Broken Crowns Read online

  Prince Azure leads the way, saying nothing. The sun is rising now, making the city pink and gold. It’s his first day as king, and he does not seem happy to see it.

  My knees buckle, and when Basil can’t hold me up, he kneels alongside me. The clock tower is in sight now, but as I look up at it, it may as well be a world away. It is Havalais’s harbor glittering on the other side of the sea.

  “She can’t go any farther,” Pen says, and drops her arms like dead weight. “She needs to be in a hospital.” She needs a doctor as much as I do, but she doesn’t say that.

  The prince turns to face the lot of us, the infant cradled in his arm. How he managed to silence her is a wonder. Maybe she was born with her own political agenda; it certainly wouldn’t surprise me.

  “Morgan,” the prince says. “You’re very tired, and maybe you don’t remember what happened back there, so I’ll remind you.”

  I raise my eyes to look at him. My vision is tunneling.

  “When we made it to the jet, my father the king was there to see us off. He was sending us to Havalais with his blessing. But one of his patrolmen was maddened from being so close to the edge, and he killed my father. He tried to kill us all, but you managed to wrestle the knife away and kill him instead. You did it to save us. That’s what happened, do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I’m glad we’re in agreement,” he says. “My sister will want a full report and that is what I intend to tell her. Best to leave the details to me. I have the clearest memory of the scuffle.”

  The infant has begun screaming again. Hungry, cold, nameless. She ought to be back with her mother, I think, before my vision goes dark and I fall into silence.

  When I sleep, I have a dream that doesn’t belong to me. Rather, it’s something that has been haunting my brother for years. He told me about it weeks ago, though it all seems like a lifetime away now.

  In the dream, Internment is the same as it has always been. I step over the train tracks and suddenly I’m at the edge, staring down at the ground that reveals itself through wisps of clouds.

  I don’t want to jump. I only want to have a better look. I lean forward, and my feet are pulled from the ground. Then I’m weightless, careening away from the clouds, away from my answers.

  When darkness takes over, it isn’t perfect. A heart beats inside it, and I can almost make out the shape of some small and living thing—almost.

  “Wait,” I say, for it is being pulled out of my reach. “I know who you belong to.”

  But it doesn’t listen. Willing the past to be undone, even in dreams, can’t set things right again. All I can say is, “Come back. Come back. Come back,” until it is gone.

  In the darkness I hear a cry, and I think that I’ve succeeded, that it has heard me and I will return what has been stolen from my brother. From Alice.

  But the cry is not coming from within my dream. It’s in the waking world, finding its way to my ears. It belongs to a different life entirely, one that may have a chance yet. We’ve all fought so hard for it.

  I’m in the hospital for the better part of a week. I’m well enough to leave, but I hesitate to leave Nimble and Pen in this awful hospital alone. Though Pen put forth a brave face, she and Nimble bore the worst of it. They’ve both been scarcely conscious since we got here.

  It was only after I began to improve that Basil relented when I told him that his time would be better spent helping the new king and visiting with his family. I know how awful it is to be a visitor in a place like this, and I wish for him to not experience it.

  Though Pen was fortunate enough that the king’s wound did not prove fatal, it fast became infected and she’s been bedridden with fever. I’ve exaggerated my own injuries just to stay on this floor and be near her. But that can last only so long. A patrolman came to my room to inform me that the king has requested I have an audience with him at noon.

  The only consolation is that, under the orders of the king, Pen’s and Nimble’s rooms are to be guarded at all times, in case anyone may try to cause them harm. No visitors are permitted into this area at all. Not even family or Thomas. Not even Pen’s father.

  When I visit Pen, her face gleams with perspiration and she’s flushed with fever, but determined to stay awake. I think her nightmares of the harbor bombing still haunt her. They surely still haunt me.

  I sit in the chair by her bed, and she offers me a wan smile. “You look dreadfully glum,” she says.

  “I just hate to see you like this,” I say.

  “Me? I’m fine.” She looks to the window, and there are clouds reflected in her green eyes. “I’ve had plenty of time to think about things.”

  “You shouldn’t be thinking,” I say. “You should be resting.”

  “A girl should never stop thinking,” she says. “Otherwise we’ll become what our world thinks of us.” She’s struggling to keep her eyes open. “Dull, simple creatures that must belong to someone lest we hurt ourselves.”

  I push the sweaty hair from her face. Without her neat curls or glossy plaits, she looks almost like a stranger.

  “Oh, Morgan, stop,” she pleads. “I can’t stand it when you worry so much about me. Really. The look on your face.”

  “It is taxing being your friend. I worry about you constantly.”

  She pushes herself upright. “What about you?” She lowers her voice. “You haven’t been sleeping. I hear you pass my door a dozen times a night.”

  “I’m all right,” I say.

  “Are you, then?” She has a way of staring through me. I’ve always been a dreadful liar, but I’m trying, for her sake. Her mouth twists, and she looks to the window. “What was it like?” she asks, in a low voice. “Killing him.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say, all too quickly.

  “Of course it matters.”

  Suddenly the sharp sterile odor of the room turns my mouth dry. My palms are slick and I rub them against my gown as though I could clean it all away that easily.

  Pen is looking at me now, offering me no reprieve. She means for me to admit it. “He was going to kill me,” I say. “All of us. He was going to kill his own grandchild.”

  I hate her silence. I stare at the floor. “I had to. That’s all. I don’t know what more you want.”

  “You see him when you close your eyes,” she says. “Don’t you? When you sleep?”

  Numbly, I nod. “But I still kill him, even in my dreams,” I say. “I have it to do over, and I do, again and again. That’s how I know I had to.”

  The king dies again in the silence that passes just then, the blood black in the starlight, the whites of his eyes dimming like a spent bulb. The only reprieve was the soft sounds of the grass, as though the city wanted to say it forgave me. Thanked me, even.

  “I’ve killed in my dreams, too,” Pen says. Her eyes are fixed on the window. She won’t look at me, but she won’t look down the way that I do. She has had years to grow familiar with the sort of hatred it takes to kill.

  “I know that I’m dreaming, in some way, but every time, when he comes into my room and I finally move to kill him, I will it to be real. I think that if I want it enough, I can somehow change the rules about what a dream alone can do.” I see the coldness in her eyes that makes me hate the one who did this to her, made her think such things. “Then I wake up, and this world and its consequences race back into my head as though they’ve been hovering over my pillow waiting for me to come back. And I know that I can’t kill him—not without suffering tenfold for it. I learned a long time ago that if I want him to be dead, he’s dead. He can’t have my thoughts when I’m awake. He can’t make his darkness be my darkness.”

  She runs her hands over the blankets, smoothing the wrinkles. “Still, though. I’ve wondered how it would feel. If I’d get any satisfaction.”

  For all the king did, and even though he tried to dispose of me the way he did my parents, I still can’t bring myself to hate him as much as I hate Pen’s
father. The king, in his way, believed he was protecting his kingdom. He believed he was doing something noble. But Pen’s father meant only to take something that was not meant to be given. He gave no mind to his daughter, no mind to the way he would change the world as she saw it, even when she was older and stronger. The brilliant thoughts in her head that he pervaded. The tonic forcing itself into her blood the way he forced himself into her, just so she can find solace from him for a few meager hours.

  He is a different kind of murderer, and there is nothing in him that can be redeemed.

  “I wish your dreams could be real, too,” I say.

  She moves across the bed and rests her head against my shoulder. I feel all the weight go out of her, and she closes her eyes. For just a moment, she is the little girl I wasn’t able to save all those years ago, and at last she allows someone to console her.

  I kiss the crown of her head, and she puts her arms around my neck. Both of us killers, both of us murdered and brought back to life.

  I’m not the only one pacing the halls of our tiny wing. On my way back to my bed, I find Nimble standing at the tiny window at the end of the hallway, staring at the glasslands in the distance.

  He flinches when I stand beside him. “Sorry,” I say.

  “It isn’t your fault,” he says. “My nerves are fried.” The city is reflected in his lenses. He shakes his head as though he can’t believe it. “I expected a war-torn mess when I got here, but if you look away from all the digging and at the city itself, it’s beautiful. Hardly what I think of when I imagine a city at all.”

  “Most of those buildings are hundreds of years old,” I say. “We’ve outfitted them with electricity and plumbing, but the bones are the same. No reason to demolish them and make waste.”

  “No weather to wear away at them,” he says.

  I laugh. “I’ve gotten to know you so well, I almost forgot you’re a foreigner here. Still, we aren’t very different, are we?”

  “No, we aren’t,” he agrees.

  After a long silence, he says, “It doesn’t feel real yet that I’m king. All my life it’s felt so far away.” He shakes his head. “I’ve always hated them—kings. Wasting away in their castles that could be better used a thousand other ways.”

  “It’s your castle now,” I say. “Who says it has to be a castle at all? It could be its own city.”

  He smiles, and his stare is faraway, as though he’s imagining it. “Havalais doesn’t know yet that the old king is dead. There are advisers handling affairs for me while I’m gone, and in secret, Birdie is advising them on my behalf. She’s the only one I trust. If news got out that there is no formal leader, or that a broad is running the show in my absence, Dastor would be at an advantage. It was irresponsible of me to go, but I felt I had to.”

  “To see Celeste,” I say.

  “You make me sound like a lovesick kid.”

  “No shame in that.”

  “Maybe it’s true,” he says. “I did want to see her. I wanted to see her world. To see the city of Internment and the clock tower where she’s lived as a princess, I can finally understand her optimism. Her faith in things.”

  Havalais is quite the opposite of Internment. What it lacks in modesty it makes up for in aggression. Even its beauty is aggressive, with bold music and bright lights and glamorous girls with black lips on silver screens. If Celeste is a product of her world, Nim is a rare creature in his own. All modesty and softness.

  “I admit that I have a hard time seeing things the way she does,” I say. “But I hope she’s right. I hope our two kingdoms really can come together.”

  “There aren’t many things I’m sure of,” Nim says. “But I’m sure about that.”

  The new king is high up in his clock tower, in the royal apartment. He requests to see me alone. Even the patrolman who escorted me waits outside the door.

  He’s standing at the open window when I reach him, staring into the garden of poppies far below.

  “You wanted to see me?” My voice is uncertain; now that he’s had time to reflect, I don’t know what he makes of his father’s murder at my hand. This is the first time we’ve spoken since the melee.

  “There’s to be a ceremony,” he says hollowly. “I’m king now, of course, living and breathing. But tradition dictates a ceremony. It’s what my father did, and his father before him, and so on back to our first king.”

  “You haven’t called me here to advise you on that, have you?” I say. “I wouldn’t know how. Parties are best left to someone like your sister.”

  “Oh, believe me, she’s got plenty of ideas about what I should wear.” He turns to face me, his hands still braced on the window ledge. “I’ve called you to share one of my key ideas. Come over here, would you?”

  Cautiously I approach the window, not entirely certain whether he means to push me through it.

  But as I follow his gesture to look through it, he leans on his forearms and nods to the poppies far beneath us. “That was my sister’s favorite place in the world when we were growing up. She was betrothed to a truly dreadful boy who also happened to be deathly allergic to most flowers. She’d run out to the center of the poppies with her skirts gathered, and she’d stand there taunting him as he demanded her affections.”

  “Sounds quite like her,” I say.

  “I admired her petulance toward him, and her bravery,” he says. “But I also feared it. I thought that if she resisted, she’d be whisked off to one of those camps and that her brains would be scooped out with a spoon until she was nothing but a blubbering mass of compliance.”

  I look at him. “The attraction camps, you mean.”

  “Yes, right. I won’t startle you with the gruesome details, but needless to say I hate it there—not only for what it is, but because it exists at all. So I’m going to do away with it. And that begins with getting rid of betrothals.”

  “Completely?” I say.

  “I’ve always hated that tradition,” he says. “Perhaps it works sometimes—you and your betrothed seem to get on rather well. But my sister chose that limping, haggard boy from Havalais. And what for? Because, as you’ve told me, he’s kind. He’s the opposite of what she was fated to as she fled to the poppies.”

  “He is,” I agree.

  “Would you still choose your betrothed if you had the option?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  He gives me a wan smile. “I’m not questioning your loyalty to Internment’s laws, Stockhour. It’s an honest question. No need to be frightened.”

  Was I frightened? The quickness of my answer was a reflex, brought on by the interrogation my family endured after my brother jumped.

  “It’s not an easy question,” I confess. “I’ve known my whole life that Basil and I were meant to be together. I don’t know how I’d feel if we met only now for the first time, or if he and I had always just been classmates in a crowd. I can tell you only that I love him now as it is.”

  “I suspect many will feel the way you do, and that’s fine,” he says, and raises his chin as though he’s come to an important decision that he’s quite proud of. “But that shall be my first act as king. Keep your betrotheds if you want, but I’m doing away with that archaic custom.”

  “What about ensuring everyone gets a match?” I say. “What about the population?”

  “Not everyone wants a match, and even if they do, they should be free to make that decision. Isn’t that what they do on the ground?”

  I shrug. “They have more space to roam. They do plenty of things down there that I find maddening.” Like a mother abandoning her children so that she might see the world without them.

  “Yes, yes,” he says. “I do think Internment could borrow a bit of their madness. I want to talk to your friend Margaret about the risks of opening a regular flight path to the ground.”

  “If you call her Margaret, she won’t help you at all. It’s Pen.”

  “Fine then. Pen. I asked to see her as well. Where is she?
”

  “She couldn’t leave the hospital just yet. She’s too ill.”

  “That won’t do.” He frowns out at his kingdom. “I’m going to need someone with a head for math and physics giving me counsel.”

  “Her father is the head engineer at the glasslands,” I remind him, and though the idea of Pen’s father being put in a position of power frightens me, he does know quite much about how the city is fueled.

  “Never cared for him—too pleasant, like he’s hiding bodies under the bed,” he says. “Never cared for Pen much, either, but I do admire the way she thinks.”

  “Have you forgiven her for nearly killing you, then?” I say.

  “I admire it, really. She’s not the sort to hide bodies or make pleasantries; with her one always knows where one stands. If I’m to choose anyone for my council, it’s a girl who has no regard for hierarchy.” He gives me a sharp look. “But I order you never to tell her that.”

  “Oh, but of course, Your Majesty.”

  He turns his back to the window and squints at me. “What do you know of her family? Pen’s.”

  My knees go weak, and I disguise it by leaning beside him against the window ledge. “She’s an only child. Her mother is reclusive. Her father works longer hours than most—but you know that already. It’s on the record.”

  “You must know more than that,” he presses. “The two of you are as close to each other as I am to my sister. I can tell. It’s this nearly psychic connection.”

  “Like a double birth,” I say, echoing something Pen has used to describe us before.

  “So you surely must know more than that.”

  I look at him. “Would you give Celeste’s secrets up so easily?”

  His smile is fond and sad. “You’d have to cut them from my veins.”

  “So then you understand.”

  “Can’t blame a king for trying.”

  “Pen is an only child,” I say again. “Her parents didn’t reenter the queue. That’s about all there is to tell.”

  “I’ve been going through my father’s records these last few days. You know there’s a sheet written about everyone in the city. Medical records, mostly. Allergies. Behavioral mishaps. Pen’s mother has quite a few notes.”