I cleared my throat and kept going. Something shook inside of me, as if someone was jangling a set of keys against my rib cage. “ ‘On one side beetling cliffs shoot up, and against them pound the huge roaring breakers of blue-eyed Amphitrite—’ ”
The king made another inscrutable noise. This time I was sure I’d heard it, and started to wish Thomas would come back in. The king spooked me; I couldn’t explain it, but I didn’t like it, not one bit.
I paused in my reading and watched him. His eyes flew open, staring straight ahead, and he raised his hand; his fingers resumed their hypnotic dance. “Mirror, mirror.”
I tried to ignore it, but after a few moments I could sense him looking at me. I put the book down. He’s in a hospital bed, I told myself. He can’t do anything to you.
“What is it?” I didn’t expect him to answer, but was it possible that he was attempting to communicate? The doctors were certain the king’s mumblings were random and meaningless, but what if that wasn’t true? What if he was actually trying to say something?
“Angel eyes,” he said. I wondered if that was his pet name for Juliana. I smiled at the thought. It was sort of sweet. My dad had called me “Little One.”
“Angel eyes,” he said again, more insistent this time. “Mirror, mirror.”
“On the wall,” I said, playing along. “Who’s the fairest of them all?”
“One, one, two, three, five, eight,” he said.
“That’s not how the story goes,” I informed him. Not that he was listening.
“Touch and go,” the king said. “Touch and go.” I sighed.
The door slid open and Thomas came in. “Is everything all right?”
“He’s talking again. And doing, you know, the hand thing.” But the king’s odd behavior didn’t seem to bother Thomas.
“Oh,” he said. “Well, I guess that’s normal. Relatively speaking, anyway. Are you ready to go?” All traces of awkwardness from our previous conversation had disappeared, at least on his end. He was acting as if the past half hour had never even occurred. Maybe I should’ve been grateful; I wanted to ignore it, too. But the fact that he wanted to ignore it made me want to talk about it more, which I knew was a bad idea, so I bit my tongue and said nothing.
Thomas glanced at his watch. “Sasha?”
I liked it when he said my name. It felt good to be reminded, by someone other than myself, who I was. “Yeah, I’m coming.”
I put The Odyssey back in its place on the bedside table. The king didn’t seem to notice us leaving. It was as if he had no idea we were even in the room. He looked so sad and desolate lying there alone, in an impenetrable bubble where nothing mattered except for what was going on in his head. He was older than my own father would have been if he had lived, much closer to Granddad’s age. Someday, I realized with a jolt, it would be Granddad lying in that bed, or one very much like it. The thought made my heart ache. I felt the sudden urge to stay with the king, just so he wouldn’t have to be alone. But I couldn’t. I had a schedule to keep. And a life to live.
TWENTY
“Are you nervous?” Thomas whispered.
Of course I was nervous, and having him at my side right now wasn’t helping. My thoughts were like a flock of birds being chased into flight, wheeling around inside my head, looping and gliding so fast that I couldn’t sort them out, but they all came circling back to Thomas in the end. In spite of all my doubts and fears, I felt connected to him. He was my only link in this world to my past, the reality of my true life. The only one, as he had said back in the king’s bedroom, who knew who I was. I wanted him close, but I wanted him far away, too.
And now, to complicate things even further, Prince Callum was coming. I hadn’t had to be really intimate with anyone in my short time as Juliana, other than Gloria and Thomas. My analog was the sort of person who kept most people at a distance. But Callum was Juliana’s betrothed. Would he expect to kiss me? To hold me? To … sleep with me? I had no idea what he would want, or what questions he would ask, and no one could tell me that, not even Thomas.
“You’ll be fine,” Thomas assured me. “He’s got no reason to suspect anything. He’s never met Juliana. He’s never even been outside Farnham. To him, Juliana is whoever you allow her to be.”
Yeah, I thought. But who is that?
We’d nearly reached the head of the grand staircase, where I was supposed to meet the queen to await the arrival of the Farnham prince. I was almost as unnerved by the prospect of spending more time with the queen as I was by meeting Callum. I’d spent the last few hours in the queen’s study as she discussed last-minute details for Juliana’s wedding with her staff, but no one asked my opinion, or even glanced my way. The wedding was a monsoon, and all I could do was sit there while it raged all around me. It didn’t bother me so much, because I wouldn’t even be there to see it, but I couldn’t imagine Juliana being able to stand it.
“Hey.” I tugged at the sleeve of Thomas’s jacket. “I was just wondering if you’d heard anything about Juliana—or Grant.” It was driving me crazy that even though I was still dreaming about her, I didn’t know anything about where Juliana was or what was happening to her. I wished I could force a vision, see through her eyes while I was awake. I was sick of this passive power; it wasn’t helping anyone. And as for Grant—I felt responsible for him. Whatever he was going through, it never would’ve happened if it hadn’t been for me. I had as little control over that as he did, but I couldn’t get him out of my head.
Thomas hesitated. “The KES raided a Libertas hideout downtown last night on a tip, but they didn’t find anything. I’ll tell you as soon as I know anything more.”
“You don’t think—you’re sure you’ll find them?”
“We’ll find them,” Thomas assured me. “Libertas is going to hide Juliana as well as possible for as long as possible, but we’re better trained and better funded and smarter than they are, and eventually they’ll slip up. When they do, we’ll be there. And Grant …” Thomas shook his head. “To be honest, I’m worried. We should’ve heard from Libertas already. They might not know he’s not me, but he can’t tell them anything. They’ll have figured that out by now. If we don’t hear from them soon …” He trailed off, but I knew what he was thinking. It was the same thing I was thinking: If we don’t hear from them soon, it means he might be dead.
I didn’t want to hear him say it. I wasn’t going to give up hope that Grant was alive. I just couldn’t accept that an innocent boy was dead because of me; I wouldn’t accept it, until I knew one way or the other.
“I’ll be standing off to the side,” Thomas said. He reached out a hand as if he was going to touch my shoulder, but then he stopped, obviously thinking the better of it. He cleared his throat and continued, “This should all go according to protocol. Just follow the queen’s lead.”
At the grand staircase, Thomas peeled off and left me standing at the top all by myself. There was another row of KES agents already stationed at the foot of the staircase; these men would protect Callum for the length of his stay in the UCC—which at the moment was indefinite. By custom he wasn’t allowed to retain his own Farnham guard.
The queen swept in from the other side of the staircase with a pair of KES agents trailing behind. Though her exterior was unruffled, the queen had to be agitated; the situation was so politically sensitive, there was no way she could be as calm as she seemed. The mere mention of Farnham and its royal family made everyone in the Castle uneasy; even Gloria had been jumpy as she helped me prepare for the meeting. What would it be like when there was a foreign element in their midst? A perverse part of me was looking forward to finding out.