How to Catch a Queen (Runaway Royals #1) - Alyssa Cole Page 0,7
1
Three months later
Shanti Mohapti had always been the type of person who could take an impulsive decision destined to go off the rails and doggedly march ahead of it, laying down track, until it arrived safely at Goal Achieved Station. Past teachers, tutors, and instructors used words like tenacious, focused, just a bit scary, and needs to learn failure is an option when writing up her progress reports. Those same people had always been disappointed when they realized Shanti wasn’t aiming to be a market-fixing economist or the head of a multinational corporation.
At the tender age of seven, Shanti had decided she, a commoner born to a family of goatherders in a small village in the mountains of Thesolo, would become a queen. It was a common childhood fantasy, especially in Thesolo where Queen Ramatla was everyone’s hero. The uncommon thing was her parents agreeing with her job goals and embarking on an all-consuming journey to make her royal fantasy a reality, becoming so deeply invested that at some point it stopped being her dream and became theirs.
When you weren’t born into royalty, there was only one way in.
Marriage.
And that was how, in the years leading up to her twenty-ninth birthday, Shanti had been personally made aware of her undesirability as a wife by almost every non-creepy royal bachelor on the planet. She’d been dissed in Druk, laughed out of Liechtienbourg, and, most humiliatingly of all, thrown up on in Thesolo, her own kingdom—in front of the queen who’d inspired Shanti’s lifelong journey to capture a crown.
After each increasingly stinging rejection, her parents had smiled warmly and reminded her that they loved her no matter what. “No worries, little rat. You’re already our queen, and soon you’ll be a real one!”
They’d made ever-shrinking lists of bachelor princes and princesses within Shanti’s age range, eventually deigning to include lesser members of the monarchy like dukes and even a viscount or two. They’d trawled gossip magazines for signs of impending divorce in various monarchies. They’d scrimped and saved to parade her around high society parties, and posted her pictures and achievements on RoyalMatch.com—updating her profile in the “Ready to Wed” section at least twice daily. They’d made sure she always looked like a future queen, too, after she’d become an adult, no matter how much it had cost them.
People had called her vain when she walked through the market dressed in finery with her hair pressed flat and cascading down her back, no matter how hot it was. They’d called her a gold digger, whispered that she was a schemer who wanted money and prestige, as if those desires were only honorable if you were born wealthy enough to have them handed to you.
Shanti had always walked with her chin up no matter what others said because, well, it was good practice for when she finally had her crown. And besides, those people didn’t know anything.
They didn’t know how, as a child, she’d sat in awe in the school auditorium as Queen Ramatla of Thesolo had spoken, poised and powerful and seeming like she could conquer anything. Shanti had felt awed, and safe, and just so overwhelmed that she’d cried. During the meet and greet, the queen had patted her braids and told her she was incredibly smart and could be anything she put her mind to. The clarity of focus that opened within Shanti at that moment had been so strong that she believed Ingoka, the goddess most divine of Thesolo, had whispered into her soul, This is your path.
After that, Shanti had begged, borrowed, and bartered to gain entry to Queen Ramatla’s speaking engagements, jotting down the words of wisdom. She’d clipped every article she could find about Queen Laetitia of Liechtienbourg traveling the world, trying to push back tides of hate and poverty with the strength of her unrelenting kindness. She’d stayed up late to follow live feeds from the United Nations, taking notes and cheering as if she were at a football match when Queen Tsundue of Druk demanded that the voices of women be heard and Princess Lisa of Zamunda fought for workers’ rights. She’d been collecting phrases and articles and thoughts about queenship for years, in the journal she called her “Field Guide to Queendom.”
To young, impressionable Shanti, the power of a queen had seemed unfathomable—and unlike so many of the ways in which she’d been shown who was important and who wasn’t, it hadn’t seemed unattainable. Once her family had gone all in on her