Red Queen

Your schedule is as follows:

0730—Breakfast / 0800—Protocol / 1130 Luncheon

1300—Lessons / 1800—Dinner.

Lucas will escort you to all. Schedule is not negotiable.

Her Royal Highness Queen Elara of House Merandus.

The note is short and to the point, not to mention rude. My mind swims at the thought of five hours of Lessons, remembering how terrible I was at school. With a groan, I throw the note back down on the nightstand. It lands in a pool of golden morning light, just to tease me.

Like yesterday, the three maids flutter in, quiet as a whisper. Fifteen minutes later, after suffering through tight leather leggings, a draping gown, and other strange, impractical clothes, we settle on the plainest thing I can find in the closet of wonders. Stretchy but sturdy black pants, a purple jacket with silver buttons, and polished gray boots. Besides the glossy hair and the war paint, I almost look like myself again.

Lucas waits on the other side of the door, one foot tapping against the stone floor. “One minute behind schedule,” he says the second I step into the hall.

“Are you going to babysit me every day or just until I learn my way around?”

He falls into step beside me, gently guiding me in the right direction. “What do you think?”

“Here’s to a long and happy friendship, Officer Samos.”

“Likewise, my lady.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Whatever you say, my lady.”

Next to last night’s feast, breakfast looks dull in comparison. The “smaller” dining room is still large, with a high ceiling and a view of the river, but the long table is only set for three. Unfortunately for me, the other two happen to be Elara and Evangeline. They’re already halfway through their bowls of fruit by the time I shuffle in. Elara barely glances at me, but Evangeline’s sharp-eyed stare is enough for both of them. With the sun bouncing off her metal getup, she looks like a blinding star.

“You should eat quickly,” the queen says without looking up. “Lady Blonos does not tolerate tardiness.”

Across from me, Evangeline laughs into her hand. “You’re still taking Protocol?”

“You mean you aren’t?” My heart leaps at the prospect of not having to sit through classes with her. “Excellent.”

Evangeline scoffs at me, brushing off the insult. “Only children take Protocol.”

To my surprise, the queen takes my side. “Lady Mareena has grown up under terrible circumstances. She knows nothing of our ways, of the expectations she must fulfill now. Surely you understand her needs, Evangeline?”

The reprimand is calm, quiet, and threatening. Evangeline’s smile drops, and she nods, not daring to meet the queen’s eye.

“Luncheon today will be on the Glass Terrace, with the ladies of Queenstrial and their mothers. Try not to gloat,” Elara adds, though I never would. Evangeline, on the other hand, blushes white.

“They’re still here?” I hear myself ask. “Even after—not being chosen?”

Elara nods. “Our guests will be here for the coming weeks, to properly honor the prince and his betrothed. They won’t leave until after the Parting Ball.”

My heart plummets in my chest until it bounces around my toes. So more nights like last night, with the pressing crowd and a thousand eyes. They’ll ask questions too, questions I’ll have to answer. “Lovely.”

“And after the ball, we leave with them,” Elara continues, twisting the knife. “To return to the capital.”

The capital. Archeon. I know the royal family goes back to Whitefire Palace at the end of every summer, and now I’m going too. I’ll have to leave, and this world I can’t understand will become my only reality. I’ll never be able to go home. You knew this, I tell myself, you agreed to this. But it doesn’t hurt any less.

When I escape back into the hallway, Lucas ushers me down the passage. As we walk, he smirks at me. “You have watermelon on your face.”

“Of course I do,” I snap, wiping at my mouth with my sleeve.

“Lady Blonos is just through here,” he says, gesturing to the end of the hall.

“What’s the story about her? Can she fly or make flowers grow out of her ears?”

Lucas cracks a smile, humoring me. “Not quite. She’s a healer. Now, there’s two kinds of healers: skin healers and blood healers. All of House Blonos are blood healers, meaning they can heal themselves. I could throw her off the top of the Hall and she’d walk away without a scratch.”

I’d like to see that tested, but I don’t say so out loud. “I’ve never heard of a blood healer before.”

“You wouldn’t have, since they’re not allowed to fight in the arenas. There’s simply no point in them doing it.”

Wow. Yet another Silver of epic proportions. “So if I have, um, an episode—”

Lucas softens, understanding what I’m trying to say. “She’ll be just fine. The curtains, on the other hand . . .”

“That’s why they gave her to me. Because I’m dangerous.”

But Lucas shakes his head. “Lady Titanos, they gave her to you because your posture is terrible and you eat like a dog. Bess Blonos is going to teach you how to be a lady and if you light her up a couple of times, no one will blame you.”

How to be a lady . . . this will be awful.

He raps his knuckles on the door, making me jump. It swings open on silent, smooth hinges, revealing a sunlit room.

“I’ll be back to bring you to lunch,” he says. I don’t move, my feet planted, but Lucas nudges me into the dreaded room.

The door swings behind me, this time shutting out the hall and anything that might calm me down. The room is fine but plain with a wall of windows, and totally empty. The buzzing of cameras, lights, electricity, is vibrantly strong in here, almost burning the air around me with its energy. I’m sure the queen is watching, ready to laugh at my attempts to be proper.

“Hello?” I say, expecting a response, but nothing comes

I cross to the windows, looking out on the courtyard. Instead of another pretty garden, I’m surprised to find this window doesn’t face outside at all but down into a gigantic white room.

The floor is several stories below me, and a track rings the outer edge. In the center, a strange contraption moves and turns, spinning round and round with outstretched metal arms. Men and women, all in uniform, dodge the spinning machine. It picks up speed, twirling faster, until only two remain. They’re quick, dipping and dodging with grace and speed. At every turn the machine accelerates, until it finally slows, shutting down. They’ve beaten it.

This must be some kind of training, for Security or Sentinels.

But when the two trainees move on to target practice, I realize they aren’t Security at all. The pair of them shoot bright red fireballs into the air, exploding targets as they rise and fall. Each one is a perfect shot, and even from up here, I recognize their smiling faces. Cal and Maven.

So this is what they do during the day. Not learning to rule, to be a king, or even a proper lord, but to train for war. Cal and Maven are deadly creatures, soldiers. But their battle isn’t just on the lines. It’s here, in a palace, on the broadcasts, in the heart of every person they rule. They will rule, not just by right of a crown but by might. Strength and power. It’s all the Silvers respect, and it’s all it takes to keep the rest of us slaves.

Evangeline steps up next. When the targets fly, she throws out a fan of sharp silver metal darts to take down each one in turn. No wonder she laughed at me for Protocol. While I’m in here learning how to eat properly, she’s training to kill.

“Enjoying the show, Lady Mareena?” a voice crows behind me. I turn around, my nerves tingling a bit. What I see doesn’t do anything to calm me.

Lady Blonos is a horrifying sight, and it takes all of my manners to keep my jaw from dropping. Blood healer, able to heal herself. I understand now what that means.

She must be over fifty, older than my mother, but her skin is smooth and shockingly tight over her bones. Her hair is perfectly white, slicked back, and her eyebrows seem fixed in a constant state of shock, arched on her unwrinkled forehead. Everything about her is wrong, from her too-full lips to the sharp, unnatural slope of her nose. Only her deep gray eyes look alive. The rest, I realize, is fake. Somehow she was able to heal or change herself into this monstrous thing in an attempt to look younger, prettier, better.

“Sorry,” I finally manage, “I came in, and you weren’t—”

“I observed,” she clips, already hating me. “You stand like a tree in a storm.”

She seizes my shoulders and pulls them back, forcing me to stand up straight. “My name is Bess Blonos, and I’m going to attempt to make you a lady. You’re going to be a princess one day, and we can’t have you acting like a savage, can we?”

Savage. For a brief, shining moment, I think about spitting in silly Lady Blonos’s face. But what would that cost me? What would that accomplish? And it would only prove her right. Worst of all, I realize I need her. Her training will keep me from slipping and, most important, keep me alive.

“No,” a hollow shell of my voice answers. “We can’t have that.”

Exactly three and a half hours later, Blonos releases me from her clutches and back into Lucas’s care. My back aches from the posture lessons about how to sit, stand, walk, and even sleep (on your back, arms at your sides, always still), but it’s nothing compared to the mental exercise she put me through. She drilled the rules of court into my head, filling me with names, protocols, and etiquette. In the last few hours I received a crash course in anything and everything I’m supposed to know. The hierarchy among the High Houses is slowly coming into focus, but I’m sure I’ll mess up something anyway. We only scratched the surface of Protocol, but now I can go to the queen’s stupid function with at least some idea of how to act.

The Glass Terrace is relatively close by, only a floor down and a hallway over, so I don’t get much time to collect myself before facing Elara and Evangeline again. This time, when I step through the doorway, I’m greeted by invigorating fresh air. I’m outside for the first time since I became Mareena, but now, with the wind in my lungs and the sun on my face, I feel more like Mare again. If I close my eyes, I can pretend none of this ever happened. But it did.

The Glass Terrace is as ornate as Blonos’s classroom was bare and lives up to its name. A glass canopy, supported by clear, artfully cut columns, stretches over us, refracting the sun into a million dancing colors to match the women milling about. It’s beautiful in an artificial way, like everything else in this Silver world.

Before I have a chance to take a breath, a pair of girls steps in front of me. Their smiles are fake and cold, just like their eyes. Judging by the colors of their gowns (dark blue and red on one, solid black on the other), they belong to House Iral and House Haven. Silks and shadows, I remember, thinking back to Blonos’s lessons on abilities.

“Lady Mareena,” they say in unison, bowing stiffly. I do the same, inclining my head the way Lady Blonos showed me.

“I’m Sonya of House Iral,” the first says, tossing her head proudly. Her movements are lithe and catlike. Silks are quick and quiet, perfectly balanced and agile.

“And I’m Elane of House Haven,” the other adds, her voice barely a whisper. While the Iral girl is dark, with deeply tanned skin and black hair, Elane is pale, with glossy red locks. The dancing sunlight speckles her skin in a perfect halo, making her look flawless. Shadow, bender of light. “We wanted to welcome you.”

But their pointed smiles and narrowed eyes don’t look welcoming at all.

“Thank you. That’s very kind.” I clear my throat, trying to sound normal, and the girls don’t miss the action, exchanging glances. “You also participated in Queenstrial?” I say quickly, hoping to distract them from my terrible social graces.

This only seems to incense them. Sonya crosses her arms, showing sharp nails the color of iron. “We did. Obviously we were not so lucky as you or Evangeline.”

“Sorry—,” comes out before I can stop it. Mareena would not apologize. “I mean, you know I had no intention of—”

“Your intentions remain to be seen,” Sonya purrs, looking more like a cat with every passing second. When she turns, snapping her fingers in a way that makes her nails slice along each other, I flinch. “Grandmother, come meet Lady Mareena.”

Grandmother. I almost breathe a sigh of relief, expecting a kindly old woman to come waddling over and save me from these biting girls. But I’m sorely mistaken.

Instead of a wizened crone, I’m met with a formidable woman made of steel and shadow. Like Sonya, she has coffee-colored skin and black hair, though hers is shot with streaks of white. Despite her age, her brown eyes spark with life.

“Lady Mareena, this is my grandmother Lady Ara, the head of House Iral.” Sonya explains with a pointed smirk. The older woman eyes me, and her gaze is worse than any camera, piercing straight through me. “Perhaps you know her as the Panther?”

“The Panther? I don’t—”

But Sonya keeps talking, enjoying watching me squirm. “Many years ago, when the war slowed, intelligence agents became more important than soldiers. The Panther was the greatest of them all.”

A spy. I’m standing in front of a spy.

I force myself to smile, if only to try and hide my fear. Sweat breaks out on my palms, and I hope I don’t have to shake any hands. “A pleasure to meet you, my lady.”

Ara simply nods. “I knew your father, Mareena. And your mother.”

“I miss them terribly,” I reply, saying the words to placate her.

But the Panther looks perplexed, tipping her head to the side. For a second, I can see thousands of secrets, hard-won in the shadows of war, reflecting in her eyes. “You remember them?” she asks, prodding at my lie.

My voice catches, but I have to keep talking, keep lying. “I don’t, but I miss having parents.” Mom and Dad flash in my mind, but I push them away. My Red past is the last thing I should think about. “I wish they were here to help me understand all this.”

“Hmm,” she says, surveying me again. Her suspicion makes me want to leap off the balcony. “Your father had blue eyes, as did your mother.”

And my eyes are brown. “I am different in many ways, most I don’t even understand yet,” is all I can manage to say, hoping that explanation will be enough.

For once, the queen’s voice is my savior. “Shall we sit, ladies?” she says, echoing over the crowd. It’s enough to pull me away from Ara, Sonya, and the quiet Elane, to a seat where I can breathe a little sigh to myself.

Halfway to Lessons, I begin to feel calm again. I addressed everyone properly and only spoke as much as I had to, as instructed. Evangeline talked enough for both of us, regaling the women with her “undying love” for Cal and the honor she felt at being chosen. I thought the Queenstrial girls would band together and kill her, but they didn’t, to my annoyance. Only the Iral grandmother and Sonya seemed to even care that I was there, though they didn’t push their interrogation any further. But they certainly will.

When Maven appears around the corner, I’m so proud of my survival at lunch that I’m not even annoyed by his presence. In fact, I feel strangely relieved and let a bit of my cold act drop. He grins, coming closer with a few long strides.

“Still alive?” he asks. Compared to the Irals, he’s like a friendly puppy.

I can’t help but smile. “You should send Lady Iral back to the Lakelanders. She’ll make them surrender in a week.”

He forces a hollow laugh. “She’s a battle-ax that one. Can’t seem to understand she’s not in the war any longer. Did she question you at all?”

“More like interrogate. I think she’s angry I beat out her granddaughter.”

Fear flickers in his eyes, and I understand it. If the Panther is sniffing around my trail . . . “She shouldn’t bother you like that,” he mutters. “I’ll let my mother know, and she’ll take care of it.”

As much as I don’t want his help, I don’t see any other way around it. A woman like Ara could easily find the cracks in my story, and then I’ll be truly finished. “Thanks, that would—that would be very helpful.”

Maven’s dress uniform is gone, replaced by casual clothes built for form and function. It calms me a little, to see at least someone looking so informal. But I can’t let anything about him soothe me. He’s one of them. I can’t forget that.

“Are you done for the day?” he says, his face clearing to reveal an eager smile. “I could show you around if you want.”

“No.” The word comes out quickly, and his smile fades. His frown unsettles me as much as his smile. “I have Lessons next,” I add, hoping to soften the blow. Why I care about his feelings, I don’t exactly know. “Your mother loves her schedules.”

He nods, looking a little better. “She does indeed. Well, I won’t keep you.”

He takes my hand gently. The cold I felt on his skin before is gone, replaced with a delightful heat. Before I get a chance to pull away, he leaves me standing there alone.

Lucas gives me a moment to collect myself before noting, “You know, we’d get there much faster if you actually moved.”

“Shut up, Lucas.”