Chapter 2

Flora

Four years later

Drizzling rain smears the car windows.

Maybe the weather will worsen, and my riding lesson will be called off. In that case, Callum and I can run off and do what we want.

It’s a delicate balance: pretending I care about horses enough to require Nanny to cart me down to the stables twice a week, and parlaying these excursions into monkeying about with Callum.

When we arrive at the stables, Callum’s father, Mr. Black, is not in the paddock, waiting for us with my horse, a moody young thing named Jacqueline, who hates me. I am not what you would call a “horse girl.” Pity, since I’m in the unique position as a princess to make all my pony dreams come true. Do I feel guilty about it? Not as long as the king and queen insist I take riding lessons despite my protests. At least the horse seems content with Mr. Black, as she’s well cared for.

“The paddock is empty. How strange,” says Nanny, parking the car.

There’s something odd about how she says that, like she rehearsed it. Grown-ups are so weird.

In the stable, we find Mr. Black brushing down Jacqueline. He spots our approach and stops what he’s doing.

“We’ll be waiting an hour before the rain lets up,” he says, his eyes on Nanny and not me.

“Oh,” she says, sounding flightier than usual. Nanny nibbles on her bottom lip and smooths her short hair when it doesn’t need smoothing. “Should we come back later?”

“If you wish,” Mr. Black says, sounding like he wants to say more.

“Maybe that’s best,” Nanny says.

“I just put on the kettle. You could stay for tea and sandwiches while we wait for the storm to pass,” Mr. Black says.

Nanny sucks in a subtle breath. “Oh. Well, I’m not very hungry, but I suppose some tea wouldn’t hurt.”

This conversation is boring. “Where’s Callum?” I demand.

Nanny clucks. “Don’t interrupt the adults.”

I could remind her that I’m 14, a princess, and if I can end a very dull conversation about tea and the weather, I most certainly will. I’m allowed to do so without repercussions. My father the king interrupts people all day, every day.

Instead, Mr. Black quickly answers. “Callum went fishing in the stream. He and the prince.”

My exaggerated pout sends him breaking out in a hearty laugh. “Don’t worry, Your Highness. They won’t be long.”

Mr. Black’s fatherly wink is all crinkles and sparkles before he turns his gaze back to Nanny. He gestures for us to walk ahead of him into the tack room, where the riding accessories are kept shining and immaculate. Here, we also find a couple of stools at the work table, where a kettle, three teacups, and a plate of sandwiches have already been made. I can smell that one of them is tuna fish, and I crinkle my nose. He was expecting us to hang around for a mid-morning snack. What in the world is going on here? Once again, adults are so, so weird.

I’m about to announce that I don’t eat tuna fish when there’s a clatter outside.

I turn and run excitedly in the direction of the stable doors. Callum and my brother Sigurd have returned. Joy thrums in my stomach. The boys have discarded their fishing gear and are now engaged in an impromptu wrestling match in the middle of the soggy paddock. Sigurd has several years and thirty pounds on Callum, but they’re closer than actual brothers.

I sprint back to the tack room, where Nanny is covering her mouth while laughing at something Mr. Black just said. Mr. Black is pleased. He looks so odd, almost peacocking, with one foot leaning on the stool, his elbow propped on his knee as he relays a story, as if he needs to take up all the space in the room he possibly can.

“The boys are back. Can I go?”

Nanny, who looks deeply engrossed in whatever Mr. Black is saying, waves me off with her hand. “Yes, yes. Go play, but try not to make a mess.”

She said, “Go play,” as she did when I was younger and much more eager to climb trees and make mud pies.

Outside, Callum and Sigurd are howling and grunting with breathless laughter as Sigurd pins his best friend to the ground.

I stride up to them as the rain intensifies. “Don’t you have something to do, Your Highness?”

Sigurd shoots me a teasing look and releases Callum, reaching out a hand to help him up.

“Don’t you have a riding lesson?” Sigurd retorts.

Callum springs to his feet in one graceful motion, aiming an unexpected, brilliant smile in my direction.

It’s all I can do not to swoon, but I manage to funnel these feelings into annoying my older brother for his very existence.

“It’s raining, genius,” I tell Sigurd.

The third prince smirks. “Guess your science lessons are finally sticking.”

I roll my eyes. “Idiot.”

“Princess.”

“That’s not the insult you think it is,” I say.

“I gotta clean the fish,” he announces, grabbing up gear, buckets, and all manner of disgustingly smelly things.

But I have to say, my brother’s fresh catches are tasty, especially when he cooks them himself over a fire. The queen once had an absolute shit fit when Sigurd boasted about this, claiming it’s unseemly for a prince to pretend to live like an unhoused person. After that scolding, the cooks keep Sigurd’s deliveries more discreet. Good for them because everyone, including the staff, reaps the benefits.

“Need some help?” Callum offers Sigurd.

Please, gods, no. I will follow Callum into the depths of the deep, dark, unknown forests, but I put my foot down at cleaning fish.

“Nah, I got it,” my closest brother says, unsheathing his special knife he got as a birthday gift from Mr. Black last year. Sigurd loves to use that blade for literally everything. Unlocking doors, jimmying open stuck windows to sneak out. I don’t know what it’s made of, but it’s indestructible.

I breathe a sigh of relief.

Callum’s mischievous expression is too much to resist whatever he has planned for us as soon as Sigurd is out of sight.

Around his eyes, there are signs that ten or twenty years from now, he’ll have the same handsome lines as his father. He already boasts the same wise twinkle in his young eyes.

Callum reaches for my hand and I rear backwards.

“Fish hands! Worm hands!”

“I washed them in the stream,” he assures me with a throaty laugh that warms me down to my toes. It’s the laugh of a man, and not a boy. His voice has changed dramatically quickly, and I like it.

I skeptically examine the offered hand of my brother’s most trusted friend.

“Come on, I need to show you something I found by the stream. But you have to hold on to me because the downhill part is going to be muddy.”

I glance down at my Ralph Lauren riding boots and wince.

“The queen will have Nanny’s hide if I ruin these boots,” I tell him.

“That sounds like the excuse of a chicken.”

Being in the public eye, I hear my fair share of insults. Sure, the general public is kind to a little girl princess overall, especially in a society like Gravenland, which celebrates the royals like nowhere else. But I have a laptop in my room and access to the internet. I see horrible insults about my family all the time, sometimes aimed at me. I can take all of it. The worst of society begrudges a coddled princess being dressed in designer clothes that she’ll outgrow in months, not years. That doesn’t bother me. Neither do comments like “Spoiled rotten.” “Brat.” “Indulged.” Even “Ugly” doesn’t bother me because I know it’s wrong.

But nobody gets away with calling me a chicken.

I jut out my chin bravely and take Callum’s hand.

“Let’s go. You’re gonna love this,” he says.

We walk silently for several long minutes, my insides fluttering excitedly as Callum holds my hand tenderly. I don’t get it. He’s grabbed onto my hand before while climbing trees or pulling me out of the steam. The boy has even given my ass a boost over hedges and fences when we’ve gone exploring the abandoned monastery to the east of the palace grounds.

But today, it feels different. Special. It’s like a sense of anticipation and excitement that something new is about to happen. But also dread and deep, deep anxiety.

The rain soaks our skin as we walk on.

“How much longer?” I ask, looking forlornly down at my beautiful leather boots.

“Just up here,” he says.

I don’t understand. We’ve been up this way a dozen times. There’s the bend in the steam. Those are the rocks where we sit and talk about everything, and where I share my favorite memes. I save them up all week for Callum, who has the best laugh in the world. My week is always made better when I sit on the rocks with Callum and make him laugh.

Beyond the rocks is the waterfall and the swimming hole where he taught me to swim, after a dozen private instructors failed to keep me from sinking straight to the bottom of the palace pool.

Callum begins to clamber over the rocks and reaches back for me.

“I’m not dressed for this,” I laugh.

He makes the noise of a chicken clucking, and I purse my lips in indignation.

I let him help me over the slippery rocks, and then we make our way behind the waterfall.

“Callum, we’ve been here before. A lot.”

The glint in his eye tells me there’s more. He gestures toward the cave behind us, at the back of the wall of water.

“Oh no. You know I can’t go in there,” I say. “I have cave-a-phobia.”

“It’s claustrophobia.”

“You’re pretty brave to be correcting your princess.”

“Forgive me, Your Highness.”

Why does Callum look so much taller today? And why does his rain-soaked hair clinging to his face look so cute?

I glare up at him because I don’t understand what he wants or what he’s doing. I don’t understand the way I feel about him right now.

Despite not understanding and not knowing why, I lean toward him ever so slightly. “I’ll let you keep your head attached. This time.”

The smile from him devastates me. He leans forward. I would not be shocked if the rain melted me into oblivion.

It feels like each of us is waiting on the other to say something—or do something.

I wet my lips.

He blinks and shakes his head as if something troubles him.

“What is it, Callum?”

Without answering, he again grabs my hand and leads me into darkness.

I let out a frustrated grunt. “Where are you taking me?”

“Do you trust me?”

More than I trust anybody in this whole world, is what I want to say.

“Maybe,” is what I actually say because, my gods, do I hate this cave. It’s dark and dirty and smells like the root cellar under the kitchens where Callum and I go to pilfer spare jam jars to use for our collections of rocks. “Unless there are bats. Are there bats? Is there bat poop? Oh my god, there could be snakes!”

“Snakes don’t live in caves,” he says.

I do not think this is true. “How do you know that?”

“Animals are my area of expertise. It’s in my blood, Flora.”

The boy is lying to make me feel better. I can always tell. He doesn’t know shit. “That blood will spill if anything happens to me,” I warn him, pulling my hand back in hesitation.

“All the more reason to trust that I know what I’m doing. Because I would never let anything touch a hair on the head of my princess.”

He said my princess. I don’t know how I feel about that.

I let the fear course through me, then I swallow it down. “Fine. Let’s go.”

In about thirty paces, Callum’s foot kicks against something metal. Warm yellow light bathes the cave seconds later, outlining Callum’s athletic frame. He used to be nothing but arms and legs. Where did those shoulders come from?

“This way,” he says.

We walk for another five minutes, heading deeper into the dark, the lantern light creating bizarre shadows against the rock formations.

“That’s convenient that a lantern happens to be there,” I say with a smirk.

Callum chuckles. “All part of my evil plot to kidnap you and bury you deep in the caves.”

“That’s not funny, Callum!”

His hand squeezes mine gently. “You’re too easy to tease, Flora.”

“Please tell me what this is about.”

The sense that we’re slowly, gradually descending deeper and deeper into the earth enhances my fear.

“Okay,” Callum finally says. He stops and sets the lantern on the ground and turns to me. “I know you won’t believe me, but at the end of this tunnel…is treasure.”

I gasp. Now we’re talking. “Really? How do you know?”

“According to legend, a hidden tunnel leads to the old monastery. Somewhere in that tunnel is actual pirate treasure.”

“Pirates?”

“One specific pirate. You’ve heard of Bird Eye Black.”

Everyone in Gravenland knows about Bird Eye Black. The story we all learned as children was that Bird Eye’s crew routinely terrorized ships in the waters around Gravenland, skillfully boarding the hapless vessels of our colonizers and helping themselves to valuables mined from our kingdom. Until our colonizers got wise to Bird Eye Black’s strategic movements at sea, which caught him off guard.

“Of course,” I say, repeating the short version of the story. “The British Navy fired on his ship and he died at sea. But I never heard about him burying treasure on our soil. Why would he bury stolen goods on the land where he was the most wanted criminal of that time?”

Callum’s eyes twinkle. “Perhaps that’s only one version of my family’s story.”

I blink at him.

“Your family? You don’t honestly think you’re descended from a pirate!”

Callum shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “Give me your hand.”

I hold out my hand and say, “You’re not going to hand me something alive, are you? I swear to the gods, I’ll scream.”

He laughs, “Your scream would collapse the walls around us.”

Something thick and metal drops to the center of my palm. I hold it toward the lantern light. “Um, a tarnished old ring is not treasure, Callum.”

“Look closer.”

I turn the silver ring over, and a cursive letter “B” stands out in relief on the face of it. Running my finger over it, the metalwork is interesting but the ring doesn’t appear valuable.

“It’s a very solid ring with the same letter as your last name. What am I not getting?”

“A lot,” he says. He’s got that look that I’ve come to know so well. Callum is gearing up to spin a yarn.

“Do I need to sit down for this?”

He laughs. “Probably.”

I know the way Callum tells his stories, and this one is going to take a while.

Trying not to think about how my dress will get dirty from the cave floor, I hunker down, legs crossed, facing Callum. The lantern sits between us. I do hope he can’t see the way I blush as I stare at him.

“When my father was a child, his father worked in this very spot. This is an old mine shaft, if you didn’t know. My granddad and his granddad, and so on—they all worked for a Dutch mining company that owned these mountains for a time. Through the years, there were legends passed down by the miners that there was more than copper here. Someone claimed they’d seen a hidden room with piles of gold and jewels beyond comprehension.”

Chill bumps form up and down my arms. Callum always tells the most beautiful stories. Or maybe it’s the way he tells it, because I’m fully invested.

“When word got around that there was such a trove, the miners naturally began to look for it. At its heyday, this mine covered a thousand kilometers of tunnels through and beneath the mountain, connecting every building on the palace property.”

“No way,” I whisper.

“I swear to the gods, it’s a true story. I’ve been through here before, and plenty of hidden places exist for a man to venture off. But no one ever found the treasure.

“My great-grandad, it was said, came close to finding it. He searched every nook and cranny, up and down every tunnel. One day, he came home with evidence. He told his family that one of the tunnels led to catacombs beneath the monastery. It was in those catacombs he found this ring. He dropped it on the table and announced that soon, the Blacks would be wealthy.

So it looked suspicious when, one day, the miners showed up for work to find the mine was closed due to a collapse. When my great-grandfather went missing, it was said that he had been lost in the collapse, buried alive.”

The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. “And did they not try to dig him out?”

“Why would they, when the mining company claimed he was never there during the supposed collapse in the first place?”

I start to shiver. “I would like to get out of here now.”

Callum stands and offers me his hand. I take it, and he helps me to my feet, then covers me in his jacket.

“Let’s get you home before the king puts out a warrant for my arrest.”