Chapter 75:

Between Mayah’s still-swollen foot, and the slipperiness of the shelterbelt’s limestone shell, it took all Mayah had to pull herself up mostly by her arms. When she finally reached the gap in the branches, she was panting. She leaned against one of the sturdier boughs and closed her eyes. She almost wanted to go back down to the Cursed side. Let Sukren come find her. He always had before.

But no, that was not who Mayah was, that was not who she had to be. Special, different, not just a little Rajas, not just a little Rajas, anything but just a little Rajas. Wasn’t that what she wanted with Sukren? A new dynamic?

Mayah opened her eyes. She looked out through her glasses into the bio-dome proper, at the curved rows of the Xhota huts. The sun had already disappeared behind the western mountains to her left. Firelamps, one after another, were being lit behind the curtains of the bazaar stalls. She watched them light up the night as the last of the merchants hurried back to their homes. Just like on that evening almost three-quarters of a season ago, when Sukren had drugged her and dragged her across the shelterbelt.

And now I’m coming for you, Mayah thought silently. Her fingers gripped the branch she was holding a little more tightly. I’m coming, Sukren, and this time I’m going to help you.

Then Mayah faltered. She clung to the limestone-capped wood in her hands, feeling like she was back on the edge of the plateau up on the southern mountains underneath the sweeping sky. Oh! she cried out in her heart. What does it matter why Sukren hid his life from me? What does it matter if it’s because he thought I was a little Rajas or if it’s because I’m different for some other reason? He lied to me. It won’t make me feel any better if it’s because he thought I was too special to know about his life. It won’t make any difference at all. He lied to me, he’s a liar, a liar, a liar!

Tears were once more in Mayah’s eyes, but this time she didn’t wipe them away. Instead, she began lowering herself down the Saranaian side of the shelterbelt. Thankfully, it was easier on the way down. There were more knots on the trunks and less limestone. Soon enough, her feet touched the ground.

All at once, shouts, rising up in command, echoed out from the urb row nearest to Mayah. “Stop! Halt! Stay where you are!”

***

When Sukren came to, he didn’t know where he was. His memories were clouded. There had been Eenma voices, a clinic bed beneath him, and the pinch of a needle in his arm, then another, again and again…

Sukren touched the pressure patches on his eyes. There was a soreness there, but the infection seemed to have been healed. Reaching out with his hands, he touched a wall. Slowly, carefully, Sukren followed the wall by feel, until he was back to where he had started. He then raised his arms above his head. The tips of his fingers just touched the ceiling.

Wood, Sukren decided. He was inside a castle, he remembered that. Was he then inside a dorm room? No, couldn’t be. There were no bedshelves, no window. As far as he could tell, there was nothing in the room at all.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Sukren tried feeling his way around again. This time his fingers found a crack that he traced up and to the left and down again. A door. With a hinged flap at its base.

It was then that Sukren realized he was in a cell. He had seen one before, from the outside. There were a few placed in each of the castles for princes or princesses who demonstrated violent tendencies against other Rajas. But to put him, a doctor-priest, inside a Rajas cell? If Sukren had not already been sure that the Uprising had happened, he was convinced of it now.

“Is anyone there?” Sukren called.

There was no answer. Sukren felt his way to a corner and sat down, leaning against the wall behind him. The exploration had worn him out. His body was still weak. After diurnals of sleeping in the dirt, the wall’s wooden surface felt harsh and unforgiving. Sukren felt intensely aware of its texture against his skin. He reached up to touch the patches over his eyes again, then stopped himself.

The bitterness that Sukren’s illness had forestalled was coming back now, in full force. With it too came a sweeping sense of loss. Struck by the finality of his blindness, Sukren for the first time let himself look back and see the truth. The happiness he had known with Mayah in the village was never going to be his again.

Sukren pressed the heels of his hands against his bandaged eye sockets. There was a knot in his throat, but no tears came. Instead, a familiar self-blame engulfed him. What had running away across the shelterbelt brought him? Hunger, imprisonment, blindness. His hope that he and Mayah would ever find a way back to the relationship they’d shared had been a fool’s hope all along. Sukren had known it was over the second he’d stepped foot inside Lost Technology Castle with her. But he’d still refused to face it.

Now Mayah was as distant from him as ever – and missing, to boot. The one charge of his life left unfulfilled. While he was waking up blind and imprisoned by the Eenta. For Mayah’s sake. All, all, for Mayah’s sake.

This is what you get, he told himself, for loving a Rajas.

***

I want to beg the doctor-priest to keep the results a secret. But loyal though he is to me, we both know no one would believe him. Everyone knows my blood is as pure as a queen’s. Even I thought I would produce at least one queened baby. But two?

I look at my baby girls, and my heart breaks.

“Tell everyone,” I whisper, “That only one girl lit up the Dome Ring.”

The girls are fraternal twins. Both made the Dome Ring’s emerald head flash, but since their genetic material is not identical, Queen Kalia could believe it if told only one girl was eligible to be queen.

Queen Kalia thinks she has me conquered – surely she will not insist on a re-test with a different doctor-priest, O Sarana, please, please please!

I am frightened by my unexpected hope. The part of me that died when they killed my first child resists the quickening in my blood. But even so, I forge on. Despair is not a cloak I know how to wear, and so my mind spins with possibilities. Only one girl will be claimed by Queen Kalia. The other girl will be left alone, and I will be able to raise her against Queen Kalia, or even have her sent away so that at the right moment…

I look at the doctor-priest. “Do you understand?” I ask.

“Yes,” he replies, simply, firmly. Then he gestures. “Which daughter?”

– excerpt from The Journal of the Lost Princess, Part I

Written 765 years after the Crash Landing