Kedrick’s back. He arrived back yesterday and, before leaving the middle ring tonight, I had given him our secret gesture. I hoped it hadn’t been too subtle for him. Sometimes I forgot he was unused to the discreet ways of my world.
I weave my way around the layers of semi-circle tables where the court members sit and ignore their whispers as I pass. I am used to their gossiping. It’s the consequence of having worn a veil since birth.
I twist through the dark passageways of the palace and climb wooden steps until I reach my room about half way up the farthest tower. I change out of my brown robes and into my black set. The light material slithers down to cover me until only my hands and sandalled feet are exposed. The only time black robes are worn is during grieving, but my brother Olandon and I often wore them to sneak around.
I settle into my spot in the opening and will time to move faster. “Come on,” I mutter.
The sky darkens according to its own schedule. Smoke gathers and unfurls, stretching out high above the palace and pitching Osolis into darkness.
At night, I’m blind. The material of my veil is too thick. In the firelight, during the day, I am able to make out the shape of objects from across the room. Not that there is much to look at in here. A bed, a basin, a chest and two fans. I could have been crippled by my impaired sight in our culture. Facial expressions were a blur to me unless I was right in front of the person. But in the last few revolutions, I had become adept at listening for clues like breathing and tone of voice. Posture also gave me a lot of information.
I lean out of the opening. Once the deep voices of two sentry guards fade around a corner, I throw my legs over the side and slide my way down the wall. My robes blend into the dark Kaur wood. After twenty holds, I drop the rest of the way to the ground, landing on soft toes and wait in a crouch at the bottom for any sounds of discovery. When I was twelve I miscounted the amount of holds to the bottom and had to drag myself all the way to Olandon’s room for help.
Low to the ground and close to the shadows, I make my way out of the palace confines to the meeting point in the meadow. I operate by memory, having had nearly six revolutions to learn where to put my feet. I cannot remember the last time I stumbled. The long, drying grass here is the perfect place to see each other. It is so tall it reaches my shoulder. Kedrick has to stoop over to stay hidden, though.
He’s not there when I arrive, but I’m usually first. The meadow is closer to the tower which Kedrick and the other eleven delegates from Glacium share, but I know the layout of the palace much better and he has to sneak away from his guards.
I sit down and close my eyes, stretching my senses as a distraction from the sudden insecurity he may no longer feel the same way about me. He’d been away for three months, things may have changed. The futility of our relationship hadn’t seemed to bother him before, but maybe he had decided the dead end of being with me was no longer worth it. A Bruma and a Solati together? The idea would be disgusting to both of our people. Which was why it was paramount to keep it hidden.
There is a slight rustle as a gentle breeze sweeps across the meadow. Apart from this, it is beautifully silent. Footsteps interrupt the tranquillity. For a graceful looking male, Kedrick has a heavy step. Aquin would have a spasm if I ever took the Prince to see him.
“Olina,” he says. His voice warms me.
Any doubts of his feelings disappear as he crouches next to me, pulling me into his arms. My face warms underneath my veil. I wonder if he can feel it through the material of his thin blue robes. Unfortunately, the peace delegates from Glacium only have blue robes to wear during their stay. They don’t blend in very well. I pull away after a few moments. We had held hands once before he left on tour, but this was our first embrace. It made me a little uncomfortable. I knew this was normal where he came from, but on Osolis, we didn’t show intimacy outside of our sleeping quarters.
“Kedrick,” I greet with a smile in my voice.
“Kedrick,” he copies in a playful tone. “That’s all I get after three months?” I hear the teasing in his tone and then the increasing heat from his body as he leans close. I move my head back and he laughs.
“Not even a kiss to say hello?” he asks. I shake my head, eyes wide, but a small thrill goes through me. He throws himself down in the grass and heaves a dramatic sigh, I laugh under my breath at his display.
“Did you even miss me?” he asks.
“Yes.” My breath catches at my accidental admission. Kedrick has been wearing off on me. Solati never talk without thinking. I quickly pluck one of the wilting wildflowers from the ground and focus my attention on it, twirling it around in my fingers.
He sits bolt upright. “Did you just admit to missing me?”
I ignore him and keep toying with the flower, a small smile playing on my lips. “I leave you alone for three months and you become a Bruma,” he continues. My smile turns into a grin.
“I hope the tour went well,” I say, changing the subject. Kedrick shuffles over and grabs both of my hands. His hands are warm and calloused from combat training. I hope he can’t feel the roughness of mine. I take great care to keep them soft so no one finds out my other secret.
He brings his mouth to my ear, I can feel the tickle of his breath. “I will tell you of the tour, but I want you to tell me you missed me first.”
For once, I’m glad my face is covered. My face is about to catch on fire, but I’m also burning with curiosity. I’ve never been out of the royal rotations, except for the migration every eighteen months, and this was done in a covered wagon. Now that I think about it, it is quite ironic Kedrick has seen more of my own world than me, yet I am to rule Osolis once my mother’s reign ends.
“I missed you,” I say quickly. He releases my hands and I drop the pieces of the shredded wildflower to the ground.
We talk of his tour. I laugh at his descriptions of the other delegates. On Glacium, where they are from, it is very cold. Many of his men still struggled with our crushing heat and they had already been here for nine months out of their twelve month stay. I doubted these men would adapt if they had not by now, though we were nearly in the third. The hottest position.
“There were no problems,” I say, a question in my voice. Our two worlds had been in a tentative peace for over thirty-three revolutions, but occasionally a villager in the fifth or sixth would cause a disturbance. Many of them remembered their relatives who had been killed or lost in the wars. We were still far from true peace.
“Do you want to try that again?” Kedrick asks, nudging my shoulder with his. I look up and laugh at him.
“Did the villagers cause any problems?” I ask. During his year here we’d been helping each other to understand the others culture. He could now conceal a question within a statement and I could ask a question without apologising afterwards. We laugh at this for a while, it feels great. There are not many people I can be free with like this. Two, to be exact.
He puts a finger under my veiled chin. The touch zaps through me. He turns my face so it’s directly to him. I hold my breath, waiting for whatever happens next. The joking of the moment before is long gone.
“I missed you every day,” he says in the open manner I am so fond of. His face nears mine. I know what he is going to do, but curious, I don’t pull away. He kisses me through the cloth of my veil. I gasp at the intimacy of his mouth touching mine. His warm breath reaches me through the cloth.
He leans away and my skin chills, the grass whispers as he rolls down to lay on his back again, humming quietly to himself.
A smile features permanently on my face the next day. I’m lucky no one is able to see it. They also cannot see the puffiness underneath my eyes, which I know is there. Kedrick and I had stayed in the meadow until the Kaur trees had begun to draw the smoke from the sky in the early hours of the morning. Kedrick, of course, turns up to the morning meal looking as though he’s gotten a refreshing night’s sleep. He told me he was used to nights with little sleep. The celebrations on Glacium often went through to the following day. Such a long celebration was unfathomable to me. It sounded nearly as bad as sitting through one of the tragic plays my mother loved.
The Prince was in negotiations for the day. He detested these because nothing was ever decided. It was the only time I ever heard him complain. I could understand his frustration, he had so many ideas to improve the relationship between our worlds, but mother was blocking him at every turn. I would have loved to be at the negotiations. I should have been in the room, but this would mean mother would have to suffer my presence, and she would rather walk into the fires of the fourth than do that.
After my education with the royal tutors finished at fifteen, I had waited to be given the duties expected of me as Tatuma, the next in line. But there were no invitations, and when months passed and nothing had eventuated, I had decided to pick up my feet and fill my time in other ways. It was not what I wanted to be doing, but it kept me sane.
I climb up the stairs. On my way to the nursery to see the twins.
Olandon, my younger by a year, was already being trained to take over as Head of the Guard. He had been furious on my behalf and ready to refuse when mother had offered this to him, but I’d swallowed my envy and made him accept. She had only done it to try and cause a rift between us and I wouldn’t rise to the bait. The Tatum loved my brother, or some emotion close to it and she hated how close we were, almost as much as she hated me.
The two nannies in the nursery curtsy and continue their tidying.
“Ochave, get out of the opening,” I say in a firm voice. Ochave throws an innocent expression over his shoulder, but drops it once he sees me and clambers down off the sill.
“Lina’s here!” he shouts. Oberon pokes his head out of a chest at the end of his bed.
“Lina’s here!” he echoes and they both rush to greet me, jumping over various strewn obstacles. The twins still have the chubbiness of youth and, unfortunately, the wildness of children without a firm presence in their lives. Their father had died four years ago, when they were still babies. I tried to make up for this loss as much as I could.
I exclaim over their artwork and discoveries of the morning, but my mind is drawn to my thoughts of before.
There’s nothing I wanted more than to start learning how to rule. There were so many things I wanted to change. I wanted to start now. It was so hard to bide my time. And the way I was treated, I couldn’t be sure I would survive long enough to become Tatum.
“Oberon,” I warn. He giggles and takes a wooden toy off the seat a second before one of the nannies sits down. “Come on. We will all go outside,” I say, choking back a laugh at the instant relief on the women’s faces.
Today I tell the twins they are to be guards. One of the orphanage matrons had let me in on this invaluable trick a year ago. I knew the matron well, as I was often down at the orphanage. Sometimes it was to help, but most of the time I used it as a cover for my training sessions with Aquin. He lived deep in the Kaur forest behind their building. In return for the matron’s silence, I organised for carts of apples to be delivered there. The matron’s sister was the head cook in the palace kitchens. They would not talk unless forced.
The twins sandwich me, their prisoner, as we walk down to the middle gardens, keeping an eye out for imaginary foe and signs of ambush. I sit on a low seat. Oberon, my thinker, soon tires of their play and sits down next to me. Ochave continues stabbing his enemy with a broken branch of a Kaur which is too heavy for him. I settle in for the stream of questions I know is coming.
“Lina?” Oberon asks.
“Yes Oberon,” I say, smiling down into his rich brown eyes.
“Nanny was talking about a first and second yesterday,” he says.
I sigh. Of all the questions children ask me, explaining the rotations is the worst. Calling Ochave, I lead them to the kitchen and pick up two pies. The explanation always works better with pies.
“Can I have some?” Ochave asks, not able to bear the wait.
“Hold on,” I say. I lead them up to the top of the steps overlooking the training yard. Watching the guards is their reward for good behaviour. They wave to Olandon. He has a sword, they love him. I bring their attention back to the pies.
“Osolis and Glacium are like two pies split into six pieces.” I cut up both pies into six pieces and push them close together.
“Osolis is hot, full of fire, and Glacium is cold. We share some of our hot with Glacium and they share some of their cold with us.” I pause to answer Oberon when he asks what cold is.
“Our worlds both spin, but Glacium goes this way and we go the other.” I demonstrate, twisting Glacium to the left and Osolis to the right.
I push Ochave’s reaching hand away.
“The piece of the pie closest to the other world is called the first. The next piece is the second.” I continue numbering the pieces of the Osolis pie clockwise until I get to number six. “Right now we are here, in the second.” I point at the second piece again and give them a spoonful each from it.
“As our world turns, we move to the next number.” I twist the pie around again and point to the piece with two bites out of it which is now further around. “Soon we will be here. What number is this?”
“Free,” Oberon replies.
“Yes, three. Remember Glacium is cold and Osolis is hot. When we move away from their cold, our own world gets hotter.” I move the pie into the next position and look at Oberon.
“Four,” he says.
I nod. “When we get to number four, we are so far from Glacium and it is so hot, the land is ravaged by fire and we cannot live there.”
“Then where do we live?” Ochave asks, worry in his voice. The twins had done the migration from the third to the first before, but they would have been too young to remember it.
“We travel back up to the first, where we have another palace. There are two royal rotations on Osolis. So when one is in the fourth, we can live in the other.” I give them a spoonful each from the piece now closest to the Glacium pie.
“Why do we not fall over as the pie spins?” Oberon asks.
I hold back my giggle. “It takes a long time, six months, to move from one number to the next and three years for the world to move all the way around.” I turn the pie in a full circle. “It is too slow to fall over.” Ochave turns to watch the guards, losing interest in learning. “What about these pieces?” Oberon asks.
“This is the fifth,” I answer, pointing to the piece. “Only a few people stay here to put out the fires and rebuild homes. It is hard to live here after the damage from the fourth. We mostly leave it alone so the plants can recover. The sixth is last and this is where we plant our food as every rotation moves through to keep everyone fed.”
Oberon nods with a hand on his chin. I tuck away the sight of him mulling information over so seriously.
“We don’t go to four, five or six,” he clarifies. I nod, more than a little proud of his intelligence. “Yes, it is safer in the first, second and third.
For half an hour we watch the guards go through their defence manoeuvres. Soon one of the twins is wilting mentally and the other physically. I drop them back at the nursery, already making a list of the errors I had seen during the guard’s sword sparring today. I would discuss them with Olandon, he was always eager for my input.