Rosaliy

As Rosaliy fiddled with the filmy ribbons lacing up her borrowed lilac party dress, she fretted over her horrible lack of a plan. She would even have welcomed Daniella at this point. At least Daniella would have had a plan.

A crack of lightning illuminated the ballroom, and a breeze whipped through the open doors of the balcony just as the ensuing thunder rumbled. At least they had managed to get inside before the storm. According to her Baysellian companions, the thunderstorm was headed their way fast.

“Hey, Rose.” Matias’ warm breath tickled her ear as he swooped up behind her with drinks.

His attempt at a sultry tone was not remotely appealing.

“Unless you have a solid plan to get past dozens of pirates and into the blocked off section of the castle, don’t ‘hey’ me,” Rosaliy snapped back, not taking the drink from his hand.

She was possibly being too harsh with him, considering he was here expressly to help her get into a pirate stronghold, but he had also been waiting in her room when she woke up that morning, so she was not feeling terribly forgiving.

Elle had graciously offered Rosaliy and Cliff much appreciated shelter in the manor, but when Rosaliy drifted awake from dreams of smiting the Flifary with fireballs and rescuing the children from hulking black beasts, she realized she was not alone. She shot up in bed, grabbing, of all things, a pillow for protection.

“I hear you’re looking for an escort to the ball,” Matias had said, lounging against her door frame. How long had he been standing there? The answer was too long.

“What are you doing here?” she exclaimed, nearly tossing the pillow at him. She refrained, lest he misinterpret the act as playfulness or some sort of invitation.

He grinned in a way he clearly thought was charming. “Sorry I missed you last night. Imagine my surprise you dropped by.”

His smug tone was too much to handle, as if he was not, in fact, surprised. Had he really thought she came all the way to his mother’s Baysellian manor to go to a party with him?

“I need a way inside a pirate stronghold, Matias,” she had told him. “I didn’t come all this way because I had a driving desire to see you.”

Her words had no effect. “Whatever you need to tell yourself,” he replied, still leaning against the doorframe.

She had been trying to come up with an effective way to tell him to go away when Jadelynn appeared at the door. “I need to talk to Rosaliy about girl things, Mat,” she said, shoving him out the door and pushing it closed in his face.

Jadelynn rolled her eyes. “Rosaliy and Drake. Blah blah blah.” She flapped her hands to enunciate her mocking words. “What does she see in that criminal? Blah blah blah. He’s been obsessed.” Jadelynn hopped onto the corner of Rosaliy’s bed like the sister she never had. “I mean, Drake.” She grinned. “Obviously. I bet he’s an amazing kisser.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Rosaliy stammered.

Jadelynn’s eyes grew big. “Oh, he’s a secret? Of course! Wouldn’t want it spreading among all the girls. Your secret’s safe with me. I’m great at secrets. Plus, I love seeing Matias so pathetic.” Jadelynn crossed her legs and nestled herself more comfortably into the corner of the bed. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

The night before, Jadelynn had helped Rosaliy and Cliff pour through her grandfather’s meticulous records for hours, and at the end, they all knew way too much about the corruption in the Bayselle courts and not enough about magical objects potentially hidden in the palace.

Luckily, thankless paperwork was Cliff’s forte, and he hung onto his enthusiasm for the task well past anyone else. After piles of fruitless searching, Rosaliy sent a yawning Jadelynn to bed, and eventually Rosaliy sent herself. She had not been looking forward to a repeat of the day before under a time crunch.

Just when she was considering getting up and shooing Jadelynn away, Rosaliy’s door burst open, and Cliff skidded in. “I found it!” Rosaliy remembered questioning whether or not Baysellians had a grasp of privacy or personal space.

“You found what?” she asked warily. Cliff’s manic excitement was untethered to the level of success he actually achieved. Or at least his perception of success did not seem to align with reality.

“The records! The records we’re looking for!”

“Cliff, did you sleep at all?”

“Sure, I think,” he babbled. “Maybe. Come see!”

After insisting on getting dressed and a hurried breakfast consisting of too much Matias, the trio reconvened in the study. Half the books were in piles on the floor. Cliff’s perseverance was something between admirable and alarming. He had found something—a ledger listing what seemed to be completely mundane supplies for fishing.

“Cliff, this—” Rosaliy started to complain, assuming sleep deprivation had caused him to snap.

“Wait, Sorceress,” urged Jadelynn, “he’s onto something. This is the king’s handwriting.”

“Exactly,” exclaimed manic Cliff. “The king wouldn’t keep personal records of fishing equipment.”

“Then what is this?” asked Rosaliy, pointing at the list of fishing supplies.

A coded list. Much excited paper shuffling by Cliff revealed that King Dromund kept a cipher in the back of a royal history volume that decoded a key tucked into an almanac that decrypted the ledger.

“Abuelo Dromund was a paranoid man,” Jadelynn said when they unearthed yet another piece to the puzzle.

“He was also overthrown and murdered, so the paranoia was warranted,” pointed out Cliff.

Rosaliy ignored them while she painstakingly decoded each piece of the fishing ledger. She found records of the debts owed by local nobility, followed by a confusing list of tiny pieces of information concerning seemingly random people. Rosaliy quickly realized she was decrypting a list of secrets—potential blackmail. No wonder King Dromund had been overthrown and murdered. Not enthused by decade-old secrets of powerful people, she moved on, finally uncovering what seemed to be a list of items and their descriptions.

“Magical objects—they’re actually here!” she exclaimed. To herself.

Sometime after lunch, Cliff and Jadelynn had left to work on packing up supplies for castle infiltration, whatever those were. Rosaliy supposed they needed a way to smuggle a jarful of healing draught at least. She had not expected Cliff to design a way to sew ropes into his clothing, but apparently he accomplished that, too.

Once Cliff and Jadelynn returned, they split huge sections of text to decrypt by candlelight. They found item lists, hidden rooms, hidden compartments in hidden rooms, hidden keys to hidden compartments in hidden—

“So basically, this is all rightfully mine,” Matias bragged, jolting Rosaliy back to the party. He gestured at the grand ballroom of Bayselle Castle, where they had been admitted as guests. The ballroom was already filled with milling people. Glittering chandeliers draped with shells clinked in the sea breezes flowing in from the massive doors opened to a glass balcony with views of the choppy ocean, a dizzying hundreds of lengths below.

“You have three older brothers,” Rosaliy argued, immediately sorry she had bothered.

“Half-brothers,” he corrected with a sour face. “I’m the first-born royal. My father already had three sons when he married my mother.”

Rosaliy did not need this information, but it did answer some logistical curiosities about the age ranges of all those brothers. Elle, the ex-princess, had been married off by her father to a rich noble. Maybe she was better off in the pirates’ control after all.

Cliff and Jadelynn saved Rosaliy from having to muster a reaction. “The healing draught—” Cliff tried to announce.

Jadelynn shushed him. “Don’t tell the whole room. Look.” She pointed. “The balcony. Nobody’s out there.”

To accentuate why no one was outside on the balcony, lightning lit up the night sky, punctuated by an almost immediate blast of thunder.

“Babies,” mocked Jadelynn, skipping outside, Cliff and his dozing monkey in tow.

When leaving Elle’s manor in colorful Baysellian party regalia, a little brown ball had launched itself out of the trees and back onto Cliff’s body, searching his pockets for treats. When anyone tried to remove her, she bit at their fingers and howled. Resigned to his fate, Cliff went back to the manor to load his pockets with nuts. Quita sat on his head nibbling the entire carriage ride to the palace, until she promptly fell asleep on his shoulder, curled up in a little ball.

Now they made their way outside into the heavy, humid air. The glass balcony attached to the castle ballroom was spectacular, but there was something disconcerting about being suspended hundreds of lengths in the air while the ocean churned below. At least they were alone.

“The third floor,” Cliff finished. “The healing draught is on the third floor.”

That was good news. If they could get past the guards, they could swing by the third floor on the way to the sealed off section of the palace. Rosaliy sighed. Of course the hidden room was in the sealed off section of the palace. Hopefully it was still intact and not sliding down the side of the cliff.

She scanned the sparkling ballroom. Only one of the exits led into the main castle, but a pair of intimidating pirates waited at the top of the grand staircase. If someone somehow slipped past them, that person would have to scale the stairs in full view of the party guests, including the dozens of pirates who wandered among the guests, fraternizing. There were eyes everywhere. If only they were looking somewhere else.

“How do we get out of this room?” she asked aloud.

“Nobody’s guarding the balcony,” suggested Jadelynn, the only one looking down instead of inside. “We can make it down there.”

“By climbing?” stammered Cliff.

“And fast, or we’re going to be soaked,” Jadelynn added.

“Too bad we can’t fly,” remarked Matias. “The hidden section is just across from us.” As obnoxious as he was, Matias had lived here until he was sixteen. His knowledge was useful.

On the cliff side of the palace, due to the eerily bright clouds and the reflection of the moonlight on the water, Rosaliy could see the shattered section of the palace just out of reach. During the pirates’ attack on the palace, they had blasted a hole in the side of the beautiful building. In the night, the hole was a dark maw with shattered stones for teeth.

“We need in Abuelo’s study to find the key in the wooden book, moron,” Jadelynn unkindly informed her brother.

“That’s below us, Jadeslug,” he answered.

“Exactly,” she smirked. “Let’s get climbing.”

“How far below?” asked Cliff, peering down.

Rosaliy could see from here the window of the room below was made up of glass panes set into a wood frame that swung open.

Spiky threads of light blazed a jagged pattern across the sky, and the thunder’s immediate blast was so loud, the balcony shook. A large piece of the crumbling wall from the broken castle before them tumbled into the churning ocean.

Cliff gaped and pointed. “Did anybody just see that?”

Droplets of rain pinged against the glass balcony. Jadelynn shot Rosaliy a “make a decision fast” look. Rosaliy had confidence in Jadelynn’s climbing abilities—she was Issabeth-trained after all. Rosaliy was less confident Cliff or “I used to have servants to climb ropes for me” Matias could scale a wall in a thunderstorm without killing themselves. Their faces mirrored her inclination.

“Cliff, the rope,” Rosaliy ordered as fat, warm raindrops pelted her head. “You and Matias will lower Jade and me. Then you’ll stay up here in case the pirates need to be distracted.” That sounded reasonable enough. No sense in having everyone tromping around the castle, anyway.

Neither Cliff nor Matias argued about needing to come along, which saved time.

“The study will be three rooms over.” Matias counted windows. “Or two. No, definitely three.”

Hopefully the pirates would allow Rosaliy enough time to try every room.

“Hurry up with that rope, Cliff,” Jadelynn ordered.

His extraction of the rope intricately twisted through the lining of his pants and jacket was comical, but nobody was in the mood to enjoy his awkward struggle. The rope was thin, but neither Rosaliy nor Jadelynn were particularly heavy. They just needed to climb down to the window underneath them, ignoring the churning ocean below and the slick rain falling from the sky. No problem. Now would have been an excellent time to have a better plan, but unless one dropped out of the sky, this would have to do.