Prince Zayed Knight || The Stowaway

The bed was too soft.

Zayed lay on his back beneath the canopy of his royal chambers, staring at the ceiling as if the carved coral and embedded pearls might rearrange themselves into an answer he had been searching for all night. Sleep had abandoned him hours ago. He had stopped trying to chase it somewhere around the third hour of watching the bioluminescent glow of his own veins pulse against the darkness. Tomorrow—no, today, for the clock on his nightstand read half past two in the morning—would bring another meeting, another briefing, another suffocating hour of advisors speaking at him in voices pitched somewhere between respect and barely concealed desperation. This meeting was supposedly important, all of them were supposedly important these days, each one carrying the weight of a kingdom that expected him to be something he had never been trained to become.

He turned his head on the pillow, looking toward the window that dominated the far wall of his chambers. Schools of fish played in the currents just outside, silvery bodies catching what little light escaped from the palace, darting and swirling in patterns that spoke of a freedom Zayed had once taken for granted. He watched them weave between the coral spires of the palace gardens, chasing each other through water that was warm and familiar and so achingly beautiful that it made his chest hurt.

He did not want to be King.

The thought had been circling him for weeks now. At first he had pushed it away, shoving it into the same dark corner where he kept his grief for Alistair and his fear of their father's disappointment, but it had refused to stay buried. It surfaced during council meetings while advisors droned on about trade routes and territorial disputes, surfaced during meals when his mother smiled at him with eyes that looked through him toward the son she had truly loved, surfaced during the long, sleepless nights when he lay in this too-soft bed and wondered if anyone would even notice if he simply stopped trying. He did not want to be the king.

He knew what leaving would mean. If he left, if he abandoned the crown that had been forced onto his unwilling shoulders, then Thaddeus would be next in line. Thaddeus, who was only 22 but already carried himself with a gravity that Zayed had never managed to achieve, who had stepped forward in the weeks after Alistair's death and taken on responsibilities that should have belonged to his older brother, who looked at their father with steady eyes while Zayed looked at the floor. Thaddeus would be in the exact position that Zayed currently occupied, saddled with a duty he had not asked for and a future he had not chosen, and the guilt of that knowledge was a hook lodged beneath Zayed's ribs that twisted every time he breathed.

But here was the truth that Zayed had been circling: Thaddeus had a better chance of succeeding than Zayed ever would. Thaddeus was serious where Zayed was lazy, dedicated where Zayed was drifting, capable where Zayed was drowning. Thaddeus actually listened during council meetings instead of counting the minutes until they ended, actually cared about trade routes and territorial disputes. Thaddeus would make a good king someday, or at least a better king than Zayed could ever hope to be, and somewhere in the dark hours of this sleepless night, Zayed stopped feeling guilty about that and started feeling something that might have been relief.

He moved before he could change his mind, making his way towards the window.

The schools of fish scattered as he slipped through the opening, their silver bodies flashing in the darkness like startled thoughts. He swam away from the palace without looking back, his tail cutting through the familiar currents with a speed born of desperation, and he did not stop when the palace lights faded behind him. He swam until his arms ached and his gills burned and the water around him changed from the warm, familiar embrace of his childhood to something colder and stranger, and then he kept swimming.

Breaking the ocean's surface was like being born again.

Zayed had read about the surface in old books, had studied the diagrams and the descriptions with the detached curiosity of someone who never expected to experience any of it firsthand, but nothing in those crumbling pages had prepared him for the reality of it. The air hit his skin like a thousand tiny needles, cold where the water had been warm, dry where the water had been wet, and he gasped as his gills sealed themselves shut, his body remembering instincts he had never consciously learned.

The moon hung overhead, fat and silver and so bright that it made his eyes water. He had seen the moon from below, of course, had watched its light filter down through the surface in rippling patterns that danced across the ocean floor, but he had never felt its pull on his bare skin before, had never looked up and seen it hanging there like a lantern in the darkness, vast and distant.

The churning sound reached him before he saw the source.

It was loud, a deep mechanical throbbing that vibrated through the water and into his bones, entirely unlike anything he had ever encountered beneath the waves. Zayed's head snapped toward the noise. The ship was enormous, far larger than anything he had seen in the old books, a floating city of lights and metal that seemed to defy every law of nature he had ever learned. It sat motionless on the water, docked for the night, its hull a dark wall that rose from the sea like a cliff face, and Zayed stared at it with his heart hammering against his ribs.

Humans. The ship held humans, he was certain of it, and the thought sent a complicated tangle of emotions through his chest—fear, certainly, because everything he had ever learned about humans had taught him to be afraid, but also something else, something that felt uncomfortably like curiosity. He had read about humans in old books, had studied their strange customs and their bizarre machines, and now here they were, real and close and waiting for him to decide what to do next. He could swim away, could dive back into the depths and find some other stretch of coast to explore. But he had not swum this far, had not abandoned his family and his crown and everything he had ever known, only to run from the first new thing he encountered.

He made his way toward the ship.

The hull rose above him like a wall of rust and Zayed circled it slowly, looking for some way to climb aboard. He found it in the form of a narrow ladder bolted to the side of the ship, its lowest rungs hanging just above the waterline. His hand closed around the metal, and he pulled himself up, and the moment his tail left the water, everything changed.

The transformation was not painful, exactly, but it was deeply, profoundly strange, like watching his own body rearrange itself from the inside out. His tail split, the scales peeling back to reveal pale skin beneath, and in the space of a heartbeat, the powerful fin that had carried him across hundreds of miles of open ocean became two legs, long and unfamiliar and entirely useless. He collapsed against the ladder, his arms barely strong enough to keep him from falling back into the water, and he stared down at his own body with an awe that bordered on disbelief. These were his legs. He had legs now. He had read about legs, had studied diagrams of how they worked, had spent long nights wondering what it would feel like to walk on solid ground, and now here they were, attached to his body and completely useless to him because he had no idea how to make them do anything except dangle there.

The first step was a disaster. The second was worse. But Zayed had spent 27 years swimming through currents that would have dashed a human against the rocks, had learned to navigate the crushing darkness of the deep ocean where light never reached, and he was not about to be defeated by a pair of legs. He clung to the ladder, pulling himself up rung by rung, and by the time he reached the top, he had figured out the basics—put one foot in front of the other, keep his weight centered, do not think too hard about how strange it felt to have his body arranged this way. He hauled himself over the railing and onto the deck, collapsing onto his hands and knees as the metal surface bit into his palms. He remained there for a long moment, breathing hard, water dripping from his skin and forming puddles on the deck beneath him.

Then he looked up, and the world went white.

The lights were everywhere, blazing from every corner of the ship in colors and intensities that his deep-sea eyes had never been designed to handle. Zayed squeezed his eyes shut, but the light pressed against his lids like a physical weight. The smells hit him next—engine exhaust and perfume and cooking food and a hundred other things he had no names for, all of it crashing against senses that had been sharpened by a lifetime in the clean, simple darkness of the ocean. He heard music somewhere in the distance, voices laughing, the creak of the ship shifting against the water, and it was too much, all of it was too much.

The throat clearing was soft. Zayed heard it anyway, his head snapping up so fast that his vision swam, and he found himself staring at a figure standing a few yards away, silhouetted against the blazing lights of the ship's interior.

His voice scraped out of his throat like something rusty, unused and unfamiliar. The sound that emerged was thin and rough, barely more than a whisper, but the words were there, pulled from somewhere deep in his chest where the lies were already beginning to form. "Please," he said, and the word hung in the air between them, fragile and desperate. "I need help. I seem to have lost my memory. I fell overboard, I think, and I cannot remember anything else."

The lie settled over him like a second skin, uncomfortable and ill-fitting but necessary. He did not know if the man would believe him, did not know if humans were as gullible as the old books suggested or if he could see straight through to the truth that Zayed was trying so desperately to hide. But he'd stick to it.