Chapter 25:
Mayah frowned. For three mornings now she’d woken up early to puzzle over Sukren’s parchment. It was hard – and hot – reading under the covers with only a mouth guard night light shining through her teeth, but it was the only way Mayah could keep looking for Sukren without triggering further suspicion from the other princesses. Thankfully, he’d written it in Rajim script! Mayah didn’t think she would’ve been able to dare read a whole parchment of serf letters.
Although, truth be told, maybe it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like Mayah was understanding what she was reading anyway. RFDFC, the note started, but that wasn’t a word! And the rest of it was the same, letters strung together randomly, meaninglessly.
She bared her teeth, half out of frustration, half to get a little more light. RFDFC, then a comma. Like it was the beginning of a letter. Like it was – a name.
Mayah stifled a gasp. Holy Sarana, what if it was a name? What if it was her name? If this was a note from Sukren, which it had to be, who else would he be writing to, then the RFDFC could be a code for MAYAH. Yes, yes, that made sense! There were two Fs right where there were two As in her name!
If she hadn’t been convinced before that the note was from Sukren, she was now. Mayah had loved puzzles and codes when she was younger. She remembered writing out messages to him, replacing letters with numbers, or hiding the words in a drawing. It had been so much fun!
The bunk bed above her made a creaking sound. Mayah immediately shoved Sukren’s parchment deeper under the covers, yanking the bedspread off her head as she did so. Her heart thumping, she lay there with her eyes and mouth closed tight.
Slowly the sleep-sounds of the other princesses turned into yawns and footsteps and murmured greetings. Mayah carefully pushed her covers down so that they were bunched up over Sukren’s parchment at the foot of her bed. Then she got up and pretended to stretch. If she ate breakfast really quickly maybe she could get back here and figure out the rest of the letter…
“You should eat with us today.”
Mayah almost jumped. Fearfully, she glanced up at the princess still sitting in her bunk bed across the aisle. “Me?” she whispered.
“Don’t you want to?”
There was only one right answer. Mayah made herself nod as enthusiastically as she could. Oh Sarana, she complained inwardly. How am I going to get away from them now? And I still don’t even know their names!
“You should probably get dressed in something purple,” the princess said. “That’s what we’re all wearing this week.”
Mayah forced the corners of her mouth up. Then she remembered she was still wearing the night light mouth guard. She yanked it quickly out of her mouth. No, wait, why had she done that, she should have waited, she shouldn’t have removed it in front of the other princesses! Oh Sarana, Mayah was so out of practice dealing with other people. Breakfast was going to be terrible, just terrible.
***
To Mayah’s utter surprise, breakfast was fine.
Oh, it wasn’t fun, by any means, but nobody grilled her or told her they were watching her, and for Mayah that was practically a success story. It even felt nice to sit with other princesses, for once. She didn’t say much, well, she didn’t say anything at all, actually, but that was okay, it was nice enough just to sit and smile and not be stared at for being alone. If only it could be this way all the time. Then waiting to become a senior princess wouldn’t be half as awful a process as it was.
The worst part of breakfast, in fact, was having to sit there and worry about whether someone would find Sukren’s parchment while she was eating. Mayah didn’t like it there in her bed, unsecured, barely hidden. Not to mention her green headscarf tucked under her mattress. What if a Chenta servie found either of them while cleaning the dorm? What if they told someone?
The thought was enough to give Mayah the courage to excuse herself from breakfast as early as was polite. She hurried back in time to find the dorm already tidied up and the beds made. Barely breathing, Mayah rushed to her bunk. The headscarf was where she’d left it under the mattress, but the parchment – where – was it –
Then she saw the corner of it sticking out. Someone had folded it over and placed it under her pillow.
Chest heaving, Mayah left the parchment where it was, and re-made the bed. Someone had folded the parchment. That meant someone had seen it. That meant someone knew Mayah was keeping a secret.
Maybe I should give up on looking for Sukren.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Mayah closed her eyes, trembling. Breakfast that morning hadn’t been that bad, right? Maybe all I need to do is go back to waiting it out, smile politely as they watch me, and then I’ll be seeded, I’m so close, I’ve got to be so close, if I had a problem, if I were one of the infertile, wouldn’t they know by now, wouldn’t they have already taken me? I’m going to be seeded soon, I have to be, it’s the only thing that makes sense.
But if I keep on looking for Sukren, if I keep on skirting the rules, then who knows what will happen to me?
She swallowed. Her hands were still on the top of her re-made bed, tracing the crisscrossing fabric stitched into the spread. Maybe I should give up. Maybe I should stop. Don’t I want to become a senior princess?
But don’t I also want to find Sukren?
***
It took only one more morning to crack the code. All Mayah had to do was shift the alphabet over by five letters, the number of letters in her name. When she decoded the parchment using that cipher, the letter turned out to be a song.
A song. An old song. A village song. Or that was when she’d learned it, anyway. She could hear the tune of it even now, in her mind’s ear, the chanted syllables and low, throaty notes rising up out of the blue-lit darkness around the cookfires.
Underneath the covers again, Mayah closed her eyes. She wasn’t supposed to think about the village. Now and then a forbidden image or sense-memory would come to her, but it was dangerous to let it linger. Everything about this parchment, no, about this search for Sukren, was dangerous.
Once more she thought about letting go. She’d had almost every meal with the princesses in her dorm, now, ever since that first breakfast, and she’d even learned the name of one of them, Yaw or something. Why risk her senior princessship?
Besides, what was Mayah supposed to do now? How could old song lyrics help her find Sukren?
Oh Sarana, she missed him so much it hurt, oh, how she missed him, she missed him, she missed him!
***
Back and forth she went. Let Sukren go? No, she couldn’t. Let being seeded go? No, no, no. For six diurnals she slept with the parchment under her pillow, unable to keep looking for Sukren, unable to let go of looking for him. Sometimes it felt like she was barely attached to the ground, that if she merely lifted her hands to the bio-dome above, she’d float up and away. Other times it felt like she was being crushed beneath the roots of the castle.
I wish Yaw hadn’t asked me to eat with them, she thought unhappily. I feel like I was going somewhere before then. But now I’m stuck again.
Stuck again. And to make it worse, on her way to class again. Mayah made a face, then looked around quickly to make sure no one had seen. Good. She was so tired of the same classes over and over again. Every four diurnals, junior princesses started a new unit. Painting, then dance, then pottery, then dramatic storytelling, then cameragramery, then music, then theater, then architecture, then sculpture. Followed by a two-diurnal break, and then the whole cycle started all over again. Painting, then dance, then pottery, then dramatic storytelling… Mayah had been in Lost Technology Castle for almost four seasons, which meant she’d completed eight painting units. Today they were studying architecture. Which Mayah actually liked! But having studied it seven times, and the exact same thing seven times, too, well, it got a little boring.
“It was the Eternal Queen Sarana who discovered the properties of the hollow-trees,” the regent was saying from the front of the classroom. Mayah played with her stylus in the cubby beneath her desk. “She built the bio-dome by pruning and slicing the trees until they grew the direction she wanted. Can anyone tell me why she had the bio-dome grow out of an oval-shaped base?”
Mayah knew the answer, not that she was going to share it. Still playing with her stylus, she responded in her head. Any other shape, and the hollow-trees would collapse under their own weight. The Eternal Queen Sarana knew this. So instead of growing a semi-sphere, she grew a semi-ellipsoid.
“That’s right,” the regent said, in response to someone else. “But why did the Eternal Queen Sarana then grow the shelterbelt?”
Because even a semi-ellipsoid needs support. The shelterbelt provides the hollow-trees with enough lift to get their branches up and overhead. That’s why we call the shelterbelt our circle of life. It’s a circle, we live inside it, and it’s the reason we can have a bio-dome at all.
“Excellent!”
Mayah smiled a little. It was fun to pretend at least that she was participating in class. She sat back in her chair as the regent began passing out a sheet of paper to each desk. Mayah knew it would be the letter the Eternal Queen Sarana had written around the time she’d created the bio-dome. In it were some instructions on how to cut living-wood properly. Mayah yawned. After reading the letter, they would be expected to practice by slicing up a bonsai. That had stopped being fun after, oh, maybe the fifth time!
The regent placed Mayah’s copy of the letter on her desk. Mayah didn’t pay him much attention, expecting him to move on. When he didn’t, however, Mayah glanced up. Did the regent want something from Mayah? No, he wasn’t even looking at her. He was standing by her desk, but he was looking out at everybody else over Mayah’s head.
“It’s always helpful,” the regent said, as if to the rest of the class, “to look up the source of a message.”
Mayah was confused. She’d never heard a regent say something like that before. And what in the bio-dome did he even mean? The source of the Eternal Queen’s letters was the book The Letters of Sarana that Started the World. Everyone knew that. But how would looking up the book help Mayah learn how to better cut living-wood? She had a copy of the letter with the instructions already! The regent wasn’t making any sense. Unless – unless –
Unless he was talking about a different message.
Mayah clenched her stylus in her fist. Stay calm, don’t make any sudden movements, don’t act like anything is different… She bent her head over the paper on her desk, forcing herself to breathe normally. She didn’t let herself smile. She got up and got her bonsai and cut through it exactly like the instructions said. But when the regent said class was over, everyone dismissed, Mayah practically scampered out the door.