“Him? What? Who?” Treb spluttered. “What could be more important than the Mercator Globes?”
“Indraneel of the Lovari,” Arun said.
4
Before the Blue Wall
“ME?” NEEL WAS AGHAST. “What’d I do?”
“The queen will explain,” said Arun. “If you’ll just follow me—”
“Yeah, follow you like a lamb to the slaughter. And that’s what I am, got it? An innocent, sweet little lamb who’s done nothing wrong. Baa.”
“You have nothing to fear, Indraneel.”
“Neel. And like I said: baa.”
“If you don’t trust me, perhaps you’ll trust your mother, who is waiting for you inside the palace. Damara was summoned—”
“You summoned my ma?” Neel shrilled the last word, then whipped around to face Tomik and Petra. He seized them. “I’m in trouble.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” Tomik said.
“Trouble,” Neel insisted. “Ghastly, boil-you-in-oil trouble. You two are coming with me. Astro, too.”
“Of course we will,” said Petra. “But—”
“Good.” Neel sucked in his breath and marched toward the entrance, dragging Petra and Tomik after him, ignoring their protests that they could walk on their own, that they wouldn’t abandon him, and would he please let go? Arun and Treb followed on their heels, Arun arguing that it wasn’t Treb’s place to intrude uninvited on a queen’s audience. Treb fired back that he was going to intrude on Arun’s face if the man didn’t get out of his way.
Inside, the palace echoed with the sound of trickling water. Petra saw that while some of the walls were glossy marble dotted with mosaics of wriggling octopi, at least one side of every hallway showed the untouched surface of the mountain on which the palace was built.
Neel blindly turned a corner, and the others followed him down a wide chamber. On their left, a natural fountain poured from a jagged rock wall. Water spilled down and rushed across their path in a stream that cut through the floor. Neel forged ahead, pulling Petra and Tomik after him into the water.
“Stop!” Arun moaned from where he and Treb stood at the stream’s edge. “That’s drinking water, and you’re absolutely filthy! Besides, there’s a bridge, if you’d only let me show you…”
Petra tugged her arm free of Neel’s grasp, and Astrophil squeaked as her foot slipped against the stream’s tiled bottom, plunging her and the spider beneath the water’s surface. But the river was shallow, and when Petra scrambled to her feet, the water only came up to her waist.
Neel had finally stopped his mad dash through the stream. He looked at Petra and Astrophil. “Are you all right?”
Fury mounted in Petra’s bones and spread through her blood. This evening wasn’t supposed to be about Neel. Meeting the Roma queen was supposed to have nothing to do with him. Petra had imagined what would happen when they reached the Vatra. This is what she had seen in her mind, so many times: that the queen would be grateful for the globes, and to Petra for her role in obtaining them. As a reward, Queen Iona would offer any resources her country had to help find a cure for Petra’s father.
Neel wasn’t part of this picture, and he certainly had no business tearing around the palace in a panic over nothing. He wasn’t the one with problems. She was. “No, I’m not all right!” She shoved wet locks of hair out of her face so she could glare at Neel better. “And you’re behaving like an idiot!”
“Really?” Neel grew calm, thoughtful. “I’m an idiot?”
“Yes!” cried Petra, Tomik, and the spider.
“But it’s strange.” Neel’s voice dropped. “The queen wanting to see me. Maybe I stole something of hers without realizing it, or … I don’t know … this is a surprise, and an odd one, odd as a two-headed dog, and that kind of beast bites twice as fierce.”
“Surprises are not always bad,” Astrophil said hopefully, but in Petra’s experience they often were.
She looked at Neel’s dripping face and remembered when he had helped her steal her father’s eyes from Prince Rodolfo’s Cabinet of Wonders almost a year and a half ago. A sudden flood had swept Petra, Astrophil, and Neel through the prince’s castle, and they were as wet then as they were now. Neel hadn’t been afraid that time—or, if he had been, he had hidden it well. But here in the Vatra, anxiety lurked in his yellowy eyes. Petra realized that fear doesn’t strike everyone in the same way. With a sense of shame, it also occurred to her that her anger had a selfish edge, a belief that her worries were more important than his.
Tomik sighed. “Can we please walk through the palace like normal human beings and not members of an underwater circus?”
“Indeed,” said Astrophil, shaking water from his legs one by one.
They turned and waded back to Arun and Treb.
Every step Arun took seemed louder than necessary as he led them over the bridge. His feet stamped against the planks. “No respect”—stamp—“the glory of our homeland”—stamp—“a pair of outsiders”—stamp—“dirty children”—stampstampSTAMP.
“We’re not children,” Tomik objected. “We’re all of age,” he added, though none of them knew if his statement truly applied to Neel, whose exact birthday was a mystery. He had been abandoned by a Lovari campsite as an infant.
Arun stepped onto the stone floor on the other side of the river and swept ahead to a broad staircase that led into a deep-bellied cave. A torch-lit tunnel glowed at the back of the cave, one so narrow that all of them had to enter singly, and the space inside was so tight that smoke from the torches stung Petra’s eyes. She heard Neel shuffle behind her and glanced back to see whether his fear had returned. He moved ahead silently, his face grim.
Tomik, walking behind Neel, looked past him to catch Petra’s look of concern. Tomik reached forward to lay a steady hand on Neel’s shoulder, and the other boy seemed to breathe more easily.
Why is Neel acting like a trapped animal? Petra asked Astrophil after she had turned to continue down the tunnel.
We know very little of the Roma queen, the spider replied. She may be … cruel.
Petra thought of Bohemia’s prince: a twenty-year-old with a brilliant smile and an ambition as cold as winter. What would happen if she were brought before her country’s ruler? Death, or maybe something worse. I am not going to kill you, he had told her when they last stood face-to-face. I am going to keep you.