How to Catch a Queen (Runaway Royals #1) - Alyssa Cole Page 0,1
his hand, his already watery eyes filling with tears as he looked up at him. Sanyu had never seen his father show this kind of emotion. And then the old man had gripped Sanyu’s hand with an almost desperate strength, a reminder of why he’d gained the name the Iron Fist. “The best. Strong. You have to be.”
Sanyu’s heart had squeezed in his chest, mashed between the gears of grief and resentment. Even with the end drawing near, this was still all his father could speak of.
“I will be,” he’d said. “You do not have to worry, Father.”
When the king’s eyes fluttered shut, the wrinkles of his face settling into a peaceful smile, Sanyu had watched him, mind blank and an unfathomable grief coating him like a layer of petrol that wouldn’t sink in. His father slept and soon he wouldn’t wake up, which was impossible.
Sanyu couldn’t imagine a world without his father’s booming laugh and bravado and secret winks when everyone around him cowered in fear. He couldn’t imagine a Njaza without the man who was the backbone of everything the kingdom was; even if Sanyu technically possessed all of the necessary skills to take the throne, he was not a king in spirit.
After a few hours of vigil had passed, he’d kissed his father’s knuckles and said a prayer to Omakuumi, warrior god and the first mighty king to rule Njaza so many generations before.
Then he’d calmly walked to his room and begun to pack.
Now, as he exited the passageway with his randomly selected belongings stuffed into his backpack, he forcibly blocked out all thoughts of his father. His soles sank into the peaty soil of the royal gardens and his heart pounded against his rib cage, as if it also surged toward escape. Sweat beaded along his brow, even though the temperature had dropped to a cool seventy degrees.
As he crept through the shadows of the garden searching for the secret side exit in the fence of reed and iron that surrounded the palace, three sentences repeated over and over in his head, vaguely matched to the tune of his song.
They want me to be king!
I have to be king!
I cannot be king!
The song was annoying as ever, but the blaring repetition in his skull blocked out the reality of what he was doing, of the action driven by the crawling sensation on his skin and the tension in his muscles and the whispers in his mind that said he wasn’t fit to rule Njaza, and thus if he didn’t become king, his father wouldn’t die.
Yes, he had to leave, and quickly. Then nothing would change.
Spiny plants caught in his clothes and scratched his skin as he lumbered through the fog-swirled darkness; their sweet fruits were crushed under his shoes as his search along the fence grew more frantic. Everything would be fine if he could just find the damn door and pass through it.
He’d been running from Njaza for half his life—as a teen, he’d convinced his father to send him to the Alpine boarding school where so many royals sent their children. After that, he’d been accepted and planned to go to Howard University in the US, but his dreams had been dashed when it was decided it was too dangerous for the future king to be away for another four years. He’d had tutors, and for a decade had been allowed a spring break of sorts where he traveled with his longtime friend, the prince from Druk. He’d tagged along on Anzam Khandrol’s international quests for enlightenment, or sometimes he’d quietly tended goats on a steep hill in the mountainous kingdom. Those trips away from home, where no one but Anzam Khandrol knew who he was, no one pointed out his flaws, and his future seemed larger than twenty thousand square kilometers, had sustained him.
He’d returned home after each one, but the suffocating atmosphere of the palace—and the constant reminders of how lacking he was—sent him scrambling away eventually, gasping for the air of “anywhere but here” until Musoke had put an end to the trips for good, stating security concerns.
But now his father was dying. Sanyu would be king. He would never again work a simple but fulfilling job, never dabble in all the rich new experiences life had to offer. Instead, the limited smorgasbord offered by Njaza’s isolationist politics, lack of capital, and stubborn resistance to change would be for breakfast, lunch, and supper every day.