Burning Kingdoms

by Lauren DeStefano

  I help her under the covers. “What do you suppose that princess is off doing?” she mumbles into her pillow.

  I fall gratefully into my bed. “Whatever it is, we can’t let on that we knew she was gone.”

  “She’s only a princess,” Pen says. “We’re queens now, remember.”

  I close my eyes and see Internment cloaked in silver. Everyone has black lips and ringed eyes. The train pulls across the screen, and I’m not awake to see the last car go by.

  6

  “Up and at ’em!” Annette says, knocking on our door as she makes her rounds through the hotel. She’s done this every morning since we arrived. I hear the phrase echo what seems to be a thousand times as she knocks on all the doors.

  Pen whimpers and pulls the blanket over her head.

  Celeste stirs in the bed across from mine. She must have come in sometime after Pen and I snuck in, and though she makes no complaint, I can see by her heavy feet and her bleary eyes that she’s worse off for it.

  “Morgan,” she says. “Did your father ever mention anything about the glasslands to you?”

  “Why would he?” I say. I crane my neck to have a look at myself in the mirror, and what I see is enough to make me want to stay in bed.

  “I just assumed that as a patrolman he might have been called there.”

  “He didn’t discuss his work with me,” I say. The throbbing in my head steals my attention from the aching in my chest; she speaks so casually of my father, when her father is the reason he’s dead.

  Celeste moves behind the changing screen, and moments later her nightgown has been flung upon its edge.

  “Don’t suppose you’d know much about your father’s work there, Margaret,” she says.

  “Never call me that,” Pen says from beneath her covers. “And what would you know about my father’s work?”

  “I make it a point to know about the people of Internment,” Celeste answers pertly.

  “Well, then,” Pen says. “You know I think you should take a running jump from that window there.”

  “He works there, doesn’t he?” Celeste says, her condescending cheer undeterred by Pen’s tone. “Today I have an audience with the king, and I only thought, if either of you possessed knowledge His Majesty might find useful, I could invite you along. I’m a little too nervous, I admit, to go alone.”

  Pen sits up. Her hair is an electrocuted blond animal atop her head. “The king? How did you manage that?”

  Celeste emerges from behind the screen and reaches for the brush on her night table. “Despite your opinion of me, Pen”—she says her name pointedly—“I am the daughter of a king. And this is a war. I’m the only one to negotiate on my father’s behalf.”

  Pen is all at once very sober. She throws back her blankets and stands. “You can’t really be saying you mean to involve Internment in this mess down here. You can’t think that’s what your father would want.”

  Celeste laughs at the mirror. “I think I know my father much better than you. And I intend to convey his support to King Ingram. My brother, the prince, would back me up.” Her eyes linger on Pen. “But he isn’t here.”

  Pen is clutching her collar, twisting the fabric in her fist. “This is not Internment’s war,” she says. “Thank goodness the people of the ground can’t reach Internment, or they’d destroy it.”

  Celeste smiles. It is a daydreaming, hopeful smile. “Oh, but soon they will,” she says. “They have mechanical birds—planes, they call them—that can go nearly as high as Internment. And they’re learning more and building upon them every day. It’s only a matter of time.”

  Pen looks as though she’ll be sick. She’s right. Internment would be very easy to destroy; it’s no match for the ground’s warfare.

  What has my blood going cold is the thought that Celeste is right, too.

  “So, Pen is clearly not interested,” Celeste says, turning to face me. “What about you, Morgan? I could use a fellow citizen from the magical floating island.” She can’t help giggling at the name they’ve given us. “And as the daughter of a patrolman, surely you know more than you give yourself credit for.”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’d like to go. Thank you.”

  Pen opens her mouth to speak, but then she closes it and stumbles from the room at a run. I wince at the sound of the water room’s door closing.

  Celeste sets her hairbrush down. “See you at breakfast,” she says cheerily.

  I find Pen sitting on the edge of the tub, red-faced and watery-eyed. I can smell that she’s just been sick. It isn’t just the tonic—she can hold that quite well—but the thought of losing her home for a second time.

  “They can’t,” she whispers. “Tell me they can’t reach Internment.”

  “I’ll find out all that I can,” I say, running a cloth under the cold water and then handing it to her. “Let’s not panic until I’ve seen the king.”

  She stares at me, horror in her eyes.

  “Pen? I’m going to find you something to wear, and we’re going to have breakfast, and we aren’t going to panic.”

  She nods dazedly.

  “Say it.”

  “We aren’t going to panic,” she repeats.

  After a deep breath, she’s ready to face the morning.

  We find Basil and Thomas at the bottom of the stairs. “Morning,” I say, perhaps too brightly. I kiss Basil’s cheek.

  I nudge Pen, which prompts her to give Thomas a flat, if troubled, stare. “Good morning,” she says. It puts her under his immediate scrutiny. I can see as much in his eyes.

  Basil is looking at me the same way.

  “Oh, all right,” I say. “Birdie showed us where the tonic was last night and we were up late in her room talking and sharing a bottle.”

  I’m startled by how easily the lie comes. I’ve never lied to Basil. But while the people of the ground find magic in the floating island, they are perhaps too blind to see the magic that hides in this city, in silver screens and brass clubs and the beautiful thieves that live in the ocean, who carry stolen trinkets from the human world to depths beyond even the sunlight’s reach.

  I feel an inexplicable need to protect that magic. Or to keep it for myself, buried in the blood that rushes around my beating heart.

  Pen has no trouble with the lie. Secrets have always comforted her. “Don’t look at me that way,” she tells Thomas, and shows him the back of her ring hand. “I didn’t lose my virginity in a card game. I’m still your betrothed, no matter how far we both fall from the clouds.”

  I’ve no idea why I find this so funny. Perhaps she said it to amuse me.

  Thomas clears his throat and then looks between Pen and me. “Word is this morning that you’re going to meet King Ingram.”

  “Morgan is,” Pen says. “I want nothing to do with all that whatnot. It makes me sick.”

  That’s all she cares to say on the matter. She pushes between the boys and makes her way toward the dining room. That’s what they call it. So many rooms that there’s no need to eat in the kitchen, where the food is prepared.

  Thomas frowns after her.

  In the car, Celeste hooks her arm around mine and lets loose a squeak of excitement.

  Two schoolgirls. What an audience we are for the king of more land than any one person should control.

  Jack Piper drives while Nimble points out landmarks for us. He’s in high spirits, but all I see are more possibilities for bombings. There’s been minimal talk of the banks, and no talk at all of what casualties could have occurred.

  “There’s our hospital,” Nimble says. “Saint Croix.”

  If the hotel is the size of a city, the hospital is the size of ten. “Morgan,” Celeste says. “Your brother is a medic, isn’t he?”

  I don’t like the liberties she’s taking by discussing my family this morning.

  “He was,” I say. “Before he lost his sight.”

  “The one who never comes out of his room?” Nimble says. “That’s your b
rother? Married to the redhead?”

  “Yes,” I say, and then quickly, “How long has your hospital been here?”

  “Went up the year Riles was born,” Nimble says. “They seem to be expanding on it every year.”

  Celeste leans in to me. “I wish for us to be friends,” she says, softly so that only I’ll hear. “I’m a great judge of people and I have a sense about you.”

  I haven’t forgotten the hours I spent shackled in the clock tower while she and her brother brought me grapes like I was a pet, or a game. But it seems so far away now. It happened in a place I can’t even see when I look for it, it’s so cloudy all the time. “I think it was brave of your parents to be a part of that metal bird’s creation,” she says. “I am sorry that they aren’t here. Truly.”

  “Thank you,” I say, for lack of fitting words. My head aches and my mouth feels stuffed with sheep shavings. I am thinking of Pen, inebriated and dancing in the smoke and noise, trying to forget what we’ve had to leave behind. And of the blue bird that sailed over our heads, unaware of its own brilliance, indifferent to whatever silly worries the humans may have.

  “I’m sorry about your brother, too,” I tell Celeste, because it seems like the right thing to say. Even if a part of me thinks he deserved what Pen did to him.

  Celeste smiles mischievously. “He’ll be so jealous when I tell him about this place. We’ve always been rather competitive.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that we won’t make it back?” My question just slips out.

  “Not at all.” The princess doesn’t miss a beat. “Have a little faith.”

  “In what?” I say.

  “Well.” She draws her eyebrows together. “In the way of things, I suppose. And in me.”

  I return her smile. We are all doomed.

  We drive through the streets that Pen, Birdie, and I haunted the night before. We pass women in long coats that are a trove of buttons, hats that look like shells or folded paper, all of them with flowers and big white beads that Birdie calls pearls. They, too, are a treasure of the sea.

  Celeste gasps, palming the glass as we pass a storefront full of fur coats. “What animals do you suppose have such pelts?”

  Nimble looks back at her. “You like fur?”

  “Not just fur. Any part of an animal is useful to me if I can kill it myself,” she says. “My brother would carve charms for me from the bones.”

  She says this as though it’s a perfectly normal thing.

  “Waste not, want not, eh?” Nimble says.

  She smiles and tugs at a bit of her hair.

  The city is arranged like some sort of giant, scaly, sleeping creature. The buildings rise and then sink in height, and then they dwindle until there is nothing but a field of snow that goes on for ages. How frightening, all that nothingness. I feel that if I should leave the car, it would swallow me whole, and I’d become nothing.

  Jack and Nimble are talking about the banks. Celeste says nothing, but I can tell that she’s listening, absorbing every bit about it that she can. Money seems to be the apex of the way things are run down here, while on Internment it’s hardly a thing to worry about; as long as we have jobs, we’re outfitted with an apartment, and a few pages a week to buy food and whatever frivolous things we like. The idea of anyone being without that much reflects horribly on this king, and I haven’t even met him yet.

  There is another city on the horizon now, its reflection in the surrounding water like a jealous twin.

  “Is this the capital of Havalais?” I ask.

  Nimble chuckles. “This is the king’s castle,” he says.

  If Pen thought the hotel too grandiose, this would have her absolutely livid. What could possibly fill all those rooms? A king could live his entire life in that place and still not have time to look from all its windows.

  I pretend that it is a city. I pretend the water is the sky and that we are going home.

  “This is lovely,” Celeste says. I think she means to pretend that as royalty she wasn’t raised in an archaic clock tower. But in our world, castles are a fantasy, perhaps even a myth. We are witnessing something beyond what we’ve been taught to imagine. She and I have that much in common.

  We drive through a series of gates, and as we cross the bridge that separates the king’s castle from its kingdom, men emerge from doors as big as an apartment itself and direct Jack where to park. Celeste waves to one of them, and he catches her gaze but doesn’t acknowledge her. The king’s men are stoic.

  It takes five men to show us to the doors, two men to open those doors, and four to take our coats. We’re led down a pathway of patterned carpets, past portraits and flowers and wallpaper whose flowers and swirls glimmer where the sunlight touches them.

  “His Majesty will see you in a moment,” one of the men says, with the most rigid of bows. “Please seat yourselves.”

  I’m not certain why Celeste feels so strongly that we should be friends, but she keeps playing the part rather dutifully, sitting close beside me on the paisley sofa, straightening my skirt hem. I think of what Birdie said about these clothes belonging to her mother. Surely Jack Piper recognizes them, but he gives no indication. Maybe the women really do stick around only long enough to lay eggs.

  “What are you smirking about?” Celeste asks.

  I clear my throat. “Nothing.”

  “Don’t be nervous,” Nimble says. “King Ingram is informal. You won’t have to curtsy or anything.”

  I wonder at their definition of “informal” down here. King Furlow wouldn’t have expected a curtsy either. And while this castle is sprawling, it seems silly that I once fantasized about ever visiting one. It’s unreasonably large, and soulless inside. Maybe I’d hoped for something magical or historic, but all I see is greed. I’d much prefer the clock tower, which was laid stone by stone hundreds of years ago, not only for the king and queen, but for our entire city.

  My parents died trying to reach the ground, and my brother and Amy damaged themselves forever trying to catch only a glimpse of it. But I wonder now if things on Internment were as bad as all that.

  I feel guilt for being so angry with my parents and brother, and it silences my thoughts.

  The doors open with a theatrical groan. Celeste rises, pulling me along with her. Her eyes are bright. “Your Majesty,” she says, with a nod that is the perfect mix of cool and cordial.

  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, eage
r 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.”