Princess for the Alien Commander by Tammy Walsh
Ikmale
I tookanother sip of heyale liquor and once again didn’t taste it.
Not that heyale was for tasting.
Most kauah put a clothes peg on their noses to help restrain the worst of the gag reflex.
Others had been known to crack their teeth due to grinding them too hard.
The more powerful versions had been successfully used to burn the locks off merchant ship doors.
No, heyale wasn’t meant to be tasted.
It was what you drank so you would never have to taste another thing ever again.
I smacked the shot glass on the tabletop, placing it a little too close to the edge.
On the edge.
I knew exactly how that felt.
To find yourself sitting on the edge of a knife wasn’t a particularly comfortable experience.
Especially when your freedom was being held hostage by the other side.
I sat at the main dining table in Ellas Castle.
I’d shut the lights off and buried myself in the massing darkness.
I peered out the window and across the balcony at King Brant’s palace built into the hillside overlooking Quoisa.
Where I might be married in less than two hours if things went to plan.
When the Prime Minister came with his so-called “solution” I’d initially dismissed it out of hand.
Get married to the king’s daughter?
“The king doesn’t even have a damn daughter!” I yelled, laughing in the man’s face.
When the politician filled me in on the story of the king rediscovering his long-lost daughter, I hadn’t believed him, taking it for some kind of harebrained scheme.
It was only after I spoke with Bena, who was twice my age, that I began to believe what the Prime Minister was telling me.
She’d disappeared fifteen years ago along with the queen one night.
Little was known about the event, and even less was known about where the queen and little princess had gone.
But everyone heard the rumors.
That the king had killed them both in the middle of the night.
No, that they’d been kidnapped and the king refused to pay the ransom.
No, that she’d been having an affair with the head of the household and the king’s children weren’t really his!
This last one I dismissed out of hand.
No one could bring themselves to fall in love with Ujok.
He was the only kauah I’d met with more loyalty to the humans than his own species.
No woman could fall in love with such a creature.
Especially not the queen.
Now the princess was back and she’d been offered up to me like a piece of jewelry.
Marry her, and I would become part of the king’s family.
We could join forces once more and unite against our shared enemy.
The dras.
With the dras preparing to invade any day now, and with no way to repel them without our forces joining together, I had little other option than agree to the sham of a wedding.
Or, as the Prime Minister preferred to call it:
“A marriage of convenience.”
To a princess, no less.
Others might have considered it a blessing.
To me, it was a curse.
It was all so neat and tidy.
The only thing that stood in the way?
The princess’s decision.
Could she bring herself to marry a lowly kauah?
If she was anything like her father, which I fully expected her to be, she would plant a blade between my ribs the first chance she got.
But when the lives of my people were on the line, what could I do?
I peered up at the largest portrait on the wall.
It depicted a powerfully built kauah with the most glorious horns.
I wished my father were still alive.
He would know what to do.
He was the business genius, the one who’d made our middle class family into one so powerful it challenged even the king’s wealth.
Some were born with superior strength, others with greater intelligence.
My father’s gift was his ability to find money wherever he went.
He couldn’t walk into a room without doubling what he had in his pocket by the time he left it.
He’d been the one to develop relationships with the crown, to grow our ownership of the land beyond all measure, to become the second most powerful creature in the entire kingdom.
When he died, all that duty and honor passed to me.
The trouble with duty was you had something to live up to.
And no one could fill my father’s boots.
No one.
Someone entered the room behind me.
“The Prime Minister just called,” Bena said.
My stomach clenched.
Maybe, if I was very lucky, the princess would refuse to marry me.
Then I could go back to dreaming up new ideas to solve our dras problem.
I could—
“She has accepted,” Bena said plainly.
My hopes deflated and I shut my eyes, knowing secretly in my heart it would come to this.
“The ceremony will be held in three hours,” Bena said, unknowingly rubbing salt into the wound. “If you’re going to get to the cathedral on time, I suggest you get dressed now.”
I didn’t move and stared at the shot glass perched on the table’s edge.
I poked it off and it smashed on the floor.
On the edge no longer.
