Duplicity: Part Four

      For a prince of the “kingdom of knowledge” and a celebrated graduate of Brightvale University, Rafael wasn’t very bright, though that could be chalked up to his Meridellian heritage. He wiped his own tears with a dirty handkerchief, whining to Danner between his pauses. “You don’t understand,” he wailed. “Gali was the best servant I’d ever had. He was always there when I needed him. He knew all my favorite drinks, could make my bed just right—oh, I don’t know what to do without him!”

      “What a tragedy indeed,” Danner said, disgust barely hidden beneath his stoic demeanor. This was more or less what he had to deal with on a daily basis. “This is a debriefing, Prince Rafael. Please try to stay focused.”

      “It’s just so distressing. I can’t believe Gali would betray me.” Rafael crossed his arms and pouted, sinking further into his large bed. He was too tired to get up, and Danner was assured this was because of “psychological and physical stress.” In addition to losing a “valued” servant, Rafael had also suffered a few cuts to his chest in the scuffle with his him, all shallow and incapable of producing any permanent harm.

      “Maybe you can just get a new servant? I’m sure there are plenty looking for work.” Unfortunately, the captain of the guard had to humor the Kyrii prince, no matter how idiotic he seemed. A lot of Neopians acted like they were stupid. Or were genuinely stupid, but still had valuable information.

      “Gali was my servant for five whole years. Five whole years!” Without any interruption, the prince continued. “I remember when I first met him. He was five years younger than he was now, always came smiling, even when I yelled at him. Did I do something to make him hate me?”

      “I’m . . . I’m sure it was nothing personal,” replied Danner. “Our investigation so far revealed that his motivations were probably political in nature.” And multiple testimonies and alibis revealed that Gali was probably responsible for coordinating the entire thing.

      As expected. There was little reason to be so brazen if you didn’t want anybody to see it, and Jeran had a lot of enemies. Most were content to simply express their disdain from the sidelines, though apparently, some were doing some scheming. The arrested assassins refused to say anything about who they stood for or followed, of course, but the magic and equipment they had access to were not exactly accessible to poor discontents.

      Danner couldn’t help but wonder if the attempted assassination was a good thing, in some respects. It certainly jolted something in Jeran. He had spent the last two weeks more heavily involved in politics than he had ever been before. He’d even done some things differently than Skarl would have. For example, Jeran threw Skarl’s favorite court jester in the dungeons for a whole hour to “think about life.”

      “But why would he hurt me?” said Prince Rafael. “Why not try to go for some other poor sap?”

      “He would still be in the dungeons,” said Danner. “Not much would change, you’d still have lost your servant.”

      “I know, but I’d be less heartbroken.”

      Danner sighed. Rafael would get over it soon enough. “On another note, your Royal Highness, would you mind telling me a bit more about Gali? Where he came from? His relationship with other members of the royal family?”

      “I suppose this information will serve as some payback,” replied Rafael, putting away his handkerchief. He sniffled a few times. “Gali came from a failing Meridellian merchant family—I remember that. He didn’t really talk about it much, though; he didn’t talk to anyone, really. Not to his fellow servants, not to the guards, nobody.

      Danner scrawled a few notes in his pocketbook. “Do you happen to recall which family he hailed from?”

      “A rather old one—I remember that. Its name started with an ‘F.’ He mentioned something about them originally residing in Brightden.”

      Danner didn’t really have an accessible mental encyclopedia of all the merchant families in Meridell, but Brightden was really a central duchy to the kingdom, and he was vaguely familiar with some of its internal politics and families. There was only one that started with an “F,” the Fairbassun family. They were one of Brightden’s oldest families that had really fallen from grace in the past twenty years.

      He’d have to cross-check his sources, but that was a solid branching point for an investigation, at least. The rest of Danner’s interrogation did not, however, produce any more useful information. At the end, the blue Wocky took off his helmet and bowed.

      “Thank you for your patience, Prince Rafael. Have a most pleasant day,” Danner said, grabbing his notes and exiting Rafael’s temporary chambers as quickly as possible. He swore he lost some intelligence from that “interrogation.” It was a valiant sacrifice; he hoped what he got from it would be worth telling Jeran about.

      When he was just a few paces away from his office, Danner bumped into Lisha, who had crashed into him while her face was stuck in a book. He emerged with little to show for it, but Lisha tripped and fell.

      “I’m so sorry,” he said while helping her get back on her feet. “Are you all right?”

      Lisha picked up her thick monster of a book, titled The Fundamentals of Magical Rifts and Time Dilations. She adjusted her glasses before responding, “You did interrupt a very interesting read.”

      Danner scowled. How could something with a title like that be anything but hopelessly cryptic? “The horror of it all,” he said. “I don’t know how I could ever forgive myself for committing such an atrocious act.”

      “Clearly, I must tell Jeran to send you to the dungeons.” Lisha rolled her eyes. Then, slowly, she smiled. “Though, if you do feel bad enough for it, you can repay me. I was looking for you anyway. I needed you to do me a solid.”

      Danner unlocked the door to his office, a clammy little room which was much too hot for its own good in the summer, and much too cold in the winter. The walls were lined with jagged stone, and the door’s bottom was sealed with a rubber coating. It squeaked shut as Lisha walked inside. There were no windows, nothing to indicate any hint of the outside world.

      “What is it?” asked Danner finally.

      “I’m glad you asked,” Lisha replied. “I need to locate a Brightvalian scholar named Lissandre who’s currently conducting some research here. Blue Aisha, black hair, brown eyes, you know.”

      Danner recognized who she was talking about: Gvoran’s newfound friend. “You can’t find her yourself?”

      “She’s hard to find. And being stuck in the castle doesn’t really allow me to search that effectively,” said Lisha. Due to some overzealous security measures, Lisha was prohibited from straying too far or for too long from the castle. She didn’t know who or what was responsible for them, nor did she particularly care. It was still annoying.

      “Point taken, but I can’t just use my position of authority willy-nilly,” replied Danner. “I at least need a good excuse. Why do you need to contact her?”

      Lisha didn’t quite know what to say. In the days following the ball, Lissandre had just disappeared. No one spoke about her, even though some didn’t quite believe it was Jeran’s luck that pulled him through. She had a feeling that Lissandre didn’t exactly want to be noticed, or, at the very least, she was ambivalent about it. Still, she deserved at least some thanks.

      “We struck a very interesting conversation at the ball, and I sort of wanted to follow up with her. She’s doing research on time rifts with a team of Brightvalian scholars.”

      “So why don’t you just talk to someone else from that team of scholars?” asked Danner. He knew that, given a month, Lisha would not have overlooked that possibility. “Have you thought of that, or is this a farce to hide the real reason?”

      “Darn it, you got me,” said Lisha. All in all, it was safe to say that she was a terrible liar. “There is a real, more important reason, but you have to promise on your honor to keep it between us, at least for now. You, of all people, should know how powerful information can be, and how important it is to keep a secret.”

      “Fine, fine,” Danner huffed with a monotonous tone. “I promise that I’m not going to tell anyone the reason you need to so meet Lissandre. On my honor.” He punctuated his last sentence with a weak pat to his own heart.

      “I suppose that’s good enough.” Lisha spoke very quickly: “She’s proficient in time magic. You know how nobody at the ball got killed? Well, that was because Lissandre stopped time and intervened with the planned assassinations.”

      “What?” Danner’s jaw dropped. The gears in his head lagged a bit as he tried to process what she had said. The last person he expected to drop something like this was Lisha. “And you kept this all to yourself because?”

      She ignored his question. “So I just wanted to thank her for, you know, stopping a disaster and all. It’s not really that time-sensitive, since her team’s research should take quite a while you can pull a few strings . . .”

      “You didn’t answer me.”

      “I don’t like talking to others. It just never came up in conversation, and, well, I don’t think she wants it to be public.”

      “Dear Fyora, you’re even worse than Jeran,” muttered Danner. “You don’t have to make it public, just—you know, I could have used information like that to inform my investigation. She might be a valuable source of information, one I overlooked. She could have done something, had some prior foreknowledge, I don’t know.”

      It was probably not a good time to tell Danner that Jeran was vaguely aware of how he was saved. “That’s more motivation to find her, right?”

      “I’ll see what I can do.”

      Danner gestured to the door, and Lisha immediately took the hint and scurried away. For some reason, perhaps the fact she’d neglected to tell him something rather important, he looked rather angry with her, and she didn’t want to push her luck.

      Besides, she’d promised herself she’d drop in on Jeran soon, just to see how he was doing. Lisha hadn’t seen much of him at all lately; he was always in some meeting or judging over some dispute between the various dukes. Sometimes, he seemed as difficult to find as Lissandre currently was, even though he lived right under her nose.

      But today, she knew exactly where he’d be, in the dirty, disorganized mess he called his workroom. Lisha tried guessing how bad it would look. An absurd amount of letters and seals would stuck to the walls. Important-looking documents would be stacked in tall piles, gathering dust and petpetpets until Jeran decided to get to them. Layers of dust and muck forming on the windows would block all semblance of sunlight.

      When Lisha had actually stepped into Jeran’s workroom, she had to double-check that the blue Lupe in front of her was not an imposter. The room was immaculately clean. Every book and piece of paper was neatly organized into shelves. Maps and portraits hung snugly against the stone walls. Rays of the midsummer sun shined through the windows, but somehow, shadow had managed to envelop Jeran’s face.

      The most impressive development of all was that Jeran had invested in a desk. A map of Meridell’s various duchies sprawled across it, with various color-coded pins stuck to its surface. Each pin donned a series of three numbers.

      Unease slithered up Lisha’s stomach. She couldn’t figure out why, though, so she swallowed down her discomfort without having to taste its acidity.

      “By Fyora,” she exclaimed in mock horror, “organization!”

      “I figured something about how I work had to change,” said Jeran, gesturing at all four corners of the room.

      “Good to see my constant pestering paid off, then,” Lisha muttered. “You’ve finally seen the light.”

      “Indeed I have.” Jeran smiled. “You know, I work a lot better, now that I actually know where everything is for once. I feel like my mind was as groggy and disorganized as my environment, and now that that’s cleaned up, well, my mind cleared up with it.”

      Lisha refused to believe that was Crown Prince Jeran, formerly the champion of Meridell. This Lupe had to be a librarian in disguise. “Who are you, and what have you done with my brother?”

      “I know it’s hard to believe that I’m not a complete slob. Honestly, if past-me saw this, he’d probably be horrified, too, but I really do feel better.”

      He certainly looked better. Jeran had lost the bags hanging under his eyes and stood more upright. Even his fur seemed a little brighter and less frazzled. It was almost strange seeing Jeran not be miserable. He seemed so changed in the past few weeks especially, so ill at ease, and Lisha could not help a sense of relief seeing the older brother she knew in a more natural state.

      “I’m glad to hear that,” she said, cracking a smile. “You even look like you’ve been sleeping more. Did the nightmares stop?”

      Jeran rubbed his temples. His eyes darted around the room as he said, “For the most part . . . I don’t know what made them stop. It’s funny, really, it’s like I reorganized myself, much like I organized this place. I learned to cast away whatever tied me down, getting rid of unwanted and unused baggage”

      “Listen, I’m the first person to tell you how great organization is, but don’t you think you’ve overstated its merits?” Lisha raised one of her eyebrows as if to ask, Okay, what’s really going on?

      “Maybe a little,” replied Jeran. He was fiddling with a golden ring around his index finger. The light around it was distorted as though intense heat had ruffled through the air. For a moment, Lisha found herself staring at it, wondering if it amounted to any sort of magical aura, but the distortion had disappeared after only a few moments.

      Lisha squinted; her eyes must have been pulling tricks on her. She took off her glasses and concentrated some miniscule sample of her magical energy to wrap around the lenses and absorb their impurities before dissipating.

      “But I am really being honest,” continued Jeran, seeing as Lisha wasn’t going to speak. “Part of organization is learning what you need to let go, and I think I’ve been holding on to things that’ve been holding me back from doing what I want. It’s useless to worry and fret about what happened during the war, useless to worry about King Skarl. Useless to worry about what others would say.”

      Jeran was always one to worry, and that worry often translated into him effectively guessing the intentions of others, knowing his limits and fixing unobvious holes in his courses of action. Sometimes, though, it absolutely paralyzed him.

      “That’s great,” said Lisha. “Great that you could put all that behind you, I mean. Obviously, the king’s illness and the war weren’t so great. You can’t let yourself be held down by pessimism.”

      “I can’t control whether or not the king gets better, but I must do what I have to do. Who knows? If I keep myself busy, waiting for him won’t be so bad anymore. He’ll get better.” He closed his eyes and whispered, “He’ll get better,” to himself again, more to reassure himself than anything else.

      “With all the physicians around taking care of him, I’m sure he’ll be fine,” said Lisha. “All chipper and jolly, as jolly as he can be, anyway. You know what, before you know it, we’ll be getting a bit of normalcy again.”

      Jeran’s face darkened. “I hope you’re right. Normalcy would be nice to have again.”

      “Is everything okay?”

      “No.” Jeran buried his head in his hands. “Nothing’s okay, Lisha. He’s not going to be fine, and if he ever is, it’s not going to be for a good long while. The king is very, very sick.”

      Lisha could not match Jeran’s distraught. She’d never been particularly close to him. In fact, she wasn’t even sure of his exact age.

      Skarl had been ruling Meridell a whole decade before Brightvale split off, which was at least forty years ago. He must have been quite old, old enough to have a remembered reign and heritage, old enough to have had his time in the world.

      For the first time, Lisha considered King Jeran to be a possible, close reality rather than a distant what-if. Prince-Regent Jeran only had to hold the kingdom steady and continue on the everyday humdrum of ruling. He was just a prop for the real deal. King Jeran perhaps wouldn’t elevate him all that much more practically, but the weight of the title would change the very nature and tone of his job, pull him even further away from the Jeran she once knew.

      Not that Lisha thought Jeran would do a particularly bad job of it. She even surmised he’d handle being his own king rather than just a temporary ruler. She just couldn’t picture him in full regalia, authoritatively sitting atop a high throne, so much higher than everyone else. Would she have to call him “your highness” then? How much would he change?

      They needed more time. Lisha needed more time. Why can’t that oaf stick around for a while longer? she thought.

      “Wait, what did you say?” Jeran asked suddenly.

      “Huh?”

      “You spoke just now, said something about . . .” He stopped when he saw the confusion on Lisha’s face. “Never mind.”

      Lisha spoke to stop an awkward silence: “It’s just, you don’t really know what’ll happen, do you? I mean, Skarl—”

      “—King Skarl,” corrected Jeran. “He’s not just some peripheral kid who lives just next door that you play ball with sometimes, all right? If you don’t care about Skarl, you can at least show some respect for him.”

      “I care for the king as much as anybody else,” said Lisha, a hollow statement she knew didn’t mean all that much. “What I meant to say is that you don’t know what’ll happen to King Skarl, and it’s always nice to have some hope.”

      “Maybe I don’t know what’ll actually happen to him, but you seem to think he’s all done.”

      She crossed her arms and pushed her glasses up. “I certainly don’t think that, and I don’t really believe I’ve said anything to give off that impression. Where did that even come from?”

      “You’re right, you didn’t say anything.” Jeran was staring at her like she was some freak of nature. “I’m sorry, I was making assumptions. I must be just worried. Stress does a lot of things to your mind, you know?”

      “I understand. It can hard to cope with possibly losing someone close to you.”

      To be continued…