Page 34 of Untamed

Queen Cottia flinched. Emotion shivered along every line on her face which broke the royal veneer she kept in place like a shield.

“Someone approached me while I…” What could I say about visiting Himzo? Saying I visited would mean we certainly had a portal and that it was in the palace. “Went out for a walk with Jaime.” That wasn’t a lie and didn’t reveal too much, right?

Her mouth twitched in the corner. “You keep your secrets but ask for mine?”

“I’m asking for my secrets, the ones about me.”

She exhaled and nodded. “What if I told you, it’s better that you don’t know all the details?”

“Never mind. It was a silly question.” I spun on my heels, needing to distract myself, and made it two strides beforeremembering I was trapped. Though she’d never said that I was some child born out of wedlock, I knew the truth. The rules in Giddel hadn’t changed, and no maids could promise themselves to another because of the rules—the same rules that kept Beatriz from Zichri, except hers were a different set of regulations. What I didn’t want to admit was that the story I imagined in my head painted a sad but beautiful picture. The real story might shatter my illusions.

The queen put on thick gloves and rooted up the plant with strange berries. She walked it to a small shed along the back wall, still not answering my question.

So, I folded my arms, dropping a few flowers from my basket and letting the scarlet roses plummet onto gray slabs of stone. I pictured my daydreams. Mamá had always been a vivacious redhead with flowing curls that caught a countryman’s attention, possibly a knight’s. They fell in love and forced a secret wedding where they exchanged their most valuable possessions, certainly a hair lock on her part. Until one day, her love died at sea, and Mamá held her strength just long enough to deliver me. When she saw my face, her heart broke at never being able to share her daughter with the love of her life.

I swiped my cheeks at remembering the tale that had comforted me so many nights alone in my bed.

“Laude.” Queen Cottia peeked her head out of the doorway to the small shelter nestled into the back of the space. “I need to show you something.” She waved for me to enter the tiny cottage.

This. This had to be what she was hiding from the world. I edged closer, the basket swinging on my arm, and drifted into the shadows of the small space. Four walls held up a shallow-pitched roof. The light from the lone window shone onto a worktable with all the tools of an herbalist neatly placed ontoshelves on the side: a mortar, a pestle, jars, a scale, tea strainers, a tea kettle, bowls, and scissors.

As I turned, I caught sight of a small oven set on one wall with ashes on the hearth. The back wall held shelves to the ceiling full of who knew what. Bunches of herbs hung above us in different states of drying.

“Excuse me.” The queen pushed open a narrow door to a back room that seemed to bleed shadows into this first room. Several seconds later, she returned with a bottle marked with a quick hand, and she poured it into a dark vial with the root of the plant she’d just extracted. She squeezed the berries from the plant using a metal tool, almost too careful to avoid the substance. The concoction was marked with a moon on the corkscrew, and she walked it to the back room again.

When she returned, she had a small box of unpolished wood. “Let’s take a walk. The thing I have to show you is not here.”

“What did you make?”

She met my gaze with her chin high and a dark note to her voice. “Poison.”

My spine shivered. Why in all Agata would we need that? But I snapped my mouth shut, needing to keep secrets as much as possible and too dumbfounded not to mess up.

“Laude, there is much I have to tell you and something I must ask.” The queen wiped her hands on a small towel and edged around me. “First, let me take you somewhere you might want to see.”

In silence, we took the route through the flowerbeds and grove to the cliffs where a spiraling walkway lined the edges and eventually led to the beach. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she wanted absolute privacy because the boundary of the property had an eerie chill to it, as if a ward to keep people out was placed there, which was a possibility.

Each of our steps down the rough-hewn stone stairs cut from the side of the cliff echoed, and the surf roared as it crashed against the boulders in the small inlet. Queen Cottia screwed up her lips tightly which seemed strange since we tended to keep conversation going—or maybe I normally kept a steady flow of chatter.

Queen Cottia reached the bottom of the stairs where the trail split. A left turn would take us to the beach, and a right turn dead ended at a gray slab of nothing. We turned right and walked toward the sheer cliff face. It shouldn’t have surprised me with all her strange behavior up to this point. She held up a hand, as if she were about to declare something of great importance. Then, she touched the cliff wall, searching.

The grooves of brown-gray rock appeared natural enough, but when she touched a low spot, the stone glowed orange. Something clicked, and the slit of a dark doorway opened.

A breath caught in my throat.

She looked over her shoulder with a pleased smirk twisted at the edges of her mouth. “Dear, will you light your finger?”

I sparked the warm flame, too curious to ask questions.

We entered. My light revealed a cave like any other with pebbles below and teeth-like rocks above. Queen Cottia searched the walls and grabbed a lantern hanging from a metal hook. As I lit it, the door closed behind us.

With more light, I caught the glint of glass and more metal hooks on the cave wall. A narrow path zigzagged between boulders, and we continued until a thick wooden door with a metal latch appeared to our right.

Did any of the servants know this existed? Was this a secret held by the royal family alone? My toes danced from the revelation of so many hidden places in a day: the garden and now this. Though I wished she’d explain more about all the secrecy and the poison.

She opened the door to a room full of chests and sacks. Sets of cots lined the back of the space, allowing for eight people to sleep. A dark wooden table was pushed up against the stone wall to the left, and a desk hid underneath smaller boxes to the right. The queen pulled out a chair and gestured for me to sit at the table. She perched on the wooden seat beside my indicated place. The intensity with which she searched my expression made me squirm.

I sneezed and rubbed my nose with the fabric on my sleeve. The tickle in my nose didn’t go away, nor did my desire to rip open each latch to discover what these chests held.

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