Page 8 of Prima
She sets an elbow on the edge of the table and drops her chin into her hand. “You want specifics, Prince Nineteen?”
“Of course. How else am I to assess the situation?”
She smiles at him. Fondly, which punctures through him as both pleasure and pain. “I believe the sons of the High Potentate came rushing when they heard that the Prima Inter Pares might be seeking a man?”
Prima Inter Pares, first among equals, is the one who casts the tie-breaking vote on the Secretariat. But in Dawan, when the word Prima comes up in conversation, the listeners hear only “Sea Witch”.
“The Dawani princes came rushing in the hope that New Ryukyu might pick a side.”
She picks up a strand of her hair and tosses it behind her shoulder. “And how am I to help the Prima pick a side, except to judge by the tributes I’ve been given?”
He finds that difficult to believe. His three older brothers vying for the throne cannot be more different in their intentions. Four would continue things as they are, Six plans to withhold education from all girls and a good many boys for their moral improvement, and only Five has any interest in opening the realm to new ideas and new ways of doing things.
But since Lady Sun already knows all that…
He pours the fiery contents of his glass down his throat. “My lady, it would be most remiss of me to offer you only tea and mooncakes. May I also prepare something for your supper?”
* * *
On second thought, this may not be the best delaying tactic.
The lounging area as a whole is not what Ren would consider roomy, but around the galley things become particularly compact. Earlier he and Lady Sun were separated by a table and the space he deliberately kept between himself and that table; now they’re less than an arm’s length apart.
And she is only more beautiful up close in a perverse proof of the inverse square law: Reduce your distance to her by half, and her allure intensifies by a factor of four.
“My goodness,” she says, standing at the narrow opening between the stove and the prep counter. “A man of your elevated station, skilled in the culinary arts? How did you learn, Prince Nineteen?”
Ah, his elevated station. The Potentate’s Palace is an entire society unto itself, separated into almost as many strata. The Potentate is fickle with his affections and those wives and consorts who occupy the top of the pyramid do so because they have powerful fathers and brothers whose alliances the Potentate must keep. And then there was Ren’s own mother, who entered the palace as a gift from a foreign dignitary and had no backers whatsoever in Dawan.
“My mother’s health was frail. The astrologer said that it would help her recover if a filial child cooked for her, rather than servants.”
Others in the palace kept trying to poison her—and me—and we no longer dared to eat anything not prepared with our own handswould probably hinder the flow of the conversation.
“So…you went into the palace kitchens?”
Where did she getthatidea? “No, into the private kitchen in my mother’s residence.”
She laughs briefly. “I see—silly for me to think otherwise.”
He reaches into the cold storage and takes out a bowl of scallops that have already been cleaned. When he turns around to put a pot to heat, she looks at him strangely, her expression reminiscent of when she’d bitten into the mooncake and found out that the filling was made from jackfruit, her “favorite”.
Hope. She is gazing at him with a reluctant yet searing hope.
But only briefly. “How is it that you have scallops on hand, sir?” she asks, sounding—and looking—completely normal.
“I had to wait at Dragon Gate before I could proceed further. So I did a little scavenging.”
A great coral reef had sprung up at the feet of those immense concrete pillars. He’d harvested an abundance of scallops from the sandy sea floor nearby.
“Of course you did,” she murmurs. “Did Prince Five select you for the task because you can survive on your own in the wild?”
“He chose me because he thought I could best make the case for him.”
He’s had to negotiate alliances for his own survival since he was a child and is known for having rarely, if ever, put a foot wrong. Which is why he should not say anything along the lines of, “And failing that, he probably hoped that the Prima would find me aesthetically pleasing.”
But he does say it, because it would strike her as amusing.
She smiles widely. He looks away—every time she smiles, he has to restrain himself from staring.
