Flecks of Gold (16 page)

I raised my eyebrows at Rafan and glanced to Breeohan for support. But he was holding out a dress, looking solemn. The dress was gold with intricate black embroidery on the hem, sleeves, and neckline. Tiny black jewels sparkled among the stitching. I wondered how they’d gotten the dress so quickly with no malls around.

“What if it doesn’t fit, and wouldn’t a foreign princess wear her native clothes?” I asked.

“It will fit, my lady. I have a talent for such things,” Rafan said.
Yeah, I’ll bet you do
, I thought rudely.

“I think it will simply look like a gesture of good will to wear our fashions,” Breeohan said. “And if anyone asks, we will tell them our story.” Cover story, huh? I wondered how plausible that would end up sounding. Breeohan dumped the dress into my arms. The golden material was thick, smooth, and shiny like satin. My chapped hands snagged the fabric.

“Look. I don’t have time to learn how to be a princess. The longer I take to find my mother, the less chance there is that she’ll be okay.” I ignored Rafan as I spoke, pleading directly with Breeohan.

“If you go to the palace as a simple mage, it may take days for you to see the king yourself. If you go as a princess, you will see him immediately. I think that is worth sacrificing one day for learning, don’t you?” Breeohan said.

“I thought you said you would be able to get an audience with the king quickly, and I have a letter from Ismaha. She said the king would help if she told him to,” I said suspiciously.

“I would be able to tell him in a day or so, but he would be less free to act on my news if you were at court as a simple magician. You didn’t tell me about the letter from Ismaha.” Breeohan sounded reproving but shook his head after a moment of thought. “But if you were a princess, no one would question his interest in your affairs. Fewer people would dare question his actions, and he could send out a search immediately rather than needing to go through a council decision.”

“What you say seems to make sense, but it’s probably only because I don’t know enough to point out the gaping flaws. I’d like to go on record now as saying that I think this is a bad idea.”

“I will remember.” Breeohan looked directly at me, and I felt a curious tightening in my stomach, then a flutter. I put it down to nervousness.

“We’d better begin teaching you what you need to know then, Your Highness,” Rafan cut in.

I looked toward the corner. “If I’m going to wear this, you two need to leave, so I can change.”

“I am afraid we had to sneak back here as it is,” Rafan said. “We cannot wait outside, attired as we are, in this part of the city. It would be a foolish right now with the attacks that have been happening.”

“Fine, turn around then. And I will be watching your backs, so don’t even think of peeking.”

Breeohan smiled slightly, and Rafan bowed before turning away.

Just to be sure, I did my old sneaky dressing trick that I’d developed years ago to avoid stripping in the middle school locker rooms. I slid the dress over my head while removing my shirt under the gold fabric. I slipped my arms through the gold sleeves, and was about to drop my pants when I noticed a huge slit up the dress’s right side all the way to my hip. In annoyance I left my pants on.

“There is no way I am going to wear this dress,” I announced.

“What’s wrong with it?” Breeohan asked, still turned away. Rafan turned around.

“It’s okay, Breeohan. You can turn around.” I glared at Rafan. Breeohan swiveled. He looked confused. “The slit is way too high. I wouldn’t be caught dead showing this much leg in public.”

“Didn’t I give you the pants? Sorry, I thought I had.” He reached into his bag, searched, and then pulled out a pair of golden pants. I was relieved to see that I wouldn’t have to argue about modesty with them. They faced away again, and I pulled on the golden pants. They were a tight fit. They were also high-waters, but softly tinkling black beads hung from the embroidered hem and reached almost to my ankles.

The neck line slanted diagonally to fancy golden buttons, and the short sleeves dangled beads as well. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before, but it certainly made me feel like royalty. My straight hanging hair didn’t really fit with the dress, however, and I wondered how I could arrange it better without hair spray, bobby pins, and other essentials.

“Are you done yet?” Breeohan asked.

“Oh, sorry. I was trying to think of how to do my hair. Do you have a mirror?”

“Don’t worry. Rafan and I will do your hair.”

“A couple of guys are going to do my hair? How many times have you done a girl’s hair before?” I teased.

“Never.” Breeohan blushed.

“I have, my lady. It will be no trouble,” Rafan said.

“You seem to be an expert at all sorts of odd things,” I said to Rafan, keeping my eyes wide and innocent. Rafan’s face didn’t redden, but he looked a bit discomfited.

“First, we will teach you how to bow. For now, you need to put this headdress on to practice with.” Breeohan pulled out a golden object that looked like an art piece, not a tiara of any sort. He came over and twisted several strands of my hair into parts of the golden weaving, and it miraculously didn’t fall off. It felt funny having Breeohan’s face inches from mine, so I kept my eyes down.

“Since you are a princess, there are fewer bows you need to worry about,” Breeohan said. Rafan and Breeohan spent the next several hours showing me the various bows for the different nobility. My head started to hurt after an hour, and I wished for the heavy tiara to fall off. It stayed firmly put, however, so I gritted my teeth and tried to remember which bow went with which title.

I learned that a second-born princess cannot pass her title on. Her children would be Zefas or Zefans and only the firstborn Zefa could pass on that title to her children. A second-born Zefan’s children would be Dolns or Dolnas. If a second-born Doln had a second-born, then he or she would be a Kav or Kava. When noble blood thinned below Kav level, they were too low to be found at court.

After an hour of purely verbal learning, I called a halt. “I can’t remember this stuff if I can’t write it down.”

I reached into my backpack and got out my spiral notebook. Flipping to an empty page, I got out one of my pens.

“Okay, tell me again who is descended from whom. I’ll make a pedigree chart.”

Rafan and Breeohan looked curiously at my notebook and pen. But I ignored them, scribbling a little with the pen to make sure it would still work. Before I could draw more than two lines, they began speaking over each other.

“How does your strange quill make marks without an ink pot?” Rafan asked.

“Who drew such straight lines on your paper?” Breeohan asked

“Whoa, calm down. It’s just a pen. The ink is on the inside. My paper was made in a factory, so the lines were drawn by machines.” The words “factory” and “machines” didn’t translate, so I tried again. “In my country, we’ve created contraptions that can do things for us, so people don’t have to do it themselves. It would take too long to explain. Can we just get back to the nobles? I’m afraid I won’t remember them all without a study chart.”

Breeohan, used to unusual things about me, pulled himself back to lessons without further trouble. But Rafan kept distracting me from my chart with questions about machines and quills. I had to use several sheets of paper in order to accommodate the increasingly branching pedigree chart, and Breeohan finally commented on my waste of precious paper.

“I forgot. You probably don’t have much paper around here, do you?” After that I tried to write as small as possible. Rafan then marveled about how small I could write with my quill and still have it be legible.
Really
, I thought.
It’s not that wonderful
. Finally, I got too fed up with his constant breathing over my shoulder.

“How do you know if it’s legible or not, Rafan? You can’t even read my writing.” I think he saw how frustrated I was because he backed off and stayed silent. When we reached the end of the pedigree line, up to present people, I was interested to learn that Rafan was a noble after all. He and Breeohan were actually cousins. Rafan was Aria’s brother, which meant that if anything happened to Breeohan’s mother, Breeohan, and Aria, Rafan could become the heir.

One thing confused me. “Breeohan, why isn’t your mother the heir? She’s the closest in line.”

“She made an agreement with the king to name me as heir instead.” Breeohan’s voice sounded funny, so I looked up.

“Is she all right?”

“Oh, she’s quite all right. She wants me to rule because she thinks it would make me more responsible.”

“I have been traveling with you for a while now, and I can honestly say that aside from your bad shortcut choices, I’ve never seen any irresponsible behavior. Have you been holding out on me, Breeohan?” I smiled.

His shoulders relaxed. The corner of his mouth twitched up. “What makes you think that you would be a choice judge of responsible behavior?”

“Only the fact that I’ve had a job ever since I was old enough to mow lawns and tend bratty kids. Someone had to help my mother make the bills every month.”

Rafan cut in, and I suppressed a twinge of annoyance. He always seemed to cut us off when I was having fun teasing Breeohan. “I could tell you some stories about Breeohan’s character that would shock such an innocent young lady like yourself. At magic school he was always getting into trouble.”

I was interested in spite of myself. “What did he do?”

“I think we need to get back to studying,” Breeohan said.

“Well, I’d like to hear what you did that was so terrible. Go on, Rafan.”

“There was one time Breeohan snuck into the experimentation chamber at school. He nearly blew himself up playing around with the half-formed patterns written on the parchments there. The Masters gave him cleaning duties for a month after he was finally well enough to walk again.”

Breeohan was blushing, but I was so disappointed by Breeohan’s bad boy story that I couldn’t help myself from blurting, “That’s it? That’s the big embarrassing story? I’m sorry, but you’re gonna have to do a lot better than that to convince me that Breeohan is irresponsible.”

I thought Rafan looked put out, but Breeohan smiled. “You chose the wrong story, Rafan. Mary has been fooling around quite a lot with untried lacings, and so far she has managed to stay unsinged, so she doesn’t understand how dangerous it is to experiment.”

We went back to the pedigree chart. After a while I asked, “Breeohan, I don’t understand something. Didn’t you say that only the firstborn passes on their title? Well, I’m confused about what happened with the third generation back, third-born Princess Rikah’s children. Her oldest son is Zefan Kelteon. You said he’s still alive, so why do his younger brother’s children have the Zefan and Zefa titles? Shouldn’t they be Dolns and Dolnas?”

“Kelteon was stripped of his title and exiled from Iberloah many years ago for trying to kill King Verone,” Breeohan said.

“Why would he do that? It wouldn’t have made him king. He’d still have to kill your mother, you, Rafan’s father, Aria, Rafan, and Rafan’s brother Temr, wouldn’t he? That’s a lot of people.”

“He planned to kill all those who stood in his way to the crown. We only just discovered his plans before he could poison my mother.” Breeohan’s expression unnerved me. This quiet, contained anger was more dangerous than the sudden bursts of petty fury I frequently inspired in him.

I had never in my life had anyone want to kill me or Mom. What was it like to have to constantly watch for that sort of deceit? I decided to change the subject. “So the title will now pass on through Zefa Avana’s line, regardless of any child Kelteon might have?”

“Yes,” Breeohan said.

A thought struck me. “This Avana wouldn’t happen to be the same one you claimed as your sister when you wanted to buy my book, would it?” I smiled mischievously. He blushed. Amazingly, I felt a little stab at his reaction. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like teasing him about Avana anymore.

“Well, anyway, I think I have most of the people memorized.” I handed the sheets to the two men. “Quiz me.” They asked me who was related to who until I wanted to tear the pedigree chart into shreds. But I was fairly certain I had it down pat by the time we quit for the night. I fell asleep dreaming of trees stretching ever upward, splitting into branches that jutted newer, littler branches from their tips until the twigs were a huge latticework of never-ending lacings.

I
felt a touch
on my arm and came instantly awake. Breeohan stood over me. “Mary, you need to get in your dress, and we need to do your hair so we can arrive at the palace on time.”

I felt like I hadn’t slept, but I sat up anyway, pulling the princess dress over my head. Breeohan turned hurriedly around. Rafan still watched, but I was too tired to care. I was good at changing in hiding. The little voyeur would see nothing but cloth. When I got to the pants part, though, I turned so he wouldn’t see my leg through the huge slit in the dress.

Breeohan had me sit on the floor while he and Rafan put on the headdress. I couldn’t see what they were doing, but I felt them threading hair through parts of the golden metal. When they were done, all my hair was firmly twisted somewhere, without a loose strand in sight. I admired the look in a little mirror they handed me. The golden headdress now looked like an extension of my head. It would be hard to get off, but it certainly made me feel royal.

“Pretty impressive for a couple of boys,” I said.

“Now for your face,” Rafan said, looking pleased with himself.

“Wait. It’s one thing for you to do my hair. It’s a totally different matter with makeup. I’ll do it myself.”

Breeohan handed me the packet he was holding. I found a vial of thick golden liquid with a paint brush. There were also vials of several colors of red, black, and bronze, and two different powder containers. They looked more like art supplies than a makeup kit. I decided to put the makeup on the way I normally would at home, though I never would have chosen gold eye shadow before. I did so now, however, using the little mirror to see my work. With the brush, I felt like I was painting myself instead of applying makeup. It was an odd feeling, putting on a golden mask.