“You mean when my grandmother banished her,” I said. I watched as my aunt’s shoulders tensed.
“Your Majesty,” John whispered. I glanced up to see him staring down at me as his hand tightened on my shoulder. Right. Less taunting and more finishing the formalities so that we could get my aunt the heck out of Nerissette.
“I mean, thank you.” I nodded to her. “I’m sure it will be a great addition to the royal jewels.” I paused and looked around. “So where is it?”
Everyone stood there, watching my aunt stand. “I had thought to present it to you at tonight’s ball.”
“There is no ball,” I said quickly. “No celebrations.”
“Even though today is your seventeenth birthday?” Bavasama asked.
My birthday. I hadn’t even remembered that it was my birthday until someone mentioned it this morning. We’d been too busy hammering out the treaty and finishing up the last of the work needed to rebuild my palace before my aunt’s arrival. Something as silly as a seventeenth birthday seemed unimportant compared to the fate of an entire world.
“Well…” I sighed as I looked at the nobles surrounding us. “I guess since everyone is already here, we can have a small party.”
Yeah, like anything that involved three hundred nobles was ever going to be considered small.
Chapter Two
Three days later—as we made our way to the formal ceremony to see my aunt back off toward her own kingdom—I stared at the glass ball in my hand as the royal carriage, with its flying white horses, soared over the forests between my palace and Neris, the capital city of my country. The leaf inside it rotated slowly, blooming from a small curled ball of green to a fully formed leaf before it browned, the edges withering and curling in on themselves before the leaf crumpled into ashes at the bottom of the orb. Over and over again the leaf appeared, bloomed, and then wilted.
“So what does it do?” Winston asked. I turned to look at my boyfriend. Things had been tense between us since he’d come back to the palace. There were things that he hadn’t wanted to tell me, things he didn’t want me to know. And I had secrets of my own—nightmares that I didn’t want to worry him with.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged, trying to find some way to breach the distance that seemed to have grown up between us. “And since Darinda and the rest of the dryads aren’t here, I don’t have anyone to ask.”
“Have you looked in the library?”
“Yeah.” I huffed as I thought about my worthless trip to the library the morning before. I’d asked the map—a piece of living Tree Folk furniture that had the ability to answer back by writing on its own parchment—and all it had done was send me to books on horticulture. Like that was helpful at all. Then again, I wasn’t surprised.
The map could understand when you made a request, but sometimes—okay, most of the time—she tended to get stuff scrambled. After all, I’d asked her once to see if the library had a copy of Pride and Prejudice, and she’d sent me to a section on how to talk to your children about not bullying pixies while still embracing your own magical legacy.
“Nothing?” Winston pressed.
“Not unless you want to know how to grow healthier ferns,” I said.
“I think I’ll pass. I spent enough time in the woods this year that I don’t want to see another plant for a while.”
“Right.” I winced. “It’s probably better if I wait for Darinda anyway. After all, my guess is this orb actually belongs to the dryads.”
“So you going to give it back to Darinda if she asks for it?” Winston asked cautiously.
“Of course,” I said. “It’s not mine. Besides, I can’t use it. Whatever magic this orb has, I can’t feel it.”
“Right, magic,” he said slowly, his tone guarded.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said, his eyes fixed out the window of our carriage.
“Win, talk to me. Come on.”
“If you could feel the magic of the orb, would you still give it back?” he asked and turned to look at me, his eyes guarded.
“Yes. Like I said, if it belongs to the dryads, then the dryads should be the ones to keep it. Why?”
“Well, it seems to me,” Winston said, glancing out the window again and not meeting my eyes as he pulled his hand away from mine, “that you don’t have too much trouble taking things from people that don’t belong to you these days.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, stunned. What was he trying to say? That I’d been stealing from my people?
“Fifteen percent of your aunt’s tributes every month? Two wagonloads of coins and treasure as reparations are even now making their way into Neris.”
“Those wagons of gold are meant to pay to fix all the damage my aunt’s army did. To rebuild Neris after they destroyed it.”
“And the increase in our people’s taxes?” Winston asked.
“I didn’t have a choice in that, either,” I protested. “We needed that money to keep the army fed. To keep supplies going to the White Mountains while we were laying siege at Bathune’s border.”
“And now that the siege has lifted?” he asked. “Now that we’ve signed a peace treaty and the army is no longer necessary? Will you cut the taxes back down?”
“You really think the army isn’t necessary?” I asked. “Really? You think we’re completely threat-free just because my aunt decided to come here and beg for forgiveness?”
“I think that you’re so busy preparing for war that you’re becoming the very ruler you fought so hard against.”
“What?” I snapped, stunned. “I’m nothing like my aunt. Or the Fate Maker.”
“What you did to her was cruel, Allie. Humiliating her that way in front of all the nobles. You bullied her just like Heidi and Jesse used to bully you.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
“She deserved it. She brought an army into our country and tried to take my throne. She killed our friends. Or did you forget about how Heidi and Jesse died in that forest?”
“The Fate Maker killed our friends,” Winston said. “And you banished him for it.”
“She helped him.”
“And you humiliated her. What do you think happens now?”
“What do you mean?”
“You embarrassed her in front of all those people. Do you think she’s just going to accept that? Or do you think she’s going to go home and let that fester like some kind of open wound? Sit there and think about it for months, getting angrier every single day until she decides that she’s got to have revenge.”
“And then what?” I asked. “You think she’s going to try to march across the border again? After we’ve already beaten her?”
“I think you humiliated her enough that she might be willing to take her chances.”
“Whatever,” I said with a turn to look out my own window.
What made him think he had the right to question my decisions? I was supposed to be the queen—the one in charge. They’d left me here in Neris, abandoned me, to lay siege to the border of Bathune. Winston and Rhys and my father had left me here alone to make decisions, to be queen, and now that they were back, they wanted to second-guess everything I did. It wasn’t fair. They’d left me with no one to lean on. They didn’t have the right to come back and complain because they didn’t like the decisions later.
Besides that, Winston was my Prince Consort—the guy who was supposed to have my back. And even if I had gone a little too far, been a little too harsh with my terms on the peace treaty, it was because I was trying to keep him safe. I was trying to keep him alive the only way I could.