Burning Kingdoms Read online

  Pen doesn’t notice that Thomas and I were talking at all. She’s walking apart from the group, looking at the stars as she goes, pointing and mouthing their names. There is a chapter in the history book devoted to the spirit of every animal that has been immortalized in the constellations. When I look up, all I see are stars, but Pen knows their names. She knows more than anyone else I’ve ever met. The gods and the glasslands and the archipelago that’s caused this war. Every time she opens her mouth to speak, there’s the chance she’ll say something great.

  Lately, though, she hides that greatness away, as though she believes it would be wasted here.

  She doesn’t look away from the sky until her feet are on the dock.

  Nimble helps us climb onto the boat, one at a time. Celeste lingers at his side. The two of them have become inseparable of late, and I wonder if she considers at all the boy she’s betrothed to. I wonder if she’s accepted that she will never see him again.

  “This is a boat?” Pen says. “It’s enormous. Where does that door lead to?”

  “Downstairs,” Nimble says. “Don’t worry; there’ll be a tour.”

  “Another one?” Celeste whispers to him, giggling. I suppose she thinks I couldn’t hear that, and I intend to perpetuate that belief.

  So Nimble gives us a tour of the boat, which he calls a yacht. There’s a helm with a wooden wheel, and a rack of tonic bottles with price tags hanging from the corks.

  “That’s the spirit bar,” he says. “We charge by the glass.”

  “It’s pricey,” Birdie says, snatching a bottle off the rack. “But it would seem one has been stolen. Huh. Pity.”

  “My kid sister’s gone corrupt,” Nimble says. “You couldn’t at least go for the cheap stuff, Birds?”

  She hugs the bottle. “We have guests.”

  Pen moves up the stairs and stares out at the water. “Are we going to leave the dock?” she asks.

  “Can’t,” Nimble says. He lights the lantern hanging over the top of the stairs, and the yacht is swathed in its dim glow.

  “Father would kill us.” Birdie rolls her eyes. “We’re expected to stay on top of the upkeep, but we can’t go anywhere in the yachts unless he’s here to supervise.”

  “Why not?” Pen asks. “Afraid you’ll sink and drown? He’d still have three spare children left.”

  “Pen, what a horrible thing to say,” I tell her.

  “I was only kidding.”

  “He’s worried about the boats getting harmed,” Birdie says. “We can still have fun. No worries.” She waves the bottle over her head. “Nim, get the glasses.”

  I’ve never seen a boat like this, with seats and room to lounge about. At home we have rowboats that can seat two, but they’re for fishing, not leisure. And our lakes are small enough that we can see one side from the other.

  I find all the space dizzying. Birdie pours a glass of sparkling tonic and hands it to me. “Champagne,” she says. “For celebrating.”

  “What are we celebrating?” Pen sits next to me.

  “True love,” Birdie says. She points the bottle at Nimble and Celeste, who let go of each other’s hands the moment they realize we’re all watching.

  Pen nudges me, but I’m still too wounded by her betrayal to delight in this bit of gossip. I lean against Basil.

  Celeste pointedly sits as far from Nimble as she can. “Full moon,” she says, nodding at the sky.

  “No, it isn’t,” Pen says. “It’s waxing gibbous. It’ll be full tomorrow.”

  “Did I tell all of you?” Celeste says cheerily. “Our Pen knows absolutely everything.”

  “You should know more about the sky,” Pen fires back. “You are named for it, after all. Celeste the Uncorrupted.”

  “The who?” Birdie asks.

  “Uncorrupteds are martyrs,” Pen says.

  “Like saints?” Birdie asks.

  “That’s one of your words,” Pen says. “But yes, if you like. Celeste was what you’d call a saint. She slit her wrists to escape her tormentors that wanted her to speak out against the god of the sky.” She regards each of us as though telling a fireplace tale. “She died and was rewarded for her sacrifice by becoming a permanent star in the sky. Bit of a raw deal, if you ask me. Only a star.”

  “I love all your stories,” Birdie says, brilliantly breaking the tension with another round of champagne. “Which star is it?”

  Pen throws her head back to look at the sky. “Oh, you know,” she says. “One of them. It’s not important.”

  Thomas frowns at the fresh champagne in Pen’s glass.

  The conversation goes to the stars, Birdie explaining the constellations and what they’re all supposed to mean.

  Thomas is talking to Pen with words that are only murmurs to the rest of us. She nods, but when he tries to put his arm around her, she scoots away from him. “I want to go swimming,” she announces.

  “Not in this water, you don’t,” Nimble says. “Lots of things lurk around here at night.”

  “Like sharks?” Pen asks, delighted. She wraps her arms around me. “Tell us about those. They sound so menacing, don’t they, Morgan? Just the word alone. ‘Sharks.’ You have to grit your teeth when you say it.”

  “What do they look like?” I ask.

  “Really? You’ve never seen one?” Nimble says. “What do you have in your water?”

  “Trout,” we all answer in unison.

  “Imagine a very large trout, then, with a dorsal fin and a taste for blood.”

  Pen shivers excitedly. “As large as a person?”

  “You’d fit in the stomach of one, easy.”

  Thomas moves the bottle away when Pen reaches for it. We can all see that she’s had more than enough. I suspect that she had enough even before the champagne, but she’s gotten so good at hiding it, I can’t be sure.

  “I’m not afraid of your overgrown fish,” Pen says, letting go of me and falling back into her seat. “To be eaten by a fish, you’d have to be a special breed of daft. Do I look daft to you?”

  Pen is one of the brightest people I know, but since leaving the sky, she has lost her head a bit.

  “Let’s not challenge it, dear,” Thomas says. Normally he enjoys fantastic notions, such as being eaten by a carnivorous fish, but I think he and I have the same fear that Pen will do something rash with even the smallest bit of encouragement. There weren’t many threats on Internment, but here on the ground the people live among them. It isn’t safe for someone who sees things the way Pen does—as though every corner of the world must be conquered.

  “I should like to see what’s in these waters,” Celeste says, looking over her shoulder at the moonlight breaking and rematerializing on the surface. “But in the daylight.”

  Pen sheds her coat. “Everything seems safer in the daylight,” Pen murmurs to me. “Should we go for a swim? Just us. No princesses.”

  Unlike her mother, she is still articulate when she’s drunk, but there’s a quality to her voice that tells me I’m not speaking with the normal Pen. Something is off. I’ve learned not to say anything she’d perceive as combative. “We can’t go in now,” I say. “Tomorrow maybe.”

  Thomas catches us whispering to each other, and he puts his hand on Pen’s shoulder. “I think we should all go back inside,” he says.

  She wrests away. “You go on if you want to,” she says. “I have a previous engagement with the fish. And I want to see this Ehco I’ve heard so much about, that holds all the world’s anger and sorrow.”

  Before he can stop her, she has kicked off her shoes and dived over the railing. She shrieks when she hits the cold water.

  “Pen!” Thomas calls. We all run to the edge of the boat.

  Pen is laughing, fanning her arms in the water to keep herself afloat. “I don’t see your sharks, Nimble,” she says. “The only thing biting me is the cold.”

  Thomas reaches his arms out for her. “Come up before you make yourself ill.”

  “At least the wate
r ought to sober her up,” I say to Basil.

  Pen starts paddling back toward the yacht, but then she stops, staring at the back of her hand in the moonlight. “My betrothal band is missing.”

  Thomas’s tone goes deadpan. “What?”

  “It must have come off when I jumped.” She stares into the dark water, but all that’s visible are glimpses of her own clothes as she moves.

  “Just come out of there,” Thomas says. “You aren’t going to find it now.”

  I make a fist to protect my own band. The thought of it being irretrievably lost in these strange waters full of odd creatures is too much to bear. “Pen, we can look for it tomorrow when there’s light.”

  “There’s something shining down there,” Pen says. “I think the water’s shallow here. I can get it.”

  “Pen!” Thomas says, but she’s already gone. Basil claps his hand on Thomas’s shoulder to reassure him, but Thomas’s spirits are as lost as that ring. “I suppose I should go after her before she hurts herself,” he sighs, kicking off his shoes.

  I wince when his body hits the water. I can smell the cold of it from here.

  “Ah, true love,” Nimble says. “There’s no one in this world I’d catch hypothermia for.”

  “Not even me?” Celeste says, nudging him.

  I stare into the water, trying to find a trace of either of them.

  Basil retrieves a stack of folded towels from under the seats. “Can you see anything?” he asks me.

  “They’ve been gone a long time,” I say.

  “They’re probably bickering down there,” Nimble says. “That seems to be all they ever do.”

  The water breaks, but my relief is short-lived when Thomas surfaces alone. He takes a breath and disappears again.

  Something is wrong. He can’t find her.

  Now it’s my turn to kick off my shoes. The chilly air hardly registers when I unpeel myself from my coat, and Basil is trying to hold me back. “No,” he says. I slip out of his hands and dive headfirst into the sea.

  This water is far more abrasive than that of the lakes back home. It burns my eyes and nose, and even in the darkness, I can see that it’s murkier. For an instant I have no sense of up or down, and I bob to the surface just long enough to note where I am and take a breath.

  Underwater, I look for any trace of movement. There’s a flicker of something light. I kick toward it, but something hinders my path. I press my hand against the shadowy wall—the side of the boat. Every instinct is telling me to return to the surface. My lungs burn. My already limited vision is tunneling. I fight my way down the side of the boat, toward that light little something. My fingers close around it, and I think I must have found a dead mermaid before I recognize it as Pen’s hair. I grab her arm, and my heart is pounding. She doesn’t resist. She comes away from the bottom of the boat like a piece of kelp. “Kelp” isn’t a word either of us had reason to know before we came here.

  I tuck her to my side and kick my way back up, at last granting my body’s pleas for oxygen.

  A small distance away, Thomas has also surfaced. “I’ve got her!” I cry, before he can go under again. He’s at my side immediately, taking her limp body from my arms, holding her head above the surface.

  “Pen!” I never knew him capable of such fear. He’s pressing into her neck, trying to find a pulse. I can tell by his desperate fumbling that he can’t get one.

  I don’t allow myself to think she isn’t breathing. The cold water has gone thick around me, and I’m sure it’s freezing me in place. I can’t move but to keep myself afloat.

  “Bring her here!” Nim calls. He’s on the dock now. Basil is leaping from the boat after him. They kneel at the dock’s edge, and it takes both of them to hoist Pen up. She was weightless in the water, but now her body is heavy and uncooperative. Thomas is already up beside her, and Basil reaches his hands out for me. He has to pull me most of the way; my legs don’t want to work.

  Basil tries to keep me from seeing her, but I push him aside.

  She’s lying in a strip of moonlight, as still as the bodies awaiting the tributary. Only there is no tributary on the ground. If any of us were to die down here, I fear we’d be lost forever, interred in a garden of stones.

  Basil is pulling me into his arms, trying to soothe me even before I’m able to panic. But the panic comes a moment later, and I’m shaking my head, saying, “No, no, no.” I see her eyes rolled back, and I can’t bear to think they will never again brighten when she’s happened upon a new idea.

  Nimble is telling Thomas that they can try to revive her. I’ve heard of this. Somewhere in Lex’s medical texts there are many pages devoted to the art of last-hope desperation. But the illustrations make it seem so matter-of-fact; there’s nothing on any of the pages about what truly stands to be lost.

  I watch, helpless, as Thomas holds her nose shut and breathes into her mouth, and Nimble presses into her ribs. They take turns, like it’s some school-yard game, and they can’t mess up, they can’t do a single thing out of time.

  Basil wraps a towel around my icy shoulders, and he’s holding me so tightly, as though I am the one who is slipping away. It doesn’t matter that I’ve made it out of the water. If Pen is lost, I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to claw my way to the surface in time to save her.

  Thomas murmurs some desperate words before he brings his lips to hers again. Her chest rises with the air he gives her, automatically, mechanically. But then she convulses, and water spills from her mouth and she comes alive with a round of violent coughs and gasps.

  “Attagirl,” Nimble says.

  I let out the breath I’d been holding.

  The stars above me reemerge from the darkness, and I feel as though I, too, am returning from death.

  Pen pushes herself up, retching.

  Thomas’s relief is palpable. He seems at once years older, and he’s shaking as he hunches forward to see her face. “Have you come back to me now? Margaret?”

  She splutters a mouthful of water. “You know I hate that name.”

  “She’s okay,” Thomas announces.

  He wraps her in a towel and scoops her into his arms. It’s the sort of display she would normally protest, but she’s dazed and still a bit drunk.

  “Home now?” she says.

  “Not quite, my love.” He kisses her forehead as he carries her away through the sand. “If only I could.”

  Nimble runs ahead of them, shouting directives to his parade of siblings, who are filing out of the hotel to see what’s happened. Celeste and Birdie are at his heels.

  Basil wipes the water from my shuddering jaw.

  “Are you hurt anywhere?” he asks.

  “I don’t—think so. I can’t feel my body, though.”

  I look at the hotel in the distance. Figures move within the windows.

  “Hey,” Basil says. I look at him. “I want you to know I’m proud of you.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I say. My teeth are chattering. “Just went for a little swim, is all.”

  “This water is not like the water back home,” he says. “It was the unknown. And you dove right in. That was extraordinarily brave.”

  I think my cheeks have thawed enough that my smile comes through.

  “But never do anything like that again, do you hear me?”

  “She’s on her own if she goes over a second time,” I say.

  “Come on. Let’s get you out of this cold.” Basil helps me up, righting me when I stumble.

  He drapes his coat over me and I lean against him. “Basil, I don’t know what to do about Pen.”

  “You’re a good friend to her.” He rubs my arm. “But let Thomas look after her. It’s what he’s meant to do. It’s what they both need.”

  As we grew up, Thomas and Basil teased Pen and me about the way we cared for each other. I’ve always suspected there was a bit of jealousy under all of it, that each of the boys knew they had to share the girl they loved. What Pen and I have fo
r each other isn’t a threat to our betrothals, but we have each other’s hearts just the same.

  But all I say is, “I know.”

  We’ve reached the front door to the hotel.

  “Promise you’ll go right to bed after you’ve dried off,” Basil says. “This cold could be lethal.”

  “I promise.” There will be no adventures in the city tonight. “You should sleep, too.”

  In the warmth of the lobby, the feeling returns to my limbs. My head is aching and my left hip is sore. I have some vague recollection of hitting it on the dock as I climbed up.

  Annette runs to us, bright-eyed. “Is it true you were nearly swallowed by a killer whale?”

  Sharks. Killer whales. This place is enough to put me off swimming for the rest of time.

  “Who told you such a thing?” I ask.

  “No one. I just assumed. Everyone was dripping wet. Nimble said you were right behind them, so I already drew a bath for you.”

  “Annie, words are too small for my gratitude right now.” I kiss Basil’s cheek and I let the smallest Piper lead me upstairs.

  I stay in the water until it’s gone from hot to cold, and despite persistent lathering and wringing out, my hair still smells of salt.

  When I return to the hallway, I hear voices from around the fireplace. Nimble and Birdie are diverting the children’s questions and replacing them with fantasies about sea creatures that will devour them if they don’t pipe down and go to bed. I don’t want to hear any of it. I want only to go to sleep and forget this horrible night happened.

  The door to my bedroom is closed. I try the handle. Locked.

  “Pen?”

  “Are you alone?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you certain? You haven’t brought along a lecture, have you?”

  “Not for tonight,” I say. “Miraculously.”

  There’s a pause before the lock is undone and the door opens.

  Pen is already making her way back to the bed, a cup of tea cradled in both hands. “I was hoping to keep Her Royal Highness out of my hair this evening.”

  She sits with her back to the headboard and draws her knees to her chest. There’s color in her face again, and her hair is plaited to set her curls. Her eyes are red, irritated by the salt water. There’s a bruise on her forehead, which solves the mystery of why she never surfaced from under the boat. Normally she is all grace—a strong swimmer and a brilliant athlete, but enough tonic will make her another girl entirely.