I trust you will approve of my decision to send Petra and Tomik to the Academy. I have been careful. I will order them not to contact their family members in Bohemia, for fear of discovery. I will give them the address of my nephew and niece, and specify that any communication with me be sent through them. As for your part, I suggest you look into the existence of the Vatra. It seems that Gypsies have more to them than meets the eye, and that Neel of the Lovari has rather moved up in the world. A king! Who would believe it?

Petra’s opinion of you

Iris paused—

is uncertain. Frankly, I think she doesn’t know what to make of you. One thing is clear: she does not trust you. Therefore, I thought it best to say nothing of our friendship.

Or shall I call it what it is: a partnership based on mutual interests? Don’t forget who stands next in line to the Bohemian throne.

—Irenka Grisetta December, Sixth Countess of Krumlov

P.S. You should have told me about the spider! I didn’t even know he existed. How embarrassing!

Iris dusted sand on the letter to dry the ink. Then she folded it, sealed it with a wax stamp, and addressed it to John Dee.

20

Tea

“STOP GIVING ME this stale old stuff.” Neel shoved a sheaf of papers at Nadia.

She shoved it right back across the marble-topped table. “You haven’t even read it.”

“You bet I have. It’s about coir. Again. You’ve been forcing me to read this muck for weeks. I hate to break your heart, dear Nadia, but I don’t care about coir.”

“You should.”

“It’s coconut hair. Why in the name of the four tribes should I care about coconut hair?”

“Because,” she said through her teeth, “it’s used to make rope. Rope is important.”

“Oh, right.” Neel smacked the heel of his hand against his forehead. His eyes went wide, sarcastic, and his voice turned mockingly sweet. “How could I forget? Rope! Rope’s got magic in it, right, magic that’ll turn me into a king who gives everyone the glow, they’re so happy I’m theirs.”

“Being a king is not about being liked.”

“Can’t argue with you. After all, you’re the expert on being unpopular.”

“I give up!” Nadia threw her hands in the air. “I’m not teaching you anything, anymore. You have been an insufferable snarl ever since your gadje friends left. You are so obvious. It’s obvious you wanted nothing more than to tear after them and win their hearts a thousand times over, and be the prankster, the adventurer, the wink-quick Lovari getting in and out of scrapes. You’re not that person anymore, Neel.” She stood and glared down at him. “You never will be again.”

Neel opened his mouth, but nothing came out as Nadia stormed from the library.

It took several seconds for Neel to realize that for the first time, Nadia’s sharp tongue had actually cut him.

* * *

“TEATIME, YOUR MAJESTY.” Karim, Neel’s adviser in manners, cracked open the library door to see Neel scowling at papers scattered in front of him.

“Not for me. I’m playing hooky.”

“You cannot miss tea. How many times need I tell you that teatime is absolutely crucial for Roma royalty?”

Neel couldn’t tear his eyes from a chart listing coir profits from last year. “Why?”

“Why?” Karim was flustered.

“You’ve never told me why you’re always nagging me to lounge around on a pile of perfumed pillows and drink tea—when I like coffee, Karim, coffee—and listen to a bunch of witless courtiers natter away about nothing, ’cause nothing is all they know, since all they do is hang around the Vatran court. Tell me why I have to go to tea.”

Karim gave Neel a look that questioned his intelligence. “To find out what your people want, of course.”

“What they want,” Neel repeated slowly. He thought of the clear glass bead, and the fact that someone in this palace wanted him dead. He stood. “Fine. I’ll go. But send a message to my ma first. Ask her to come, too.”

* * *

NEEL SAT ON A LARGE CUSHION stuffed with sweet dried seagrass. He didn’t sprawl across the pillows, although he would have liked to. He sat carefully, his folded legs neatly tucked beneath a low lemonwood table with inlaid patterns of mother-of-pearl. On the table rested a copper teapot warmed to the perfect temperature. He poured himself a cup and didn’t even make a face as he took a cautious sip. He stared at the courtiers arranged around the pool in brightly dressed clusters of color, and gazed at the pool itself. It looked temptingly deep and cool. Neel became conscious of the heat of the tearoom. He glanced away from the pool and took another sip.

“Mingle,” Karim had hissed in his ear before crossing the room to talk with Arun. Both Karim and Neel’s chief adviser had thought it best to keep their distance from the king in public. “No one needs reminding that you are in dire need of better manners,” Arun had said. “And it will not improve your image if your people think that I am leading you around by the nose.”

Mingle. Neel supposed that was fine advice—and, after all, he was here, drinking this vile, flowery tea, in order to get to know the court better. But—Neel took another sip, and let his dislike of the drink steady his nerves—it might be interesting to sit here, wait, and see who’d creep over to talk to him.

He didn’t have to wait long. Treb glanced up from where he was playing a game of Vices with his brother. Tarn leaned across the table with its board of two large circles, a pawn in each center, and muttered something to Treb, who grinned, snatched his brother’s pawn, and strode alongside the pool toward Neel, his boots crushing a few silk cushions along the way.

“I think you’re supposed to wear slippers to tea,” Neel told Treb when the captain reached him.

“And I think you couldn’t care less what I wear.” Treb sat across from Neel, blocking his view of the pool.

Neel sighed.

“Don’t mind if I smoke here, do you?” Without waiting for an answer, Treb rapped his pipe against the table to knock out the old ashes. He thumbed a wad of tobacco into the pipe bowl and lit it.

“What do you want, Treb?”

Treb puffed out a cloud of smoke. “Who says I want anything, coz?”

“What does your brother want, then? Other than to never speak with me again.”

“Oh, now, you can’t blame him for that.” Treb poured himself a cup of tea. “You took away that pretty toy of a throne from him.”

“I won’t give it back.”

Treb slid his teacup toward Neel. “Then give me some sugar.”

Neel didn’t move. Treb shrugged and helped himself. “Give the Maraki something to sweeten our loss,” said the captain. “Give Tarn, our leader, a reason to support you. Because the Maraki can play nice, or”—Treb smiled—“we can get in your way.”

“And now, seeing as you’ve made your point, you might as well say what you want.”

“Nothing. A small smidgeon of a thing. A patch of coconut trees. There’s a coconut plantation on the other side of the mountain, and its ten-year lease is up. The Maraki would like to be its new leaseholders.”

“Huh.” Carelessly, Neel said, “Who’s got the lease now?”

“The Ursari. They won’t miss it, Neel. The Ursari raise and train animals. What could they possibly want with a bunch of coconuts? They’ve hung on to that plantation just to spite us Maraki. Pure, petty spite, that’s all it is.”

Neel watched Treb wait to see if the young king would ask why the plantation was so important to the Maraki. Neel let a lazy look settle over his face. “I’ll think about it.”

“A quick answer’s the best kind.”

“If this is just a small smidgeon of a thing, you won’t mind if I take time to think.”

Treb stood. “Think fast.”

Not a second after the captain strode back to his game, the red-slippered feet of Shaida, the Ursari tribe leader, whispered across the floor to meet Neel. She sat, and got straight to the heart of things.

The Ursari wanted to keep their lease of the coconut plantation.

Neel took pains to be polite, and was relieved when the entrance of his mother gave him an excuse to send the Ursari leader away with the promise that he would consider her tribe’s request.

Damara looked out of place in the tearoom, even more so than Neel, who had put on every elegant article of clothing Karim had handed him, and had even allowed his manners instructor to smudge kohl around his eyes for the occasion. Neel’s mother, however, always refused Neel’s every effort to give her finery.

Damara took the place at the table vacated by the Ursari leader. “Thank you for inviting me.”

Neel shifted uncomfortably. He had decided long ago, during that fall from the palace wall, that his mother wasn’t to blame for the past, and that she’d done the best that she could by him. Why was it, then, that he couldn’t bring himself to say so?

“I’ve missed you,” she said.

Neel had sent her packages of dresses and bangles, yet ducked away from every opportunity to see her. He had had his guards send her away. And all because he couldn’t bear to wear his heart on his sleeve.

“Ma,” he said. “Will you help me?”

“Of course.” She smiled, and Neel’s throat tightened to see the happiness on her face. “What do you need?”

“Some advice.” With an eye on the courtiers, to make certain they kept a respectful distance from his table, Neel told Damara about the coconut plantation. “I know why the Maraki want it,” he said.

She raised one brow.

“Coir,” Neel said. “The hair of a coconut is stripped away to make coir, which gets spun into rope. The best rope for seafaring. I sailed with the Maraki long enough to know that salt rots away most rope—except the kind made from coir. A ship needs yards and yards of rope for its rigging. If the hull and masts are a boat’s skeleton, rope is its muscle. I’ve been reading charts on coir profits—”

Damara raised both brows.

“—and its price has been going no way but up in Europe. Whoever runs that coconut plantation could make oodles of money in trade. Not the Maraki, of course. They’d keep it all for themselves. But another tribe could sell that coir anywhere that’ll accept Roma goods. The thing is … the Ursari haven’t been selling it for much. I’ve seen the records. It’s as if they don’t know they’ve got gold in their hands, or they don’t care. The Ursari want to keep that plantation, sure as sure, but I don’t get why. What do coconuts have to do with training elephants and horses and bears?”

“I don’t know,” Damara said, “but I think you’d better find out.” She looked at him. “You don’t need me to tell you that.”

Invisible fingers plucked a gold bracelet from Neel’s pocket and slipped it onto his mother’s wrist.

“Neel—”

“You keep that. You can’t stroll around the palace wearing dowdy dregs of clothes. Karim has a fit every time he sees you.”

“Neel.”

“After all, you’re the king’s ma,” Neel said. “Aren’t you?”

Damara brushed a lock of hair off his forehead. “Oh, Neel.”

“You, too,” he said. “I’ve missed you, too.”

They sat there in silence. Neel let a wave of secure peace flow through him, and tried to ignore the chilling current of a thought:

Everybody in that room, man and woman alike, wore crystal beads on their clothes.

21

Sid

NEEL DUCKED INTO one of the city’s alleyways, a dark crevice between two walls of mountain rock with houses built on top of them, covering the narrow divide. It was a tunnel, really, that Neel was walking down, with sunlight at the beginning and at the end, and none in between. There was no one in this alley but Neel, and it was the perfect shadowy place for him to grab a fistful of dry dirt and rub it into his face.

And—Neel looked at his hands—he should work some of that grit under his nails, too. His hands were entirely too clean.

He stripped off his fine clothes and shrugged on some plain, slightly tattered ones he’d filched from a clothing line. He kicked the beautifully tooled leather sandals from his feet, wrapped the clothes he had been wearing around them, and climbed one-handed up a rock wall to wedge the soft bundle into a cranny where one of the house beams joined the rock. Then he jumped down onto the street, dirt puffing up around his feet.

Neel scrunched his toes into the fine layer of sandy soil and smiled. Barefoot in a city.

It had been a while.

His destination, however, was not the city. He followed its winding ways down to the harbor, and its ships. He avoided the docked Pacolet and padded over the beach to a rocky strip by the shore where a clan of Maraki—not Treb’s—were sloshing through tide pools. They were crab-hunting.

Neel peered at the morning sun. He had time. Plenty of time for what he had to do later. It wouldn’t hurt to muck around in the seaweed for a bit with these sailors before moving on. The slime would dirty him up nicely. Neel walked up to a cluster of five sailors, offered his help, and waited for any keen glances that would tell him they knew who he was.

“Know anything about crab-chasing, lad?” a short man asked, not bothering to unbend from his crouched position over a tide pool.

“D’you sail by the North Star?” Neel countered. “Does a gull fly free?” He knew the slang of the sea.