In my quarters, I found a copper basin waiting for me, steaming and fragrant with washing oils. I eased in up to my shoulders and took a deep breath. I let out the breath and let go. Tears streamed down my cheeks. It was all too much. The slaughter of the Ba-Hali. The burning of the bodies. The smudging of reality around me. Carbo’s distrust of me. There was too much to keep straight and figure out. We were groping around in the dark on an absurd rite of passage for a Prince with no map and no compass. “Start at the beginning” is not an instruction. My anger and frustration had been held tight and was loosening with my muscles in the steaming basin. I wanted to go home and eat at Febril’s table and drink his terrible coffee. I wanted to watch the Quinze morning mist burn off from the roof and sleep in my own garret room with my well-worn books close at hand. I wanted to return to the library and to my simple, revolving task. Dust the books. To wish for adventure and intrigue was wrong. Books had taught me the adventure was always clear. There was a map or an ancient man with a quest to be completed with the fate of the world in the balance.

I did not know what we were doing. I was not meant for such things. And I was not meant for keeping secrets. Behind every corner and every tree I looked for the Rodanian rebel or signs of him. Why did he want me here in this place with Edouard? Was he able to watch us? I assumed he was in possession of signets we did not have, but could he travel along the same pathways of time as we had or would he travel only along his own? It was too much! I slapped the side of the basin hard with my palm and water spilled over the edges and onto the stone floor. There was a clatter in the corridor and a knock at my door. I knew it was not Edouard, who was still in conference with the King about the conflict with the Ba-Hali and its future. I prayed it was not Carbo come to ask for more details about colorful ground birds of the Rodanian plains. A familiar voice came through the door, but I could not place it.

“I need to speak with you.”

“I am washing up. Can you wait a few minutes for me to finish and get dressed?”

The door opened a crack and a figure slipped through the crack, shut the door, and turned around again to face it.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t be seen snooping around the corridors. I’m not supposed to be in the palace. I’ll face this way until you’re finished.”

I recognized the voice then. It was the stable boy who had helped me on my horse. Probably come to collect his bribe to stay quiet to Carbo and others who might whisper. The prosaic nature of a simple bribery ended my fit of self pity. I dried myself with the towel folded on my bed and put on the accompanying robe. I remained standing with my hands across my chest.

“You may turn around now. What did you have in mind, young man? I’ve not a tremendous amount of coin, but I may be able to put in a good word or have my master put in a word on your behalf if you so wish.”

As the stable boy turned around I realized two things. First, my stable boy was a stable girl, and second, she was terrified. The stress and fear of the morning must have blinded me, because the bird-like features, delicate lashes, and aquiline nose all made her sex obvious to anyone looking past the sheared hair. Her eyes were light blue, almost gray, and they were wide as she stared at me, making no response to my query about our terms.

“What’s your name, girl?”

“Elisha.” It was no more than a whisper.

“What’s the matter Elisha? What is so important that you had to come into the palace and find me? That can’t have been too easy.”

“You think I want money. For hiding your ignorance of horses.”

I opened my arms in a shrug.

“I apologize if I offended you. I assumed.”

“I heard you,” she said. “I heard you talking.”

I gestured for her to leave the corner of the doorway and to sit down next to me on the bed, a fair distance apart. We did not have to look each other in the eyes. She could stare straight ahead at the doorway if that made things easier. Once we were settled in a more normal conversational position, I continued.

“Now, what’s the matter?”

“You weren’t looking behind you. You were only concerned with the Prince’s saddlebags and what he put in it that you didn’t see me. I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop. I was out looking for a mare that had run off from beneath her mount”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

That her mount was dead was left unspoken, but she paused and swallowed.

“I never found her.”

There was another long pause and swallow.

“You and the Prince you said–”

She whipped her shoulders to the side and stared into my eyes, her pupils blacking out all the gray. Her chest heaved.

“Am I real?” she asked. And the floodgates opened. “Am I in your and Prince Edouard’s imagination? Is that what my life amounts to? My seventeen years have not been pretty and if you’re dreaming them up I’d have preferred something nicer. But now that it comes down to it I find I want to be real. I don’t want to fade at the edges like you said about Master Carbo.”

I could not let her see the panic I was feeling. This was bad. Very very bad. We had never discussed the possibility of one of them questioning what was happening on the twenty eighth floor. Maybe she wasn’t real. Maybe she was only a page in a book on the top floor of a library, a part of an elaborate game to help prepare a Prince to lead real people. But I wasn’t so sure that was the truth.

“Elisha,” I said, taking her hand in mine. “Do you feel real?”

She nodded, a tear running down her cheek and leaving a streak on her dirty face. Not everyone had been able to clean up after the ride yet. I could not imagine the mental turmoil she was going through.

“Do you feel my hand? Do you remember your seventeen years?”

“Course I do.”

“Then what are you asking me?”

“I want you to explain what you and your master were on about.”

“I can’t do that.”

“I could tell Carbo. Doesn’t take any brains to tell he has no love for you.”

“I could kill you.”

“I don’t think you will,” she said. “You seem a nice man to me. You helped me after the skirmish and I saw your face as the savages were stacked and burned. I think you feel a lot of pain.”

“You’re observant, aren’t you?”

It was her turn to shrug.

“Listen,” I said. “This is not my place. I need to talk to my Prince. And I don’t think you’re the type to run and tell stories either. So we may be at an impasse for a moment.”

She stared at her hands. She had pulled hers away from mine and intertwined her own. They were sweaty and I could see her heart beat in her wrists. For all of her threats, she was afraid. It was her fear that compelled me to speak.

“I can’t tell you what you want to know,” I said. “But I think you’re real.”

“You said we blurred at the edges without…without that thing.”

I reached across and put my palm over her eyes. She flinched at my sudden movement but held still.

“Can you see me?”

“No.”

“But I’m still here. Why should my observance of you determine if you’re real or not?”

She did not have an answer for me, and I had no better explanation for her. I found that I had not lied to her. That was what I felt, though I had not until then been able to put it into words, this uncanny experience we were having. I thanked her for her help earlier in the day and bade her use my small ewer of water to wash the grime from her face. We parted as close to friends as we could under the strange circumstances, and with a promise from me that Edouard and I would not ignore her, but would give her the best explanation we could. As the door closed behind her I thought of the trusting nature of youth, even those who had been hard used in their short time. For all her bluster and threats, it would have been easy for a man in my position to have her killed in an accident or outright murder without the consequences coming back to me. Girls had been killed for far less, especially in the early Empire. She was not a citizen, but a subject.

Afterwards, I sat on the chest in front of my bed and stared into the empty fire grate. It was full dark and few stars were visible as clouds moved in over the towering palace above the city of Singhal. It was late in the night before I heard the sounds of Edouard returning to his quarters. My fire was cold and I had lit no candles. I waited for him to wash up, to prepare himself for sleep in all those particular ways even kind Princes have before knocking on the partition and entering his quarters. It was the opposite of my own. A crackling fire was going and a candle burned low on a tray in his lap. He read a bound volume by its light and it played about his face as his eyes left the page to see me.

“Ori, I had no idea you were awake. You were very quiet. Have I woken you?”

“No,” I said, sitting at the end of his bed.

“I expect you want me to recap my time with the King after that disaster today. I’m afraid progress is going to be difficult as Everard is every bit what the histories say about him. However, I do think there are a few stratagems we might pull out. That’s what this is, actually,” he said, indicating his reading material. “It’s a treatise on clothes and the power of clothes in society and all that rubbish. I think we can use it as a way in, a way to breach the culture of the Ba-Hali. Of course, Everard only sees their nakedness as proof of their savagery which I told him–”

“Edouard.”

My tone silenced him.

“Edouard, we have a problem.”