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“Huzzah! We knew you would save us.”
“You are our savior.”
“Our champion.”
“Our queen!”
“Oh, ahh...” I was blushing worse than when Alisdair gave false, sweet compliments to torment me. These praises were actually real. “Th-thank you. My pleasure. Please enjoy your—” I scrambled down, helped off my Eadaoin.
“Wow, my lady. That was wonderful.” She squeezed my shoulders, jumping up and down. “You’re a genius. Of course if they’re one of us, they’re beholden to the queen. If there’s anything Meallan would chew his leg off to prevent, it’s Foalan being chosen as alpha in place of him.”
“The solution just came to me,” I confessed. “Although, when you live under a tyrant, you learn many awful ways to bring people to heel by force.”
She laughed. “You shouldn’t speak of your husband that way.”
Crazily, it wasn’t Alisdair I was thinking of. It was my fath— It was King Salman. Standing up on that stage, a memory assaulted me. A woman once came to the castle, crying because her entire harvest had been seized to feed the army. They hadn’t paid her for what they took, or left her so much as an ear of corn.
Salman listened to her weep for her starving children, and said that her land was in Lyrica, and Lyrica belonged to him. Therefore, every scrap of land and the food growing on it belonged to him—free and clear. If her crop didn’t belong to him, it meant she wasn’t a citizen of Lyrica. She was a dissenter and a traitor, and should be put to death on the spot.
She ran out of the throne room crying. Emiana never found out what happened to her after that.
Alisdair’s right. There is plenty of cruelty and barbarism on my side of the wasteland.
“Should we stay and enjoy the festivities?” Eadaoin asked.
“We shouldn’t. We don’t have much time before—"
“Mangoes! Get your sweet, juicy mangoes here!”
I took off through the cheering crowd, picking up pats on my head, shoulders, and back. Stumbling over a raised cobblestone, I fell on the mango cart—popping the merchant’s brow up.
He was a tall, hefty man with grayish, leathery skin, ears twice as large as his head, and large ivory tusks growing from his jaw. I’d never seen an elephant outside of a storybook. The curse sought to change that.
“Mangoes?” I cried. “Truly? You’ve managed to grow mangoes in this climate? How? You must tell me.”
“Not easily, is the answer, my queen.” He tossed me one, stealing an embarrassing shriek of glee from me. “They love sun, heat, and humidity. All in short supply in Lumenfell.”
“An understatement. They need eight hours a day of direct sunlight if they’re to thrive,” I said, holding my mango close. “And these are huge.” My eyes were big and round, straining to take in the red, orange, green, and pink treat. I had a mango only once in my life. They were expensive and hard to come by even in Lyrica, but I treated us one year on the twins’ birthday. One bite, and we devoured them so fast, the mango was gone in less than a minute. I promised the twins I’d learn to grow them, so we’d have them all the time.
Now I can go home with the news that I learned how to do it!I was so happy, I was bouncing up and down.
I got so deep in the conversation, listening to how he used magic to mimic the sun’s rays, that I almost didn’t hear someone calling me.
“—queen? Excuse me, Queen Emiana.”
“Ana,” I corrected automatically.
A cat woman stepped out from behind her cart, holding a basket. “If you like tropical fruit, you’ll love these.”
“Oooh,” I breathed, gazing at the big, purple fruit. “What is it?”
“We call it pranganut. Tough outsides, but inside are a bunch of little seeds that burst with sweet, tarty juice with every bite.”
“That sounds delicious. Would you tell me how you grow them?”
“Oh! How about I write down the instructions and put them in your basket?” she said, running back. “You have so many tributes to accept, I wouldn’t want to slow you down.”
“My basket? Tribute?”
