Page 77 of Tall, Royal and Grumpy

“Yes. People,” I mumbled, closing my eyes over the prickling dampness that filled them.

I didn’t think the silence could grow any more suffocating, but it did, and it made me feel sick down to the stomach. I wished I had my phone with me so I could call Shehryar and beg him to come get me. But phones were prohibited during the scavenger hunt, and I had a feeling—

“You used to like solving riddles.”

I blinked down at the evenly cropped grass under my scuffed pale blue trainers, wondering if my ears were playing tricks on me. There was no way the Kareem I knew could have spoken to me so…softly. I lifted my gaze to find him watching me with some unreadable expression.

“I did,” I heard myself say eventually. “But I haven’t had anyone to tell me any in a long time.”

He was the one who used to tell me riddles. When I’d been too little to solve them, I used to bribe him with my toys for answers. By the time I’d been able to solve them, he’d stopped telling me any.

Kareem glanced down at the red envelope in his hands. He flipped open the triangular flap and pulled out the little square piece of paper with the typed riddle on it. “I’m a snake who’s sick of my skin,” he read aloud. “I dig, I chop, and I snip. But look up high and you’ll find I’m home to four legs and a long neck. Spotted and spouted and all. Find me and the next riddle is yours.”

Kareem raised his brows in question. “So? What do you think it is?”

“I don’t…I don’t know.” I wasn’t talking about the riddle. I had no idea what was going on with Kareem. Was he really going to tell me the riddles like we were kids again and solve them with me? Did that make me angry or happy? Relieved or frustrated? I had no idea. I felt almost numb.

“‘Four legs and a long neck’ and ‘spotted’ sounds like a giraffe to me. Though I don’t know why it’s ‘spouted’.” He frowned a little at the paper. “But ‘a snake who’s sick of my skin’?”

Maybe I was using the riddle as an excuse to avoid having to decipher what this interaction between us was, but I replayed the words in my mind repeatedly, stuck in my awkward stance.

Then it hit me. “Snake’s shed their—” I said just as Kareem said the exact same words.

We stopped at the same time. He blinked at me. I looked away first, feeling embarrassed.

He cleared his throat. “So snakes shed their skin, but how is that related to ‘I dig, I chop, and I snip’?”

“Gardening tools,” I mumbled upon realisation. “They’re what you do with gardening tools. The riddle is a homonym. Shed has two meanings.”

“Not shedding skin, a gardening shed. We’re looking for a shed with some sort of giraffe inside.”

I nodded, small and awkward. “There are three sheds in the palace gardens. But only one is used for gardening tools. It must be that one.”

Kareem returned my nod with the same level of stiffness. “Do you know the way?”

We walked with a one-metre gap between us in dead silence as I led the way back around to the gardens. We were hollered at by Raven’s team as they rushed past us, and Kareem chuckled at the King’s joke. But when they disappeared through an arched hedge, silence fell again.

“How did you know this was the only gardening shed?” Kareem asked as we came up the side of the glasshouse. There stood a wooden shed with a slanted roof, about thirteen-feet wide and twenty-feet long.

“Kai—” I replied but faltered, my shoulders going stiff. “I mean, Prince Kai showed me once.”

My stomach churned uncomfortably. Talking about Kai in front of Kareem felt like talking about something taboo or forbidden. And just the mention of Kai’s name brought back the agony of Kareem telling me to stay away from him.

Without another word, I turned the knob on the wooden shed door and stepped inside ahead of Kareem. Stained workbenches lined the two long walls under four square windows placed at equal intervals, and metal shelf units stood in the middle, forming a rectangular path around them.

I walked down the right side of the shed, scanning the workbench. But I was so hyperaware of Kareem’s quiet steps on the other side of the metal units that I couldn’t take anything in other than a general blur of empty plant pots and small garden tools.

“How long have you and Prince Kai been close?”

I flinched to a stop. Through the seedling pots sitting eye-level on the metal rack, I stared at Kareem’s back, my heart a frightened bird in the cage of my chest. But the moment he put down whatever he was fiddling with, I whipped my head away so fast my neck clicked, and my vision spun.

Why was he asking about Kai? It felt like a trap. Like he wanted me to say something that would give him a reason to condemn me further.

“I don’t want to talk about Prince Kai,” I said quickly.

There was a rustle of movement behind me. “I’d like to know.”

His near-emotionless statement sent anger and bitterness spiking through me. None of which I had felt yesterday, but they arrived with vengeance right then, curling my hands to tight fists.

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