Burning Kingdoms (9 page)

The king, for all the grandeur of his home, is unremarkable to look at. He is short and slight with hair that is slicked back to curl up at the nape of his neck. He wears a dark suit with elaborate copper-colored lapels that disappear over his shoulders. While Nimble wears a pair of round lenses over his eyes, King Ingram has only one, attached to his pocket by a gold chain. He brings it to his left eye as he studies us.

“I guess I’m in the presence of two princesses?” He sits at an armchair in a beam of light that seems all too planned.

“You flatter me, Your Majesty,” I say, and the words are sour on my tongue. “But there is only one princess of Internment, and she’s standing beside me.”

“Celeste Furlow,” she says. Her smile has gotten tight. She is accustomed to formalities, but even she can’t be sure what to make of this king’s behavior.

I’m beginning to like him.

“They’ve been our houseguests,” Nimble says, winking at Celeste when he thinks no one will notice. “And the princess was especially interested in helping with the war effort.”

“Mr. Piper tells me you’re from the floating island,” King Ingram says, and waves for us to sit. “I’ve been out to see the thing that brought you to our humble kingdom. What kind of airplane is that?”

After a silence, I realize I’m the only one in the room who can answer.

“The professor has never called it an airplane, Your Majesty. Actually, that’s a word we don’t have on Internment.”

“What she means, Your Majesty, is that we haven’t built any sort of aircrafts, yet,” Celeste says, eager to preserve our city’s integrity. I can hear in her voice that she’s embarrassed, and it angers me. Internment is a brilliant place, and she should be proud to have called it home. She should miss it at least marginally. How could she not? It’s a knife to the heart every time I look up and find that the clouds conceal it from my view. I feel ousted.

“Internment had no intention of building an aircraft,” I say. “There are winds that surround our city, and anyone who tries to leave is either injured or killed.”

“Nonsense,” the king says, though he looks at me with interest. “How are you here, if that’s the case?”

I’m not sure I want to tell him about the rebellion, or the seedy behavior of King Furlow. I question Celeste’s motives, but I’m not ready to dismiss her claim that the two cities can work together somehow. So I only say, “It was an experiment several decades in the making. The professor devised a way to burrow through the bottom of the city. He doesn’t believe it would be possible to return. Not in his machine, at least.”

Behind its lens, the king’s eye brightens with intrigue. And I realize that I’ve just said too much even before he says, “You all left Internment expecting to never see it again?”

“What she means to say—” Celeste begins, but the king interrupts.

“She doesn’t need you to speak for her. She isn’t a mute. Go on, Miss . . .”

“Stockhour,” I say. “Morgan Stockhour, Your Majesty. And I only meant to say that—well, you could consider us explorers, I suppose.” It’s a weak attempt to bandage what I’ve done.

Celeste moves in quickly. “We have scopes—much like the ones you use to see the stars and our island—and the kings of Internment have been studying your technology for generations. We felt confident that you would devise a way to reach us soon. We thought it should be time to greet you, so you’d know a bit about us.”

Flawless. She must have been planning what she was going to say. She raises her chin, quite proud of herself.

“So you came down to welcome us,” King Ingram says skeptically.

“There was something else,” Nimble says. “Her Highness is too modest to bring it up unprompted.”

“Oh?” the king says.

Celeste’s face becomes guarded. She sits, prim and rigid. She folds her hands in her lap. “As you can imagine, Internment being so small, there’s only so much room for advancement.” She lowers her eyes, composing herself, and then she looks at the king. “My mother, the queen, is rather ill. She’ll die soon if she isn’t treated.”

And with those few words, it all makes sense. The tranquilizer darts, and holding me hostage while demanding information. Not telling her father or the patrolmen the truth when we escaped and injured her brother in the process. The stowing away, holding a knife to Thomas’s throat so we wouldn’t cast her out.

She wasn’t a bratty princess discontent with her tiny paradise and striving for grander things, and she wasn’t trying to torment us like the game she hunted for amusement. She was desperate.

King Ingram takes this as a bit of politics. “We know you haven’t got a sister,” he says. “Is there a prince?”

“Yes, my older brother.” Celeste hesitates. “He’s incapacitated at the moment.”

King Ingram tucks his lens into his breast pocket, pats it into place. “So I have Internment’s heiress presumptive in my parlor?” he says.

“Yes,” she says, with some difficulty. “If you’d like to call it that.”

“It isn’t a matter of what I like to call it,” the king says. “Your mother is dying, and your brother isn’t fit to inherit the throne—”

“Not at the moment, Your Majesty, but—”

“So at the moment, you are it.” He smiles, all the lines in his face spreading out, making him a drawing of himself. He breaks into a laugh that is startling, coming from a man so small in stature. “I think you should embrace it,” he says. “You’re your kingdom’s only hope. Yes, I believe we can work together. I’d be a fool to say no.”

I don’t know what this means. I only know I’ve given up the idea that I’ll like him.

There is talk of airplanes and biplanes and altitudes and atmospheres. According to King Ingram, Internment sits above the troposphere at thirty-five thousand feet, in a zone called the stratosphere. The most powerful planes the kingdom has to offer right now are hardly capable of leaving the troposphere and are unable to endure the stratosphere anyway. But there is talk of a new sort of plane that may be able to reach Internment. A jet, he calls it.

“We had a lot of fancy hopes about visiting the floating island,” King Ingram says. “But then the war began and we’ve had bigger fish to fry. There is an archipelago that sits between the kingdom of Havalais and the kingdom of Dastor. King Erasmus and I are having, shall we say, a disagreement about who should have it.”

“An archipelago is a cluster of islands,” Nimble tells us.

“Yes, thank you, I gathered,” Celeste says, though I’m sure she hadn’t. We would have no cause to know something like that. I’ve only just learned what an ocean is. Celeste looks to the king. “Am I to understand that this war is all about a cluster of islands?”

“It isn’t the islands,” the king says. “They’re too small to be inhabitable. But they contain something precious. There is a substance that occurs naturally beneath its soils, called phosane. When it is in rock form, it isn’t of much use. But once melted down and refined, a few gallons could fuel a city for a year.”

If the war seemed absurd when I thought it was being fought over islands, I think it’s doubly absurd now that I know it’s being fought over fuel. Sunlight is always free and fuels Internment, and there’s plenty of that to go around. But I don’t say that, for I will surely talk myself into a corner again.

“I’m certain my father would love to help, speaking on his behalf,” Celeste says. “If you were able to return us to Internment and your doctors were willing to help my mother, I’m sure he would allow you to use Internment as a sort of base. It’s quite a vantage point, you must agree.”

This is exactly what Pen was against. My heart palpitates at the thought. How could Celeste be the daughter of a king and truly not see the risk of what she is doing?

Or perhaps she sees it, but the alternative is to let her mother die.

And now I’m thinking of my own mother, turned away from me in what I thought was sleep. Wouldn’t I have saved her if I could? And my father, killed in the melee. And Lex, who was once so full of energy and life but who is broken now. I would want to save all of them, and the last thing on my mind would be the cost.

7

Celeste is quiet
during the drive back to the hotel. She catches herself fidgeting several times and tries to still herself.

Havalais passes by our windows, less intriguing now that we’ve seen it all before. The sun is bright and the snow is beginning to puddle. I can see traces of sidewalk and grass. I wonder if the grass could ever recover from such a long burial, but I don’t ask. Everyone in the car is respecting this tight silence.

Once we’ve returned to the hotel, Jack leaves us at the door and drives off to park in the carriage house.

Judas and Amy are in the distance, heavily clothed and fashioning some poor animal out of snow. They meet my eyes, expectant, inquisitive.

“Morgan,” Celeste says. Her voice is uncharacteristically gentle. “I see no need for everyone on the ground to know about my mother. As someone who has endured her own hardships, surely you can understand why I’d like to keep something like this private.”

“Of course,” I say. And I do. It’s the first time since the night she dragged me, paralyzed, to her tower that I feel I understand anything about her.

“Especially not that incessant friend of yours.” She can’t quite look up from the snow.

“Celeste?”

“Yes?”

I touch her shoulder. Startled, she looks at my hand against the plaid wool. But she doesn’t move away. Maybe some part of her understands that this is it, our fate, and small comforts are the only reward she will have for her valiant efforts. “I really am so sorry about your mother.”

She almost smiles, and offers the very slightest of nods.

“I should see what Nim is up to,” she says. “Excuse me.”

As soon as she’s gone, Pen and Birdie burst through the front door. It’s nice to see that they’ve both recovered so well from last night’s adventure. Pen throws a string of pearls around my neck and then tugs them, harnessing me to within a breath of her face. “You have to tell us
everything
,” she says.

I glance behind her to the open door, where the younger children are chasing each other around the lobby.

“It doesn’t have to be here,” Birdie says. “We can go anywhere. I’m all caught up on my lessons for the day.”

I nod to Judas and Amy, who are still making some effort at that snow animal while pretending they aren’t straining their ears. “We should invite them along,” I say. “And Basil and Thomas.”

Pen makes a sour face. “Must we bring Thomas?”

“This will concern them, too,” I say. “I’ll talk to Lex and Alice tonight.”

“Why don’t they ever leave their room?” Birdie says. “I only catch the redhead when she’s on her way to the water room. She’s a real doll. So gorgeous. And my sisters love her.”

Birdie can’t know how sad it makes me to be reminded of Alice’s beauty, and the things she and my brother could have had, if only.

“It’s complicated,” is all I can say.

Pen comes to my rescue by shouting to Judas and Amy, “Come on, then! We all know you want to.” She goes inside to find the boys, and as Judas and Amy approach, I turn to Birdie.

“Can you borrow the car?” I ask. “Or should we take the ferry?”

“Nim would be fit to be tied if I even asked about the car.” She rolls her eyes. “Now that the sun’s out, I thought we could rent an elegor.”

“What’s an elegor?” Amy asks, excited.

“A very big and very slow animal,” Birdie says. “We could rent one for the day, and for a few rubes the boys at the rental place will hook a cart up to it.”

“What do they look like?” Amy asks.

“They’re nifty; you’ll love them,” Birdie says. “They’re bigger than a car, and they have dark silky eyelashes that are as long as your hand.” She holds up her gloved hand. “And they can’t go very fast, but they love it when you talk sweet and feed them sugarcane.”

Basil, Pen, and Thomas meet us outside and we start walking. Birdie is telling Amy about the pen of elegors in the city, how they like to be patted on the cheek, and how very human they can be when it comes to emotions.

I walk between Basil and Judas, and my silence must be torturing them, because finally Judas says, “How doomed are we?”

“I don’t know that we are,” I say.

Pen is skipping over the cracks in the sidewalk. “I’ve been thinking,” she says.

“What’s that, darling?” Thomas asks.

“Once all the clouds clear up, we’ll see Internment again. I was thinking it can be our star.” She nearly crushes a limp weed that has grown through a crack. She will let it live, in case it should bloom when the weather turns warmer. “I was thinking that would be better than not having it at all.”