Chapter Nine:
Five hours later, Marie found herself eating some of the most delicious food she had ever had in her life, better even than that served at Lord Daenlyn’s estate. The group ate at a long, low table and sat on cushions lying on the ground. Marie had changed into the dress Lord Daenlyn had given her, and on the whole she felt rather excited and exotic. It helped that Rheidan was not only at the feast, but because of the peculiar, hierarchical seating arrangements, sitting beside her. Further down the table, Barnabas, Darius, and Pamela sat talking with Councilor Parvenin. Barnabas and Parvenin seemed to have forgotten their earlier disagreement: Parvenin was chuckling, and Barnabas had the same charming smile on his face he had worn when he first met Marie.
Marie turned her attention back to her food, a little disgusted. Barnabas irritated her. It wasn’t that she thought he was a particularly bad person…just a manipulative one, picking up and abandoning people whenever it suited his purpose. Including her. Which was what was so irritating. Honestly, she probably wouldn’t be so upset about it otherwise.
Beside her, Rheidan leaned forward. “So what do you think of your rooms?”
Marie smiled up at him. “They’re lovely. Very beautiful. An unexpected gift.”
Rheidan’s eyes glittered. “I’m glad you like them. His Excellency is known for his hospitality.”
Marie wasn’t sure she believed him. What kind of host didn’t stay to welcome his guests? Not wishing to say something rude, though, she fished for another topic. “Do you live in the palace?” She picked up a red vegetable shaped like a green bean.
He looked pleased at the question. “Yes. I have a room here. But when I am off duty, I generally visit my family’s home. They live here in the city.”
Marie took a bite out the red vegetable, grimaced at its lemony flavor, and swallowed quickly. “What is your family like?”
He shrugged, his lips tightening and his eyes hardening. Marie immediately regretted asking the question. “Like any noble family, I suppose,” he finally said, “My father is a Lord Councilor, but he is not here tonight.” He lowered his voice. “He is old, and his health is failing him. When he dies my elder brother, Garshaun, will take his title. Garshaun is my only full sibling, but I have four younger half-siblings. My sister, Terrah, is sixteen. Then there is Juliel; he is twelve. And there is also a set of twins: Kraiden and Porsin. They are eight. You might meet them one day.”
“Whoa,” said Marie, stunned. She hadn’t pictured Rheidan as someone from a large family. She had pegged him as an only child. She looked him over again. Somehow him having siblings made him seem like a slightly different person. More real. “You have such a large family,” she finally said. “I can’t even imagine having that many siblings!”
Rheidan looked surprised. He stared at her curiously. “What is your family like?”
Marie immediately lowered her eyes. Her cheeks reddened. What could she tell him? “I’m…” she started haltingly, “I’m an only child. I don’t have any brothers or sisters. My mother—she died when I was two. She had a disease known as AIDS, which she had contracted before even marrying my father. But my father, even though he knew she was dying, was never quite right after her death. When I was four, he…” Marie tapered off. How could she tell him her dad went to prison? How would that go over here? What would Rheidan think of her? She frowned at the plate in front of her. When her dad had gone to prison, life had changed in more than one way. Not only had she lost her dad, but she had lost her friends as well. People avoided her like the plague. She had no longer been Marie, but simply “Ezekiel’s child.” She couldn’t let that happen again. “Well, he was taken away from me. I was raised by my grandmother. “
Rheidan and Marie looked at each other, and both seemed to understand at the same time neither of them was comfortable talking about their families and neither had told the full truth.
Marie broke the stare, her eyes falling to the plate in front of her. She scooted all the red green bean things to its edge. “So will I get to meet your family?”
Rheidan looked down at her. “I am sure you will,” he murmured. “But when depends on what your responsibilities will be while staying here. So,” he said, a smile on his face, “What will your responsibilities be?”
Marie shrugged. She wondered the same thing. She had no doubt Barnabas would find some use for her, even if it was simply smiling prettily at someone.
“Barnabas has yet to decide.”
“Hmm.” Rheidan glanced down the table. “Well, if you have spare time, then I will try to take you to see them sometime in the upcoming weeks. What is the name of your chamberlain?”
Marie blinked. What the heck was a chamberlain?
Seeing her confused look, he elaborated, looking amused, “The man in charge of your domestic concerns.”
Oh. She blushed. “Hannon.”
“Then when I can take you to see my family, I will make sure to leave a message with Hannon if I cannot find you myself.”
“Well, then it’s a date,” Marie said automatically. Then she blushed horribly. Why had she said that?
But there were advantages to being in another world. Rheidan looked at her oddly, and she realized the significance of that saying did not translate through in Maretzian. Small favors.
Marie felt warm, comfortable, and relaxed for the first time in a long time. She sighed happily, then frowned. Why did her neck tingle…and now her cheek…her forehead? It was as if someone was drawing a line up the side of her face. Something warm and wet slid over her eyelids, and Marie’s eyes blinked open.
The laewin stood above her, a wet cloth in his right hand. “Is it morning?” she asked groggily, sitting up. Her head pounded, and her limbs felt heavy. The laewin took a few steps back, bowing to her.
“Ugh…” The last vestiges of sleep cleared from her mind. She glanced around. Sunlight streamed in through the window. “What time is it?” she muttered. When the laewin just stood there, she sighed. She kept on forgetting he couldn’t hear her and that even if he could, he couldn’t understand English.
She slipped out of bed. Her eyes slid across the room and landed on a dress that had most certainly not been there the night before, a beautiful orange gown like the one from Lord Daenlyn’s manor. Just looking at it, she could tell it would fit her perfectly. Her mind spun. How on Earth…? She shook her head. Rheidan had said Emperor Sidriel’s hospitality was legendary. With the sheer luxury of his House, Marie wouldn’t be surprised if Sidriel jus had piles of clothes lying around.
Marie turned to the laewin and blinked when she realized he was no longer there. She stood still for a minute, stunned and disturbed he could move so quietly, then tiptoed to her new dress, marveling at it. She lifted it up and saw a pair of slippers beneath it. She slid one onto her foot—a perfect fit. Of course. It was as if the laewin had measured her in her sleep. As soon as the thought her crossed her mind, she knew instinctively it was true. Which was disturbing.
A panel in the wall slid open, and Marie jumped, whirling around. The laewin entered again, bearing a tray of food. He set it down on a small table and backed into the corner, standing there with his arms clasped in front of him.
Marie glanced at him, fingering a bowl of fruit, before sitting down at the table. “You know,” she said conversationally, “I need to come up with a name for you. Something other than ‘laewin.’ I doubt you can tell me your name in a way I’ll understand, so I’ll just come up with one myself. Something to refer to you by.” She pondered it for a moment. At last she nodded. “I’ve got it! You remind me of a boy from my high school. He was incredibly quiet…you know, the brooding type. He had long dark hair, too. His name was Max. So I’ll call you that, okay?”
Of course he said nothing.
Marie decided there was something incredibly nice about being able to talk to someone and not having to worry about their opinion. She spent her entire breakfast blabbering away in English about absolutely no
thing and enjoying every minute of it.
She didn’t know it at the time, but that morning was an indication of how she would pass most of her days in Melei-Argalla—in luxury. The first day in the palace started with a tour, conducted by Hannon, which was long and confusing enough for Marie to determine she would never know her way around the whole complex. She decided to be satisfied with knowing the paths to the important places, such as the main entrance.
Dinner that night was not as sumptuous as the first feast, but it was delicious nonetheless. She spent the evening in her room, writing on some parchment Max brought her. As she wrote down her thoughts for the day, she realized that her evenings might be a little quieter than she was used to. Cristaña, Jennifer, Mabel, and everyone else she talked to were in the camp outside the city.
She set down the scroll to reread what she had written. Thinking it over, she decided life wouldn’t be too bad once the rest of her things arrived. Barnabas had told her her belongings would be brought to the palace in a day or so. Marie had packed plenty of books to keep her entertained. But until then…
She recalled the library, which Hannon had shown them earlier. It had been magnificent, as large as a football field, filled with shelves upon shelves of scrolls. What a pity it was all written in another language. She froze at the thought. She could speak Maretzian, but she couldn’t read or write it. Perhaps that would be useful to learn. Maybe Barnabas could arrange for someone to teach her! If someone taught her how to read Maretzian, she could learn Maretzian history and culture on her own. Barnabas couldn’t deny it would be important to learn, and who better to do so than her? Everyone else staying in the palace had some important duty requiring their full-time attention—everyone but Marie. She decided to approach Barnabas about it the next day.
Barnabas gave permission. That very afternoon Marie found herself meeting up in the library with a black-haired man named Master Karash, who looked down his nose at her as soon as she entered, heaved a great sigh, and proceeded to give her a copy of the Maretzian alphabet. The alphabet was huge—76 different letters—and each letter looked the same. Marie shuddered when she saw it.
After that, Marie met up with Master Karash every day, and the days took on a predictable pattern. Max woke her up every morning and served her breakfast, and every morning she had a new dress waiting for, each as beautiful as the first. She spent some mornings practicing her Maretzian, but she passed most of them exploring the palace.
After about a week she found the way to the gardens, and once she did, she tried to go there at least once a day. Like everything else in Sidriel’s House, the gardens were both beautiful and exotic. Marie thought about Mabel every time she went. Mabel would have gone crazy in the gardens. As would the zoologists.
Dragon-birds of all sizes nested in the gardens, flying about like glittering jewels. These birds seemed somewhat domesticated, and would allow Marie a little closer to them before fleeing. They were strange creatures, the dragon-birds, thought Marie. Beautiful and mysterious and from the looks in their eyes, keenly intelligent. “They are Sidriel’s favorite animals,” Rheidan explained to her one day. “They are even featured in his personal crest.”
But there was more to the gardens than just the dragon-birds. Blue-barked trees lined the major walkways, and the sweet scent of their vanilla flowers never failed to intoxicate Marie. Silver fish with patches of flashing blue scales swam in shoals in the gardens’ fountains, and glittering green insects collected nectar from the fiery red flowers of the hanging trellises. Yellow birds the size of grasshoppers nested in spindly, white-barked trees. If Marie was lucky, the birds would come to her, balancing precariously on her fingers, entreating her for food.
But not only were the gardens beautiful, but they were ever-changing. Different flowers bloomed at different hours. At sunrise the gardens looked completely different from the way they did at midday. Rheidan once took Marie to the gardens after dinner, and Marie almost didn’t recognize them.
After her visit to the gardens came lunch, which was generally a quick affair taken in the suite, often with Hannah or Barnabas. Marie tried to avoid eating with Darius or Pamela, who more blatantly disliked her, but sometimes it couldn’t be helped, and those lunches Marie ate much faster than usual.
The afternoons with Master Karash were long and toilsome, but Karash, though generally grumpy, was a good enough teacher, and Marie started catching on to the alphabet faster than she had anticipated she would. After a week of firm instruction she could read very simple sentences, much to her delight, and though Karash lamented her penmanship was ghastly, she thought she was improving.
Dinners passed with a different rotation of companions each night, with the exception of Councilor Parvenin, who was present at all of them, and Rheidan, who came about every other night. Whether or not Rheidan sat near Marie depended on the importance of their dinner guests, but wherever he sat, he tried to say at least a few words to her before she returned to her room.
The dinners with Rheidan present were always the most enjoyable ones. Marie and Rheidan quickly resumed their habit of telling each other their favorite fairytales. Sometimes, however, they would wander entirely off topic and never get the chance to finish a story, which Rheidan always used as an excuse to seek out Marie later.
She had been living in the palace for two weeks before Barnabas finally allowed her to sit in on one of his meetings with Councilor Parvenin, but the subject matter consisted of trade contracts concerning, of all things, writing utensils. Marie hadn’t even known people needed contracts for such things. But what she did know, or at least guess, was that Barnabas was trying to bore her so she wouldn’t want to attend another one. She refused to give him that satisfaction. When he asked, somewhat sardonically, two days later if she wished to attend another meeting, she told him yes just to spite him. The surprised look that crossed his face was almost worth the three hours of torment she had to endure the next morning, listening as Barnabas and Parvenin argued over taxes.
If after dinner she wasn’t too tired, she would curl up on her bed with a cup of fernigh, a hot chocolate like drink, and read one of the many books she had brought, which had arrived as promised. When packing for the trip, she had packed a few sheer pleasure books—such as the Harry Potter series—but mostly she had brought classics, like Pride and Prejudice and One Hundred Years of Solitude. When Dunstan Richards, the man who had recruited her, had asked her why she was doing it, she had given two reasons.
“If I’m going to be an ambassador,” she had explained, dumping another book into her suitcase, “then I ought to have at least a basic knowledge of respected Earth literature. Plus,” she added in a low voice, “If I don’t have anything else to read, I may actually be able to force myself to read them.”
“I see,” Richards had said, gingerly picking up a tattered copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron and eyeing it as though it was an interesting but vaguely disgusting bug. “Well… have fun with that.”
Now Marie was regretting her choice. She knew intellectually she was enriching herself as she struggled through Hobbes’ Leviathan, but that didn’t stop her from wishing she had some childhood classic like Ella Enchanted on hand.
When she couldn’t force herself to read, she found herself chattering away in English to Max, content he couldn’t understand a word she said. She prattled away about everything: her frustrations with Barnabas, Darius, and Pamela, her concerns about her grandmother, her worries about the mission and what she would do once she got home. She told him her of her concerns about slavery, her disgust with the death fights; she confessed her desire to leave the palace, explained how bored she was inside. It was like having a diary, except she couldn’t go back and read what she had written. That was fine with her. There were some incidents she didn’t want to relive.
Being foreign meant getting into a lot of embarrassing and awkward situations. One day, as Marie watched some of the palace guards do a strange routine, she had rema
rked blandly that they reminded her of baseball players running around a baseball diamond.
A nearby guard had looked at her and demanded, “What is baseball?”
“Uh…” she floundered. “It’s a game. A ball is thrown and men try to hit it with a big stick. If they succeed, they run around in the shape of a square.” Even to Marie, the explanation had sounded dumb.
The man had swelled with indignation. “This is not a game!” he snarled. “It is an important training exercise that has been performed in Maretzia for hundreds of years!”
Marie shrank back, holding up her hands. “I meant no disrespect! I just…”
But the man continued to glower at her, and she knew it was a lost cause. She scurried away.
An equally awkward incident occurred two days later. Marie had been in the gardens chit-chatting with a woman of Sidriel’s court when a harried nanny rushed by, chasing a screaming toddler.
The courtier had sniffed in disapproval. “What an insolent child.”
She stared at Marie expectantly, obviously waiting for her to agree.
Marie felt obligated to say something. “Um, well…the nanny does need to put her foot down…”
The woman gave her a thoroughly puzzled look. She turned back to the nanny. “But her foot is down. Oh. Well now it’s not. Now it is. Now it’s not…no offense, My Lady, but I’m not sure if it makes any difference…”
Marie explained the meaning of the phrase, but the incident must have reminded the woman who she was talking to. She gave Marie a hostile and disdainful look before finding an excuse to flounce away.
Other embarrassing incidents happened that had nothing to do with a lack of knowledge of Maretzian culture and everything to do with Marie’s stupidity. As Marie returned to the suite from a long, hard lesson with Master Karash one evening, she saw a laewin she thought was Max in the hallway. She stopped him in order to ask him what he was doing before she realized her mistake.
It wasn’t that bad of a mistake, she comforted herself as the laewin walked away, He does look like Max. In fact, now that she thought of it, all of the laewins in the suite looked alike. All were tall and young and male, with long, plaited brown hair and pale skin. Nevertheless, Marie was much more careful from then on to look carefully at a laewin before approaching him.
Overshadowing all her days was Emperor Sidriel’s absence. The entire palace buzzed with the subject. The courtiers never seemed to tire of talking about it. According to everyone, it seemed, Sidriel’s presence could make everything better. Sidriel could find a solution to Lord Zorin’s dispute with Lord Gauritat. Sidriel could quiet the protests of the Silversmiths’ Guild. Sidriel could rein in ‘that horrid Master Vumatten’ of the Academy. If there was a problem, Sidriel could fix it.
Thoughts of Sidriel soon consumed Marie. Who was he? From the way his people talked about him, he seemed too perfect to be human. Sidriel was an enigma, a figure shadowed in mystery and power. No one did anything but praise him, yet Marie had not heard a single mention of how he had earned such praise. To Marie, the blind devotion to Sidriel was both frightening and awe-inspiring. What type of personality must this Sidriel have in order to so affect his people? Sidriel the Clever, the Powerful, and the Magnificent…
Marie spent hours dwelling on the mystery of Maretzia’s missing emperor, but at the end of it all, she would only have more questions and no answers.