from her and she paused.
She wasn’t in the mood to try to decipher him. He was the one who’d said that everything should remain as it was during the day, and now after she thought things had progressed, he showed up to glare at her and steal paperclips before going to this speech where she wasn’t even allowed?
Oh.
It was improbable, but what if . . .
“Husband?” she called out.
He looked back over his shoulder, and she saw it in the way he tried to look like he didn’t care at all. He needed something more than a paperclip from her, and maybe he didn’t deserve it, but Shanti didn’t believe in bartering. She could give him this without expectation of anything else.
“Good luck with your speech,” she said. “You’re going to do great.”
He nodded sharply and stalked off to join the retinue of guards that waited near the entrance. Shanti settled back into her work feeling a little less annoyed whenever she glanced at the trail the paperclip had left in the dust.
The files in the box Gertinj had brought her weren’t ancient, but old enough to have collected a thick layer of dust and, judging from the husks that fell to the table and scared the crap out of her when she began pulling things out, to have been home to several generations of an insect family.
The first few dozen pages were dossiers of companies that had been interested in doing business with Njaza in the eighties and nineties. There was no follow-up, but from how things seemed to work here, she was certain most of the requests had been denied.
An old, old letter from the head of the Thesoloian archives requesting books on Njazan religion was amongst the mess, and she plucked it out and scanned it, preserving additional evidence against Musoke’s claims that Thesolo had ignored Njaza for decades.
She sorted mindlessly until she came upon a bright plastic binder with technicolor rainbow dolphins on it—she was tempted to just throw it into the trash pile because it didn’t look historically relevant, but queens didn’t do things half-assed, even if they were worried about what kinds of creatures might be living in the binder’s rings.
She wiped the dust from it with a microfiber cloth, and when she carefully opened the cover was happy to find that the only thing in the binder was paper. The first few pages appeared to be someone’s to-do list, chicken scratch scrawls.
More trash.
Still, Shanti was thorough, and continued flipping past blank pages until she came across something that made the slight warmth that stayed with her after Sanyu’s odd visit go cold.
In the center of the binder was a page with three large words written carefully in the middle:
QUEENS OF NJAZA
Her heart thumped in her chest as she flipped to the first page, which had a black-and-white wedding photo of Sanyu’s father and a short pear-shaped woman pasted above handwritten text in a neat script.
Second wife of Sanyu I. Tended to palace gardens.
Shanti turned the page, certain there had to be more to the caption, but on each page was a new wedding photo and with the same brief, benign description of the wife in it.
Organized the library books.
Oversaw religious ceremonies.
Managed the palace kitchens.
Her stomach turned with each flip of the page. These women had all been beautiful in various ways, but in the photos their eyes grew increasingly dull, as if they knew their time was short. Sanyu’s father looked the same in every photo—entirely indifferent. Shanti couldn’t help but notice that every woman’s singular accomplishment was something that, while not devoid of value, didn’t match the rank they held.
A third of the way through, she saw a photo that stopped her in her tracks—a woman that looked so much like Sanyu—her Sanyu—that she had to blink. She was tall, muscular, and stunning—and unlike the others, her eyes held a rebellious fire as she gazed from her photo.
Twentieth wife to Sanyu I. Bore a single son.
That was it, even for the one queen who’d produced an heir.
The first queen hadn’t even been deemed worthy of an entry.
Shanti’s face suffused with heat as she imagined her own entry—Scanned trash in the library. Nothing like the encyclopedia entry she’d imagined for herself all her life. She’d be reduced to a single line, forgotten in an old box somewhere and covered with dust and bug crap. Whoever had made the entries hadn’t even bothered to add relevant information like name and age.
Because they didn’t care.
She