“You disappeared early last night.” He watched as she finished the water in a single gulp.

“Too much wine,” she said, holding out her cup for the servant to refill.

“I suppose none of the boys you had fawning over you had anything to do with it.”

“Father,” she chided, the questions that had been plaguing her momentarily forgotten.

He chuckled, sending a cloud of pipe smoke over his shoulder. “You were always destined to break hearts, Laya. I pray to the gods you will spare mine.”

She smiled into her lap. Her father was the only member of her family who didn’t find her horrible.

“And what of your admirers, then?” she teased.

During the feast days, all the noblewomen flocked to the king, young and old, married and unmarried alike. Like Laya, they adored his colorful stories and booming laugh. It amazed her that her mother never got jealous. Maybe she was proud that the king could command such rapt attention. Laya surely was.

“You’re very kind to think so highly of your father, but I’m afraid I’m too old for admirers.” When he smiled at her, a burst of warmth spread inside her chest.

“Oh, Father,” she said, “I could never think lowly of you.”

The king and queen were nothing alike. At times, she wondered how they came to fall in love. They were born under different moons⁠—her father, who laughed at the worst jokes if only to make the teller feel at ease; and her mother, who offered her thin, tight-lipped smiles only sparingly. As Laya grew older, she came to understand. Her mother was the firm, solid ground in which her father planted his roots. And for her mother, he was the tree that stretched high into the heavens. His branches swayed in the wind but didn’t break.

Hara Duja needed someone who could enrapture and enchant, who bent to the court and its many demands⁠—at least, on the surface. With his winning smile and his cleverness, her father could do all these things. Once, her mother remarked that he was more powerful than the rest of their family combined. Laya laughed then, but as she grew older, she realized it had never been a joke.

The king opened his mouth, surely to wave aside Laya’s compliments, when something beyond her head caught his attention. “Ah, there you are, Dr. Sauros. Come, join us.”

Laya turned. Her jaw dropped open. A man unlike anyone Laya had ever seen hung back at the entrance of the terrace. He wore ill-fitting Maynaran clothes⁠—a shirt buttoned all the way to the throat and trousers that tapered off laughably above his knees⁠—but he was not Maynaran. She could tell by the way he held himself, a stiff posture unknown to this island, and his western-style spectacles, which pinched his abnormally high-bridged nose.