Red Queen (Red Queen 1)

When I escape back into the hallway, Lucas ushers me down the passage. As we walk, he smirks at me. “You have watermelon on your face.”

“Of course I do,” I snap, wiping at my mouth with my sleeve.

“Lady Blonos is just through here,” he says, gesturing to the end of the hall.

“What’s the story about her? Can she fly or make flowers grow out of her ears?”

Lucas cracks a smile, humoring me. “Not quite. She’s a healer. Now, there’s two kinds of healers: skin healers and blood healers. All of House Blonos are blood healers, meaning they can heal themselves. I could throw her off the top of the Hall and she’d walk away without a scratch.”

I’d like to see that tested, but I don’t say so out loud. “I’ve never heard of a blood healer before.”

“You wouldn’t have, since they’re not allowed to fight in the arenas. There’s simply no point in them doing it.”

Wow. Yet another Silver of epic proportions. “So if I have, um, an episode—”

Lucas softens, understanding what I’m trying to say. “She’ll be just fine. The curtains, on the other hand . . .”

“That’s why they gave her to me. Because I’m dangerous.”

But Lucas shakes his head. “Lady Titanos, they gave her to you because your posture is terrible and you eat like a dog. Bess Blonos is going to teach you how to be a lady and if you light her up a couple of times, no one will blame you.”

How to be a lady . . . this will be awful.

He raps his knuckles on the door, making me jump. It swings open on silent, smooth hinges, revealing a sunlit room.

“I’ll be back to bring you to lunch,” he says. I don’t move, my feet planted, but Lucas nudges me into the dreaded room.

The door swings behind me, this time shutting out the hall and anything that might calm me down. The room is fine but plain with a wall of windows, and totally empty. The buzzing of cameras, lights, electricity, is vibrantly strong in here, almost burning the air around me with its energy. I’m sure the queen is watching, ready to laugh at my attempts to be proper.

“Hello?” I say, expecting a response, but nothing comes

I cross to the windows, looking out on the courtyard. Instead of another pretty garden, I’m surprised to find this window doesn’t face outside at all, but down into a gigantic white room.

The floor is several stories below me, and a track rings the outer edge. In the center, a strange contraption moves and turns, spinning round and round with outstretched metal arms. Men and women, all in uniform, dodge the spinning machine. It picks up speed, twirling faster, until only two remain. They’re quick, dipping and dodging with grace and speed. At every turn the machine accelerates, until it finally slows, shutting down. They’ve beaten it.

This must be some kind of training, for Security or Sentinels.

But when the two trainees move on to target practice, I realize they aren’t Security at all. The pair of them shoot bright red fireballs into the air, exploding targets as they rise and fall. Each one is a perfect shot and even from up here, I recognize their smiling faces. Cal and Maven.

So this is what they do during the day. Not learning to rule, to be a king, or even a proper lord, but to train for war. Cal and Maven are deadly creatures, soldiers. But their battle isn’t just on the lines. It’s here, in a palace, on the broadcasts, in the heart of every person they rule. They will rule, not just by right of a crown, but by might. Strength and power. It’s all the Silvers respect, and it’s all it takes to keep the rest of us slaves.

Evangeline steps up next. When the targets fly, she throws out a fan of sharp, silver metal darts to take down each one in turn. No wonder she laughed at me for Protocol. While I’m in here learning how to eat properly, she’s training to kill.

“Enjoying the show, Lady Mareena?” a voice crows behind me. I turn around, my nerves tingling a bit. What I see doesn’t do anything to calm me.

Lady Blonos is a horrifying sight and it takes all of my manners to keep my jaw from dropping. Blood healer, able to heal herself. I understand now what that means.

She must be over fifty, older than my mother, but her skin is smooth and shockingly tight over her bones. Her hair is perfectly white, slicked back, and her eyebrows seem fixed in a constant state of shock, arched on her unwrinkled forehead. Everything about her is wrong, from her too-full lips to the sharp, unnatural slope of her nose. Only her deep gray eyes look alive. The rest, I realize, is fake. Somehow she was able to heal or change herself into this monstrous thing in an attempt to look younger, prettier, better.

“Sorry,” I finally manage, “I came in and you weren’t—”

“I observed,” she clips, already hating me. “You stand like a tree in a storm.”

She seizes my shoulders and pulls them back, forcing me to stand up straight. “My name is Bess Blonos and I’m going to attempt to make you a lady. You’re going to be a princess one day and we can’t have you acting like a savage, can we?”

Savage. For a brief, shining moment, I think about spitting in silly Lady Blonos’s face. But what would that cost me? What would that accomplish? And it would only prove her right. Worst of all, I realize I need her. Her training will keep me from slipping and, most importantly, keep me alive.

“No,” a hollow shell of my voice answers. “We can’t have that.”

Exactly three and a half hours later, Blonos releases me from her clutches and back into Lucas’s care. My back aches from the posture lessons about how to sit, stand, walk, and even sleep (on your back, arms at your sides, always still), but it’s nothing compared to the mental exercise she put me through. She drilled the rules of court into my head, filling me with names, protocols, and etiquette. In the last few hours I received a crash course in anything and everything I’m supposed to know. The hierarchy among the High Houses is slowly coming into focus, but I’m sure I’ll mess up something anyways. We only scratched the surface of Protocol, but now I can go to the queen’s stupid function with at least some idea of how to act.

The Glass Terrace is relatively close by, only a floor down and a hallway over, so I don’t get much time to collect myself before facing Elara and Evangeline again. This time, when I step through the doorway, I’m greeted by invigorating fresh air. I’m outside for the first time since I became Mareena, but now, with the wind in my lungs and the sun on my face, I feel more like Mare again. If I close my eyes, I can pretend none of this ever happened. But it did.