All That Glows (11 page)

The prince selects another album from his slimming pile. His fingers brush over it with tender familiarity, wiping away dust and memories as he prepares it for its journey.

His mother’s eyes train in on him like a stalking tiger’s. There’s nothing close to Richard’s grief behind her gaze. It’s all hardness. She’s like a diamond—all the pressures of her life, her lover’s death, have crushed her into something terrifying, unforgiving.

“Didn’t you hear me? We have a meeting with the prime minister and your uncle today to discuss your preparations for the crown.” She stops, just now catching sight of Richard’s garb—jeans and a white V-neck. “You’re not even
dressed
?!”

“Sorry. I forgot.” Something in Richard’s sullen words makes it obvious that he’s lying. That and the fact that Lawton reminded him of the meeting at breakfast this morning.

“They’re expecting us in fifteen minutes, Richard!” His mother grits her teeth. “This meeting is of the utmost importance. You can’t be late.”

“Tell them to reschedule. I’m busy.”

“Reschedule! Don’t you get it? There is no rescheduling! This is the prime minister, Richard, not one of your Eton chums. You’re going to become king in one month! You can’t just ignore it or pretend it’s not going to happen! You have to grow up!” With every word, her voice pitches into a shriek. It’s amazing how, with so much brokenness inside her, she still resembles a perfect, slightly aged porcelain doll.

“I don’t want to go, Mum.” Richard’s words are all the same tone, robotic despite his mother’s awakening temper. “I’m not ready yet. I just need a few days. I thought you’d understand.”

“You see. This. This is what did it—” She stops short. “You can’t keep acting like this. It’s time to grow up.”

But the prince doesn’t let her previous statement go. “This is what did what?”

His mother’s cheeks pale, her mouth pinches with regret. I can tell by watching the curve of her chin that she’s shaking. “Nothing. Forget it. I’ll reschedule the meeting for tomorrow.”

Richard stands. The album he’s sorting tumbles onto the rug. “What did you mean, Mum?”

“I told you to forget it,” she says, eyes flashing. “Tomorrow at noon. Don’t be late.”

She strides out almost as quickly as she exploded in. The door slams behind her, startling and final. Richard stares at it, deadpan.

He turns to me after several seconds. The look behind his eyes is devastated. Smoking ruins. “She thinks I killed him.”

I swallow, not knowing what to say. I want to tell him she didn’t mean it. But it doesn’t take magic to read the thoughts that ran through his mother’s mind.

“I didn’t—” Richard catches his breath. “I never got a chance to apologize. I never got to make things right.”

I slide off the bed, closer to him.

“It’s not your fault he died.” As soon as I say this, I see the danger in my words. Looking at Richard now, his hair dull and shoulders slumped, I know he isn’t ready to know about the Old One. There will be a time to reveal the truth, to inform him of the assassins out for his life. For now, he needs to focus on living itself.

But the prince is so swallowed in his mother’s inference, so drenched in his own guilt, that he doesn’t realize the significance behind my statement. That I know why King Edward died.

“The doctors were always telling him he was putting himself under too much stress. At least, that’s what Anabelle used to tell me. She was always better at talking to him. . . .” His laugh has no joy in it. It’s a breathless thing, blowing stale in the air between us. “The last time I talked to Dad . . . I probably upped his blood pressure by ten points.”

“You didn’t do this,” I say, firmer now.

But he’s not listening. He’s not even here really. He’s back in the turquoise dining room, staring at flower arrangements and fighting off his father’s yells.

My hand finds his. It’s surer this time. The soft skin of my palm absorbs his knuckles. The touch breaks him out of his daydream.

“They want me to take his place, Embers. They want me to be king.” His grip twists and writhes, becomes deathly in mine. So hard my fingers turn numb. “I can’t, I can’t be him.”

“You don’t have to be him,” I tell him, trying to ignore the twinges in my crushed knuckles. He’s stronger than I thought. “You’ll become the king you’re written to be.”

“I can’t—” He stops short, looking all around the room. At the landslide of boxes, the four-poster bed covered in shirts still buttoned on their hangers, the tumbleweeds of hair and dust hovering on the rug’s borderlands. Everything, even the angels on the ceiling, with the paint of their smiles breaking into hairline cracks, feels in shambles. “I have to get out of here.”

Visions of the Darkroom and The Blind Tiger lurch through my head. Light, sweat, nausea, hungry soul feeders.

And now assassins.

No. I have to put my foot down. No more bars. No more watching Richard lose himself to drink.

Before I can tell the prince this, he’s tugging my hand. Pulling me through his piles of unpacked possessions, toward the door.

“Let’s go for a walk. Get some fresh air.”

A walk. Feeling his frantic pull, the way my joints stretch and strain to keep up, I suspect it’s more of a run. Tearing for any chance he has to get away.

Ten

“H
yde Park,” Richard tells his driver.

I swallow back the stirring in my stomach and slide against the car’s leather seats. They hold the shine and smell of polish, awfully pungent in such a cramped space.
Just a short ride
, I tell myself,
then trees and the Serpentine.
A chance to strengthen my magic.

The chauffeur, an older man, peeks into the mirror from beneath his dark cap. “At this hour, sir?”

The driver is right. The afternoon is late, shifting fast into evening. Prowling hours. Even though we’re avoiding the pubs, I’ll have to be wary.

Richard shuts his eyes and rests his head against the window as the driver weaves us in and out of London traffic. I look out of the glass, watching for watchers. Richard’s fingers are still around mine, curling infinitesimal distances, the way ivy slowly invades a wall: crawling, inch by inch, until there’s nothing but leaves to see.

The perimeter, woven tight with wards and spells, is still. The younglings aren’t paying attention to what’s leaving. Only what might come in. I’m glad for it. It would be hard—no, impossible—to explain why my hand is folded into the prince’s.

The whole action, this touch, is against everything I’ve practiced since the day Queen Mab learned of Guinevere’s betrayal and the Pendragon’s death. Though we took on their form and speech, gave up so much of what we were to be close to them, to protect them, we faded into the realm of lore and legend. For entire lifetimes, we were only inches away, always watching, always taking care, and they never knew.

Until now.

I look at our hands. At the gravity of meaning between them, and I feel fear.

The car ride lasts only a few blocks. The air is cool and soothing, cut by the lingering traces of the last few days’ rain. I step out of the car into the borders of Hyde Park and breathe deep. Good green things surround me—keep the nausea at bay. There’s a fresh, minty rush—like wind—threading through my veins. Colors seem brighter, leaves shine almost neon in the reflections of leftover puddles.

Here, out of all the places in London, I feel alive.

Richard catches my eye and glances at his bodyguards. “Do you think you can make them forget? Distract them?” he whispers, words barely formed. His hand clenches tight in mine. “I need for us to be alone.”

I nod and cast the magic. They wander over to a path-side bench and sit.

“They’ll be all right, won’t they?” Richard looks over at the pair. Their heads slump over their shoulders as they drift into a complete, dreamless sleep.

“That spell isn’t harmful.” I feel out into the surrounding hedges. There’s nothing there other than birds, but I can’t ignore the possibility of other immortals in the park. Though Green Women prefer crowded bars and subways, and Banshees haunt wakes, Black Dogs hunt in fringed public places. Alleyways, lonely underpasses, dead, tangled underbrush. Places like Hyde Park.

Richard isn’t thinking about any of this. He’s walking down the path, through puddles, getting as far away as he can from the car. I have no choice but to follow, watching perfect pictures of the sky ripple apart under our feet.

I’m just getting used to the silence, this invisible beat to our stride, when Richard finally speaks. “Who was your favorite king?”

This question feels rambling, desperate. Like a grappling hook violently flung by some plummeting climber.

He sees the way I’m looking at him, trying to dissect and diagnose his hurt. “I have to talk about something. It’s too quiet.”

Partly my fault: my not knowing what to say, how to approach his grief. “My favorite king?”

“Sure.” He shrugs and his walk slows. “Besides Arthur.”

It takes me a moment to adjust my own pace. Our fingers strain against one another. Almost break. “Why do you think Arthur was my favorite?”

“The Pendragon? I mean, c’mon. The man could do no wrong. He’s one step down from a god!”

“Arthur had his faults.” I think of how the Pendragon married off his own sister to a vicious warlord. How pale and shaking she was when she stepped onto that boat with her new husband, began her exile across the sea. I’d always thought ill of Arthur for it. “They all did.” Out of all the names and faces of the royalty I’ve guarded only a few stand out—many terrible and a few exceptionally noble. So many centuries of mortals easily turns into a blur. “My favorite monarch was a queen actually. Elizabeth the first. She’s the reason I turned my hair red.” I brush the ends of my hair with my free hand.

“Why her?”

The path splits. Richard chooses the way. To the right. Away from the sinking sun.

“She knew who she was and what she wanted. She was a survivor. And she held excellent dances.” I sigh at the memory of so many beautiful silk gowns and powdered ladies, spinning endlessly to harpsichords and lutes beneath the candlelight. Such things of beauty have died off under the harshness of stereos and electric bulbs.

“Your father was a good king.” As soon as I say this I wish I hadn’t. It’s all I can do not to use a memory wipe and reel those six words out of Richard’s past.

The prince’s face glows gold in the evening light—giving him a surreal, beyond-human appearance. I watch as the window to his pain flicks past, like the light of a train car at full speed. There and gone.

“I guess he was,” he says after five long steps. Then nothing.

I clear my throat. “You’ll be a good king too.”

He stops walking. His hand falls out of mine. In the far reaches of my chest, beneath flesh, veins, and aorta, there’s a pang.

“It shouldn’t be now. . . .” His Adam’s apple jags across his throat, flatlining after the swallow. “There was supposed to be more time. . . .”

A cloud passes over, low enough to break apart the sun. Richard’s halo is gone.

“I’m not ready,” he says.

“You will be.” I don’t know this for sure, but I say it anyway. It’s what he has to hear.

He shuts his eyes. “How?”

“One step at a time. That’s all it takes.”

“I don’t even know how to begin.”

“Well. You can begin by going to the meeting tomorrow.” I place my hand on his chest, feeling the light cotton fabric of his shirt. It’s a familiar touch. More familiar than it should be. . . . “And by wearing a suit.”

He laughs. The sound rumbles his body, buzzing through my fingers. “Basically catering to Mum, you mean.”

“She means well.” And suddenly this conversation, these words, remind me very much of Anabelle’s civil lecture in the garden. “We don’t have to talk about this anymore, if you don’t want to.”

His eyes open, all tawny and flecked. I see the thanks in them.

“Should we keep walking? Or do you want to go back?”

Richard looks up the path, memorizing its winds and bends. Gently he peels my hand off of his chest. For a moment the air is chill around it, but he doesn’t let go. “Forward.”

I wait until we’re a comfortable distance, in both time and space, from the subject of his future and his father’s death to speak again. “Who was
your
favorite king?”

“I’ve never really thought about it.” He frowns. “Honestly—I fell asleep lots in history. Never got much out of it.”

“Most of it’s depressing.” I catch myself and veer away from the topics of decay, death. “Is there any subject you did enjoy?”

“Polo.” It takes me a moment to realize he’s joking. Only his smile, a brief, faint twitch at the side of his mouth, betrays it. “I dunno. Maths maybe. I was good at it, at least.”

“What about music?” I ask, thinking back to all the coiled, rubber-banded posters wedged between the packing boxes.

There’s the key. The grin is real this time. “Yeah. Mum tried to make me learn piano—I detested it. But guitar . . . God, I loved that thing. I even tried to start a band a few times in fifth form. They never lasted long.”

“Why not?”

“The other guys weren’t so used to the . . .” The prince pauses. His tongue runs quick over his lips as he searches for the perfect word.
“Exposure
. . . that comes with being me. The tabloids picked at them a bit too hard.”

“You could’ve performed on your own.”

“Have you heard me sing?”

I think back to the wailing excuses of lyrics that rose along with the steam through the prince’s bathroom door the first night I revealed myself to him. Before the world around him became too serious for song. “It’s not
so
bad. . . .”

“Are you kidding me?” Richard laughs. “I’m bloody awful!”

The trees crowding along the ribbon of gravel give way to open spaces. The path grows wide under our feet, making room for a series of benches. Richard nudges me toward the closest one, an aged, wooden thing with armrests of intricate metalwork.

“Let’s sit.”