Enthroned Chapter 4, a sailor moon fanfic

Title: Enthroned

Chapter: 4

Date: 6.18.11

Disclaimer:Naoko Takeuchi owns Sailor Moon.

Three hours into the party, Rei was beginning to sweat inside her whalebone corset. Since her "unbelievable conduct" with the king (Luna's tearful words, not hers), Rei had circulated through the ballroom, sat for long periods at a table in plain sight near the buffet, and even lingered near doorways leading out of this cavern of a ballroom.

Yet there had still been no sign of her contact.

A few young men had come to ask her to dance, and each time Rei had waited with pounding heart for them to speak the arranged coded exchange about her slippers. But each time, she was disappointed, as they spoke little more than pleasantries and flirtations – and even veiled insults, in the case of the dark-haired Nehelenian whose voice dripped sarcasm every time he called her "Princess."

So now she had retreated to a fairly dim corner of the room, partly hidden by the shadow of one of the huge down-drippings of rock that hung from the ceiling far above. It was chilly there, in a spot away from any of the fireplaces, yet she still sweated nervously. She patted surreptitiously at the front of her dress, worried that the scroll nestled inside her slip would be ruined as effectively as it would have been had the servant girl put it in the wash.

She felt gazes on her again, and pulled her hand down immediately. Lifting her chin and pretending she was studying the gold veins glinting in the rock hanging above her, she actually glanced around the room – and almost immediately met the gaze of the Andalusian king. His eyes were glazed, a cup held to his mouth, but somehow the glassiness of that steady gaze was all the more unsettling.

Rei tore her stare from his, looking around at the other people in the ballroom to see if they had noticed. They had; she saw noblewomen watching her with their painted eyes, murmuring to each other behind their fans, and noblemen speaking out of the corners of disdainfully curled mouths. Knowing she was the object of their stares and their conversation was like being back in Elysion all over again, with the courtiers who didn't bow as deeply to her as they would to a real princess and the noble-born girls her age who snickered behind their hands when she walked past and the etiquette masters who had not let her stand with her brother the king at their father's funeral.

And the familiarity gave her a feeling worse than homesickness. A feeling like she didn't have anywhere to be homesick for, because she didn't really belong anywhere.

Heat stung her eyes, and she spun to find a way out of the ballroom, to a hallway, a water closet, anything.

Instead she ran into something solid.

"Careful," said a voice in her ear. Its breath was sour; she immediately recognized the smell. The king. He was holding her waist with both hands, and not gently. His face smiled, but that grip was angry, and so was his voice, as he spoke through his teeth to her. "You are ready for our dance now?"

The moisture that had spring to Rei's eyes a moment before evaporated. "Un. Hand. Me." Her voice was the quiet, threatening one that Endymion had used on her three weeks prior.

Around them, eyes watched, burning into them. Assan released her.

Rei didn't step back. She stared him down instead, her eyes boring into his yellowed ones. The air between them seemed almost to waver with the rage they were directing at each other.

Then he smiled confidently, sifted his hand through the curtain of hair hanging down her back, and slipped back into the crowd.

The audacity – and the intimacy left Rei frozen. When her mind was able to function again, her first thought was of Endy. What would he say? Bad enough that she had failed in the mission she had given her, but how much worse to have let a dirty-blooded king treat her like some common wench!

A sick feeling, of guilty, of shame, of dirtiness, filled her. She slunk from the glittering cavern, hating Assan al-Numa and hating herself, too.

The Elysian princess had been assigned quarters in the western wing of the taddart. These quarters had been chosen specially for their proximity to the bathing ifran; the king, or his steward, had thought she might be more comfortable closer to water, different as it was from that of her homeland.

It was a decision he wished had not been made, for while the quarters were close to the bathing ifran, they were more than half the taddart's length away from the stables. The distance doubled the chances that they would be caught by her guards – or someone else – on the way from her quarters to the horses waiting for them.

His best hope was that she would cooperate, but based on her behavior thus far that night, that hope was a slim one.

He adjusted the dark hood around his face again, making sure the bit over his mouth and nose were secure. The corridors he padded through in his soft-soled boots were pitch-black; he had made sure that all the wall sconces save the one before the princess's door were extinguished once the last of the birthday celebration guests had trickled back to their quarters (or someone else's, he thought, thinking of the giggle and moan he had heard as he passed one room the door of which had imprudently not been closed all the way), but the Elysian guards were not fools; they would have a torch. The ones set to guard the princess tonight should be asleep at their posts, thanks to some powder slipped into the tea offered them compliments of the king by a servant an hour earlier, but as leader of the resistance, he preferred to be thorough.

Midway through his next step be he went still. His ears strained beneath his hood. He could have sworn he had heard a sound from behind him, and Mikai was supposed to be ahead of him…

But still as he stayed for a whole minute, he heard nothing more, and so he crept forward again, moving through the pitch blackness only by his sheer familiarity with the corridors. When he saw light flickering from the next curve of corridor, he knew he had found the princess's door. From the regular flickering of the shadows, devoid of larger, dark ones, and the absence of voices, he knew the tea had done its job.

Sure enough, he slid around the curve and saw the two guards slumped on either side of the door. He glanced to his left and saw Mikai's eyes and familiar piercings glinting from just outside the dancing circle of firelight from the sconce.

Mikai lifted a hand with two fingers out: all-clear.

He splayed a hand carefully across the stone door and pushed it open.

His first thought was, Stupid Elysians. Instead of using the glowing sufu lichen, they had left candles burning in the outer chamber, despite the warning he knew his steward had given to the lady's maid, the dark-haired one with the narrow lips, about how they could eat up the air in a room in only an hour.

His heart began to thud hard in his chest as he moved silently to the doorway to the inner chamber, wondering if they had left candles burning there, too, if he would duck through the curtain only to find the princess suffocated, dead, all his plans laid to waste…

But he did not find a dead princess lying on the bed of rugs. Instead he found no princess lying on the bed of rugs.

His thudding heartbeat turned into a deafening pound in his ears. His head swung from side to side, searching the whole room, but there was no one in the lichen-lit room at all, only the mussed blankets.

He darted back out into the outer room, but only the lady's maid slept there: no princess hidden in the shadows from the candles. He extinguished them with an angry sweep of his trembling arm and burst out into the corridor.

"She's not there!" he hissed to Mikai. But even as he spoke he remembered the faint sound he had heard from behind him in the corridor minutes ago, and he swung around to look that way – just in time to see a pair of dark, wide eyes gleaming out at him from just outside the circle of light cast by the torch on the wall.

"There!" he snapped in Andalusian and leapt at the girl. He grabbed her by the arms as she tried to run away, then by the waist as Mikai caught up and seized her arms. Together, they began to drag her down the corridor toward the stables. By then she was crying out for her guards, and he became distantly aware of himself hissing, "Sshh! Sshh!"

"Luna! Luna! Guards!" she screamed in Elysian.

He swore and yanked her so roughly that she stumbled to her knees. Cursing himself for not having the lady's maid drugged as well, he took the opportunity to slap a hand over her mouth, pressing it there so hard he could feel the outline of her teeth through her skin.

It was none too soon, for from behind them there was the sound of doors opening and uncertain footsteps clicking on the stone. "Princess? Princess!"

Without waiting to be ordered, Mikai swung the princess from the ground and over his shoulder, then broke into a run. He followed suit, one hand clenched in the fabric over his burning chest and the other scrabbling to find the pressure point in the princess's neck so he could knock her unconscious and stop her screaming.

Then suddenly they were bursting out into cold air and grey dawn light. The dark shapes of horses and men waited for them. He scrambled onto his own mount just in time to catch the princess as Mikai slung her onto its back. With her back mashed against his ribs, he felt, rather than heard, her sucking in a breath for another scream, and he covered her mouth with his hand just in time.

He hadn't placed his hand properly; she bit down on the fleshy part between his thumb and finger. He hissed but didn't remove his hand, just dug his knees into Amazigh. The stallion broke into a gallop, then a run, and on either side of them, Mikai and the rest of their small company followed suit.

Despite the cold air of just-before-dawn, he was sweating, his nerves made all the worse by the sound of shouting from behind him.

"Her guards are coming," Mikai shouted, barely audible over the sound of hooves and the blood roaring in his ears. "They're gaining on us!"

For a minute he went stiff with indecision as he leaned forward, jaw clenched, and then, with a rush of decision and fury, fury at the princess still thrashing in his hold, he threw up his free hand with four fingers extended, then motioned it backward, behind him.

Fluidly, four men – men he trusted, men he had helped train, men who were not much more than boys–peeled off from the line of horses and rode back in the direction they had come, toward the approaching Elysians.

As the sound of metal striking metal reached his ears, he took the hand from the princess's mouth and dug his thumb into the base of her skull before she could scream again. She went immediately, gracelessly limp.

Behind him, men began to scream.

Rei woke up on a rug. A thick, woven rug that was sandy against her face.

She sat up, brushing sand from the side of her face, and realized that not only were the rug and her face sandy, but so was the floor. She was in a tent pitched on top of sand, the cloth walls around her rippling as they were hit by little gusts of dusk wind. She could tell it was dusk from the bit of purple-orange sky she could see through gaps as the bottom of the tent was sometimes blown up, away from the ground, and from the way she felt chilled, not hot.

Outside the tent, men were speaking in Andalusian. They couldn't be more than three feet away, from the closeness of their voices, and the knowledge that her kidnappers were so close made Rei's fingertips even colder with fear. How horribly hilarious, she told herself, that she had humiliated herself on the way to Andalusia by seeing kidnapping attempts where there weren't any, and now she really had been kidnapped.

The laugh that she tried to push out was really more of the beginning of a sob. The voices outside stopped, and she put a fist over her mouth, trying to swallow back the tears. She heard crunching in the sand, as though one of the men outside had gotten up. Immediately she looked around. The only thing in the tent, aside from the rug and herself, was a pile of saddlebags that had been dropped next to the rug. The flaps of one of them, probably the one the rug had been taken out of, was open. Something gleamed inside it. Crawling silently toward it, Rei reached inside and lifted it. It was a heavy gold container a bit like a vase or a lamp; it made her think of an Andalusian story she'd read once about a genie and an orphan.

Still moving silently, she got to her bare feet – her slippers were still on the rug – and positioned herself beside the tent's entrance flap. She held the heavy lamp above her head, ready to crash down on the head of whomever entered, for she could hear someone stopping in front of the tent's flap…

The head that poked through had gold-streaked red hair. Kentar, she thought viciously, and brought the lamp down –

Hands seized her own from behind, trapping her fingers between its own and the lamp so that she couldn't hit Kentar with it.

"Drop it," said a cold voice in accented Elysian. "Gently. It's something of an heirloom."

Rei stared at the hand over her left one. Angry red bite marks stood out on the tan skin between its thumb and pointer finger. Her bite marks.

With a growl, she wrenched around to glower at her kidnapper.

Jaundiced eyes stared back.

"Drop it," said the Lord of Kentak, Emperor of Muhassin, Head of House Itto, One and Only True King of Andalusia, His Most Exalted and Benevolent Highness Assan al-Numa again.

He forced her arms down from where she held them above their heads and dug his fingers into her wrist, pinching the nerves so that the vase fell from her numb fingers. It landed harmlessly on the sand. Rei angrily (and with her pulse thudding in her dry mouth) drew her foot back to kick it, but Assan pinned both her feet with his own, pressing down with his soft leather boot.

"Well, this is much more exciting than we had bargained for." Kentar had ducked the rest of the way through the tent flap and was now gingerly patting down his hair. "We may have ended up with a bigger firebrand than even you can handle, Majesty."

"There is no such thing," Assan said tersely. As if to prove his point, he increased the pressure of his foot on Rei's. She refused to wince, only glowered at him in defiance of the fear knotting her insides. After a moment, he lifted his foot, releasing her. She took an immediate step backward, out of range, snatching her arms back as well and rubbing them where he had gripped them.

He watched her rub feeling back into them. His blue eyes were still yellowed, as they had been when she met him in the ballroom, but their gaze today was clear and sharp, not glazed. And they had none of the hungry, smoldering heat with which he had watched her in the ballroom. Instead, they were cold, and he showed no inclination to touch her or invade her private space as he had before.

Feeling confused, but determined not to show it, she straightened her back, standing proudly. "What do you want from me?"

"No jellyfish speech this time?" Kentar muttered under his breath.

Assan ignored him. "What I want, Your Highness," he said tersely, his faint Andalusian accent giving each word extra stress, "is to know why you were so…" He paused, seeming to choose his word carefully, "uncooperative last night."

"Uncooperative," repeated Rei. "You mean when you abducted me?"

"I mean at my birthday celebration."

Rei was growing more and more confused by the second, and the more confused she felt, the angrier she was becoming. Her eyes flashed. "I'm sorry, Elysian princesses aren't raised to cooperate with barbarian who try to grope them!"

The king pursed his pale lips. "My apologies for that," he said, not sounding sorry at all. "Your Highness, I'm afraid that we may not be on the same page."

"Not even in the same book," Rei muttered, crossing her arms. It made the scroll in her slip crinkle, and she quickly coughed, trying to cover the sound.

"Indeed," he acknowledged, and he looked suddenly very tired, almost like her brother when he had come to her room after the council meeting weeks ago. "Why don't you tell me why your brother sent you to Andalusia?"

Rei glowered at this. "I'm not telling you anything!"

"Let's try this." He cleared his throat. "Those shoes of yours don't look very pleasant for dancing, Princess."

Glancing down at her bare feet, Rei opened her mouth to say scornfully that she wasn't wearing shoes. Then recognition seeped into her. She looked back up slowly, her eyes wide.

The king lifted a brow. "I believe your answer should be something about how you might as well be wearing slippers made of glass?"

It was the coded exchange that was supposed to identify the underground Andalusian contact to Rei. Which meant – her mind leapt to the obvious conclusion – the king had found Rei's contact and tortured it from him. That was why he hadn't found her at the party!

The king saw her expression and took a step forward. Rei automatically took one back. Assan went still, raising his hands as though to indicate he meant no harm.

"I fear you are jumping to the wrong conclusion, Princess," he said quickly. "Your brother warned me about your tendency to jump to conclusions–admittedly, in this case, it is the obvious conclusion to jump to. But the only reason I knew what you were going to say is because I am the one who came up with that ridiculous exchange." Keeping his hands open, he took another step forward. "I am the rebellion."

"You can't possibly expect me to believe that." Rei's eyes flicked from his eyes to his open hands and back. "It makes no sense–"

A bit of anger flashed through his eyes. "It doesn't," he said, "because for some reason your brother the king has not seen fit to tell you why he truly sent you here."

Rei's temper flared: how dare he insult her brother? "You," she began angrily, but he cut her off.

"Why don't you just read the message you were supposed to bring me? Perhaps that will let you know that I'm not lying."

Rei glared at him for one moment longer, trying to buy time to think. But as a whole minute dragged past without her thinking of anything else to do, she conceded defeat.

"Fine," she said, and lifted a hand. Then, remembering where the scroll was, she tensed. "Give me a moment."

Both men eyed her uncomprehendingly. She flushed. "It's…in here." She motioned vaguely at the front of her bodice.

Kentar hid a smile. Assan motioned him out of the tent. "Wait outside."

"What about you?" Rei demanded.

"I'll turn around."

Rei huffed at him, but he only raised an eyebrow at her and turned so that his back was to her…and his feet were planted firmly before the tent exit, blocking it.

Face and neck burning, Rei turned around herself, face to the rippling wall, and withdrew the scroll from within her slip. It was hot and damp from her perspiration.

She fingered it for a moment, peeking over her shoulder. As though sensing her eyes, the king glanced over his shoulder as well and, seeing she was done, turned back around.

"Go on," he said, almost gently.

Rei fingered the familiar wax shape of her brother's seal: a fin cutting out of rough water. Then she broke it and unrolled the tightly furled scroll.

Kentar poked his head back into the tent and was saying something urgently to his king, but Rei didn't notice. Her eyes were fixed on what was scrawled across the scroll in Endymion's familiar, cramped hand–permission for Lord of Kentak, Emperor of Muhassin, Head of House Itto, One and Only True King of Andalusia, His Most Exalted and Benevolent Highness Assan al-Numa, to marry her.