Page 4 of His Princess Brat
My mother’s jaw hardened and her eyes glazed over, her face taking on a demeanor that could only be described as ‘ice queen.’ “Talib can’t inherit the throne. You know that as well as I do, and you very well know why. This discussion is over. Delu will be up shortly to help you pack your things. Your plane departs Monday morning.”
Monday morning? I inwardly balked. It was Saturday night, and my plane was already booked?
“Y-you can’t be serious.”
“This discussion is over,” she said again and started walking toward the door.
Desperate, I ran to throw myself up against it, blocking her from exiting. My mind was reeling. I searched for arguments, any argument I could use to stall the inevitable.
“You can’t send me off to Cousin Mazi. How could he possibly teach me how to be proper and princess-like, he takes his clothes off for money!”
“Not anymore,” she said drily.
“This reeks of one of Father’s half-baked ideas. You can’t possibly have thought this through.” I loved my father dearly, and he was a beloved king with a heart for his people, but his heart was often bigger than his head, and my mother was vastly better equipped to be the brains of the operation.
Of course, insulting my father wasn’t likely to soften her or make her listen, but this scheme was particularly hare-brained. “Mazi was a stripper who became king only when his father was dying, and decided to search out his bastard son, and lure him to Osei to take the throne in his absence. A stripper, Mother! What could a stripper from the States possibly teach me about being a proper princess?”
“Mazi,” my mother snarled, “is the king of Osei, and he’s currently doing a better job of running the kingdom than his father did in years. Their economy has stabilized. He has an heir already. Despite Mazi’s questionable upbringing and the fact that he certainly never intended to be king, he has made the best of his situation and that alone makes him the perfect person to relate to your unique circumstances.”
Dammit. She had a point, several of them, in fact, and I couldn’t find a thing to argue with.
I had one last argument, one last bargaining chip, one last hope with which to convince her that this wasn’t the fabulous idea she was making it out to be. I hoped that somewhere deep down, my mother still had a romantic side, buried beneath all her icy layers.
Her hand was poised on the doorknob, and she looked ready to exit, regardless of the fact that I was still blocking the way.
“You promised I could marry for love,” I reminded her, my voice lowering to a plaintive whisper. This was it, my final argument, my one glimmer of hope at a reprieve from my sentenced fate, and shouting it would clearly get me nowhere.
As I had hoped, this gave her a moment’s pause. It had been a promise, made not only to me but both of my siblings as well. There would be no arranged marriages in our family’s quest to hold on to the throne. My parents, though both of royal lineage, had indeed married for love, and had sworn that we would be able to do the same.
At my desperate outcry, my mother paused, looked me up and down, and cocked an eyebrow. “You can, my darling, most certainly marry for love, but the problem with your argument is that you are nearly twenty-five and no closer to finding a suitable mate than you are to suddenly sprouting hooves and becoming one of your beloved horses. You spend all your time in the barn and fields and arenas with your precious stallion and last I checked, horses are the only thing outside your family that you love. You haven’t even attempted to meet someone, and how would you meet them anyway? You smell like a stable half the time.”
She delivered the insult as coolly and matter-of-factly as one would state the weather, paying no heed to the fact that it was quite a hurtful thing to say to anyone, much less one’s own daughter.
“Better a horse than the inside of a brothel,” I argued half-heartedly, returning to the question of Mazi’s roots.
My mother said nothing. Quelling me with her ice queen stare, she pushed the door open, indicating that this discussion really was over. The window for negotiations had closed.
I had to try anyway. Despite her icy demeanor, my mother was still my mother, a woman who loved each of her children and only wanted their happiness.
“Wait!” I stalled her, grabbing her wrist. “I’ll do it,” I acquiesced, “but if I do, then I think I deserve something special. Especially considering what I’m giving up my life for.”
“You mean, your country?” she retorted, and I wilted. She couldn’t have helped but notice, and surprisingly it softened her. “All right,” she sighed. “What do you want?”
“Sanaa,” I said, naming a mare I had had my eyes on now for months. My dream prior to Jabari’s passing had been to start my own line of champion horses. I’d searched for years, and I knew that Sanaa was the mare I needed to make that dream a reality. “If I do this, buy me Sanaa so I can at least keep one of my dreams.”
My mother threw up her hands. “This is what I’ve been saying! You smell like a—” She stopped herself with another sigh, but too late. That stung twice as hard the second time hearing it. “Pita, Pita.” Turning back to me with a calculating stare, she said, “Darling, first, your negotiating skills shall be the first thing we work on when you return. And second, you should have opened with that.”
Carefully detaching herself from my grasp, she shot down my dreams with one harsh sentence. “Ask your husband for her. After you find one, that is.”
Before I could pick my jaw up off the floor, she departed, her heels clicking against the hard marble floor.
Point. Set. Match. I had tried everything in my arsenal to no avail, and my mother had won. I was going to Osei.
