The Royal House of Karedes: Two Crowns. Кейт Хьюит

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ her life. The rest of it, anyway. Kalila swallowed the acidic taste of fear.

      ‘Look.’ Juhanah steered her towards the mirror, and even after the hours of preparation Kalila wasn’t expecting the change. She looked…like a stranger.

      The red and gold kaftan swallowed her slight figure, and her hair had been twisted back into an elaborate plait. Heavy gold jewellery settled at her wrists and throat, and her face…

      Kalila didn’t recognise the full red lips, or the wide, dark eyes outlined in kohl. She looked exotic, unfamiliar. Ridiculous, she thought with a sudden surge of bitterness. Like a male fantasy come to life.

      ‘Beautiful, yes?’ Juhanah said happily, and the kitchen maid nodded in agreement. Kalila could only stare. ‘And now, the final touch…’ Juhanah slipped the veil over her head, the garment of feminine pride, the hijab. It covered her hair and a diaphanous veil spangled with gold and silver coins covered her face, leaving nothing but those wide, blank, kohl-lined eyes. ‘There,’ Juhanah sighed in satisfaction.

      Gazing at her exotic reflection, it seemed impossible that only eight months ago she’d been in Cambridge, debating phi-losophy and eating pizza with friends on the floor of her student flat. Wearing jeans, completely unchaperoned, living a life of freedom and opportunity, intellectual pursuit and joy.

      Joy. She felt utterly joyless now, standing, staring there, utterly alien. Who was she? Was she the girl in Cambridge, laughing and flirting and talking politics, or was she this girl in the mirror, with her dark eyes and hidden face?

      Eight months ago her father had come to England, taken her out for a meal and listened to her girlish chatter. She’d thought—deceived herself—that he was merely visiting her. That he missed her. Of course there had been a greater plan, a deeper need. There always had been.

      Kalila still remembered the moment she’d seen her father’s face turn sombre, one hand coming to rest lightly on hers so the spill of silly talk died on her lips, and her mouth went dry. ‘What…?’ she’d whispered, yet she’d known. Of course she’d known. She’d always known, since she had been twelve, when she’d had her engagement party.

      She and Zakari had exchanged rings, although she barely remembered the ceremony. It was a blur of images and sensations, the cloying scent of jasmine, the heavy weight of the ring, a Calistan diamond, that Zakari had slipped on her finger. It had been far too big, and she’d put it in her jewellery box, where it had remained ever since.

      Perhaps, Kalila thought distantly, she should wear it again.

      ‘I know the wedding has been put off many times,’ Bahir said, his voice surprisingly gentle. It made Kalila’s eyes sting, and she stared down at her plate. ‘Family obligations on both sides have made it so. But finally King Zakari is ready to wed. He has set a date…May the twenty-fifth.’

      Kalila swallowed. It was the end of September, the leaves just starting to turn gold, flooding the Cambridge backs with colour, and the start of her term. ‘But…’ she began, and Bahir shook his head.

      ‘Kalila, we always knew this was your destiny. Your duty. I have already spoken to the registrar. Your course has been cancelled.’

      She jerked her head up, her eyes meeting his, seeing the implacable insistence there. ‘You had no right—’

      ‘I had every right,’ Bahir replied, and now she heard the hard implacability, felt it. ‘I am your father and your king. You have received your degree—the post-graduate course was merely a way to pass the time.’

      Kalila swallowed. Her throat ached so much the instinctive movement hurt. ‘It was more than that to me,’ she whispered.

      ‘Yes, perhaps,’ Bahir allowed, his shoulders moving in a tiny shrug, ‘but you always knew what the future held. Your mother and I never kept it from you.’

      No, they hadn’t. They’d spoken to her before that wretched party, explained what it meant to be a princess, the joy that lay in fulfilling one’s duty. Propaganda, and Kalila had believed it with all her childish heart. She’d been dazzled by the crown prince of Calista, although now she didn’t remember much of Zakari, no more than a tall, charismatic presence, a patient—or had it been patronising?—smile. She’d only been twelve, after all.

      ‘You will come home with me,’ Bahir finished, beckoning to the waiter to clear their plates. ‘You have a day to say goodbye to your friends and pack what you need.’

      ‘A day?’ Kalila repeated in disbelief. Her life was being dismantled in an instant, as if it had been meaningless, trivial—

      And to her father, it had.

      ‘I want you home,’ Bahir said. ‘Where you belong.’

      ‘But if I’m not getting married until May—’

      ‘Your presence is needed in your country, Kalila.’ Bahir’s voice turned stern; she’d worn his patience too thin with her desperate, fruitless resistance. ‘Your people need to see you. You have been away nearly four years. It is time to come home.’

      That evening, packing up her paltry possessions, Kalila had considered the impossible. The unthinkable. She could defy her father, run away from her so-called destiny. Stay in Cambridge, live her own life, find her own husband or lover…

      Yet even as these thoughts, desperate and treacherous, flitted through her mind, she discarded them. Where could she run? With what money? And what would she do?

      Besides, she acknowledged starkly, too much of her life—her blood—was bound up in this country, this world. Zaraq’s future was bound with Calista’s; to risk her country’s wellbeing for her own selfish, feminine desires was contemptible. She could never betray her father, her country in such a manner. It would be a betrayal of herself.

      So she’d returned home with her father on his private plane, had settled back into life in the empty palace with its skeleton staff. She drifted from day to day, room to room, at first trying to keep up with her studies in history and then discarding them in depression.

      She’d attended to her civic responsibilities, visiting sick children, new businesses, shaking hands and cutting ribbons, smiling and nodding. She enjoyed the interactions with the people of Zaraq, but at times it felt like only so much busy work, a lifetime of busy work, for that was her duty.

      Her destiny.

      Now, gazing into the mirror, she wished—even wondered if—her destiny lay elsewhere. Surely she’d been made for, meant to do, more than this. Be more than this.

      ‘Princess?’ Juhanah said softly. ‘Beautiful, n’am?’

      Kalila had a desperate, intense urge to rip the veil from her face. She’d never been veiled before—her mother had refused, wearing only Western clothes, her nod to old-fashioned propriety no more than a scrap of head covering on formal occasions. Her father hadn’t minded. He’d married his English rose as part of an attempt to Westernise his country. Yet now, Kalila thought with renewed bitterness, she looked like something out of the Arabian Nights. Like a harem girl. The coins tinkled when she moved.

      ‘Lovely,’ Juhanah murmured. Kalila’s fingers bunched on the gauzy material of her kaftan and a fingernail snagged on a bit of gold thread.

      Juhanah tutted СКАЧАТЬ