Xara Zynthar's Arc

Chapter 5 of 16

The bell for the next hour came and went. The prince did not send Xara away. He sat across from her at a small table, and a servant brought a tray with two cups and a slim glass vial. The vial glowed faint silver, like a piece of the moon held in water. The prince did not touch it. He turned it once with a finger and left it between them. "You said you came for the books," he said. "Where were your books before?" Xara felt the trap without seeing its shape. He was asking about home. Any answer she rehearsed would sound like a lie in this quiet room. She thought of her grandmothers by the fire. Listen first. Let him feel heard before he speaks. "Before I answer," she said, "may I ask you something small?" He waited. "When you sit alone at night, what do you think about?" His hand stopped on the vial. His face did not change, but the room did. The servant at the door looked at the floor. Xara knew she had stepped near a wound. She did not know which wound. One wrong word and the door in his face would shut for good. She chose not to guess. She gave him her own answer instead. "I think about my home," she said. "It is dying. The water is going bad. The children cough at night. I left because I could read, and someone here would pay me for it. I saved one person. Myself. I could not carry the rest." She kept her hands flat on the table so they would not shake. "There is no one coming for them," she said. "I know that now. I sit up at night and I count who is still alive in my head, and the number gets smaller, and I am here in a warm room drinking clean water." The prince looked at her for a long moment. Then he picked up the vial and set it aside, out of reach, as if he had decided he would not need it. "I thought no one else knew that feeling," he said. "Sitting up. Counting." "I did not know you did either," she said. He nodded once. He did not tell her what he had lost. He did not have to. Something in his shoulders let go, small but real, the way a rope loosens by one turn. "Come back tomorrow," he said. "Not to the library. Here." Xara stood. At the door she remembered the eel egg in her quarters, the pale shape curled inside, waiting to become something with teeth. Someone from her world knew where she was. Someone had chosen her. She had just made the prince trust her, and she still did not know whose hand was on her back.