Untouched Queen By Royal Command

His father said that those quarters had been mothballed over a hundred years ago.

His mother said it was out of bounds because the roof was unsafe.

Didn’t stop him and his sister looking for it, even if they never had much luck. It was like a treasure hunt.

They wouldn’t have found it this time either, without the help of a map.

The floor was made of moon-coloured marble, and so too were the columns and archways surrounding the central room. The remaining furniture had been covered with dusty drapes that had probably once been white. Above all, it felt warm in a way that the main castle living areas were never warm.

‘Why do we not live in this part of the palace?’ asked his sister from somewhere not far behind him. She’d taken to opening every door of every room that circled the main area. ‘These look like bedrooms. I could live here.’

‘You want fifty bedrooms all to yourself?’

‘I want to curl up like a cat in the sunlight. Show me one other place in the palace where you can do that.’

‘Mother would kill you if you took to lounging about in the sun. You’d lose your milky-white complexion.’

‘Augustus, I don’t have a milky-white complexion—no matter what our mother might want. I have black hair, black eyes and olive skin—just like you and Father do. My skin likes the sun. It needs the sun, it craves the sun. Oh, wow.’ She’d disappeared through another marble archway and her voice echoed faintly. ‘Indoor pool.’

‘What?’ He backtracked and headed for the archway, bumping into his sister, who was backing up fast.

‘Something rustled in the corner,’ she muttered by way of explanation.

‘Still want to live here?’ He couldn’t decide whether the hole in the ground was big enough to be called a pool or small enough to be called a bath. All he knew was that he’d never seen mosaic floor tiles with such elaborate patterns before, and he’d never seen exactly that shade of blue.

‘I still want to look around,’ his sister offered. ‘But you can go first.’

He rolled his eyes, even as pride demanded he take the lead. He’d been born to rule a country one day, after all. A rustling sound would not defeat him. He swaggered past his sister and turned to the right. There was a sink for washing hands carved into the wall beside the archway, and taps that gleamed with a dull silver glow. He reached for one and, with some effort, got it to turn but there was no water. Not a gurgle, a splutter or even the clank of old pipes.

‘What is this place? What are all these stone benches and alcoves for?’ his sister asked as she followed him into the room. She kept a wary eye on the shadowy corners but eventually turned her attention to other parts of the room.

It was an old map of the palace that had guided them here. That and a history teacher who preferred giving his two royal students books to read so that he could then nap his way through afternoon lessons. Their loss. And sometimes their freedom. If they got caught in here, he could probably even spin it that they were continuing their history lesson hands-on.

‘Maybe it was built for a company of warrior knights who slept in the rooms and came here to bathe. They could have practised sword-fighting in the round room,’ his sister suggested.

‘Maybe.’

Kings had ruled from this palace stronghold for centuries. It was why the place looked so formidable from the outside and had relatively few creature comforts on the inside, no matter how many generations of royals had tried to make it more liveable. There was something about it that resisted softening. Except for in here. There was something soft and strangely beautiful about this part of the palace. Augustus plucked at a scrap of golden silk hanging from a peg on a wall and watched it fall in rotting pieces to the floor. ‘Did knights wear embroidered silk bathrobes?’

His sister glanced over and gasped. ‘Did you just destroy that?’

‘No, I moved it. Time destroyed it.’ Rational argument was his friend.

‘Can I have some?’

Without waiting for permission, she scooped the rotting cloth from the floor, bunched it in her hand and began to rub at a nearby tile.

‘It’s going to take a little more than that to get this place clean.’

‘I just want to see the pictures,’ his sister grumbled, and then, ‘Oh.’ She stopped cleaning.

He looked, and…oh. ‘Congratulations. You found the ancient tile porn.’

‘It’s art, you moron.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I wish we could see better in here,’ his sister said.

‘For that we would need electricity. Or burning torches for all the holders in the walls.’ He closed his eyes and a picture came to mind, clear as day. Not knights and warriors living in this part of the palace and bathing in this room, but women, bound in service to the reigning King.

Augustus had never read about any of his ancestors having a harem, but then, as their eighty-year-old history teacher was fond of telling them, not all facts made it into their history books. ‘So, bedrooms, communal bathing room, big gathering room…what else?’

There were more rooms leading from the centre dome. An ancient kitchen, storage rooms with bare shelves, larger rooms with fireplaces, smaller rooms with candle stubs still sitting in carved-out hollows in the walls. They found chests of drawers and sideboards beneath heavy canvas cloth, long mirrors that his sister swore made her look thinner, and even an old hairbrush.

‘I don’t think people even know this stuff is here,’ Moriana said as she put the brush gently back into place. ‘I don’t know why they’re ignoring it. Some of it’s really old. Museum-old. The back of this brush looks like ivory, inlaid with silver, and it’s just been abandoned. Maybe we should bring the history prof down here. He’d have a ball.’

‘No.’ His voice came out sharper than he meant it to. ‘This is a private place. He doesn’t get to come here.’

Moriana glanced at him warily but made no comment as they left the side room they’d been exploring.

All doorways and arches led back to the main room. It was like a mini town square—or town circle. He looked up at the almost magical glass ceiling. ‘Maybe our forefathers studied the stars from here. Mapped them.’ Perhaps he could come back one night and do the same. And if he took another look at those naked people tiles in the room with the empty pool, so be it. Even future kings had to get their information from somewhere. ‘Maybe they hung a big telescope from the ropes up there and moved it around. Maybe if they climbed the stairs over there…’ He gestured towards the stairs that ran halfway up the wall and ended in a stone landing with not a railing in sight. ‘Maybe they had pulleys and ropes that shifted stuff. Maybe this was a place for astronomers.’

‘Augustus, that’s a circus trapeze.’

‘You think they kept a circus in here?’

‘I think this is a harem.’

So much for his innocent little sister not guessing what this place had once been. ‘I’m going up the stairs. Coming?’

Moriana followed him. She didn’t always agree with him but she could always be counted on to be there for him at the pointy end of things. It didn’t help that their mother praised Augustus to the skies for his sharp mind and impeccable self-control, and never failed to criticise Moriana’s emotional excesses. As far as Augustus could tell, he was just as fiery as his sister, maybe more so. He was just better at turning hot temper into icy, impenetrable regard.

A king must always put the needs of his people before his own desires.

His father’s words. Words to live by. Words to rule by.

A king must never lose control.

Words to be ruled by, whether he wanted to be ruled by them or not.

They made it to the ledge and he made his sister sit rather than stand. He sat too, his back to the wall as he looked up to the roof and then down at the intricately patterned marble floor.

‘I feel like a bird in a cage,’ said Moriana. ‘Wonder what the women who once lived here felt like?’

‘Sounds about right.’ He wasn’t a woman but he knew what being trapped by duty felt like.

‘We could practise our archery from up here.’ Moriana made fists out in front of her and drew back one arm as if pulling back an imaginary arrow. ‘Set up targets down below. Pfft. Practise our aim.’