Revenant Eve Read Free Page B

hint of sarcasm there?” I asked, making a face. “Have I been whining too much?”
    “One hundred percent sarcasm-free observation.” He kissed me. “You are the only woman I know who was interested in me in spite of the baggage, and not because of it.” On the word
baggage
he waved a hand, taking in the palace.
    I thought of Cerisette von Mecklundburg, who’d been Ruli’s secret rival and my overt one, and not because she loved Alec. She’d been so in love with the idea of herself as a princess that she’d been willing to endure Alec’s sense of responsibility if she couldn’t get a crown any other way.
    I kissed him back. “I appreciate your accepting my ambivalence about the princess issue. But I can’t help feeling that it’s another Thing for you to deal with, and your life is an endless juggling of Things. So let’s skip that discussion and move on. I get it that royal figures are a fiction agreed on by everybody, not just the guys at the top. That we’re giving up a certain amount of privacy in living public lives, etcetera. But tours? How’s that work?”
    “How about I put it another way, then?” he said. “I want you to spy.” He gave me a bland smile.
    “Spy? On who? When, and where? I don’t want to appear ungrateful for my first official offer of work, but you know I’m not very good at lurking.”
    “Don’t want you to lurk. I am hoping you will smile, and look around, encourage people to talk, and listen to them. Especially if you—as a newly minted princess—request a tour of the mines.”
    “Okay, still trying not to sound like I’m arguing, but aren’t you better qualified for mining inspection than I am?”
    Alec said, “If I go up there, I will get the official tour. That means everyone will buzz around cleaning things up and decorating, and they will line the streets and salute. I’ll get careful speeches. But if you go up there as the new, friendly princess—look around admiringly, get to know people—you will hear all the anecdotes that they keep from me and my father. And among those, you will probably catch references to the mines that I am not supposed to know about.”
    “So you aren’t joking. You really do want me to spy?” I got up from the desk and turned so we stood face to face. He was my perfect guy, from his gorgeous dark hair to his fine-boned face and the body he kept in shape by fencing with the Vigilzhi guards several times a week. But:
“Spying?”
    “Yes.” He grinned. “The only reason why those mines are secret is to avoid paying taxes. Understandable, while we were under the control of the Soviets, but now my father thinks it is time for everyone to be contributing equally, just as they have equal shares in the benefits that the taxes bring. However, if you feel uncomfortable—”
    “When you put it that way, I don’t have a problem,” I said. “It becomes a kind of game.”
    “It is a game,” Alec said. “Centuries old.”
    “So if I discover these secret mines, what’s going to happen? It won’t be a game if people end up in prison.”
    “Even if we had a large enough labor pool to be sending miners off to prison,” Alec said, “which we don’t, they don’t see themselves as criminals. To indict them as such wouldn’t be playing the game as we Dobreni understand it.”
    “Is it more like the smugglers versus the excise men of the seventeen hundreds?”
    “Exactly. So what will happen is, you’ll come back and tell me about anything suspicious. And in a month or two, Dmitros Trasyemova, in his capacity as Jazd Komandant of the Vigilzhi—or one of his captains—will be up there on a training mission, or an inspection, and will happen upon the mine, and Tony—because you know Tony will be behind it—will express surprise and consternation. The miners will express surprise and consternation. There will be an elaborate charade, ending with a conversation between me and Tony—or Tony and the Council—resulting in the