The Forever War (The Queen Trials Book 4), page 5
Wendla raises her eyebrows. “What is a general, without a war? He doesn’t want to see it end. Perhaps he thinks your mission might be a success.”
Despite the fact that an incredibly clever and powerful man wants me dead, I feel hope rise in my chest. Could my peace mission really work? “If the general is so concerned that I might end the war that he’d try to eliminate me before I could, then I really may have a chance,” I say slowly.
Wendla grinds her teeth. “But if it weren’t for your engagement navigator’s timely warning, you’d be gone by now.” She shudders. “I never thought anyone would make a move on you before tonight’s event. I should have had you under my own surveillance. I won’t make that mistake again. The general knows that sometimes you only get one shot at these things. The element of surprise is lost to him now. While we do need to keep an eye on him, I suspect he’ll resort to more official means of circumventing you from here on out. When he snatched you, he still thought he was in charge of your wish fulfillment. Now that he knows Relicant is in command, he won’t be so quick to act.”
I feel a knot in my stomach loosen as Wendla talks. That makes sense to me. There’s something I’m extremely curious about, and now that my worries about the general have been addressed, I have to ask Wendla. “When he came to get you, did my navigator speak in a strange voice?”
“Now that you mention it, yes,” Wendla confirms. “The W.R.E.N. unit was unusually screechy and staticky.”
“I think there’s something to that. From time to time, Wren gave me some very odd instructions during the Wishing Round and when he did he always used a weird voice.”
“Odd instructions? Like what?”
“He told me to lie.”
Wendla doesn’t respond to that; she just glances toward the quiet box. I’m worried she doesn’t believe me. I rush on to convince her. “He’s the reason I’m still alive. Wren told me to pull my ripcord on my parachute when I didn’t know what to do. I also think Wren may have retrieved my first key for me. That one that I ‘found’ in the water? That was staged. I already had it, but I don’t know how it got into my pocket. I think it was Wren who put it there.”
Wendla’s facial expression is consternated. “I don’t know how to explain this. A couple of days ago, I would have told you to trust your W.R.E.N. navigator no further than you could throw it. I would have also cautioned you not to refer to it as a ‘he.’ They are not human. They are meant to be ingratiating, to get you to confide in them, but they often miss the mark. But this navigator… it – he literally saved your life today. I don’t know what to make of this, but I’m not going to turn that unit in to the Magister of Technology. When I remove it from the quiet box, I’m going to let it go. If it returns to you and gives you any further advice, I’d err on the side of following it.”
“I thought you or Prince Relicant might be controlling him,” I admit.
“No,” Wendla says. “These machines are programmed to learn and adapt. Perhaps during the Wishing Round, your navigator taught itself to protect you. For whatever reason, your unit seems to be less a tool of the Rotunda than others. It acts like it’s in your corner.”
One of the wooden decorations hanging on a nearby wall makes a chiming sound, and a little bird pops out of the front. It chirps five times before retreating.
Wendla sucks in a sharp breath. “You need to be seated at dinner in an hour. We must get you ready.”
“I’m supposed to leave for the front lines of the Forever War tomorrow, and the man in charge just tried to abduct me. Going to a dinner seems… kind of trivial and silly.”
“He is not the man in charge anymore,” Wendla says. “Prince Relicant is.”
“General Blaylock is still in charge of the war.”
Wendla’s lips tighten at the corners. “You must attend tonight’s dinner. Back in the general’s office, I said your presence would be missed. I wasn’t making that up. The general was counting on putting you in a shallow grave, but now that that’s not happening, there would be far too many questions for both of us if you skipped the event to remain in my quarters.”
Wendla crosses the room, opens a wardrobe, and inspects the contents while continuing to talk over her shoulder. “Given your recent vulnerability, it’s also best for you to stay highly visible. While I don’t think the general would make a move on you at this point, if I’m wrong, your prominence is your best protection. He’d have a hard time spiriting you away if the entire kingdom is watching you eat foie gras and dance the quadrille.”
Wendla gathers a burgeoning armful of material and brings it over. She fluffs it out, revealing a long sheath gown of purple material covered by sheer, silvery netting. She holds it up in front of me. “I had this done for you during the last round. At that time, I had no idea you’d wear purple at the wish reveal, but it’s a good color on you, and this overlay makes it different enough. You’ve lost a bit of weight, I believe. Those nutritional wafers provide energy, but they don’t help retain mass. A few stitches in the right places and this will fit perfectly.”
“I think purple might be my favorite color,” I say, reaching out to finger the material.
“If Cartong Fleming ever asks you, which he probably will, as he’s always full of inane questions, you might want to claim red, orange, or – as a last resort – yellow as your favorite.”
The Rustonian colors. Of course.
Wendla helps me out of my pants and sweater and into my evening wear. The bodice fits perfectly everywhere but the waist, which is a little loose. Wendla steps back and scans me up and down. “Just a bit of needle and thread work through here,” she says, pinching the extra fabric at my middle. “I dislike being monitored in my own quarters, but this should be documented. The gap in your coverage has probably gone on too long already. I’m going to take your Wren out of quarantine. Obviously, once that unit comes out of the box, we need to be very careful. We can and should talk through some of the planning for your upcoming trip to the front. It would be considered odd if we didn’t. Follow my lead, and don’t address any topics I don’t bring up myself, do you understand?”
I nod.
“I’m sure Glory has been returned to your shared quarters by now. She must be losing her mind. I’ll have your navigator unit send her a message to join us.”
Wendla opens the quiet box and lifts Wren out, then sets him on the ground on his rubberized tracks. He flips his tablet screen up and blinks his eyes at her, then swivels slightly to blink at me. “I see you’ve finished changing your clothing, Princess Clio. That seemed to take an inordinately long time. What were you doing?”
“Navigator, ping Princess Cliodatra’s retinue,” Wendla says before I can respond. “Give them our location and tell them to join us immediately.”
Wren gives Wendla one of his patented slow blinks. “I will,” he says in a deep tone. Wren’s glowing eyeballs fade. His tablet screen flickers and is replaced by an image of Magister Suny Chilovich’s stern face. “After the princess answers my question.”
“Excuse me?” Wendla’s voice is like acid dripping from a leaky pipe. She stomps over to Wren’s tablet screen and leans down so that her face is inches from Wren’s camera lens. On the tablet screen, I see Magister Chilovich recoil.
“My lady,” the magister says, his voice strained. “I was under the impression the princess was with her guardian.”
“Your impression was wrong,” she says evenly. “And I was under the impression that the engagement navigators had been decommissioned. Why are you contacting her on this one?”
“General Blaylock informed me of its activation.”
“Oh, so this is Blaylock’s doing?”
She knows it’s not, but she has Magister Chilovich decidedly flummoxed, and that might not be the best thing right now. I don’t need another powerful man developing new hatred for me right now. “I don’t mind answering the magister’s question,” I call out. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
Wendla puts her hands on her hips and sighs. “When you’ve been crowned Queen, you answer to no one but King Ergondy.” She huffs.
King Ergondy murdered her sister and would have executed her nephew, Prince Relicant. I know that she hates Ergondy, so I have to believe this is her way of indicating that she’s willing to play along with me, even if it’s not how she would have handled the situation.
If I can neutralize Chilovich’s anger by simply telling him an abridged version of the truth, I don’t see why I shouldn’t do that. “I lost quite a bit of weight during the Wishing Round,” I say. “My gown… Well, it revealed my body in ways that will only be appropriate for King Ergondy’s eyes should he marry me.” My stomach clenches just saying those words out loud, and I realize that maybe I shouldn’t say things that literally make me nauseated when I don’t absolutely have to. I forge on before Magister Chilovich can take note of any hint of greenishness under my skin. “Wendla needed to make numerous alterations to ensure my modesty. She reactivated Wren as soon as she could.”
I twirl around like a mindless girl would, and I run my hands over my hips. “I’m so glad to be back in the Rotunda. I’ve grown fond of being pretty.”
Magister Chilovich’s hard expression softens, and I know that I struck exactly the right chord with him. He is an extremely serious man… who wants his queen candidates to be frothy and vapid. That’s why he’s never seemed to like me. I’ve been the opposite of what he’s been hoping for. I clasp my hands in front of myself, my elbows locked, and I bat my eyes for good measure.
“The public is very taken with you… and I’m beginning to see why.” The Magister’s voice drops an octave, something I never would have believed was possible, given how low his register already is. “I believe you’ll find my name on your dance card at the ball tonight.”
“I’ll apologize to you in advance then, Magister.”
His eyebrows begin to knit together and storm clouds gather on his face, so I rush on. “You’ll find that I’m not very good. My dance card is pink.” I flash him one of my patented weaponized smiles. “But I’m working on it.”
“I have no doubt you’ll surprise us both.”
To my right, there’s frenzied banging on the doors to Wendla’s quarters.
“I believe that will be your guardian,” Wendla says, her voice a touch strangled. “Or perhaps your dance instructor. Either way, better late than never.” She crosses to the door and opens it. Glory charges in, wild-eyed, a round hairbrush thrust out in front of her, brandished like a weapon.
“I’m sorry, Magister, but I must beg your leave so I can finish getting ready,” I say sweetly. “My mother’s here now.”
CHAPTER 6
Wendla was right – my presence here would have been missed. That’s because I’m seated alone, at the very front of the dining room, on my own personal hover platform that’s just big enough for a small, round table with a floor-length, white tablecloth and one small, cushioned, red chair.
I face the audience of diners, important magisterial representatives in their robes, military men in their uniforms with their ribbon bars and their cordage, and the rest of the Queen Trials contestants and their guardians.
Try as I might, I can’t seem to stop my eyes from landing on General Jolton Blaylock over and over again. He’s dressed impeccably in full military regalia, not a single one of his short, bristly gray hairs out of place. He doesn’t look like a man who may have been planning to abduct a princess a few short hours ago. It helps me a bit to think of myself as “a princess” in this situation. When my frantic brain occasionally breaks through hissing, “Me, it was me,” I feel a lump of fear rise up from my stomach and into my esophagus, trying to kill me as surely as the general would have, if Wendla hadn’t whisked me away.
I’m not sure why the Rotunda has me on a hovering platform. Yes, I’m up above everybody, but they could have achieved that with a staircase. But nevertheless, here I am, floating at the front of the room at my table for one, with Odessa hovering on her own platform and eating her dinner on one side of me and the third Wishing Round winner, Jorlene, doing the same on the other.
We each have a server assigned to us who also has a hover platform, because they must in order to bring us our food. Our hover platforms don’t go anywhere, though. We’re stationary at the front of the room. The servers zip back and forth, removing one course and bringing the next.
Because they can’t sit with us on our hover platforms, our three guardians are all seated together at a table near the very front of the audience. I don’t know either Odessa’s or Jorlene’s guardians’ names, but the three middle-aged women seem to have plenty to talk about. I could read their lips if I really wanted to, but after a few minutes of tracking their inane observations and polite conversational gambits, I find that I don’t care to continue. Instead, I make up little chatty tidbits for them in my head. “That certainly was sly of Odessa to steal my darling Clio’s knife and use it to try to murder Clio’s friend Snow. Too bad she didn’t succeed; I don’t trust that little weight around my daughter’s neck. I would have loved to see her taken out.”
Odessa’s guardian throws back her head and emits a tinkling laugh, her fingertips feathering her throat, where she wears a triple strand of white beads. The woman could laugh like the blare of a carbon monoxide detector for all I know, but in my imagination, her giggles sound like chips of glass cast by a careless hand across a tile floor. “Your girl was never supposed to have a weapon in the first place – she stole it off a dead guard. She’s lucky Odessa didn’t use it on her!” Jorlene’s guardian smiles tightly and presses her fingertips together. Her princess found all three of her keys first, without ever tangling with the other two. It seemed so nice at the time, but now she has nothing to add to the conversation. “Have you tried the goose pâté?” she asks, giving them each an ingratiating grin. “It’s divine.”
I feel like I should be doing more with my time rather than making up stupid conversations for the three guardians, but what? Up here, alone, with my wish already cast, revealed, and set to begin tomorrow, there really isn’t much for me to do with my mind. I know who I’m bringing with me to the front, as the peace envoy “team of my choosing” that I wrote into my meticulously worded wish. Snow and Shellor. I was also planning on bringing Prince Relicant, but now that he’s in charge of the whole endeavor, I really doubt there’s any need to call him out specifically. Maybe I’ll mention it in my parting remarks, though, just so there’s no question. Relicant will surely bring Wendla. Glory and my retinue will come along for the ride, and I guess that’s it. I might have requested another nice princess accompany me as well, but the only other kind woman I’ve met here was Bellossy, and she died gruesomely on the first day of the Wishing Round. There are other women here, though – plenty of them – each with her own story. I think of the tall woman, the one who grappled with and then threw a guard out of the plane before leaping to her own death. I would have liked to have gotten to know her.
I stop watching Glory and the other two guardians at her table and I let my eyes rove past Jolton Blaylock’s table without stopping. Instead, I gaze around the room at all of the other princesses still vying for a spot as one of King Ergondy’s six queens. I’m not sure exactly how many contestants are left. There were forty-seven before the Wishing Round and we lost… eight, during that round? Is that right? I don’t know for sure. In any event, I think there are around forty of us still competing, and maybe it’s time that I started evaluating the other women and categorizing them a bit better. Except for Snow, they’re all automatically my enemies. But are there a few that I could transition into allies?
Maybe.
I spy Zerline Creel sitting at a table for four. It’s her, her guardian, and another princess/guardian pair. Zerline has a blank expression on her face and her skin looks loose on her body, like her skeleton is unexpectedly shrinking. She’s unlikely to become an ally, but maybe she’s not a nemesis, either. Honestly, she seems too weak for either role. Perhaps a third category, for women who are neither enemies nor friends, but are simply… affiliates?
I sit up a little straighter as my server hovers over to remove my plate of goose pâté – whatever that is – and replace it with a new plate. “Roasted cauliflower and chili paste,” the server murmurs as he sets down the silver-edged plate of food, along with a shiny, new fork.
“Thank you,” I reply, making sure to meet his eyes so that he knows my appreciation is genuine.
I glance to my left and my right. As per usual, Jorlene thanks her server as well, while Odessa almost makes it a point to ignore hers. Jorlene could be an ally. Something I always noticed in the mines was that you could tell a lot about a person by how they treated the people they thought they were better than. Jorlene shows appreciation for the people who serve her. Odessa shows a disdain so deep that it borders on contempt.
Odessa is not going to be an ally. Ever. That was decided when I first arrived here, and it has only been reinforced by every single interaction we’ve had since.
How can I evaluate the other women, though, and sort them into little mental buckets? For the seventeen women who weren’t allowed into the Wishing Round, I’m still not sure. But for those others who competed with me in the nine square grid of fear – but did not win their wishes? Tonight is an excellent time to start gathering intel on them.
That’s the main reason for this dinner. As soon as we’re all served our desserts, the women and girls who did not win their wishes will be called up one by one to read their bonded pages and let us know what their hearts’ desires were, back when they still had hope that they would be on one of these hover platforms at the front of the room as a winner.
What might their wishes reveal about who they are as people? I wonder what the tall woman who threw the guard out of the plane would have wished for. That’s something I might never know. I’m not sure if anyone will read the wishes of the women who died in the Wishing Round aloud, and if they do, would they skip over the tall woman’s? I don’t even know her name. I do know that the Rotunda didn’t show the footage of her wrestling with the guard, overpowering him, and hurling him from the airplane. They only showed her falling to her death, landing face-down in the smoldering grid space, where everything was in flames. Her body caught fire almost immediately. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Rotunda writes all the dead women out of existence, especially her. They don’t mourn us when we pass. We are forgotten, meaningless.
