Royal Outlaw: (Royal Outlaw, Book 1) (6 page)

The girl stared at the archmagician of Natric with wide eyes. She was completely dumbstruck. She could only gape as her mind replayed his words repeatedly, unable to believe them. Here she had been searching for the heir, while it had been her all along.

Shock was so prominent in her system that she could not think clearly. She nearly fell off Iyela and into the river as she doubled over with laughter, clutching her side with the pain of giggling.

Nobody else laughed. Mariel tried to gain control of herself, but it took a few moments to make the giggles stop. When they did, she guided Iyela around her papa, who sat frozen in his saddle, so that she could face Dreyfuss directly. But the moment she saw him, unhindered by her papa’s protective stance, she broke into laughter again.

The archmagician looked at her condescendingly. “I find nothing amusing in the situation, your Highness.”

Her uncontrollable laughter ceased, all humor disappearing. She pushed her curls out of her face and met his eyes directly. “You’re not joking?”

“I do not joke.”

“But I’m an
outlaw
. I’m Mariel Quickwit.”

“Do not remind me.”

“You are joking.”

“Why would I joke about something as important as this?”

“Are you doing this to spite the king and queen? I won’t be a part of a political intrigue.”

“I have been charged to find you by Their Majesties who have been given the right to rule by the powerful Valmir and the kind Narel.”

Mariel said nothing as she stared at Dreyfuss in amazement. She was of the societal underworld. She could pick a lock as easy as flash a grin. Smugglers, thieves, and outlaws were her friends and she had broken out of prison multiple times.

They were asking her to be the Princess of Natric, the heir to the throne? They wanted her to rule the kingdom someday? She could almost laugh at the irony of it. Her enemies would be her allies. She would be thrown into the world of politics, the true terrible world of society. Mariel wanted none of what they offered her. She had no desire to sit on a golden throne with servants fanning her as she gossiped with nobles who had cobwebs for brains, while people suffered on the streets. Mariel did not want to be their precious princess.

“No.”

Dreyfuss blinked in surprise. “I beg your pardon?”

“I said ‘no’. Is that too hard of a word for you to understand? I would think you would know better, being a great magician and all.”

“Perhaps you do not fully understand me. All past misconduct of yours will be forgiven. You will live in the palace in Fintel with your grandparents, learn to behave like a proper princess, attend grand balls and high-class dinners, dance and flirt with wealthy men, and one day rule the kingdom of Natric. You will be the first female heir in the history of the de Sharec line, the dynasty that has ruled this kingdom for more than three hundred years.”

Mariel was not moved by his speech, only disgusted by the life he spoke of. She did not want any of the things he offered: to be showered in wealth while common people starved, to be trapped in the cage that came with power. She also knew that there was more to the king’s plan for her than Dreyfuss had revealed. The king would try to marry her well and allow the man to rule with her sole purpose being breeding stock. It was the same life he had wanted for her mother.

“My answer hasn’t changed. I don’t care what you have to offer.”

Dreyfuss’s pale face tinged with sudden color as anger flooded his cheeks, but then his grey eyes flickered to her papa behind her and he smiled slightly. “If you agree to claim Natric’s throne, your traitorous father, the ex-Sergeant Darren Haroldsson of the Versati Corps, now known as ‘Brightsword’ and most wanted man in the entire kingdom, will be pardoned of all offenses and be free to do as he pleases, including rejoin the Versati Corps.”

The offer caught Mariel off-guard, but she did not hesitate in her answer. “He wouldn’t want to work for your horrible king again. Perhaps you don’t remember correctly, but he left the Versati Corps willingly. Besides, pardoning him would do no good because he would continue to fight against the de Sharecs.”

“Fight against his own daughter?”

Mariel had not thought of it that way, but it made her angrier at the offer. If she agreed to this madness, not only would the king have an heir, but his biggest threat would be taken out of the picture, since Darren would never do anything to harm his daughter. Without Darren Brightsword at its head, the Resistance would collapse.

“Why now?” Darren broke his long silence. “The king refused to help me find her eleven years ago when I begged for his help. After I found Princess Carolina murdered at Remel and Mariel missing, I raced to Fintel to ask for his aid to find my daughter quickly. Her blood was mine, as well as the king’s and queen’s, all I needed was a magician to use a drop of that blood to locate her and rescue her, but he said ‘Now the abomination is dead, murdered like her foolish mother.’ Mariel’s death was a blessing to all of you then, but now you want to recognize her as heir.”

“At the time, Queen Meredith could still bear children and we hoped a son would come. The king needed an heir, so five years ago I took a drop of his blood and scryed for the true heir of the kingdom. To my amazement the image of a girl appeared. Although I had never met her, I had met her mother and she had her same brown curls and I had heard once that Princess Carolina’s child had the most incredible dark green eyes. I knew at once that this girl who we all thought was dead was being revealed to me by the gods and she was Princess Carolina’s illegitimate daughter, Mariel. I woke the king in his bed and he instructed me to go fast and find her.”

Dreyfuss appeared to be finished, but his story had a huge gap in it and Mariel’s curiosity refused to let that gap remain. “The king should replace you if it’s taken you this much time. It’s been five years, why did it take so long if you had blood to trace me?”

The archmagician glared at her. “I should be asking you that.”

Mariel cocked her eyebrow and remained silent.

“When I scryed you again, your image appeared once more in a forest with massive trees, larger than any I have ever seen. You touched your head, but before I could initiate the trace to find you, the image vanished and I was never able to create it again and the trace did not work on you. It was as though the gods were playing a trick, allowing me to see you and then erasing the vision.”

She recalled a memory of five years past when she had been in Parloipae and felt an invisible tugging feeling. It had disappeared after a few minutes, never to happen again.
But it did happen again
, Mariel thought,
it happened to Papa.

“So after five years of being unable to scry me, you came up with a different approach.” Mariel thought aloud. “You found Papa’s relatives and took their blood. It didn’t help you find me, but it helped you trace him. The last you’d seen of him was just after Mother was murdered and he had claimed I was alive and your precious king had refused to help him find me, so you assumed he found me, and finding him would mean locating me. You kept the blood trace going and followed him, waiting to pounce until I showed up next to him in the image.”

“So,” Mariel continued, feeling somewhat elated now, “All those years of work and you’ve finally found me, but I refuse to be your princess.” She smiled broadly, victory a sweet taste.

All the diplomacy that Dreyfuss had possessed throughout the conversation vanished. “Foolish girl! There is no one else with enough royal blood to make a legitimate claim to the throne. Our kingdom will be thrown into civil war.”

“Then let there be war. Let the de Sharec line fall.”

“You are a de Sharec!”

“I have never been one! I was never recognized as a princess when I would have been stupid enough to want it, and now I refuse to become a part of such a horrible world! I will not be caged like the king caged my mother.”

The archmagician looked like he was about to explode with anger. “A thousand girls would die for such a chance.”

“Then find one of them. My answer is no.”

The Natrician soldiers looked on in amazement as Mariel refused the one position that so many coveted; wanted enough to kill for it. She had no desire to be part of the corrupted upper class, and now she could see that she could create the end for the de Sharec line of rule. Mariel felt elated, especially as she watched Dieter Dreyfuss, archmagician of Natric, fume silently as he sat on his horse on the bank of the river. She would rather be imprisoned, rather be executed as an outlaw, than be their princess.

Dreyfuss appeared to gather himself together and he beckoned for her to approach him. Darren stiffened. The archmagician noticed. “I will not harm a hair on her head. I need her alive. Now, please come here, your Highness.”

Unsure of what he wanted, but pulled by the invisible force of curiosity, Mariel and Iyela walked out of the flowing water and stepped onto dry land. When she was directly beside the archmagician he leaned toward her, his scent was something exotic and undoubtedly expensive.

He spoke so that only she could hear. “I may not be able to trace you—only the gods know why—but do not forget, Mariel de Sharec, that I can always find your father. If you do not agree to claim the throne, I will find and kill him.”

Mariel’s tongue felt thick as she asked, “If he dies, how will that persuade me to join you and the king, his killers?”

Dreyfuss smiled. “I do not expect you to, but it will destroy a dangerous threat to the crown that has evaded us for so many years.”

A sick feeling twisted her stomach and she could not bear to look at the dirty playing man anymore. Her papa looked at her, brown eyes wide with concern. He had told her that he would rather see her royal than dead, but she knew that he would rather see himself dead than her royal. She was being blackmailed. The gem encrusted shackles were being locked around her wrists and ankles and she was being tossed in the pretty, gilded cage. No choices were left to her.

Dreyfuss raised his voice so that everyone could hear, in the river and on its banks. “What do you choose, Princess?”

All eyes turned to her. The Natrician soldiers were curious, and some were almost pleading. The eyes of the members of the Resistance were confused, uncertain how to take this turn of events about the identity of Mariel Quickwit. There was one pair of eyes she could not look at: her papa’s.

“I will go to the capital,” Mariel muttered quietly.

The horrible man’s lips shaped into a sneer. “What did you say?”

Mariel wanted to crawl under a rock. Anything had to be better than this, but not anything, her papa’s death was not a worthy price for her freedom. She shut her eyes and spoke a little louder, but in a voice that held defeat and misery. “I will go to Fintel and claim the title of heir to Natric’s throne.”

“No!” Darren cried.

Mariel heard loud splashing and a moment later her papa was at her side, wrenching her around to face him. She could not bear to meet his eyes.

“You can’t do this, Mariel.”

“This is what I choose,” she said weakly.

Darren shook his head. “No.”

She could not remember a time since waking up in the zreshlan world that she had wanted to cry so badly. “This is what I want.”

“You would never want this.”

Mariel knew what she had to do. She could not let him know what the cost was if she chose freedom, if she did, he would commit suicide to protect her. He had to think that this choice was hers alone, with no blackmail involved. She swallowed the knot that had lodged itself in her throat, blinked back the tears, hardened her features, and sat up straight in the saddle.
This is just another act
, she told herself. But it was the hardest act she ever had to put on. Mariel pushed back her brown curls and set her piercing green eyes on her papa.

“I choose a royal life,” she said in a strong, sure voice that betrayed no hint of the pain and misery she felt. To make the act more realistic, she turned back to Dreyfuss. “But I won’t come with you now. Give me a few months. Let Papa bring me, to prove that you will stick to your word about pardoning him. And everyone here goes free, no arrests.” She needed time to accept her future, time to savor the last bit of freedom she had, and she needed to explain to the zreshlans her decision because they did not believe in rulers.

Dreyfuss gazed into Mariel’s eyes, but he looked away first. “Agreed, I will give Darren Brightsword a pass of entry. You must arrive by the last day of April.”

No room was left for negotiation. At least he had given her some time; that was more than she had expected.

Mariel’s heart throbbed painfully as her papa turned away from her, hurt and angry, and kicked his horse into a canter. She watched him disappear into the trees.

The soldiers that had blocked their path across the river joined the rest of their companions on the opposite shore. The members of the Resistance, depressed and confused, also stepped to the shore. The archmagician created papers of entry into the palace grounds and signed and sealed them before presenting them to Mariel with a condescending smile. “The final day of April.”

Mariel’s throat was too tight to respond, so she nodded. The king’s men who had finally been victorious after a five year search, departed slowly. Mariel said nothing to the outlaws that continued to stare at her, but dismounted as Iyela sent her sympathetic feelings. The outlaws kept their distance, as Mariel sat on a rock in silence, staring at the sealed letter of entry the archmagician had given her.