Crown of Coral and Pearl

“I love you, Nor. Be careful.”

“I love you, too,” I said, doing my best to keep my voice from breaking. As I walked to the flap, the kite seller pulled a red kite from the wall of the tent and handed it to me.

“They’ll wonder what you were doing in here,” he explained.

“I can’t pay for it. I’m sorry.”

“Consider it a gift.”

I touched his arm for a moment. “Thank you.”

I stepped out of the tent and blinked against the bright sunlight. Suddenly a man’s gloved hand closed around my arm and yanked me back into the aisle, where two other soldiers waited.

“What are you running from, girl?” Riv demanded, his putrid breath wafting into my face.

I struggled against his grip. “I wasn’t running from anyone. I came to buy a kite.”

“It looks like you forgot your escort in the process.”

I gritted my teeth and glared at him. “I don’t need an escort. And you have no right to touch me.”

Riv laughed at his friends. “Cheeky little bitch, isn’t she?”

The blade of Talin’s knife was against Riv’s throat before he could say another word. “You forget you’re speaking to a lady, and your future queen.”

Riv’s hand released me immediately, and I stumbled over to Ceren’s guards.

“Is everything all right, my lady?” Talin asked, his knife still pressed to Riv’s neck.

“I was just getting this for Prince Ceren,” I said, holding up the kite bearing the Ilarean crest. “Were you looking for me?”

Talin shot me a look as pointed as his blade, but he released Riv with a shove and took my arm. “Come with me,” he said, dragging me back down the aisle. When we reached an unmarked silk tent, he pulled me inside, waving his knife at a man selling what looked to be Varenian pearls to another man.

“You can’t come in here,” the merchant shrieked, but he cowered when he saw the Ilarean crest on Talin’s armor. The port was considered neutral territory, but the traders who came to the floating market weren’t supposed to trade the pearls to anyone but Ilareans.

“Leave now, and I won’t report you to King Xyrus. Selling Varenian pearls to a Galethian is illegal, as you well know,” Talin said.

The merchant nodded and gathered his wares before hurrying out on the Galethian’s heels.

When they were gone, Talin turned to me. “What were you thinking, running off into the market like that?”

I tried to come up with an excuse more plausible than a kite for a prince who lived inside a mountain, but there wasn’t one. “Please don’t ask me that, Talin.”

“How can I protect you if I don’t know if I can trust you?”

I stepped closer to Talin and carefully took his hand. “You can trust me. I swear it.”

“Can I? Then why did we really come to the market? Tell me the truth.”

“I—”

“The truth, Nor.”

I crossed my arms and sat down on a tufted pillow. “Sami trades illegally at the port sometimes with the Galethians. He knew the value of the pearls hadn’t gone down, that someone was deliberately cheating us. We thought it was your father, based on the rumors Sami heard. Before I left Varenia, I had hoped I might be able to talk to King Xyrus and convince him that if he didn’t back off, we were going to starve, and he would run out of pearls.”

“So why did you want to come to the market?”

“To meet with Sami. I was supposed to find him here. It was the only safe place we could think of.”

Talin came to sit next to me. “And what were you going to do when you met him here?”

“I was supposed to report everything I’d learned to him.”

Talin’s eyebrows lifted. “So you are a spy.”

I snorted. “Hardly. The one time I followed Ceren down to the lake in the mountain, he caught me. I’ve never been so terrified in my life. And you caught me outside Ceren’s study the night before the trip to Lake Elwin.”

“I assume you’ve now spoken with Sami?” he asked.

I nodded. “He told me what you did, when you came to Varenia. I know you tried to warn Governor Kristos. Unfortunately, he has chosen not to heed your advice.”

“It’s worse than that,” Talin said. “Governor Kristos threatened to tell my brother that I was a traitor. He and Ceren have some kind of understanding, it seems. That’s why when I saw you in Ilara, I thought...”

“You thought Kristos had sent me to betray you to Ceren?”

“Possibly. I didn’t know. And then when you ran off today, after what happened yesterday... I was afraid you were going to leave. Not that I would blame you. It’s just... I at least wanted to say goodbye.”

There was so much sincerity in his voice and sadness in his eyes. “I’m sorry I worried you. I was afraid you’d try to stop me. And if Governor Kristos doesn’t do something, Ceren could turn all of the people I love into human extensions of his devices, including Zadie.” Tears welled in my eyes at the thought of her attached to one of Ceren’s hoses like some kind of animal. Just because a person could be underwater for so long didn’t mean they should. And how many months would it be before the oysters were gone? Not many, if Ceren made enough of his devices.

“Don’t give up,” Talin said fiercely. “I don’t believe that Kristos wants to surrender to Ceren. I believe he’s just afraid more people will suffer if he doesn’t.”

“He’s a coward.”

“He has every reason to be afraid,” he said. “The Varenians are poor, untrained, and tremendously outnumbered.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “Thank you. I feel so much better now.”

“I’m sorry.” He took a deep breath and released it. “Nor, if your governor believed he could win against Ceren, do you think he would feel differently?”

Governor Kristos had always been good to my family, and I believed he loved our people. Knowing what I did about Ceren, I realized Talin was right: Kristos did have a reason to be worried for them. But what kind of understanding could he have with Ceren that would make him take the prince’s word over his own son’s?

“I don’t know,” I said finally. “Maybe. But the Varenians don’t stand a chance against Ilara’s army.”

“Not alone, perhaps.”

“What do you mean?”

“There is reason to hope, but until we know if Governor Kristos is on our side...”

My breath caught. “Our?”

He glanced at the tent flap. Ceren’s soldiers would be out there, wondering what we were doing. “You said you saved my brother that day out of a sense of duty.”

“Yes.”

He reached for one of my hands. “Just promise me now that I’m not wrong, Nor. Tell me you don’t have feelings for my brother.”

I recoiled at the very idea. “For Thalos’s sake, Talin. First you think I would betray you to Ceren, and now you think I have feelings for someone who would use my people as tools for his own selfish aims? Honestly, the nonsense that comes out of your—”

He closed the space between us, cutting me off with his lips and stealing my thoughts along with my words.

After seeing Sami and Zadie kiss, I had imagined what it would be like to kiss someone I cared for. I had even let myself imagine kissing Talin. But I hadn’t anticipated the contrasts: the softness of his lips above his stubble-roughened chin; the heat of his mouth on my cool skin; the watery looseness of my limbs that flowed to a tight ache low in my belly.

I closed my eyes and pressed closer to him, running my hands over his muscular chest and shoulders, trailing my fingers up to the soft curls just above his collar. I breathed in his scent of sunlight and leather and tightened my grip on his hair, drawing him closer still.

He moaned softly before parting my lips with his tongue, deepening our kiss. For a moment, all my concerns about Varenia and Ceren, all my long-held fears and insecurities, were washed away on a tide of desire, until I was nothing but pure sensation and energy. I was hungry and full at the same time, a million miles away and yet rooted so firmly in my own body I could feel every nerve.

I was drowning; I could never get enough.



      29



When Talin finally pulled away, it took a moment to remember where I was. He pressed his fingertips gently to my swollen lips. I kissed his fingers and brought my hand up to cup his cheek, then tucked his hair behind his ear. He shivered at the sensation, biting his lower lip, and I wondered what else I could do to make him shiver like that again.

“Nor,” he said, moving his fingers up to my cheek. The touch of his fingers against my scar startled me, and I pulled back on instinct.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, still holding me, his eyes searching mine.

I drew his hands away from my face gently. “The guards will be suspicious.”

He cleared his throat and rose to his feet, pulling me up with him. “Of course. I was being impulsive.”