Burning Kingdoms Read online

  Celeste, Basil, and Thomas have formed a sort of bond as well. They are on the outside trying desperately to see through the wall that’s been built between them and the ones they love. And when they can’t console us, they console each other.

  Alice reads on. Fairy tales and novels and plays. No one really pays attention, but I’m grateful to have a familiar voice filling the silence.

  Amy and Judas hover on the outskirts of the room, not daring to approach any of us. It’s as if they know there’s a delicate balance, and one misstep will cause everyone in the house to collapse into a sort of chaos that can’t be undone.

  Pen reads The Text of All Things, and she tries to draw the divinities. She sketches Ehco in many forms, but most prominently as a water monster with human fingers, and screaming mouths for scales. And I begin to think Ehco is real, and that Pen has captured him exactly.

  The sun goes down. Jack Piper doesn’t return, and, uncertain what else to do, everyone goes to bed. Basil carries me up the stairs and feeds me a spoonful of that awful medicine the hospital has given me in a brown glass bottle. “Would you like me to stay until you fall asleep?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. I don’t mean to sound so sharp about it, but I am too drained to bring myself to say I’m sorry.

  He tucks the blankets around me. “I’ll check on you through the night,” he says.

  I close my eyes, hoping that he won’t kiss me good night or say more nice things to me. I have no room in me for affection. I can’t bear to be touched by anyone right now. But my betrothed knows me well, and he leaves.

  I hear footsteps in the hall moments later, and I think he’s come back already, but when I open my eyes, my brother is the one standing in the doorway.

  “Lex?” I say, unbelieving. He has hardly left his room since we arrived.

  “I have the right room, then,” he says. “How cluttered is the floor?”

  “No clutter,” I say. “There’s a bed on the left, and two beds on the right. I’m in the farthest one. I’d guide you, but—”

  “Alice told me you hurt your leg,” he says. “Is it serious?”

  “No. They wrapped it in gauze and sent me home with something in a brown bottle. It’ll be fine.” I’m astounded that he’s here, making his way to me. And without Alice, at that. I have always been the one going to him.

  He feels for the first bed, Pen’s, and then mine, and he sits beside me. I take his hands.

  “You were right, you know,” I say. “This world is miserable and I hate it. The only things I’ve liked about this world are the things Gertrude Piper showed me.” I can’t go on telling him what’s happened to her.

  “You don’t hate it,” he says. “You don’t hate anything. Not truly. You only say that you do sometimes out of anger.”

  “I hate when you tell me what I’m feeling, too,” I say.

  “Don’t confuse my philosophies for yours, Little Sister. I’ll go on hating everything, and you’ll go on finding the good in things that don’t deserve it. And we’ll never agree, but we’ll both be right.”

  “Is that what you’ve come to tell me?” I say.

  “No,” he says. “I came to yell at you for sneaking off in the middle of the night and scaring Alice out of her mind.”

  “Tell Alice that I am most sorry,” I say.

  “I don’t know what you’ve seen, Morgan, but I—”

  “I’d rather not talk about it,” I say.

  “I’ve also, maybe, come to tell you that I’m sorry that it’s come to this. When Mom and Dad and I talked about coming to the ground, we thought it best to shelter you from it, but then, you have to understand that none of us really thought we’d pull it off. We didn’t expect that Daphne Leander would be murdered or that the professor would get the bird running in our lifetime.”

  “What’s done is done,” I say. “Why bring it up now?”

  “Because, after the other night, waiting until dawn to hear whether you were among the casualties in the city, I began to think you might have been safer on Internment. Even with the king’s specialist trying to poison you. I knew Internment had its horrors, but they are nothing compared to this.”

  “How is it that there are two worlds—one in the sky and one on the ground—and I forever feel that I have nowhere to go?” I ask.

  “Internment is still your home,” he says.

  “But there’s nothing left for me there,” I say. “You and everyone else are here. Mom and Dad are dead.”

  “Dad isn’t dead,” he blurts. And immediately I can see that he regrets it. His skin pales and he cannot seem to comfortably place his hands anywhere. For a moment he touches the scrap of cloth around his wrist, nearly identical to mine. A sign that we’re both in mourning.

  Through the haze of shock and grief and utter exhaustion that has numbed me these few days, something within me begins to stir. Something frightening. “What?” I say.

  He has gone as still as a statue.

  “Lex.” My voice is soft because it’s all I can manage. I pull my hands away from his. My bones are shaking. “What are you saying?”

  “He’s not dead for certain, at least,” Lex says. “After Daphne’s murder, when it began to look like we’d really try to get away, Mom and Dad told me that if things went from bad to worse, I was to get you to the bird. Alice and I weren’t to go searching for them. If they didn’t make it back to us in time, I should do whatever was necessary to protect you.”

  “What’s all this talk of you protecting me?” I snap. “I’ve been the one looking after you for the last four years. Who would make sure that you were eating? Who would sit with you when Alice had to run errands all day? Who carried dinner and messages up and down the stairs like a bloody mailboy day and night when Mom was too sad and Dad was too stubborn to deliver them themselves?”

  “You would have tried to find him,” Lex says.

  “Of course I would have tried to find him!” I say. I want to say more, but the words are a frenzy inside me and they’re moving too quickly to make sense.

  “Morgan, try to understand,” he says. For once he isn’t being condescending; he sounds contrite.

  He reaches for my shoulder, but I move away. “No,” I say. “You try to understand. Why should you be the one to decide that we leave him behind? Why shouldn’t I have decided for myself whether to go after him? It’s like you think you are more entitled to them just because you’re older, and you’ve seen the edge, and you were left with scars. I have scars from that day too, Lex. You didn’t take a plunge off Internment’s edge alone, you know. You took us all with you. Mom, Dad, Alice, and me. We’ve all had to watch as it took over our lives. That day you crossed the tracks, you didn’t think about what would happen to us, not at all. You didn’t need Mom and Dad anymore, but I still needed them.” My voice has gotten louder, but it cracks. “I needed them.”

  My breathing is rapid. “You took our parents from me once before. How could you do that to me again?” I would like to run away now, but my leg wouldn’t oblige.

  My reaction has Lex afraid, and I wonder at what he expected. “Morgan, please,” he says. He tries to touch me and I move away and I hit him, push him, say such awful, hateful things that it’s as though something has taken over my tongue and I am powerless to stop it. I scarcely know what I’m saying. The words get louder until my voice becomes a scream. He won’t leave me. Why won’t he leave? He’s trying to find and hold my hands—the only pieces of me that are still familiar to him.

  I hear footsteps running up the stairs, and then Alice and Basil and Pen are in the room. Alice pulls Lex off the bed, and Pen wraps her arms around me, rocking me and whispering, “Shh, shh, Morgan, shh.” After what happened to us at the harbor, she can’t stand the thought of seeing any more pain. She looks at my brother. “What in the world did you do to her?”

  Neither of us answers. I’ve broken into tears. I see explosions, explosions, explosions, Birdie fighting feebly for her life, my fath
er’s sad eyes, the creases in his patrolman’s uniform. My brother was the selfish one, he said, but not me. Never me.

  I’m choking on the memory of smoke, and the tears and the saliva that’s pooling around my teeth. I make the most hideous sobbing sounds. They surely aren’t human.

  I see Lex with his head down, Alice’s arm around him, and I can’t be certain, but I think he’s crying too. I’ve never spoken to him this way. The way Alice frowns at me tells me that she knows what’s happened. Has she known this whole time? I can’t stand the thought that she would betray me, too.

  “Morgan, you have to calm down,” Pen says. “You’re going to make yourself sick.”

  “I needed them,” I murmur through my sobs.

  “Shh, shh.”

  Basil brings a wet cloth, and he dabs at my face and the sides of my neck. “What happened?” he says, once Lex is gone and I’ve settled some.

  “I’ll never forgive him,” I say. “Not for this.”

  “Yes you will,” Basil says. “He’s still your brother. You’ve just had a fight, is all.”

  “Some fight,” Pen says. “What did he do, Morgan?”

  “He lied,” I say. I don’t tell them any more than that; I have no idea what to do with what I’ve just learned.

  My brother tells me that I don’t know how to truly hate, but I can’t think of a person in this world or the next that I hate more than him. It’s ugly and dark, and it scares me the way that the explosions at the harbor scared me.

  Basil and Pen sit with me while my body calms. My face loses its heat; my lungs take up a gentler rhythm; my tears dry and the gurgling coughs die away. But the hatred stays. It is inside me and around me.

  Nimble knocks on the doorframe. He could be a ghost. A ghost in a sling and pin-striped pajamas. He’s got a bottle and a spoon in his hand. “This will put you to sleep,” he tells me. “I thought you might need it.” He sets them on the night table beside The Text that’s bookmarked by a pencil and pad, which Pen has been using to take copious notes. He leaves without another word.

  The liquid is amber, and it tastes like every bitter thing combined, but before long my eyelids are heavy. “On Internment we have pills, but on the ground they have bottles and spoons,” I say. “It isn’t very different.”

  “Good night,” Basil whispers. I see light against my eyelids as his shadow leaves me, and I reach out and grab his arm.

  “Stay,” I murmur. I move to make room for him on the mattress. “Please stay.”

  “Okay.” He’s still whispering, trying to keep the tentative calm the medicine has caused me. “I’m here.”

  He climbs in beside me, and I wrap myself around his arm, pressing my cheek to his shoulder so hard, it starts to hurt. I’m so grateful for him, grateful that if I had to fall through the sky, he chose to fall from it too. I want to tell him, but the words dissolve along with consciousness, and everything is beautifully, peacefully, medicinally dark.

  Rather than dreaming, I relive another memory.

  I’m small, and I’m thinking of how big Lex is getting, and how like our father he is. So serious at thirteen. He’s starting to get bulging veins in his hands; he says it’s because he’s taken to running. He likes to do things that get his heart racing. He likes to feel the throb in his throat and to lose his breath and know that his body is working. I like to run, too, and he says that when children do it, it’s not the same, but he can teach me when I’m older.

  My father picks me up over his head, and I laugh as all my thoughts break like the sunlight on the water. Internment is on fire in the minutes before the stars start coming through.

  My father’s uniform is crisp; it whispers as he reaches up to steady me on his shoulders.

  We’re watching the fire in the water, and he tells me, “You’re getting too big for this.”

  “I’m not bigger than I was yesterday,” I say.

  “A bit,” he says. “A fraction every day.”

  “I don’t want veins in my hands,” I say.

  He laughs. I don’t think he knows what I mean.

  I begin to worry for what the stars will bring as they appear, one at a time, in the darkening sky.

  Jack Piper returns in the morning. The cooks, restless by the lack of routine, are serving breakfast. A few of us are even sitting down to humor the idea.

  We all turn at the gust of wind Jack Piper has brought in with him.

  He does not look as bereft as I think he should. “Everyone, get changed into your dress clothes,” he says. “Meet at the cars in twenty minutes.”

  “Where are we going?” Marjorie asks.

  “We’re going to bury your brother,” he says.

  Annette’s eyes are wide and they fill with tears. “Without a church funeral?” she says. “The priest has to say the burial prayer. If he doesn’t say the prayer, how will Riles be able to get to heaven?”

  “You can ask Nimble,” Jack Piper says, as he steps outside again. “This is his fault.”

  It is the most horrible thing I have ever heard anyone say. Annette runs from the table, sobbing. Nimble puts his face in his hand. Celeste grabs his chin, forcing him to look at her, and she stares at him, hard. She kisses him, and it’s no matter who sees it. The rules of decorum have died along with the casualties of the explosions. “It’s not your fault,” she says. “It’s not.”

  He shakes his head, pushes himself away from the table. “I’d better get changed,” he says. “He’ll leave in twenty minutes whether we’re ready or not.”

  We all leave the table. Basil helps me up the steps, and then I try to situate myself using the crutches that the hospital gave me. I’m a little wobbly, but I’m able to move about, at least.

  Pen and Celeste and I change into dresses that Mrs. Piper left behind along with her children.

  “He doesn’t want their mother here,” Celeste says, helping me with my zipper. “That’s probably why the burial is today. He doesn’t know how long it will take for her to hear what’s happened to Riles. That’s what Nim said.”

  “This family doesn’t make any sense,” Pen says. She watches Celeste brush her hair in the mirror. “Where’s your betrothal band?” she asks.

  “I removed it,” Celeste says coolly. “It was about time.”

  Pen narrows her eyes, but says nothing. She holds my crutches and wraps her arm around me as we make our way down the stairs. It doesn’t seem fair that my only discomfort is an injured leg, while Birdie clings to life all alone in a bed somewhere, and Riles is to spend eternity in the dirt.

  Marjorie and Annette have buttoned the wrong buttons on their dresses, and the hair on their heads is a mess. They looked pristine every morning by the time the tutor came around, and I now suspect that was Birdie’s doing.

  I fix their dresses while Pen brushes their hair, and they begin to resemble something like themselves, but with droopy eyes and gray faces.

  Annette looks at me as I straighten her collar. “Is my sister going to come home?” she asks.

  “I know that she wants to come home more than anything else,” I tell her. “But right now she needs to be near the doctors so that they can make her better.”

  Annette looks at her shoes and nods. I don’t know whether she believes me, but I seem to have brought her no comfort.

  “Is there anything that would make you smile, Annie? Even for just a teensy second?” I ask. “I’ve always thought your smiles have real sunlight in them.”

  “Really?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “A kiss, then,” she says, tapping her cheek. “Right here. But when you do it, you have to make a funny noise like Birdie does.”

  “A funny noise, huh?” I say.

  Marjorie, standing a pace away, peeks through her haze of grief with a bit of curiosity on her face.

  “Like this?” I say. I kiss Annette’s cheek, and when I do, I purse my lips and exhale from one cheek until a loud and bizarre sound comes out.

  Annette’
s shoulders convulse with giggles. “Yes,” she says.

  “Are you sure it isn’t more like this?” I say, and this time I make a different sound. She wraps her arms around my neck and gives me the same sort of kiss. She’s laughing, and so are Marjorie and Pen; even Nimble smirks from where he’s standing in the doorway. And I could swear the room gets a little brighter, as though we’ve invited the sunlight through the windows.

  The sunlight is a skittish thing, though, and it flees when Jack Piper comes through the front door. The giggling stops and the youngest Pipers straighten their skirts, feel their hair to be sure it is perfect.

  Jack Piper doesn’t have to say anything. The girls know to follow their brother. They have always moved according to height, and now there’s a gap where Birdie, followed by Riles, should march for the door.

  Celeste follows after them, frowning at the back of Nimble’s head. Pen helps me manage my crutches and get into the car.

  I wind up wedged between Judas and Basil. “Where’s Amy?” I ask Judas.

  “She thought the graveyard might trigger a fit,” he says, at a volume only I’m meant to hear. “She didn’t want to cause an interruption.”

  With all that’s happened, I haven’t had a chance to check on Amy. She’s got an extra sense about death, and I wonder if she felt it when the first bomb hit the harbor. When she told me of her dream about Internment falling from the sky, perhaps she had her facts confused, and what she was seeing was that attack.

  “Feeling okay?” Basil asks me.

  “It’s impossible to be in high spirits on the way to something like this.”

  “I meant about last night,” he says.

  “I’ve put it aside for now.”

  “I could talk to him, if you’d like,” Basil says. “I hate to see the two of you at odds.”

  “There’s nothing left to talk about,” I say. “Let it go.” I feel guilty enough harboring so much anger for my brother when the Piper children are about to bury theirs. When I see the cemetery gates, a heaviness settles on my chest.