Tomik dropped the saw to the table and rubbed tiredly at his brow. “No. Yes. I mean, I asked him, and he said he’d give me the globes, but I didn’t expect him to do it then, or like that.” He shook his head. “He’s such a show-off.”
“It will make him very unpopular,” said Astrophil.
“You asked him if you could destroy the globes, and … he agreed?” Petra’s hand strayed across the red fabric of her sleeveless dress to touch her shoulder, where a fencing scar stood out like a brand. She had earned that scar fighting for a globe.
“I’m not going to destroy them.” Tomik glanced at the handsaw. “Well, fine. Yes, I am. But I have an idea. I couldn’t tell you before—in fact, I wish we weren’t talking about this now—because I didn’t—I don’t want to get your hopes up. I wanted to wait until I was done, but…”
“Tomik.”
“I want to replicate the globes.”
Petra stared.
“Oh,” Tomik said in a low voice. “You don’t think I can do it.”
“Do you know—” Petra’s voice cracked. “Do you know what this looks like? It looks like you’re trying to ruin the one thing that might help me get home.”
“Petra, don’t you trust me?”
Have some faith in me, Kit had told her, sometime soon after he had kissed her, and soon before he had stabbed her deep in the shoulder.
“I’m not sure I can,” she whispered, and left.
She stood for some time outside Tomik’s closed door. Then she heard it: the rhythmic, dry whine of a saw cutting through wood and paper.
She forced herself to walk away slowly, but as the sound grew fainter it cut more deeply at her heart, tearing at a hope she would never have dared admit, would never have let see the light of day, because she would never have asked Neel for his kingdom’s greatest treasure.
Petra, Astrophil murmured in her mind. Tomik would never betray you.
She didn’t know. She just didn’t know, and there was so much she didn’t know. An overwhelming awareness of her ignorance crashed over her in a great wave. Who was Petra Kronos, to think of slipping close to the Bohemian prince and kidnapping his most valued magician?
She had gifts—she knew this. She could fence like a sword was part of her body. And she had magic. A feel for metal. Glimpses, sometimes, of the future or someone else’s thoughts.
Yet she was no master. None of her gifts was strong enough. None of them showed her whether Tomik was telling the truth. None of them promised she could save her father.
Her feet picked up pace, and Petra followed them out of the palace, down, down, down the city streets, and deep into the darkest dark she had ever seen.
In the depths of the cave, four lights sprang to life around her head.
“She has returned!” a Meti squealed.
“Why?” said another.
“Indeed, brother, why? I thought she did not like us.”
“Please—” Petra said. She tried again. “Please—”
The Meti with the softest voice said, “Little woman, young braveling, why are you here?”
“Teach me,” Petra said.
10
Gifts
NEEL WAS SLINKING DOWN a palace passageway, eager to escape the hordes of angry courtiers, when a hand reached out and touched his arm.
It was his mother.
No, he told himself, it’s Damara. He instantly regretted he had succeeded in commanding his guards not to follow him everywhere. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have. Not alone. He didn’t want to stand in front of this woman and realize that somehow he had grown taller than her. He didn’t want the emotions that realization unleashed inside him.
“Neel,” she said. “You can’t do this. You can’t give away the globes.”
“Can’t I?” His voice was taunting. “I’m the king!”
Her black eyes narrowed. Neel recognized that look. It was the one she usually gave before smacking the back of his head for doing something dumb.
“Anyway,” he said, “it’s done. Tom’s a quick one. I bet he’s already sliced ’em open by now.”
Damara briefly covered her face. “As it is, people don’t want you to be king. After this … Neel, you can’t afford to be seen as a boy being used by a pair of gadje.”
“I am not a boy.”
“This is about how you are seen. You—”
“It was my choice to give Tom the globes. Mine. I deserve my choices. Especially after you tried to take them all away.”
“I didn’t—”
“You kept the greatest secret of my life from me,” Neel said, yet he didn’t voice the fear that simmered below his hurt, the fear that there was something else Damara wasn’t telling him. He didn’t ask, If you kept that secret so long, why did you let it come out? Was it because you have something at stake? What do you want, Ma, now that I’m king? People will try to use me, sure as sure.
Will you?
Damara looked as if the wind had been knocked out of her.
Quietly, Neel said, “I wish Sadie were here.” He missed his older sister, who was sweet, and kind, and would so easily mend things between him and his mother.
“I do, too. But—”
“Don’t say it. Don’t say what everybody says, that it’s good she’s stuck in Prague. That spying on the Bohemian prince is the best thing she could do for her people. Don’t.”
“I was going to say something you’d like even less.”
“Oh, yeah? Out with it, then.”
“I’m sure you did want to give the globes away. I know you.” She gave him a small smile. “It’s not easy to make you do something against your will. But if you love Sadie, you have to stop thinking about what you want.”
For a moment he couldn’t speak. “If I?” he choked out. “If I love her?”
“Neel, we live in dangerous times. Thousands of our people are locked inside Prince Rodolfo’s prison. The choices you make as king will affect Sadie, and every Roma. They need you. They need you to stop thinking only about yourself and what you want.”
Neel stared. “You don’t know me at all,” he said coldly.
He walked away.
* * *