to find the heir to the Ibaranian throne. Their royal family had fled when the country had briefly been conquered at the end of WWII, and the country had now enlisted the aid of the World Federation of Monarchists—the premiere chroniclers and proponents of nobility in the modern era—to help them find the rightful heirs and reinstate their monarchy.
Shanti wondered what that would be like, to be sitting around without a care in the world and have someone hand you a crown and rule over a people, no marriage necessary. She made a note to check if she had any Ibaranian ancestry listed in the genealogy test she’d submitted to Royal Match.
A notification from Shanti’s messenger app popped up on her screen. The message was in Njazan and Shanti responded in kind.
M: Hello sister. Can you make it tonight? New location, I’ll send you the coordinates.
S: I will try my goodest to be there. Thank you twice.
Shanti was supposed to go into “work” at the archives but she’d already said she was sick, and no one would care. While there was important work being done in the Royal Library, Shanti’s was pointedly unimportant, and she wasn’t in the mood to smile benignly and take any shit Josiane might want to dish out.
She would nap and preserve her energy for something useful, like what she would get into when she snuck out later, in the evening. She wasn’t allowed to make decisions, but she didn’t need Sanyu or Musoke to make change.
Chapter 2
Sanyu forced himself to sit down and work at his father’s massive desk, a mahogany monstrosity that made even a man as big as him feel adrift.
When he was very young, his father would let him sit on the edge of it, legs swinging as he watched the king carry out important royal business. Then, it’d been a special treat, and while Sanyu had never wanted to be an important man, he’d very much wanted to be his father. He’d spent a lifetime mastering how to replicate his father’s swagger, his booming voice, his presence. Sanyu’d been so focused on filling the man’s shoes—on filling his seat at the king’s desk—that he hadn’t even truly mourned, or accepted, his father’s loss.
Now that the desk was his, it felt wrong. He kept expecting the door to the office to open, for his father to stick his head in with an expression of playful menace and say, What are you doing at my desk, my prince? You’ll have plenty of time to sit here when you become king, but that’s my seat.
His heart clenched at the memory of his father, who would playfully chase him around the office until Musoke showed up and told him to stop spoiling the future king. That was how things had always been behind the scenes, even if he heard his father yell and make threats in public, saw the guards and advisors and citizens rush to do his bidding. He was always kind to Sanyu, even as he expected the impossible from him.
“One day you will have to be strong, fierce, and unrelenting. You’ll have to be fiercer than me, like your song says. We are counting on you to protect the kingdom we have built.”
An ugly feeling had cocooned Sanyu in darkness since his father’s death, blocking out everything but the paralyzing fear of making a misstep that would destroy his father’s legacy. He missed the man so much that it sometimes hit him like a physical blow, bringing him to his knees, and the very act of missing him revealed the flaw in a king who was supposed to have a fist—and a heart—of iron.
And then there was the shame—Sanyu had spent so long wanting to escape from Njaza, had tried so hard to break free of the legacy that had been his father’s pride and joy. He would never live down the fact that he had almost run away the night his father died—that the not-fear had driven him so far, and that Musoke and the guards had witnessed it.
Sanyu’s relationship with his father and Musoke had been difficult in different but intertwined ways. Two men who’d seen different potentials in him as they raised him, which meant double the opportunity for them to be disappointed.
“Why do you allow him to hide and read dusty old books, when he must be strong?”
“Why do you force him to fight, when he must be smarter than all who would harm us?”
People would be surprised