In the winding streets of the Persian Empire, a poor girl is chosen to become the third prince's concubine.
Aliya Farhad has no interest in the lofty ideas of the palace, the staff, or her lover. Prince Cairo has all the interest in his blue-eyed A...
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MARIA MOST CERTAINLY WALKED fast, for she had somehow managed to push me through the doors of the dining room just five minutes before the King came in.
If he could still be considered King, anyway. It certainly doesn't seem so.
I took my seat at the end of of long, rectangular table, on a chair that was gilded with gold and, coincidentally or not, placed right next to Maryam's, and an uncomfortably close position of three seats away from the three princes.
"Where were you? Why did you come in so late?" she whispered, ducking her head close to my shoulder. "You came later than the princes!"
"Headache," I whispered back. "I didn't get enough sleep."
"Why not?"
"I don't know -- maybe I'm coming down with something. A cold or fever of some sort. Maybe a contagious disease."
Maryam's lips pulled down into a deep, hard frown. "A cold? Fever? Contagious disease?'
I nodded.
"Why didn't you just stay upstairs then? In your room?" she whispered. "You might feel worse here."
I was grateful that she hadn't said, 'You might go and infect me, too, because you came down here,' even if, in the context of the sentence, the phrase had already been implicitly said. "My maid, Maria, didn't allow me. She said that if I admitted that I had some sort of contagious sickness, then I might be sent home."
And if the outcome really would have been me being sent home, I would have gone and faked a contagious disease in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, Maria had failed to account for the dozens of physicians working in the Palace, each more outstanding and knowledgable than the rest, and I wasn't too confident that I'd be able to pretend I'd somehow been infected by some unknown, malevolent virus without being caught in the one minute it took doctors to measure my heart beat.
I didn't think that the realization that I'd feigned an entire illness just to avoid having breakfast with someone who could possibly be my father-in-law was believable, remarkable, or excusable with a pat on the back and a laugh.
Worst comes to worst, I'd be excused with the glinting edge of an executioner's blade for treason and sicrimination against the royal family.
Maryam furrowed her eyebrows. "Your maid has a point," she said. "You'd be in a huge amount of trouble if the royal family found out about your fever and deemed it to be an onslaught of a virus. Just stay here and act normal, and try to get as much sleep as is possible after breakfast is over. Although you can't miss out on breakfast with the King, you can certainly miss out on other activities with the rest of the women here... Not that you've been joining them in the first place."
I raised an eyebrow. "You're an odd one, aren't you?
"Odd? I wouldn't think so. Why?"
"Just for the main reason that most people would be concerned at the idea of their seatmate possibly contracting some unknown virus or disease," I said. "They'd be afraid of the virus passing itself over to them, whether that be from their clothes or from their food, and with this entire selection period still ongoing, I thought you'd be a little more wary of that possibility... Unless you've been planning to be sent home?"
