Two Worlds of Oblivion Page 6

  Maray

  When Jemin left through the closet, Maray’s heart was racing with anxiety.

  “Trust me, I know the palace better than anyone.” He stepped between the precious fabrics, and some low clicking noise followed his disappearance.

  She wasn’t anxious over him getting caught, but that he might never look at her again the way he had a moment ago, allowing the blue fire to flare in his irises.

  Her hands mechanically shoved aside the dresses, looking for the door Jemin and Heck must have used, but she couldn’t find the outline in the wooden wall behind them. Probably the same mechanism that enabled portals or started the water in those fascinating basins. With a grind of her teeth, she ripped the gowns back into place and leaned against the doorframe of the closet. Why couldn’t Jemin make it simple for once? She frowned at the assembly of fabrics beside her for a long time with no intention of giving up on Jemin just because her station would make it difficult for them… couldn’t he see… Mom and Dad were together…

  The light was fading from the winter sky when she finally combed through the clothes, hoping to find a nightgown or pajamas. She was lucky. On the very left, inside the closet, there was a shelf with stacks of mother of pearl and pale-blue silken nightgowns. She drew the darkest one of them out. It resembled a bleached version of the tapestry with thin, braided straps.

  With a flimsy motion of her hand, Maray lifted her toothbrush from her bed and tiptoed to the door, ready to find her parents.

  To her surprise, Jemin’s rejection didn’t leave her paralyzed. She couldn’t deny, though, that a hollow sensation had settled where the butterflies had hoarded since that first kiss. It was as if someone had drained all of the blood from her veins. She shuddered at the thought, remembering that that was exactly what Rhia would do to her if she ever got her hands on her.

  As Maray stepped into the hallway, she heard her mother’s voice coming from the next room.

  “… too young. I am not sure if she is ready.”

  Maray tiptoed closer and laid her hand against the white painted wood, fingertips resting on one of the golden ornamentations.

  “It doesn’t matter if she is ready, Your Royal Highness,” Parsin Scott’s voice answered. “The Allinan people deserve to know the truth.”

  “They do, Parsin. And I will make sure they learn the truth. We’ll start with making my marriage to Ambassador Johnson official, and then we’ll tell the public about Maray. All we need is a little time for her to adjust. She doesn’t even know the traditional Allinan dishes…”

  “What are the traditional Allinan dishes?” She pushed the door open and stepped inside, preferring to take part in the conversation than to be the subject of it.

  Her mother and Scott turned around, both looking caught. Parsin Scott had his hand on his sword, and for a long second, he didn’t relax as he scrutinized her face, as if trying to figure out if she was Maray or Rhia. When he finally did bring his sword hand back behind his back and bowed, Laura’s face smoothed.

  “There are different ones,” she explained. “Most of them involve dumplings of some sort.”

  Maray pictured an elegant table loaded with various sizes of dumplings. “Sounds like an adventure. I would like to try them.”

  “That can be arranged,” her mother said with a smile.

  “All of them?” Scott asked incredulously.

  Laura’s smile widened as his eyes bulged at her nod. “All.”

  “I’d better inform the kitchen.” He wiped his forehead, showing signs of stress all of a sudden, looking not at all like the impressive commander she remembered, but a frustrated manager.

  “Do I even want to know?” Maray commented, not on the dumplings but on her mother’s request for more time.

  “Scott is urging us to hold the public event sooner rather than later in order to gain leverage over Langley.” She gave Maray a meaningful look. “Langley is out there, looking for you, and the sooner Allinan knows about you, the harder for him to just eliminate you.”

  Her words weren’t chosen the way a mother would talk to her daughter. There was little compassion in them but more the logical deduction of necessities.

  Maray measured her mother’s face. “I understand why you left Allinan for Dad,” she said and earned an alarmed gaze from her.

  “Why?”

  “Dumplings,” she suggested, but both of them knew she wasn’t talking about dumplings. It was the corset of the court; even though she’d been here less than a day, she could already feel it cutting off her air supply.

  Laura laughed and laid her arm around Maray. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “How much time do you think I’ll get to ‘adjust’?” Maray wondered.

  “The faster you learn, the better,” she answered instead of a precise statement. Then, her gaze moved to the nightgown in Maray’s arms. “You were planning to go to bed early?”

  “I was considering it.” Maray pushed away the emptiness that came with the thought of her conversation with Jemin. “But now I am curious about those dumplings.” She forced a smile.

  Despite the happy reunion with her mother, things were not smooth between them. The scars of being left at the age of eleven ran deep, and they weren’t just going to disappear overnight. For now, their conversations were going back and forth between serious, life-or-death conversations about Rhia, Langley, and how to handle the revolutionaries, and meaningless babble about food. There were moments when it felt as if Laura had never left, and then the next second, Maray remembered that she had been motherless for five years. And even though it made a huge difference that her mother hadn’t abandoned her but left to protect her, she’d still been absent.

  She glanced at Laura, finding concern in her eyes. “Scott is an impatient man… I’ll make sure you get all the time you need, Maray,” she reassured her.

  “You’re the Queen, Mom. Can’t you demand it?”

  Laura looked amused. “I am not the Queen—Rhia is until proven dead. And that’s a lesson you can learn right now: monarchs don’t demand if they want their people to work with them. They suggest and let others figure out the details. They trust that their people will find a way because they know best what their own lives are like.” A gracious expression spread on her face. “Rhia wasn’t like that. She demanded. And that brought forth a group of people who want to eradicate her. Our people are our assets. They are the beating hearts of Allinan. Rhia never saw it that way. She saw them as resources at her disposal. She has no respect for human life—”

  “Not even for her own family,” Maray added, her memory flickering back to the incident in the dungeons.

  “Especially not for her own family.” Laura’s face darkened, and she glanced at the carved wooden table behind them.

  “Mom?” Maray laid her hand on her mother’s forearm.

  Laura looked up, gaze summoned by her daughter’s touch.

  “What happened?” What happened besides Rhia using her as a blood-tap would have been the right question, but Maray wasn’t ready to bring that up.

  With a look that told Maray she’d better follow her mother, Laura led them to two egg-yolk yellow brocade chairs with woven, pale roses on the backrest where they both settled. The cheerful color didn’t fit the direction of their conversation at all.

  “When we talk about Rhia and her disregard for her people, we should talk about the First Breach of Dimensions.”

  Maray knew a little bit about the First Breach of Dimensions. Someone had opened the borders between the two worlds and let the demons from the world where Maray had grown up cross into Allinan. She also knew that the incident had been blamed on Jemin’s father and that, supposedly, Rhia had been the one to start the whole thing. What she didn’t know was why. Heck had once said that it had been to overthrow the crown, but if Rhia herself had been the one to open the rift… What reason did she have to do this?

  “Okay.” She nodded, tension plastering her against the chair.

&nb
sp; “When Rhia opened the rift between dimensions, she could never have been strong enough to do it on her own.”

  “Heck said the power was sourced from the darkest corners of each dimension,” Maray hesitantly added in what she already knew.

  “And that’s where the problem lies.” Laura leaned back in her chair, giving her a meaningful look. “Rhia isn’t interested in being Queen of Allinan. She wants to reign over both worlds, and I fear she might have allies in the other world as well. Demons.”

  Maray pondered her mother’s words for a moment before she felt confident to ask. “Mom, what are demons?”

  Laura raised an eyebrow, making Maray wish she hadn’t asked. Heck had explained it to her: demons were creatures that drew upon negative energy for their strength.

  “It’s okay if you’d rather not talk about it,” she insisted, retracting her request.

  “No, it’s fine.” Laura shook her head. “We need to talk about it.” Her shoulders in her royal blue blouse rose as she took a deep breath. “Demons are rare in Allinan, not so much in the other world, though. They feed upon negativity and use their power to foster distrust and destruction.” She noticed Maray’s confused expression and continued. “They could be anyone. Any person you meet on the street. Or they could be distorted shapes with multiple limbs and tentacles. Or they could be one disguised as the other. That’s what makes it so difficult…”

  Maray considered. If they could be anyone, how could she trust anyone? And then, if she didn’t trust anyone, how could she know she wasn’t fostering a demon with her negative energy?

  “I know it’s a lot to take in,” her mother said, understanding. “But there is something else I have been wondering about.” She leaned forward, hands folded and creases across her forehead. “Rhia might have become one of them. Getting involved with them to gain power over both worlds…”

  “What do you mean ‘one of them’?”

  “When Jemin stabbed her—” She sent Maray’s mind back to the day in the dungeons, “—you saw her true form, right? Her decaying flesh.”

  Maray nodded with a bitter taste of that memory in her mouth.

  “She must have been around them for such a long time, channeling their power to breach the dimensions, that it might have made her one of them somehow—”

  “Or someone,” Maray suggested. “She needed your blood to become immortal. But she wants mine to become almighty. What if Feris’ way of making her immortal involved more than your blood? What if it involved demons?”

  Laura’s features changed, making her look intrigued. “I have never truly thought about it that way. We don’t know what motivates my mother.”

  It was the first time Maray had heard Laura speak of Rhia as her mother.

  “What I mean is; what if Feris made her into a demon using demon blood?”

  “Demons aren’t immortal,” Laura declined. “But, she might have done it for the power.”

  “So, what if Feris made her into a demon so she’d become more powerful? Your blood already made her immortal. Maybe keeping you around as a blood-bar was more for aesthetic reasons than immortality.”

  Laura swallowed an escaping laugh at Maray’s suggestion, making Maray wonder if she’d actually said something stupid.

  “That,” Laura commented, voice smooth again, “sadly, does sound like something my mother would do.”

  Maray’s fingers twitched nervously at the thought they might be getting closer to solving the riddle.

  “She hasn’t really shown herself in twenty years, right?” Maray verified if she’d remembered correctly and got a confirming nod from her mother. “If she started decaying back then, after she opened the rift, she must have been using magic to appear normal, and she chose to look like her sixteen-year-old self.” The horror of what she was saying dawned on her while she was speaking. “For all we know, she could have been anywhere at any time, disguised as anyone—like a demon.”

  The dumpling feast didn’t happen that night. Instead, Maray was presented with a particularly bitter type of lettuce garnished with boiled potatoes.

  She ate half-heartedly, her stomach loaded with the uneasy feeling of losing Jemin for good.

  “You don’t like it?” Gerwin asked with an expression that gave away he didn’t.

  Maray shrugged and continued shoving the food from one side to the other.

  “You can’t do this once we start dining with the nobles,” Laura commented. “As a Princess of Allinan, you need to have table manners.” She gave Maray an apologetic glance, and Maray straightened her back and attached her elbows to her sides the way she had seen in movies. It didn’t feel natural but fit the way everything around her didn’t feel natural. She felt as if she was five again, sitting in their kitchen in the other world, her father smiling as she tried to braid spaghetti while her mother frowned.

  It was easier to accept now that certain things would be a requirement; such as the way she sat upright, the way she swallowed whatever would be presented to her, no matter how little she enjoyed the taste, or that she wouldn’t be glancing at Jemin with a look that could betray that she might never get over him. Especially as their feelings for each other were mutual.

  As she drifted into thoughts of his bright-blue eyes, blue as the ocean on a sunny day, closed with a layer of clouds before he’d left, she realized just how contained she had been about the way she herself felt. Of course, she had kissed him, and she had taken his hand; but had she told him—actually told him in words—how much she liked him, potentially more than liked… most definitely more than liked.

  “Are you all right?” Her father’s voice brought her back.

  She nodded and lifted her chin, ready to put a potato in her mouth so she wouldn’t need to talk.

  “I honestly didn’t expect you’d miss me that much.” Maray laughed as Corey wrapped her into a tight hug.

  “You…” Corey said into her hair, “…have no idea.”

  It was good to see someone who didn’t care the slightest bit about her family name.

  “Breakfast can wait,” Corey informed her as she pulled Maray out of bed by both hands.

  Corey had been her wake up call. The sky outside the lace-shielded window was still darkish, and she had no concept of what time it might be. But Corey was too enthusiastic to give her another minute to fully wake up.

  “We have so much to do.” Corey was on her way to the closet and opened it with a slight push. “What do you have in there that will make you look like an Allinan person?” She glanced at Maray over her shoulder, dark eyes sparkling through bushy curls of black hair, impatience evident in the way she pulled up the corner of her lips on one side.

  Knowing better than to let the gorgeous warlock girl wait, Maray slid to her feet and padded to the closet.

  “What’s the plan?” she asked as she peered past Corey’s shoulder, watching as her friend was already pulling pieces of clothes from the shelves inside the closet.

  “First of all—” Corey eyed her top to bottom, “—fancy gown.” She pushed a set of something that felt suspiciously like Thaotine into her arms. “Get dressed. We’ve got to head out before the sun comes up.”

  Maray closed her hands around the pile in her arms and headed for the ridiculously large bathroom across the hall. The soft light greeted her as it flickered on, triggered by something like a motion sensor, and she glimpsed at the mirror as she put down the clothes on the sink, a basin like the others, also upgraded with a motion sensor so she wouldn’t need a bracelet to trigger it. Her mother had made it very clear she wouldn’t get one any time soon. Not until she had her magic under control.

  “It won’t be long, and you’ll have forgotten how to get dressed on your own,” Corey commented through the cracked open door. “The minute you have a handmaiden…”

  Maray shuddered. “Let’s hope my mom refrains from installing one for a little longer.”

  “You’ll have one eventually.” Corey disappeared back to the
room, leaving Maray to her morning routine, and awaited her with a ready face in the bedroom.

  “I know someone who’ll have trouble taking his eyes off of you,” she commented on Maray’s clothes—shiny Thaotine pants and a shirt that hugged her like a second skin, all a dark shade of blue like the rest of the room. Maray glimpsed at the mirror over the fireplace and notice with surprise that she looked fierce like Corey, and her lips made a contrast like a rose in a snowy field. She frowned at herself and thought that it didn’t matter what that particular someone thought as long as they couldn’t be together.

  “Let’s go.”

  Corey didn’t wait but turned around and vanished into the closet.

  Anxious to not miss how she got through the back wall the way Heck and Jemin had, Maray rushed after her, and when she made it through the satin, silk, and Thaotine hanging from the center of the closet, Corey was there, hand on her hip, thin eyebrow raised with impatience.

  “Are you going to wear anything on top of this?” she asked as if she couldn’t believe Maray hadn’t had that idea on her own. Corey grabbed a cloak from the hooks on the side and handed it to her, then laid her hand against the back of the wardrobe, and it sprang open, spilling thin morning light into a narrow corridor behind.

  Corey didn’t give Maray time to ask about the how but stepped into the half-light. “Coming?” Her footsteps disappeared behind the wooden planks.

  “Wait,” Maray hissed after Corey. “Mom knows you’re picking me up, right?”

  Something inside of her became hesitant. An impostor Corey had led her out of the safety of her friends’ protection before. How could she know this was Corey?

  “I promised to help you with your magic,” Corey reminded her. “I’ll take you to the forest so you don’t get a fire off in here.” Corey’s voice sounded so much like the Corey she had gotten to know: a fluctuation between sarcasm and open friendliness. “Of course your mother knows. Who do you think told me to take the safe route in and out?”