Prologue
The meeting room is a neutral space both politically and color-wise. The walls, floors, and even the thick silk curtains are as white as bleached fabric. The only things of color in the room are the outfits of the political parties currently at play and the very furniture that the political parties are sitting at. The thick gold and wood made meeting table was long, almost the entire length of the room. On one end, a man sits, his posture slack and somewhat relaxed as he leans over with his elbows on the table and his face held up by his large hands. On the other end, a woman sits, her posture is rigid with her back as straight as an arrow and her eyes heavy with dark wrinkled bags underneath them. The woman holds a rolled-up piece of parchment on her hands; the paper crinkled around the tight and white-knuckled grip of her right hand.
It is funny how neutral spaces do not typically lead to neutral feelings.
If anything, it only adds to the thick suffocating tension in the air. SLAM! “This is an outrage!” The lone woman in the room, the queen, shrieks. She raps her free hand against the table. “What do you mean ‘no’!? You can’t just say no with no explanation given!”
Queen Tara Morningdew of the Zerima Kingdom, the woman has a rosy skin tone with vanilla white skin flushed a healthy pink throughout her entire body. Specifically, her cheeks and the bridge of her nose are the pinkest parts of her. She wears a dress with a sleeveless cream-white button-up bodice that snugly hugs her gargantuan breasts and a long and flowing navy-blue lace skirt made of silk and shimmering like gems as if perfectly outlines the curve of her wide childbearing hips. Her oche brown hair is cut in a short bob that curls around her pearl earring pierced ears; her hands are layered in long-sleeved silk gloves made of navy-blue lace and silk that matches the fabric components of her dress skirt. The queen has sharp greyish-blue eyes lined with luscious doe-like eyelashes that sparkle when direct light hits them.
She glowers at the lone man in the room in front of her, the king, not her king but one that is still grating on her patience and nerves with every meeting they have.
“I mean no. I should not have to explain myself. But I will, if it will help you understand my stance on things. Although, I doubt my explanation will have that intended effect,” King Justice states, as he uses a hand to point at the bunched-up roll of paper in the queen’s grip. “That deal is fixed to suit your kingdom and your people. Not for my kingdom or my people. There was no attempt to make things balanced in the slightest. Thus, I must refuse your offer. You of all people, a fellow ruler, should understand such a viewpoint.”
King Justice Hibiscus of the Arirn Kingdom is a man with dark chocolate brown skin almost as dark as shadows. He has black hair braided into medium sized ‘triangle braids’ only the best hairstylists in his kingdom can style. His hair is darker than charcoal used by great artists and even darker than the ink used for royal missives. His eyes are covered in a dark pepper green silk cloth. It is debatable if he can see through the cloth. His braided hair flows down his back all held together in one large bunch by bronze braid rings. Justice wears a dark pepper green pair of breathable ‘bubble pants’ that are baggy and puffy around his crotch and legs but are tightly tied to his waist and ankles with black velvet ribbons. His perpetually hard nipples are pierced with two silver wedding rings, one of them – with a peridot gemstone – belongs to him and the other – with an emerald gemstone – having once belonged to his deceased wife. A long and baggy black cloak covers most of his broad shoulders, muscular torso, and six pack abs.
“You won’t accept gold or gems. You won’t accept crops. You won’t accept slaves even though you will only need to house them tempo—” Queen Tara starts before she is cut off.
“We have no use for gold or gems. Your crops, Zerima fruits and veggies, are not built for hot climates. Remember, your grandmother traded my grandfather several Zerima plant life in exchange for my grandfather giving your kingdom Zerima laborers for a single season. All those crops died in the Arirn sun. Some of the seeds even baked themselves into a tasty yet ungrowable crisp before they could be planted. In short, we wasted time and permanently lost good when your people worked them to death. So, we lost valuable lives as well—”
“The lives of slaves—”
“Are priceless. And again, they are laborers, not slaves. They commit a crime and have to work at least ten hours a day for a set period of time to make up for their misgivings. That is the Arirn way and you know it,” King Justice states, his voice as solid and unwavering as stone. “And that is also part of the reason I refuse to accept any laborers from you. I would love to give your laborers some comfort they were robbed off when they were ensnared by your kingdom’s barbed chains. But you only allow your laborers to work in my kingdom for a full moon cycle. Us Arirns get attached. I do not want my people, especially my son, to get attached to poor souls that are doomed to disappear in the blink of an eye. I do not want a laborer from your kingdom to become attached to mine and plead to stay when that cannot happen. Or, worse still, I do not want that laborer to take their own life, realizing they will have to go back to you. Seeing them despair, let alone dead, would break my heart. So that offer is not fair to anyone.”’
King Justice suddenly stands, the chairs of his seat scrapping against the floor as they make an audible screech. He stretches for a moment; the knots in his seat-stiffened back audibly cracking. Then, without another word, he leaves the meeting table and walks for the lone entrance and exit to the chamber he and the queen are chatting in. Queen Tara suddenly stands herself, scuttling around her chair to quickly reach King Justice. “What are you doing!? Where do you think you are going!?” She demands, her voice frayed and breathless. She clutches her side of the table, the world suddenly spinning into a blurry vortex of colors as heat flushes from her toes to her head. But Queen Tara stays standing; she has to.
Creek! The meeting room door opens with piercing whine; King Justice does not deign it appropriate to even look back at her. “I am leaving with my son and my men,” Queen Tara opens her mouth, but King Justice is quicker with his tongue and lips. “This meeting is done. We will stay to do the farewell feast, but no longer than that,” He walks out the door, his wooden sandaled feet tap-tapping in hollow yet peaceful rhythms against the marble floors.
Queen Tara stands as still as a statue. A chill grips her heart despite the heat that still flushes through her system, and a tightness in her chest and throat, suffocates and chokes out any replies she could have for a departing King Justice. That was my last chance, She thinks to herself as she slumps against the table like a limp ragdoll. THUD! The tears, salty and hot, pours from her tear ducts and leaves sticky trails of saline down her rapidly flushing cheeks before dripping from her chin and onto her collarbone. The tears burn like acid whenever they hit the skin making up her torso, but that discomfort is nothing compared to the buzzing and painfully throbbing stress headache she is experiencing. THUD! THUD! THUD! It is like she is a lobotomy patient having an icepick jammed through her skull. Her inhales come out in ragged breaths, sharper than knives yet rougher than sandpaper, rattling her lungs and esophagus.
“Mistress?” A voice as gentle as a summer sea breeze pulls Tara out of her spiral; she looks up to see a stableboy about eighteen years old glancing up at her. The boy is scruffy with long and shaggy dusty blonde hair that has terrible split ends, he wears a two-piece blue and white semi-casual suit, and he also has pale skin with old burn marks on his face and neck. “Are you okay?” He takes a hesitant step towards Tara, his legs shaking like a foal who is learning to walk for the first time while he reaches out an arm as it to gently takes her hand.
“Take me to the castle food stores,” The queen states, as she wipes the tears from her eyes and allows them to soak into the gloves she wears. Her voice comes out strained and croaky like a toad. “King Justice, Prince Rosario, and their men are expecting a farewell feast before they take their leave tonight. I need to know that we have enough for the occasion.”
The stableboy bites his lip, his pale golden eyes locking onto the parchment still in my hand. “May I? I mean, I assume the deal fell flat given your state, mistress.”
A flash of anger, as hot as the coals fueling a Hearthsmis fireplace, causes Tara’s cheeks and neck to burn, but she takes a deep cooling breath before she can fly off the handle. She glances down at the contract she had been holding this entire time; the paper has visible wrinkles in it now, not that it matters. Wordlessly, Queen Tara hands the scroll over to the stableboy who gladly takes it. The stableboy leads the ruling women out of the meeting room and through the quiet yet heavily guarded sparkling hallways of the Zerima Royal Palace, the stableboy reads the contract as he leads, he does not have to look up to know where to take me.
Eventually they stop by a wall slightly off-color compared to the rest of the salmon pink exterior, he presses his hand against the wall and mumbles an incantation, his hands and wrist glow in time just as an orange symbol of a fox eating its own tail appears on the off-color section of the wall. The secret entrance to the food stores rolls over to the side with a great rumble that shakes the ground. Queen Tara takes a breath as she folds her trembling arms behind her back, she walks toward with even steps and the stableboy follows, the crinkle of paper echoing as the young man folds up the contract. Once inside, she stops before a long and widening pantry.
The food store room is just what it is, a giant semi-circle of a cupboard built into the walls of the tower-like storage room itself. The cupboard has mahogany wood painted yellow and goes up and up until it disappears up into the darkness of the upper parts of the tower like room. The room itself is cold to the point where her and the stable boy’s breath can be seen with each inhale and exhale. The freezing temperature is on purpose to ensure that everything within the storeroom stays preserved for as long as possible. There are several rows to the pantry, ten cabinets long with thick panes of glass closing off the food inside. Some have bread, others have cured meats or sundried fish, others have bags of nuts or berries inside. But most are empty, left with nothing but crumbs or portions barely big enough to feed a young child.
She glances up at the unseen upper levels of the pantry. “Those are empty,” The stableboy states, his eyes forlorn. “All of them. Nothing is left beyond what you can see.”
Queen Tara clicks her tongue and chews on her lip. “This is disgraceful, there is no way I can feed anyone with supplies like this. What are we going to do? King Justice just will not budge! I have had my daughter, my maids, and even some slaves talk with him. He just—” Tara cuts herself off as she sighs and rubs her forehead.
For a moment, the stableboy is silent before speaking up. “Mistress...have you tried talking to the prince? Prince Rosario? He seems far more...malleable than King Justice a-and he is an Arirn young man at that, so he is more likely to respect and cave to your demands.”
Queen Tara gives another deeper sigh and shakes her head. “Arirn noblemen and princes are not given any political power in their homeland until they are twenty-five years of age. I am not saying that I cannot find a solution to our food crises fast but if I want to find a quick one then it cannot be discovered by simply waiting Prince Rosario to age five more years.”
There is a beat of silence as both the stableboy and the queen are at a loss for words.
The darkness weighs heavy on Tara’s shoulders like an anvil, and the cold seeps into her bones like icy tendrils. But it is the stableboy that gives her a renewed sense of hope. “It is too bad you cannot simply give Prince Rosario political power or political priority within the Arirn Kingdom. He would be able to sign any deal you offer him then, age notwithstanding.”
Queen Tara nods, acknowledging the words but not processing them. Yet. Yes, it is a shame. If only Prince Rosario was older, then all would be well. If only his older brother were still alive, I could finesse something with him. His brother had been married too, so him just being married to a noblewoman in the Tarilon Kingdom had provided the place with— An idea clicks into her mind, Queen Tara can feel her eyes nearly pop out of her skull as they bulge in their sockets. She turns around on her heel to face the stableboy, a grin brighter than sunshine beaming on her face as she feels like she could just dance until her feet were bloodied stumps.
The stableboy jumps back, his eyes widening in alarm.
“Prince Rosario is single, right?” Queen Tara asks, her smile never falling for a moment.
