Page 23 of Black Salt Queen

My nobler friends have perished, and I live in their stead. I choose a haunted life with you as my ghost. I write to you, Nelo, even though you are gone. Even though you cannot reproach me for my mistakes. Even though you cannot grant me forgiveness.

I abandoned my heart to save my head. Now you know this. Would you still love me if you lived?

—?Ariel

Ten

Duja

Duja heard her husband’s laughter all the way from the entrance hall of the eastern wing. It echoed across the gilded nooks in the coffered ceiling. She took a right down the narrow servants’ passageway and followed it to the open door at the end. The king brightened when she stepped inside. The Orfelian, garbed in what Duja recognized as the king’s old clothes, dropped to a nervous bow beside him.

“There you are, my love,” Hari Aki said, holding out his hand to her. “Come see what we’ve done with the place.”

Duja scanned the room. Pineapple silk drapes did not cascade from the ceilings. Gilded ornaments did not adorn the paneled wood. The walls were plain even for the eastern wing, which stood barren most of the year. The air inside was stale. Light shone dully through the opaque panels of the window shades. All were sealed shut, and Duja wondered how long it had been since they were last opened. Before the eastern wing collapsed, the room had once served as a break area for the servants of their guests’ private households. Hara Duja had not dared house anyone there after the second accident. Part of her agreed with the rumors: the eastern wing was cursed.

When it came to the Orfelian, however, she didn’t have a choice. During the feast days, nobles with keen ears and prying eyes crawled like fire ants across the palace grounds. The Orfelian, with his peculiar features and foreign accent, was sure to provoke questions. If one of Duja’s subjects caught sight of him, vicious rumors would spread across the island like her brother’s wildfire. How long before they found out who he was and about his precioso? No, Duja needed to keep him out of sight until Mariit quieted. The eastern wing was her only option?—no one would search for trouble there.

Duja turned to the Orfelian. “I hope your new workshop is to your liking.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” he said, nodding enthusiastically. “I think this workshop will suit my needs perfectly.”

A long, narrow table of unfinished rosewood stood at the center of the room. Duja ran a finger over its rough, dusty surface. The table had been there for years. As for the cupboards at the back of the room opposite the paneled windows?—that morning, the Orfelian and Aki had hauled them down from the upper floors. Duja balked at the idea of her husband doing this sort of labor, but he had insisted. The fewer servants milling about the eastern wing, the better.

Through the cupboards’ glass doors, Duja spied several canisters of varying sizes, some as stout as teakettles and others as slender as bamboo flutes. Many were unlabeled, but the Orfelian had given her the names of the ingredients he needed. Duja didn’t recognize most of them?—chemicals with strange, multisyllabic names?—but she had passed this list on to General Ojas, who’d sent one of his most trusted guards to the city proper to acquire them.

“I see you’ve already received the materials,” Duja said with a small, approving grin. “Unfortunately, my people were not able to find the quantities you requested, but we’ve put in an order?—”

“Oh, no, these will be more than enough for a sample batch,” the Orfelian said, then turned pink in the cheeks when he realized he had interrupted her. He bowed his head and added a briefYour Majestyin one breath.

Hari Aki’s eyes twinkled when he glanced between Duja and the Orfelian. Unlike Duja, he was amused by the young man’s occasional breaches of formality. “If you’ll allow us, Duja,” the king said, “I was just about to give Dr. Sauros here the lay of the land.”

That was his name?—Dr. Ariel Sauros. The Orfelian had told Duja this when they’d spoken during the dawn feast, but she still had trouble thinking of him as anything more than an outsider.

“Allow me to accompany you,” she said, leading the way out of the workshop. Her muscles screamed in protest when she reached the staircase. Ariel’s precioso couldn’t come soon enough. Even when the tremors did not plague her, their effects lingered?—an ache that seeped deeper into her bones with each passing day. Precioso would slow the tremors’ progression, but the Orfelian had told her how it had poisoned the people in his homeland. The sickest ones craved the drug with a feverish desperation, consuming it before water, before food, until their bodies wasted away.

Even her husband had shared the warnings from his research; precioso addiction would creep in slowly, then all at once. However, there were ways to mitigate the risks. Once Ariel started producing it for her, she’d have to limit herself to small, sparing doses. Duja prayed that the Orfelian’s guidance?—and the discipline she’d built over the past twenty-two years of her reign?—would save her from such a fate.

On their way upstairs, Aki remarked over his shoulder, “As happy as we are that you’ve come to stay with us, Ariel, we do hope you understand the delicacy of your presence here.”

Duja bit her lip to conceal her smile. Her husband was not a man for straight talk. Every other sentence hid a riddle of a sort. In a number of words, the king had made one thing clear. No one was to know about how Ariel Sauros truly came to Maynara, nor the fact that the queen commissioned him to produce precioso.

She glanced at the Orfelian. Behind his thin wire-framed spectacles, understanding flickered in his eyes. “Yes, Your Majesty,” he said, this time in a careful, obsequious tone. “I understand.”

The king would never outright threaten him, but Duja could not deny the guilt simmering in her stomach. They had asked people to lie for them before, but the Orfelian was a different case. The previous day, Ariel had briefly spoken of the horrors awaiting him back home. The westerners slaughtered his friends and robbed him of everything he had. She sensed the sadness in Ariel because the same sadness lived at the core of Duja’s being.

An unbearable hollowness swelled in her chest as she ascended to the upper apartments of the eastern wing. When Duja’s mother was alive, she would flood these halls with heady banana-flower perfume. If Duja closed her eyes, she could still smell it, and her heart lurched at the memory. Her kind, unsuspecting mother. Duja wanted to lean over Ariel’s shoulder and whisper:I, too, know what it’s like to lose.

They stopped on the second story. The king had assigned Ariel a set of apartments in a dark corner of the eastern wing. They stood in front of the modest sitting room adjoining Ariel’s bedchamber. The sitting room offered a small writing desk, an antique divan with a lattice cane back, and, if they rolled back the window screens, an unobstructed view of the central courtyard.

“As we discussed earlier, you’ll have one servant to attend to your chambers. Otherwise, you will not be disturbed,” the king said.

Ariel shook his head and tried to protest. “That’s kind of you, but a servant really won’t be necessary.”

“Nonsense,” Hari Aki said. “I don’t think you realize how valuable your services are, Dr. Sauros. One servant is the least we can offer in return.”

The other man remained silent. Duja saw from his conflicted expression that Ariel was not accustomed to such luxuries. How different he was from the horde of highborns who’d bombarded Duja during the dawn feast. She knew not to be too critical of her own subjects, but they were the reason she dreaded the feast days year after year. The constant cavorting, the endless stream of requests?—it was Duja’s duty as queen to entertain them, but to her, the feast days felt more like a military campaign than a celebration. Compared to that spectacle, Ariel’s humble presence, despite the risk it posed in Mariit, was a welcome relief.

Beyond the window screens, angry shouts rang out from the courtyard below. Duja’s ears perked up?—her daughters’ voices. She sighed and turned to her husband.

---