A Royal Ruse

Chapter 11

News From Arnoa

Zita returned from her day at the baths exhausted; her skin sauna-parched and her spirit depleted.

The girls' probing had been relentless. Being unable to properly fend off the questions of her kingdom, she fled the steam room, stating a splitting headache as the reason. She hid inside one of the cooling chambers until one of the royal servants found her and escorted her to the carriage.

As the princess moped and meandered through the palace gardens, she suddenly spotted a stoically raised pavilion in the center of a sea of tulips. It shone like a lighthouse amidst the blushing blooms and Zita felt drawn toward its alabaster, ivy-draped beauty.

She clip-clopped up its mosaic-tiled steps and slumped against one of its girthy pillars. Zita's eyes immediately turned watery as she drank in the unparalleled view of the gradients of green that stretched across and beyond the Haddonite horizon.

For the first time, Zita properly reckoned with the sheer distance between her and her homeland —the evergreen ocean that roared between with no end in sight.

She was adrift. 

The world, which once seemed so finite, so knowable to Zita now felt big enough to swallow and drown her in its undertow.

"Mind if I join you?"

A voice snapped Zita out of her dark trance.

She turned around to see Prince Oziakel taking long, lolloping steps in her direction. His feet splashed against the gravel of the garden pathway.

"By all means," Zita replied, disturbed that she was so consumed by her thoughts that the prince's voice announced his presence before his footsteps did.

The prince flopped against the pillar next to her, looking out at the same forest sloping off in the distance.

"I always thought they looked like broccoli," he said.

"The trees?"

"Don't they? When I was younger that's what I thought trees were; overgrown broccoli," he rolled his eyes at his youthful foolishness. "I refused to eat it. I was absolutely against the idea of eating baby trees."

"So it had nothing to do with the taste?"

"No. It was the principle. I would come out here and think 'look at what they could grow into.'"

"Although I feel I should warn you, never come out here at night." His face fell serious. "It's beautiful when the sun's out but in the dark, the trees look like black smoke clouds rising from the ground. Especially when it's foggy. It's menacing."

"I don't know..." the princess cast a skeptical glance at the younger prince. "I have a feeling you just have a really vivid imagination."

He quirked his brow at the princess. "And you don't?"

"Of course not."

"That can't be right. All those stories you read? All that poetry you 'soak into your bones'?" he clutched his hands to his chest, referencing the passion Zita displayed the previous night when speaking of poetry.

"Come on, I'm sure you cook up all sorts of things in that mind of yours."

Zita shook her head. "My mind is just a museum of all the art I've loved. I would starve if I had to cook things up for myself."

The prince readjusted against the pillar to look squarely at the princess. "What about that look?" his eyes narrowed into her.

"What look?"