Page 98 of A Storm in Every Heart
“Yeah, but most of the time they don’t realize it. Like, I doubt Thorne will have any idea of what a bad king he’ll be when he eventually takes the throne. He’ll probably think he’s an amazing ruler and everyone loves him, even if your entire country goes up in flames.”
She snorts. “Probably, but let’s not jinx it.”
“Sorry.” I smile. “Thorne is a bad example because he’s genuinely an asshole. I only meant that I wouldknowI wasn’t a good ruler, which would make everything so much worse.”
“What makes you think you’d be a bad ruler?”
So many things.
I hate diplomacy and playing politics, and I’ve never been able to pretend to get along with someone I didn’t like.
I like being alone, or spending time with a few close friends, rather than mingling in crowds or throwing parties.
And most of all, I can’t stand watching someone do something stupid and not fixing it for them. I can’t delegate. If there was a problem in the kingdom, I wouldn’t be able to just watch it happen or hand it off to someone else to fix it; I’d need to fix it myself. I’d need to control the entire situation, regardless of what anyone else thought.
I don’t know how to explain all that to her though, so I ask: “Do you know what kings do during wars?”
She shakes her head. “No.”
“They watch.” I sigh, and lean against the railing. “Kings send other people to fight, but they don’t go into battle themselves. They ride onto the battlefield and stay at the very back of the army, watching all the foot soldiers get slaughtered.”
“You’d want to get slaughtered instead?” she asks, and again I have that inexplicable feeling I’m being tested.
“No, but I wouldn’t want to watch either. I would never want to send someone to do a job I could do better myself.”
“And yet you claim you’re not arrogant,” she says with a teasing smile.
“I’m not, I’m just cursed with needing to control everything. Actually, it would be better if I was arrogant. Even good kings need to be a little arrogant because that’s the only way anyone can be in charge of thousands of people without having a nervous breakdown.”
I look sideways at her, trying to read her reaction to all this. She doesn’t seem like she’s about to run screaming off this boat, which I suppose is a good sign.
“I don’t know anything about being a king,” Odessa says matter-of-factly. “But on ships, the captain is always the best at everything—best sailor, best navigator, the strongest fighter. I once saw my father cook an entire week’s worth of meals for the crew himself because our chef had fallen ill—the captain knows how to do every job because if you’re in the middle of the ocean and you lose your crew no one is going to save you.”
“That I can understand,” I say, smiling.
“So what would you do if you weren’t going to be a king?”
“Based on what you just said, maybe I should be a ship’s captain. This ship, for example.”
She looks around the deck of my ship and smiles. “All the other ship captains would make fun of you for sailing around on a boat named after yourself.”
“I could rename it. It could beThe Odessa.”
Her cheeks flush, and her smile widens into a grin that somehow makes her look more beautiful and more tangible at once. “But really, what would you do?”
I shake my head, tearing my gaze away from her smiling face before I make an idiot out of myself. “I don’t know, actually.Maybe I’d be a soldier, or I could do what my mother’s family did and help keep storms from reaching the city.”
“I could see you doing that.”
“What about you?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you could be anything, what would you want to be?”
She shrugs, and opens her mouth to answer, but before she can say anything we’re both distracted by shouting coming from the docks below.
Odessa leans over the railing, her fingers curling around the wooden beam as she squints at the scene below. My heart skips a beat, and I swallow the impulse to grab her waist and tug her back to safety. My mind races—surely she won’t fall. The thought is completely irrational, and yet a vivid image of her slipping overboard flashes through my mind.
