Broken Crowns (10 page)

He pales at that. Swallows a hard lump in his throat and goes on, “When King Ingram asked which one of you should be used as symbols, I chose the pair of you because of your dumb expressions. Look at you—you're utterly harmless. Nobody would suspect you had a valuable thought in your head. But that friend of yours is another story. My sister told me all about how brilliant she is and on this front, I believe her.”

“Why did you choose me, then? If you want to save Internment so badly and Pen's so valuable?”

Prince Azure closes his eyes for a long, painful moment. “Because I do not want her helping my father. Or King Ingram. I no longer believe either of them can do what's best for Internment.”

“We agree, then,” I say. “Your father is doing more harm than good.”

Prince Azure waves his hand. “Fine. Let's be candid. Yes, I agree with you. My father's way may have been sinister at times, but it worked when Internment was self-contained. He had people killed in the interest of suppressing riots that would have destroyed the city. But now things have changed. I need you and that betrothed of yours to go up there with your dumb expressions and play the part of two harmless idiots. I need you to talk to my sister. She'll know what needs to be done. And moreover, I need you to look after her.”

I blink. “I thought you were coming back with us.”

“You don't get it, do you?” he says. “I'm not here by choice, Stockhour.”

King Ingram has spotted us, and from across his party he calls our names, waving us enthusiastically back into the party.

I follow after Prince Azure, with a lead anchor in the pit of my stomach.

When I return to the hotel, I fall into bed without bothering to unpin my hair or scrub the cosmetics from my skin.

Pen climbs into the bed with me and for the longest time we don't speak. My back is turned to her, and I'm watching the curtain arch around the open window like a force field when the wind comes.

“I've been thinking about the gardens of stones,” she says.

“The graveyards?”

“Yes. Those. I've been thinking about all those bodies beneath the earth just rotting and feeding the worms and the soil. On Internment we burn everything away—the skin and the bones, the brain, the heart, until there's just dust.”

She rests her chin on my shoulder. “But down here, what's left inside these people who are buried? Do they still hold on to the secrets that people have told them? Where does it all go?”

“I don't know,” I say.

“I think we have a lot in common with the dead,” Pen says. “We're filled with things we won't say out loud. Things that get trapped inside us that nobody will ever hear.”

When I leave, is she going to go on having thoughts like this? “We aren't dead,” I remind her. “What we say or don't say, the secrets we do or don't keep—those are all choices. Conscious choices we get to make while we're alive.”

“I thought you'd see it that way.” She lies back against the pillow. “If there's anyone I can tell my secrets to, it's you, Morgan. You'll keep them if I ask, won't you?”

“Of course I will.”

I understand now what is about to happen. Several months ago, I discovered one of her secrets on a piece of paper that was meant to be burnt at the Festival of Stars. It was the most desperate, hateful thing I'd ever seen her draw: buildings with the word “die” making up their bricks and plumes of chimney smoke. We fought each other to the ground over that bit of paper and she never fully explained what it meant.

That secret has taken on a body of its own. It sits between us all the time, this thing we don't acknowledge.

She turns away from me and settles with the back of her head against mine. “It started the day my father took me to the glasslands,” she says. “It was evening and we were alone. He said we were going to share a secret, he and I. I knew that something was wrong, because he'd never so much as talked about his work with me, much less taken me to see it.” She is very still as she talks.

I don't understand but I don't ask. I know that if I interrupt, she will stop this story and never begin again. “I don't even remember if I looked at him. I remember the spire filling up with orange light as the sun went down. I remember reciting a poem in my head. You know, the one we read in kinder year about the flowers being the eyes of the god in the sky, spread out to keep watch over us. I recited it over and over until the words didn't seem like words anymore.

“That was the first time.”

I close my eyes tight against the words she is about to say.

“After that, he started coming to my bedroom when it was late. Usually just as the sky was changing before the sunrise. I told Mother about it. She was still good back then. She still had her wits. She went right to the clock tower, to speak to one of the king's advisers.

“But what could be done when my father was so important to the glasslands? He's one of their top engineers. He was in the middle of a project to outfit older buildings with electricity. The king didn't want a scandal. So it was decided that I was mistaken, then. I had to speak to a specialist and explain, once a week, why I wouldn't stop telling these lies.

“Do you know what I remember most, though? All the lines that started appearing in my mother's face. You'd think I'd be the one crying about it, but it was never me. It was always her. Breaking into hysterics while she was washing the dishes, or going for these long walks and not returning until after my father had gone to sleep. She never slept herself, and she was prescribed tonic. As much as she wanted. As much as it would take to drown her thoughts.”

My nails are digging into my palms, and I hold my breath for long stretches, exhaling slowly, silently. I always blamed Pen's mother for her battle with tonic. Vilified her at times for spreading that toxic addiction to her only daughter like a terminal disease. I never once thought that there might have been a cause.

“There are dozens of men like my father on Internment. Maybe even hundreds. Even if you look, you won't see them. Every king knows what happens in his kingdom. He knows how to hide things. I'm not afraid of my father anymore. I don't know that I ever was. I've been afraid of what would happen to my mother and me if anyone found out. My mother can't handle herself the way that I can. She's like a train car that only goes backward. Around and around all the time in the wrong direction, and there's nothing I can do to even slow her down. It wasn't always that way, I think, but it has been for as long as I've been alive. I suppose I can't blame my father for all of her madness. I don't believe in that. I don't believe in letting other people be the reason we turn out the way that we do.

“Thomas doesn't know. He absolutely can't. He may not seem like much, but if he found out, I know that he would do something as violent as it is stupid.” She's right. The boy has no sensibility when it comes to her, he loves her so. “I've found ways to handle it myself. I've started keeping a knife under my pillow, and the last time he came into my room, I pretended to be asleep until he came close, and then I had the knife at his cheek and I asked him how he would explain his injuries at work tomorrow. He does so value his charming smile. That's how he gets everyone to trust him.”

The curtain falls limp as the wind leaves it. Insects impassively go on with their songs.

For the first time all night, Pen's voice loses its cool detachment and she sounds small. “Say something.”

Say something.

After Lex's incident I modeled myself after her. I wanted to be as strong for my parents as she was for her declining mother. I foolishly believed that we had something in common, something we didn't have to talk about. Every night while I slept safely in my bed, while my greatest problem was that I didn't have the attention I craved, the light was being stolen from Pen's spirit, and I saw nothing, did nothing. And rather than bonding over our tragic little lives, the real truth was that our childhood was disappearing behind our footfalls as we walked, hand in hand, down very different paths.

“I remember this one December, we must have been seven or eight,” I say. “We were at the Festival of Stars. My brother was supposed to come and light our papers for us, but you had been bouncing all day; you had thought of something really important to ask for, and you couldn't wait any longer. So you climbed onto one of the picnic tables so you could reach the flame lantern. I couldn't have stopped you if I'd tried. The fire burnt right down to your fingers before you let the paper go and it spiraled away from you. You stood there in your white dress, the hem and ribbons already stained by the grass, and you watched your flame disappear into a sky that was already on fire.”

The sun was deep orange, like it was bleeding into the sky, and everything—our whole world—had seemed ablaze.

“You were beautiful. You were the bravest and most powerful thing in the sky.”

I turn to face her in the darkness. The moonlight clings to the curve of her cheek. “I still see that girl when I look at you,” I say. “I always will.”

Pen closes her eyes, and her stoic expression melts.

“No one has ever seen me the way you do,” she says.

It's early when Nim knocks
at my door. The sun itself is still sleeping. “We'll be leaving in a half hour,” he says, and then he's gone. I'm uncertain whether or not I've slept. I didn't dream, and spent most of the night in silence, with Pen just as silent beside me.

I light a candle so I can see what I'm doing, but I don't turn on the light as I slip into a dress from the closet. It's satin with a drop waist, and a sequined collar. The fashion will startle the king, if he bothers to notice.

I thought Pen was sleeping, but she sits up and watches me attempt to brush the tangles from my hair. “I told you not to go to bed with all those pins in it.”

“What do you think everyone back home will say about this dress?” I say, and can't help but grin.

“It's positively scandalous,” Pen says, dropping back against the pillows with a flourish. Staring up at the ceiling, she says, “Are you nervous about flying in the jet?”

“After tumbling to the earth in the professor's metal bird, it's a relief to be flying in something with a proper engine.”

“That bird was quite impressive, though,” Pen says. “It had a full kitchen. I think we could have lived there if things had gone differently. For a while, at least.”

“You should draw it,” I say. “Not like a map, but a full rendition, with the bolts and gears and everything.”

“I don't know if I remember it clearly enough now.”

“Of course you do. Your mind works that way. You capture images of things and they stay up in your head forever.”

She sits up again, turns on the lamp, and looks at me. “I hope you're right.”

It's painful to take in the sight of her. Twin braids. Sleepy green eyes. Defiant smirk that never really leaves her lips. I saw it even after her body was pulled from the water, taunting death itself.

She squints curiously at me. “What is it?”

“I'm just thinking is all.”

“Yes, thank you, I gathered that much.”

Everything has changed. That's what I'm thinking. The way I saw the world has changed. The way I saw life. But Pen still looks the same. My beautiful Pen, who has given me her ugliest secret.

“Do you really want the truth?” I ask.

“Yes, I really do.”

“I'm thinking that when I go home, I don't know what will be waiting for me, but I hope that I can find your father—in your apartment or just leaving the glasslands. I'm thinking I'd like to stop his heart. It isn't right. What he did. It isn't right that Daphne and my mother and how many others had to die such awful deaths, but he goes on as though he's done nothing wrong.”

Her face softens. Her eyes have awoken now.