The Olive Conspiracy (4 page)

Certainly the most interesting foreign
delegation was from their neighbors to the immediate south, Perach.
Their darker skin made them easy to find among the places of honor.
What a tiny woman their queen was, standing in the middle of nearly
a dozen guards! Not only short but slender. And was that her child
strapped to her chest? Did she not have a nurse?

Some of the less cosmopolitan mothers in the
crowd had to be reminded by their friends that Perach had different
customs.

There was a very beautiful woman with heavy
hips and a large bosom standing next to Perach’s queen. Her
presence confused some of the Imbrian celebrity-watchers. They knew
she wasn’t the queen’s sister, but neither could she be a servant
in those clothes.

Anyone in the crowd who had the queen’s
proclivities understood, and many were pleasantly
surprised.

What attracted even more attention than
Perach’s queen and royal mistress, however, were the two guards
closest to Queen Shulamit. One of them was a blond man with bulging
arm muscles. He was taller than all the other guards and seemed to
be in charge of them. The other one was an enormous dragon, dark
green-black like the way the Imbrians painted their shutters. He
curled himself around the Perachi royal family like a resting cat
and watched the crowd with enormous gold eyes.

There was a blast from the trumpets. The
teary-eyed Imbrian nobles had stopped droning, and Princess
Carolina stepped forward. In all this time, she had never taken her
hands off her father’s urn.

Absolute quiet fell over the mourners. Not even
a foot stepping on a crunchy leaf split the air.

The Crown Princess bowed to the crowd, a slight
nod of the head. It was to be her last acknowledgment of them as
princess. Then she turned around and entered the temple.

When she emerged, the urn was gone from her
hands, and on her brow a sparkling crowd of diamonds
rested.

The crowd rose up in an enormous
thundering cheer.

Queen Carolina nodded back at them
somberly.

4. Queen Carolina

Visitors floated through the palace in puffs of
finery and etiquette. These were the people whom fate had set apart
from the teeming masses outside; they were the elite, the nobility,
the wealthy merchants, and the foreign monarchs. It was time for
them to pay their personal respects to the royal family in their
time of mourning.

Isaac waited with the Perachi delegation just
outside the royal family’s private parlor while the Imbrian guards
checked the basket of fruits and other edible gifts that Shulamit
had brought. He was human again, or an approximation thereof—the
past few nights he and Rivka had been on the night watch and
sleeping by day in one of the carriages, so at the moment he was
keeping himself awake with a combination of wakeful magic and seven
cups of tea.

Shulamit used the downtime to breastfeed. Isaac
could tell she was doing it as much for herself as she was for
Naomi; these past few days she’d been anxious and distracted, and
now that she was here in the Imbrian palace, there was a
practically visible tension radiating from her tiny
body.

Isaac wanted to help, but he knew she’d come to
him for help when she was ready—if she needed him. He wondered how
much of it had to do with her teenaged crush on Princess Carolina,
now Queen, and how much was the funeral itself. Queen Shulamit was
never close to King Fernando, but surely the funeral of another
king, a king who had left behind a daughter to rule in his place,
was triggering memories of her own sorrowful coronation.

That couldn’t be pleasant.

Isaac didn’t want Shulamit to feel stared at,
so he looked away at random. His eyes fell idly on a nearby servant
as she hurried past. The woman started like a hunted animal when
she noticed him, and he heard water sloshing in the basin she
carried. He smiled at her and hoped it was enough, then looked
somewhere else.

As he stood idle, his mind wandered back to
Home City and the Frangipani Table. How troublesome that Ezra had
not shown up that morning! It would have been such a graceful
opportunity to catch him in the act. Now, with the palace’s only
shapeshifter out of the country, Yael had no choice but to hold him
off for another week or two. Or call the whole thing quits—it was
within her right.

Isaac growled slightly in his throat at the
thought of prey lost due to the vagaries of fate.

The Imbrian guards returned with Rivka and the
fruit baskets. “All good, Your Majesty,” said a guard in broken
Perachi.

“
Obrigada
,” said Shulamit in
Imbrian.

Isaac noted surprise and approval on the faces
of the guards and enjoyed the moment. His little queenling wasn’t a
brainiac for nothing.

The doors were pulled open for them, and in a
cluster they filed into the salon with Rivka at the
lead.

***

There were about a dozen other mourners there
already, some speaking with each other quietly in the corners, some
orbiting the royal family. At the center of the room was Queen
Carolina, her enormous skirts spread out over a small, curving
sofa. Her little boy and girl were playing under the furniture, and
her husband stood to one side holding a glass of port. He was
speaking with the man who stood on her other side, a tall gentleman
wearing a vest, whose hands were busily cracking nuts open with a
metal implement. He had a full beard that went all the way around
his face—unlike Isaac’s own graceful afterthought.

“
Here, I’ve finally gotten one of
the damned things open,” Isaac heard the man with the beard say in
Imbrian. He was surprised at how much he understood, given that the
last time he’d been up this way he’d been under a curse and stuck
in the body of a horse—with an intellect to match.

The bearded man tried to hand the nut to Queen
Carolina, but she waved it away. “I can’t; I’m not hungry.” Her
voice was a flat murmur.

“
Oh, but Caro, you must eat!” her
husband protested.

Isaac watched her ashen face, saw her pain,
almost smelled her tears.

“
I really—” she began.

The bearded man lifted her hand, the one
closest to him, in his own. “Here,” he said, pressing the nut into
it with his other hand. “Don’t eat for hunger. Eat for life. The
country needs life and you are the country now.”

Carolina turned to look at him, and Isaac saw
things in her face he didn’t expect. It was as if night was
reaching out to pull its own dawn closer.

Instinctively, he looked at Rivka, the blazing
sunlight to his own gray dusk. She was scanning the room for
possible hostiles, and his heart leapt a little with admiration and
love.
She
wasn’t about to get distracted from her life’s
work by gossip fodder.

Queen Shulamit stepped closer to the other
queen’s sorrowful bower. “Carolina,” she said in a cracking voice,
in Imbrian. “I’m so sorry.”

Carolina’s attention shifted abruptly as she
turned her head at the sound. “Shulamit! Thank you, thank you for
coming.” The words poured out in voluble fluent but accented
Perachi. “Oh, Shulamit, Shulamit, tell me… how long does it hurt?
How long do I feel like screaming? Like… breaking? There is
something
breaking
.”

Carolina’s husband rubbed her shoulder
soothingly. On her other side, the bearded man squeezed her hand,
then let it drop and wandered off.

Shulamit smiled wistfully. “I wish I had the
answer you want to hear. It’s just going to take a lot of
time.”

“
How long with you?” There was an
intensity about Carolina.

Shulamit sighed. “Couple of years? You never
really stop being sad, not all the way. But you’ll go longer and
longer without the really hard bits. And eventually you’ll just be
sad that he’s not there, not sad that he died. If that makes any
sense.”

Isaac noticed her shrinking back into Aviva,
who was waiting supportively just behind her with entirely
non-platonic closeness. Ever since they’d entered the Imbrian
capital city but especially here in the palace, Shulamit had been
physically clingy with her sweetheart. Had she been a different
type of woman, Isaac would have wondered if she was trying to show
off to Carolina, her old crush, that she had a pretty girlfriend.
With Shulamit, it seemed to be more about Aviva being a security
blanket.

He understood the feeling, a little. On the
rare occasions women who weren’t Rivka piqued his interest, it
disturbed him and made him immediately want to seek her out, to
recalibrate his settings back to normal.

“
I’m glad you came,” said Carolina,
“and I’m sorry I couldn’t be there, you know, five years ago. I had
just given birth to this little one, you see…” She gestured to her
daughter, who had gotten bored of sitting quietly and was lying on
the floor clapping her hands.

“
But your father was there,” said
Shulamit, “and I never forgot that. So now, I am here for him. And,
well, to see if there’s anything I can do to help you.”

“
Just that you came means
something.”

“
Um.” Shulamit licked her lips.
“This is Aviva.” Then came the awkward, grimacing grin she usually
kept hidden, because, as Isaac knew, she thought it looked like the
face of an angry ape.

“
Pleased to meet you, Your
Majesty,” said Aviva.

A light of understanding came into Carolina’s
eyes. “Ahh, I remember those things you said! When you visited,
what was it, nine years ago?”

“
Think so.” Shulamit bounced Naomi
in her wrap, burning off spare energy.

“
I’m glad things worked out for you
the way you wanted, that way,” said Carolina.

“
We’ve brought you…” Shulamit
turned around, motioning to her guards. “We’ve brought all kinds of
food. I don’t know very much about your mourning customs, but in my
culture, when somebody dies, we have days where people come and
bring us food, and take care of us, and let us… you know, tell
stories, or just cry, or whatever we want. And we cover the mirrors
so we don’t have to see ourselves ugly-crying.”

Carolina let out a smirking sniff, the closest
thing to laughter her grief would allow. “I don’t need a mirror. I
have to see my little ones crying.”

Shulamit looked down at Naomi protectively as
the guards set the gift baskets in front of Carolina. “A sampling
of Perach’s agricultural riches, hand-picked just for
you.”

“
Thank you.”

The children playing on the floor started to
pick through the basket. “Ooh! Papaya!” said the tiny princess.
“Mamae, can I have it? Can I have it?” It was so large compared to
her tiny, roly-poly frame that she could barely lift it.

“
Go see if Papai will call a
servant to cut it up for you.” Carolina patted her on the head
affectionately.

Really?
thought Isaac.
He needs a
servant to slice open a papaya?

“
What’s this?” asked the little
prince in Imbrian, half holding a bottle that was much too heavy
for him.

“
Fernando, no! Put that down,” said
Carolina.

“
Extra pure olive oil,” said
Shulamit. “First press.”

“
How wonderful,” said the bearded
man, returning with a glass of port. “We will finally have the
chance to do a blind taste test of our two country’s
oils.”

“
Nothing tastes of food right now,”
said Carolina.

“
Perhaps the Prince-Consort will
try his hand at it, then?” Then, turning his head toward Shulamit
and her family, he bowed deeply. “Your Majesty. I have not yet had
the honor.”

Carolina looked from him to Shulamit, then back
again. “Yes, you have, nine years ago! Shulamit, I don’t know if
you remember João—Visconde João Carneiro de Façanha?”

“
He was the one playing the guitar,
right?”

“
When I sang! Yes, that was him.
Wow.” Carolina shook her head. “Nine years. How long it’s
been.”

Isaac eyed the glasses of port that were being
passed around. He didn’t want alcohol muddying his thoughts and his
reflexes, but the foreign wine appealed to his sweet tooth and
there were constant reminders that it was available on the other
side of the room.

Arms folded across his chest, he remained with
the other guards and distracted himself by continuing to
eavesdrop.

“
Such beautiful baskets you brought
us,” said the Prince-Consort as he examined its further
contents.

“
Representing the very best of
Perach’s wealth—her farms and her groves,” said Shulamit, adding,
“Well, everything that would make the week’s journey without
spoiling, anyway.”

“
Oh, wow, coconuts!” exclaimed the
little prince as he continued to rummage in the basket.

“
Imbrio, too, is proud of the
riches she grows,” said the Prince-Consort. “I’m sorry, where are
my manners? Let me get you something to eat from that beautiful
spread over there. I’ll call a servant.”