Аманда Хокинг - Torn

“Don’t they already know that?” I asked honestly, and Willa shrugged.

“It doesn’t hurt to remind them.”

“Since your father is out of the picture, Noah can walk you down the aisle,” Aurora said, writing something else on her paper.

“Noah?” I asked. “Your husband?”

“Yes, he’s a suitable choice,” Aurora replied offhandedly.

“But I barely know him,” I said.

“Well, you can’t walk down alone,” Aurora said, giving me an annoyed look.

“Why can’t Matt walk me down?” I asked. “He practically raised me anyway.”

“Matt?” Aurora was confused, and when she remembered who he was, she wrinkled her nose in disgust. “That human boy? Absolutely not. He shouldn’t even be living in the palace, and if others were to find out he was here, you’d be the laughing stock of the kingdom.”

“Then… fine.” I scrambled to think of someone other than Noah. “What about Garrett?”

“Garrett Strom?” Aurora was appalled, but I think it was because he was actually an acceptable candidate.

“He is nearly her step-father,” Willa pointed out with a sly smile. Having her father walk me down the aisle would give her and her family more prestige.

That’s not why I picked him, though. I actually liked Garrett, and he was the closest thing I had to a decent father figure around here.

“If it is as the Princess wishes,” Aurora said, and grudgingly, she crossed out her husband’s name and wrote Garrett’s instead.

They continued that way for a while, and eventually, I had to excuse myself. I needed a break from their subtle jabs and bickering. I wandered down the hall. My plan only went so far as to be anywhere that they weren’t.

As I got closer to the War Room, I heard voices. I stopped and poked my head inside. The pasty Chancellor sat at the desk with a stack of papers spread out before him. Finn and Tove stood on the other side of the desk, talking, and Thomas was at the bookshelves, searching for something.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked and came into the room.

“The boys here have an idiotic plan, and I’m indulging them,” the Chancellor said.

“It’s not idiotic,” Finn said, glaring at the Chancellor, who was too busy dabbing sweat from his forehead to notice.

“We’re trying to find a way to extend the embargo,” Tove explained. “We’re going through old treaties with the Vittra and any other tribes to see if we have a precedent.”

“Have you found anything?” I asked.

I went over to the desk and touched some of the papers. Most of them were written in a language I didn’t understand. It was all symbols, almost like Russian or Arabic. I’d found that to be common of the older documents when I looked in the library.

“Nothing useful yet, but we only just started,” Tove said.

“You won’t find anything useful.” The Chancellor shook his head. “The Vittra never put their deals in writing, and they never extend them.”

“What kinds of things could extend the embargo?” I asked, ignoring the Chancellor.

“We don’t know, exactly,” Tove admitted. “But often, there are loopholes in the language that we can use against them.”

“Loopholes?” I asked.

“Yeah, like Rumpelstiltskin,” Finn said. “They usually throw in something clever like that when they make a deal. It seems impossible, but sometimes, you can break it.”

“I heard the deal. They didn’t say anything like that,” I said. “Except that the peace only lasts until I become Queen. What if I never become Queen?”

“No, you need to be Queen,” Finn said and picked up a stack of papers.

“But that would make indefinite peace, wouldn’t it?” I asked. “If I was never Queen.”

“I doubt it,” Tove said. “The King would find a way around it eventually, and it would only make him more pissed when he finally did.”

“But…” I trailed off and sighed. “So he’ll find his way around anything, including an extension. Why are you even bothering?”

“An extension isn’t our goal.” Tove met my eyes. “We’ll settle for a temporary fix if it’s all we can find, but we want to find something that will end this.”

“Do you think something like that exists?” I asked.

“The only thing that King will listen to is violence,” the Chancellor sputtered. “We need to attack them with everything we have, as soon as we can.”

“We have tried that,” Tove said, exasperated. “Over and over again! The King is immune to our attacks! We can’t hurt him!”

It suddenly hit me when he said that. When Tove had talked about Loki, he’d said that only he, Elora, and I were strong enough to hold him, and he wasn’t even sure if we could execute him. By Elora’s own admission, the King was stronger than Loki. He’d killed her mother, who was as powerful as her.

Nobody had ever been able to stop the King. Elora wasn’t strong enough, and Tove was too scatterbrained. But I had the King’s strength and Elora’s power.

“You want me to kill the King,” I said. “You want to extend the deadline so I have more time to train.”

Tove and Finn wouldn’t meet my eyes, so I knew I’d gotten it right. They expected me to kill my father.

Thomas grabbed a large book from the bookshelf and dropped it on the desk with a heavy thud. Dust rose from the leather cover. Tove had been so busy avoiding my gaze that he jumped when the book banged.

“That might be of some help.” Thomas motioned to the book. “But it’s written in Tryllic.”

“What’s Tryllic?” I asked, eager to change the subject to something that wasn’t patricide.

“It’s the old Trylle language,” Finn explained, and pointed to the papers I’d seen written in a symbolic language. “Only Tove is any good at reading it.”

“It’s a dead language,” the Chancellor said. “I don’t know how anyone knows it anymore.”

“It’s not that hard.” Tove reached for the book. He opened the pages, letting out a musty odor. “I can teach you sometime, if you’d like.”

“I should learn it,” I said. “But not right now. We’re trying to find a way to extend this thing, right? How can I help?”

“Look through the papers.” Finn sifted through some on the table and handed me a small stack. “See if you can find anything about treaties or embargos, even if it’s not with the Vittra. Anything that might help.”

Tove sat down on one of the distressed leather chairs to read the book. I sat down on the floor with my stack of papers, preparing to dig into Trylle legalese. It always seemed to be written in riddles and limericks. A lot of it was hard to understand, and I had to ask for interpretations.

I didn’t feel so bad about that, though, when Tove called Finn over to help him understand a passage. Finn leaned over the chair so he could peer down at the page, and he and Tove discussed what it meant.

I thought about how strange it was that Finn and Tove got along so well. Finn seemed to turn into a jealous freak whenever I flirted with a guy, but I was engaged to Tove, and he seemed perfectly okay with him.

Finn looked up from the book, and his eyes met mine, only for a second before he looked away. I saw something in them, a longing I missed, and I wondered again if I made the right decision.

“Princess?” Aurora called from the hallway.

I’d only been sitting on the floor, reading pages, but she probably wouldn’t approve of it. I jumped to my feet and set the papers on the desk to avoid a lecture about ladylike behavior.

“Princess?” Aurora said again, and she looked in the room. “Ah, there you are.

And you’re with Tove. Perfect. We need you to go over engagement details.”