“I don’t have it, not yet, I don’t have much. But”—Rivka stood before them proudly—“I know this now—the men who paid Tova are being bankrolled by someone who’s been inside the Imbrian palace.”

  Shulamit froze. Pieces of gauzy, pink silk floated to the floor. “You don’t mean—you can’t mean—”

  “I don’t,” said Rivka bluntly. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe I do. I don’t know who it was yet. She didn’t say the Imbrian queen. It was just her way of trying to insist to me that they were classy people, not common street ruffians. She heard one of them saying to the other something about the cookies they make in the palace, how they even have the Imbrian royal crest imprinted on them before baking, and she asked them, ‘Wait, you’ve been to the palace in Home City?’ and he said no, that their boss had sent them cookies from the palace in Imbrio. It was some kind of holiday gift, but she’s too caught up in her own drama to remember Imbrian holidays.”

  “That still could be Carolina that gave it to them.” Shulamit was mumbling and Isaac barely heard her. “Oh, please, please, please don’t let it be her.”

  “Why does it matter?” Rivka scratched the back of her neck. “Anyway, I’m going back there while she’s still ready to talk. Like I said, I’m almost there.” And she bounded away without another word.

  Shulamit looked at Isaac, and he saw sadness shimmering in her eyes. “Malkeleh! Why these tears?”

  “Isaac, she’s so terrible and so beautiful.” The tears squeezed out and slid down her cheeks. “I hate myself for loving her when I was younger. Doesn’t that make me just as bad, somehow?”

  “Why do you say she’s terrible?” Isaac petted her head gently, being careful to caress in one direction only, knowing how fussy she was about her precious braids. “Her airs are only natural for someone born to such high office. She is only a little spoiled, like you were once.”

  “But, no, it’s not like that! Wait—don’t you know?”

  “What is it that I don’t know?”

  “I thought Rivka would have told you.”

  “Rivka doesn’t tell me your secrets, kindeleh,” said Isaac. “But if it will upset you to talk about it—”

  “No, I need you to know,” said Shulamit. “I didn’t know you didn’t know already.”

  “Then tell me a story.” Isaac put his arm around her shoulder protectively.

  She leaned her head against him. He felt her dry her eyes on his sleeve, and then she began her tale.

  15. Six Weeks Shy of Seventeen

  Crown Princess Shulamit, six weeks shy of seventeen, pushed aside the curtain on her side of the royal carriage and gazed out across the marsh. The light of sunrise illuminated the green-gold spikes, knee-deep in a vast sea until they ended at the high ridge of the road. Wading birds scattered when they heard the hoofbeats and the rattle of wheels, their search for this morning’s crabs and snails interrupted. She could see some of the crabs if she squinted, scurrying sideways with their one swollen claw. Why were they like that? What was its purpose?

  “Sweetheart, close that curtain.”

  Shulamit turned to face her father. King Noach was a man of average height, lithely built but with a broad chest. His head was bald to the back of his crown, but the black-but-graying hair that started there flowed down in thick waves to his shoulders. “You should look,” she told him. “The marshes look really pretty in the morning.”

  “I already told you,” he countered. “You shouldn’t let people out there see who’s riding in this carriage. Knowing there’s a wealthy young woman here could put you in danger.”

  “There’s nobody out there,” Shulamit insisted. “It’s just birds and crabs.”

  “I’m just trying to keep you safe,” said Noach solemnly. “You never know.”

  Shulamit thought he was being silly, especially because they were traveling with such a huge component of the Royal Guard. But it was a little too easy to imagine villains popping out from the mud, so she returned the curtain to its original position.

  Looking down at her clothing, she rearranged her filmy, pink scarf and straightened out the ribbons that decorated the end of her long braids. She ran her fingers over the smooth silk of her dress and adjusted the trousers she wore beneath. “Aba, can I have your shaving glass?”

  “What, again?” Noach’s tone was teasing. “Don’t worry—you look lovely, and your clothing is perfect. You’ll definitely impress Crown Princess Carolina. Maybe even make her jealous of such an outfit.”

  Princess Shulamit didn’t want to make Princess Carolina jealous. What she wanted was for Carolina to feel the same way when she looked at Shulamit that Shulamit did when she looked at Carolina—that she wanted to lie down at her feet and die, or grab her around the waist and stare into her eyes, or kiss her until they both forgot to breathe.

  “Sweetheart?”

  “Huh? What?” Shulamit turned to see Noach offering the mirror. “Oh. Thanks.”

  She looked into the glass and saw a little female replica of her father’s bushy eyebrows staring back at her. The braids, however, were perfect, which was what she wanted to check. Nothing stuck out at the top or had unraveled from the braids themselves. She was satisfied with the rest of the ensemble as well; from her ears sparkled tiny jewels of pink in the same shade, and the white lace on her collar evoked elegance and refinery.

  Let’s hope I live up to my clothes, the little princess told God.

  ***

  Shulamit and her father stood before the great royal palace in Imbrio’s capital, Riachinho de Estrela. It rose to the sky in towers of columned marble, striking and cold in contrast to the comfortable, homey, winding palace network of one-story chambers and courtyards that Shulamit knew from home. There was a courtyard here too, with orderly, manicured gardens and artistic patterns of pavement reaching out to the stone wall that surrounded the whole affair. But it all seemed grand and imposing, like a great chord played by every instrument in the band at once.

  She drew closer to her father and clung to the arm he offered as they started their way up the palace stairs.

  King Fernando III of Imbrio came into view just beyond the palace’s front pillars as the little princess summited her climb. His hair was black but his skin strangely pale, and he wore his beard bushy and long. Beside him was his wife, Queen Ines, a folded fan in her hands. And beside the queen—there she was, the most beautiful girl in the world, Princess Carolina. Dark eyes with long lashes shone out from a pale face ringed with waves of thick, black hair. She was tall, curvy, and broadly built, her wide hips accented by what seemed like hundreds of petticoats that broadened her skirt until she looked like a human flower. She smiled at Shulamit when she saw her, and Shulamit, to her own embarrassment, responded by grinning so hard she was practically laughing.

  Shulamit’s legs wobbled beneath her, and she was convinced that if she wasn’t holding on to her father like his arm was a rope swing on a tree, they’d turn into noodles and she’d go sliding back down the stairs and land with a crash back in the courtyard.

  “Fernando!” Noach dropped Shulamit’s arm and stalked forward to clasp the other king’s hand in his.

  “Oi! Tudo bem?” said the other king, which was Hello, how are you?

  They hugged quickly, and then Noach stepped to the side to nod respectfully to Queen Ines. “Good morning! You look beautiful today.” He spoke in Imbrian, which Shulamit found easy to understand, at least as slow and booming as he was.

  “Thank you,” said Ines, beaming. “We’re so glad to welcome you both! This is your first time here, isn’t it, Shulamit?”

  Her mind racing to catch up with the faster and less enunciated speech, Shulamit nodded as she found her practiced words. “Yes. It’s beautiful.”

  Carolina stepped forward, and Shulamit’s heart flew upward and banged into her brain. She realized she was gaping at her open-mouthed. It didn’t get any easier to think when Carolina reached out her hand and took hold of one of Shulamit’s. “You’re here! Come on—I have so many wonderful things to show you.”

  Warmth spread across her face as Shulamit let herself be dragged away after her. It was so easy to imagine that the minute they were out of sight of the parents, Carolina would pull her closer by that hand she held, spiral her inward, wrap her other arm around her back, and kiss her against the marble columns. Lord knows, she’d daydreamed about it enough times that it seemed completely plausible.

  Naturally, it didn’t happen, and the daydream poured out and evaporated, replaced by a tugging ache. But at least she was still holding her hand. Shulamit reveled in the contrast of softness with confidence, and hoped her own hand wasn’t too wimpy, or too grippy, or too clammy. “Where are we going?”

  “It’s a surprise!”

  What if the surprise is that she loves me back? Shulamit sighed. She needed to calm down and stop thinking about this and just enjoy the moment. Maybe, maybe, things would happen later on in the visit. After all, she had plans. It was silly to expect anything this early.

  Hallways that she was too lovestruck to notice whizzed by; she had the vague impression of gilded portraits and statuary, and rooms hung all over with embroidered drapery. Finally, they reached the outside again. Carolina pulled her into the sun, then dropped her hand and pointed.

  “Look!”

  Shulamit’s mouth fell open in an appreciative gasp as she gazed all around herself at the person-high wall of flowers. The bushes went on for quite some ways, down into a garden path, thick and fluffy, green foliage covered with a generous layer of brilliant pink flowers. They reminded Shulamit a little of the hibiscuses from back home, but they were smaller and darker.

  “They grow so high!” she exclaimed. “And they’re everywhere!”

  “They’re azaleas,” said Carolina. “And it looks like they match you. We’d better be careful as we walk the path, or you might get lost in them!”

  Shulamit looked down at her dress, then back at the blossoms. She grinned awkwardly at the similarity.

  They rounded a corner and began to sink into the rhythm of a comfortable stroll. “I am not walking you too fast, am I, Shulamit?” Carolina asked suddenly, her face earnest as she turned toward the other princess.

  “No, I’m good!” Shulamit could feel herself answering too quickly, too enthusiastically, but never mind that. She was in too deep to care. “It’s all so beautiful.”

  “Because I remember that you sometimes feel ill,” Carolina continued. “How is your—” And here, she said a word in Imbrian that Shulamit didn’t understand.

  “I am—what?” Shulamit bit her lip, her mind racing over her language lessons.

  “Your—here.” Carolina patted her own stomach delicately through the layers of ribbons and petticoats. “When my family visited your palace, you were sometimes ill.”

  “Oh.” Shulamit twiddled the end of one of her braids absently. “I’ve been good during the trip so far.” Her face flushed at the idea that her mysterious stomach upsets had made such a big impression on Carolina that she was still thinking about them, months later. She found reassurance in her relative health of the past few days, when she’d mostly been sticking to a diet of rice and fish because that’s what they grew and caught and served around here.

  Maybe that was the key to her misery—simple foods. When she got home she vowed to shut herself away in the palace library with a piece of pita and a mug of chicken broth.

  “All this sun will be good for you, I hope!” Carolina looked around herself at the garden. “Oh, I am foolish. You come from such a sunny place. I forgot. Our winters are so bleak and dull. The sky is white. Can you imagine it? White as cotton, and some of the trees become bare as—”

  Shulamit couldn’t place the Imbrian word. “I’m sorry, what is that?”

  Carolina ran her fingers down her own arm, then tapped herself, hard. “Bones. All the bones in the body, together.”

  Skeleton, thought Shulamit in Perachi. “Maybe you should spend the winter with us every year,” she found herself blurting out, then wanted to hide behind her scarf and blend in with the flowers in horror at her own forwardness.

  “Our winter makes us love our spring,” said Carolina. “Here, I will show you more beauty.” She gestured to a group of bushes of a different type than the walls of azaleas all around. Instead of flimsy, their leaves were sturdy and glossy, larger, and of a darker green. The blooms that decorated their branches were the same brilliant pink, but they looked more like roses. “This is a camellia.”

  Shulamit smiled and nodded appreciatively, and trotted along after Carolina as she floated from flower to flower. Not all of the azaleas were pink; they reached a corridor where they were all white, and then a pale and watery lilac. Hyacinths of purple and yellow rose out of the earth in cheerful clusters.

  Carolina pointed out a tiny blossom of white-and-cream tendrils. “This one is very special, because you can drink it.” She carefully picked one and used her fingernail to remove the stem, then lifted it to her lips. “Here, I will fix one for you.”

  Transfixed, Shulamit watched as she retrieved another flower and prepared it. Drinking flowers. That was practically a metaphor for… wasn’t it?

  She realized Carolina wasn’t going to literally feed it to her, so she accepted it in her trembling hand and mimicked what she’d seen Carolina do with it. The drop of nectar was sweet and fragrant and only contributed to the swirling clouds of hormones in her mind.

  “It’s called honeysuckle,” said Carolina. “One day, when I was very small, Papai and I were riding in a carriage, and we reached a bridge that men were fixing. We would not have taken that road, but nobody knew the bridge was down. So we got out of the carriage while we waited and ate all the honeysuckles on the side of the road.”

  “Sometimes when Aba tours our farms back home, he takes me with him and the farmers always give me things they’ve grown.” It wasn’t a great story and not really the same thing, but Shulamit felt like she had to respond and it was the first thing that came out.

  “The landowners give me cookies we call cat’s tongue,” Caroline replied, “because so many of the things we grow you can’t give someone just to eat. Like cotton, or rice, or indigo.”

  “Can’t really eat fluffs of cotton!” Shulamit wanted to hide in the roots of the camellia bush. That was possibly the stupidest thing she’d ever said. Ugh. Were boys this dumb when trying to talk to girls?

  She wished she could ask her father for help with this sort of thing. He was fabulous with women and usually had more than one girlfriend at a time. But when she tried to tell him how she felt about women—how she felt about Princess Carolina, and how she was a little bit in love with Queen Esther from the Purim story—he just dismissed it as something she didn’t understand and would grow out of. The good part was that he’d promised her he’d never choose a husband for her. But he definitely thought her heartfelt, honest feelings were something she was misstating and exaggerating.

  “Where are we going now?” Deep in her fretful reverie, Shulamit had missed the transition of their walk from walls of flowers to walls of plain and thorny hedge, a hedge that was cultivated and trimmed within an inch of its life and rose several heads above them.

  “This is our garden maze,” explained Carolina, “but I know the way to the middle.”

  “Then I’ll feel safe with you because we won’t get lost.” Shulamit then spent the next several steps worrying that her comment had been too forward, too flirtatious, too obviously something that ordinary girls said to boys, not to other girls. See, this was why she wished she could have her father’s help!

  Maybe she didn’t need it. After all, Carolina was a girl, just like her, so why not just speak to her the way she, Shulamit, would wish to be spoken to herself?

  Eyes wide open with admiration for Carolina’s beauty and elegance, the little princess realized this wasn’t much help. They might both be women, but they weren’t the same people. Carolina was tall and broad and gorgeous; Shulamit, an awkward waif with a body, she thought with a grimace, that didn’t seem any different from the way she’d looked at eleven.

  What she could bring to the table was her brains. She wondered if she could impress Carolina with them, and tried to think of something relevant to say.

  Luckily, Carolina didn’t seem to mind the silence as Shulamit frantically scrubbed her brain for interesting trivia.

  “Here—we’ve found it!” Carolina stepped into the clearing, her arms outstretched. Delicate lace drooped from the edges of her sleeves and floated in her wake.

  There was a small stone tower at the core of the maze’s center. “Wow, this looks really old.” Shulamit’s eyes were wide with admiration as she ran her hand over the cool, gray rock.

  “Good eye!” said Carolina. “It has been here almost a thousand years. It was part of the castle that stood here long before my family’s dynasty. Now it is all that remains, so we have built a maze around it to help protect it.”

  “That’s great!” Shulamit was happy that she could stop feeling so self-conscious about smiling all the time, because now there was an excuse to smile that wasn’t an eighteen-year-old goddess with big hips.

  “Do you want to go to the top?”

  “Oh, can we, still?”

  “Yes, we make sure to keep it free of damage and debris.” Carolina turned and led her into the narrow, winding staircase. “And since it rises over the maze, you will love the view.”

  When Shulamit slipped into the crevice in the rock tower, she found herself pressed close against Carolina’s fragrant warmth. A throbbing awoke between her legs, and she ached to be held. She followed her up to the top, wanting nothing more than for Carolina to turn around suddenly on the stairs and kiss her.

  I’d better get it together or I’m going to fall off the top of the tower if I’m not careful, Shulamit told herself angrily.

  Still, when Carolina reached the top and reached out for Shulamit’s hand to help her up, Shulamit took her hand into her own with as much sensuality and reverence as if they had been lying betwixt each other’s thighs.