear she was deep in dreamland instantly. I could have been, too. But you ought to try sleeping with Brit. Restless is too mild a word. She tossed and turned and groaned and kicked me repeatedly—all while utterly dead to the world.

Eventually, clinging to my pillow at the far edge of the bed, I drifted off, too.

Someone was shaking me. “Go ’way…” I grumbled, batting at the hand that clutched my shoulder.

“Dulce…” Brit’s voice.

I opened one eye. “Huh?”

“Gotta go. Back soon.” She was already halfway out of the bed.

I sat up, swiping a swatch of tangled curls back from my face, blinking against the bedside light that we’d never bothered to turn off. “What time is it?” The clock beneath the lamp said 3:10. “Ugh.” I fell back to the pillows. “You’re nuts, you know that?”

“I just… I have to see Eric.” Her face was positively glowing. “What can I say? It’s love, you know? I didn’t want you to wake up and worry when you saw I was gone.…”

I grumbled something unintelligible, turned on my side and shut my eyes again. I was asleep so fast, I didn’t even hear her leave.

The hidden door through the mirror in my sister’s room began to move. I doused my palm-size flashlight and stepped back into the shadows.

Brit came through, wearing a pink robe and absurd fat pink bedroom slippers. She shut the secret door, turned and saw me there. I was all in black, including the smooth mask of perfectly tanned karavik skin that covered my face.

She gasped, then shone her light hard in my eyes. “Valbrand. What are you doing here?”

“Keeping watch.” I had my arm across my eyes, guarding my night vision. “Shine the light away.”

She did as I asked, then reached out a tentative hand to me. Trusting her as I did few others, I allowed her to brush the side of the mask, which fit my face like another skin—one both flawless and without expression.

“Is this really necessary?” She meant the mask. In her eyes there was great sadness.

I saw no reason to answer her. “What brings you into the passageway at this early hour?” I knew what, of course. “Eric?”

“I miss him. Love’s like that.”

“Ah.” They were happy, my youngest sister and my bloodbound lifelong friend. This pleased me. Behind the mask, I smiled.

She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering a little at the chill in the passageway, and sent me a look of dawning suspicion. “It’s Dulcie, right?”

I did not so much as blink. “I fail to grasp your meaning.”

“You’re here in the passageway, by the secret entrance to my room, because Dulcie’s in there.”

I hadn’t known. But my foolish heart beat faster to hear it. “Dulcie. Your friend…”

“Yeah, duh. Like you have trouble remembering who she is.”

“You are angry with me.”

Her eyes grew tender again. “No. Never. I just… I saw the way you looked at her the other night. And the way she looked at you. Valbrand, you do have to ask yourself, where can it go?”

Nowhere, I silently replied. It was a truth I fully accepted. “We shared a dance.” I sketched the most casual of shrugs. “It means nothing.” And it didn’t, not in the greater scheme of things. I had felt something powerful when I looked in Dulcie’s eyes, and experienced a thoroughly shaming physical response to her. But it was of no consequence, I kept telling myself. And I would hardly have occasion to see her again. I asked my sister gently, “You object to my dancing with your friend?”

“No. No, of course not. It’s only…she doesn’t have an inkling of what we’re up against here. I don’t want her involved. I want her to enjoy her visit to Gullandria and I want her to fly home safe and sound the day after the wedding.”

“And so she shall. As for tonight… I knew a strange foreboding. It caused a restlessness within me. I looked in on Eric. And then, unbeknownst to him, on our father. I checked on Elli and Hauk.” Elli was our sister and Hauk was Elli’s husband. “Hauk woke, of course. He saw it was I and rose to speak with me briefly, vowing that all was well with them and their unborn babe. After that, I came here to assure myself that you, like the others, were undisturbed.”

“I’m fine. Honestly.”

“Good, then.”

“Eric’s awake?”

I chuckled. “Go to him. Find out for yourself.”

She came closer, laid her hand on my arm and brushed a quick kiss against the mask. “Don’t hang around in the passageways all night. Please?”

“You mustn’t concern yourself with me.” I touched the device on my belt. “I’ll signal if I require your aide in repulsing intruders.”

She made a scoffing sound. “Valbrand, you’re a little overboard on this, don’t you think? Nothing suspicious has happened in months.” Her pretty lips curved down in a scowl. “Not since that SOB Sorenson escaped us.” My sister had a special enmity toward the traitor, Jorund Sorenson. Before we found him out, Sorenson had pretended to be her friend in order to get close enough to try to kill her. “There’s no reason for you to—”

I put a gloved finger to her chattering mouth. “Go. Remind my friend what a fortunate man he is.”

“Will you go back to your rooms? Get some sleep? Nothing’s going to happen here, in the palace, in the middle of the night.”

I took her by the shoulders and turned her gently toward the waiting corridor. “Go.”

She sent me one last fond, exasperated glance over her shoulder before she hurried off down the gleaming stone hallway.

I watched until she’d turned the corner, and then continued watching, until the light from her lantern faded to nothing.

Utter blackness. It was good. Soothing to the formless anxieties I’d been experiencing that night.

I ducked back into the alcove a few feet from the now-invisible entrance to my sister’s rooms and, for a while, I simply stood there, arms crossed over my chest, surrounded by darkness, lulled by the gift of blindness, velvet black all around me…

Yes. I confess. I was thinking of the redhead on the other side of the looking glass. Thinking how simple it would be: to press the spot that would open the wall, to step through the glass.

I pictured her sleeping, wild coils of red hair poured over white pillows. Myself, the handsome prince I once was, bending close for the kiss that would wake her from her dreams…

It was but a fantasy.

In the world of reality, it never could have been—and it would never be.

Once, as a man who dedicated his life to his country and to the sacred duty to someday earn the throne, I could not have allowed myself a dalliance with a commoner from California. Not such a commoner as she, in any case—one with stars in her eyes and true love on her mind.

That would have been wrong. Cruel.

In the months since my return home, I had come to realize that the man I was on leaving had been vain, one who preened in pleasure at his handsome face and lean form, at his very goodness. And yet, all vanity aside, I did strive, in those earlier days, to be a better man. If I gave love casually, it was only to women who gave it back in kind.

Now, since the horror, I gave no love of any kind.

Everything was changed. Without and within.

My father insisted we could simply continue at the point where we had left off, that I should resume pursuing my former goal. That I would still one day be king.

I knew differently. I would never be king. I lived on for one purpose only. To root out and destroy the threat to my family.

Thus, when it came to the redhead from California, nothing was changed. The reasons might be different, but the truth remained the same: I had nothing to offer her. I might dream of her a little. But in practice, I would leave her—and the emotions she stirred in me—strictly alone.

How long did I stand there, in the dark, thinking of honest eyes and Titian hair, tormenting myself with what I wouldn’t do?

Too long.

At last I bestirred myself. My little sister was right. Lurking in the secret passageways was a senseless waste of time, time that would be better spent in slumber. There was no danger here. Only empty shadows and a futile longing for a tender touch I would never know.

I slid my thumb to the switch of my flashlight.

In that fraction of a second before light spilled out in front of me, I saw a glow—another light, moving toward me down the passageway.

Another light, and the sounds of stealthy footfalls approaching.