Burning Kingdoms

by Lauren DeStefano

  “I was worried you’d be scared,” I say.

  “Oh, it was terrifying at first. Thomas and I were at the harbor, and we heard these loud snaps like the god of the sky was cracking a whip. I thought the world was going to end. But then nobody around us seemed to notice at all, and when the water started to fall, some of the people raised these funny canes they’d been holding, and the canes bloomed open over their heads.”

  She wrings out her hair, darkening the carpet. “It was wonderful. I’m in need of a hot bath, though, before I catch my death. It’s so cold down here, I don’t know how they get on. I feel like the cold is trapped inside my bones. Do you ever feel—”

  She stops talking because I’ve pulled her into an embrace. She smells like wool and wet air and redolence she borrowed from one of the many dressers in this sprawling building.

  Her arms wrap around me with uncertainty. “Is everything all right?” she asks.

  “I’m just glad to see you so happy,” I say.

  She draws back and holds me at arm’s length. “Is there anything you want to talk about?”

  My betrothed thinks I’ll be seduced by a murderer, and my brother is far too young to have given up, and Alice is inventing ghost children downstairs.

  “No,” I say. “Go have your bath. I’ve got a present for you after.”

  She nods to her bed. “Is it that lump under my blanket?”

  I push her toward the door. “After,” I say.

  She takes the shortest bath in the history of this world and our own, I’m sure. As soon as she returns to our room, she makes a line for the bed and pulls back the covers.

  I lean back on my elbows on my own bed, and I can’t help smiling.

  “Morgan,” she gasps. “Where did you find it?”

  “The professor gave it to me. He said it was a gift for my friend, the budding cartographer.”

  She holds it in both hands and stares at the cover. I have the thought that one day her great-grandchildren will have that book in their possession; it will be worn and yellowed by then, and it will be the most precious thing her family could ever own, because it will be the only piece left of that magical island hovering out of reach.

  Pen throws her hand over her mouth to catch her sob. In an instant her eyes are red and wet.

  “I thought you’d be happy,” I say.

  “I am,” she says, and wipes her tears with the back of her hand. “I think this might be the greatest day of my life.” She falls onto my bed beside me. “It’s like the sky opened up and it sent this water to scrub away every bad thing that’s ever happened to me.” She bumps her shoulder against mine. “I love this day, and I love this book, and I love you more than life, Morgan Stockhour.”

  “I love you, too,” I say. I don’t even have to think about the words, they’re that easy and I’m that sure of them. So why can’t I say them to Basil? He’s told me he loves me enough times.

  “Pen?”

  “Mm?”

  “Do you ever tell Thomas that you love him?”

  She crinkles her nose. “Why would I say a thing like that?” She lies back and holds the history book over her head and sighs happily. “What should I read first? Something with the stars, I think.”

  11

  The rain turns into snow, and the snow into rain. For weeks the two weather patterns engage in a sort of dance with each other. It’s much more than we’re accustomed to, and one at a time we all fall victim to runny noses and fevers.

  Jack Piper says we only need to get used to the cold, and then we’ll be fine. Birdie sneaks gin into our tea. “It’ll make you right as rain,” she tells us. “That’s what we say down here.”

  “It’s the rain that made us this way,” Pen says.

  “I never thought of it that way,” Birdie says.

  Days blur by. One afternoon, while I’m feeling too sick to be up and about, I rest my head on Basil’s knee as he reads to me in bed. The rain has become so normal to me that I forget I’m hearing it sometimes, but the thunder still makes me jump.

  Basil doesn’t miss a beat in his reading, but he runs his fingers through my hair.

  “What’s that part you just read?” I ask. “About throwing that girl into that thing.”

  “Volcano,” he says. “I think it’s a sort of mountain that has fire inside it. So to appease the volcano, they’re making a sacrifice. Otherwise it’ll flood the entire island with lava. I think lava is a sort of melted stone.”

  “So is the volcano a god, then?”

  “Shh, just listen. It’ll explain.”

  Pen, half-asleep in her bed and ravaged by fever, mumbles, “This story is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I could find another one,” Basil says.

  “No, I want to see if they’ll go through with it,” she says.

  “I don’t understand why they’re throwing her into the volcano,” I say.

  “Because she’s a virgin,” Basil says, and clears his throat.

  “We could throw Morgan into the volcano,” Pen says. “That ought to save at least ten islands.”

  “Hush, you.” My face is burning. “Keep reading.”

  Pen doesn’t make it to the end of the story. By the time the young girl is saved by the hero from someplace beyond the ocean, Pen’s asleep and dreaming. Of some other girl in no need of any heroes, knowing her.

  Basil sets the book on the nightstand, dabs at my face with the damp cloth that held an ice cube earlier. It’s still cool, though; still a relief.

  “I don’t like seeing you this way,” Basil says.

  “It’s only a cold,” I say. “You had it, and you got better.”

  Thunder shakes the walls. I close my eyes and see the volcano erupting with liquid fire. The girl and the hero are drifting away on the sea. They aren’t even looking back.

  Basil says words that I can scarcely make out. Morgan, Morgan, love, here, the rain.

  “Yes,” I say, although I’m not sure what for.

  I open my eyes and am greeted by Amy’s blond hair strewn across my pillow. Her face is buried under the covers. “You were talking in your sleep,” she says.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Bad dream,” she says. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  A flash of lightning fills the room. Shadows of raindrops curtain the walls. “What was your dream?”

  She yawns. “Internment came crashing down. The sky was full of screaming, and the screaming was trapped in the clouds, like a net. I can still hear it.”

  She burrows herself against me. I don’t mind the closeness; it makes me think of home. There is too much space on the ground; everyone is so far from everyone else.

  I touch her forehead. She’s under the spell of this weather, too. “Internment isn’t going to fall,” I say. “You’re only delirious.”

  “If it fell, maybe it would fall into the ocean.” Her voice is sleepy. “And float away and away.”

  Strange, strange girl.

  “I worry about you sometimes,” I say.

  “I worry about you, too,” she says.

  “Why me?” So tired. I close my eyes and I am adrift on an ocean the color of her hair. Gold and yellow and white glittering under the sun.

  “You had to hold everyone together. Your parents and your brother. Lex said it.”

  “When did he say that?”

  “At jumper group. The king mandated as part of our therapy that we express at least one regret for jumping. One regret every week. He has lots of regrets, and many of them are about what happened to you.”

  This clears away my sleepiness. I open my eyes. Lex never talked about what went on in jumper group, not even with Alice. It wasn’t allowed. But we’re away from Internment’s rules now. “What did he say?”

  Amy’s voice is fading; she’s falling asleep, if she was truly awake to begin with. “He said that he had broken everything, and you were the only one trying to glue them back together. Only, you cou
ldn’t. Too many pieces were missing, cracked beyond repair.”

  It’s true. I spent years trying to cheer my mother out of her melancholy, trying to get her to speak. I tried to hold myself together, didn’t let them see me cry, so that they wouldn’t have two broken children. When they couldn’t bear the sight of what had become of their son, I went upstairs and delivered messages and food and money to my brother. I tried to stop needing them, when every second of every day, I resented it. Resented him.

  I close my eyes, but it’s too late. Tears squeeze their way out. They are silent. I don’t want anyone to know.

  “I didn’t do a very good job,” I say.

  “No,” Amy says. “They all let you down.”

  “Why are you saying all these things?”

  “Because,” she says. “Someone needed to. You still do it now. You try to hold everyone together. Sometimes you can’t.”

  I dream of my mother. She’s threading one of her samplers. Strange streams of light in the clouds.

  Lightning.

  She knew about lightning.

  Celeste is the last of us to succumb to the weather. She fights it, getting dressed each morning and forcing herself down the stairs.

  She stares at her breakfast plate with glassy eyes.

  “Would you just go back to bed before you infect us all?” Pen says.

  I kick her under the table.

  “No meetings with the king lately, I’ve noticed,” Thomas says.

  Celeste shakes her head. Her voice is a whisper. “No. No meetings.”

  Guilt is a pain in my chest. I stare at my hands in my lap. My betrothal band is made of sunstone. Or phosane, as it’s known here. It’s a secret that could save her mother’s life and destroy our home.

  Basil tells me that I’m pale and he asks if I’m feeling sick again. I shake my head, force down breakfast even though all the Pipers are wrong, I haven’t gotten used to the taste of eggs, and I don’t understand how they can all go without fresh fruit until the weather gets warm.

  But there will be no fresh strawberries today. There will be only rain and snow and clouds that hide Internment from view.

  I hope that we won’t all wilt waiting for the sunlight. I hope the secret about sunstone is the right one to keep.

  12

  The first day of spring smells like copper.

  Spring. The word is everywhere. Annette fills the rooms with paper flowers and ribbons. Amy loves this. She follows Annette from room to room, both of them finishing the lines of each other’s made-up songs.

  “We can go fishing soon,” Birdie says during lunch. She’s gotten bolder now, hemming her skirts with ball pins and wearing red lipstick to the table, much to her father’s displeasure. She says we’ve made her brave.

  I worry we’ve all become reckless. Pen has become dependent on our almost nightly adventures, and some days she ventures out on her own with no word as to where she’s been when she returns. She prefers gin to sleep. She laughs louder than she used to. She has good days and bad days, and on the bad days, she locks herself in the bathroom and runs the water to drown out the tears. She doesn’t blame me. She says it’s just the way it has to be, and she won’t hear any talk of going back to the sky. She dabs under her eyes with the paisley hand towel, smiles at her reflection, tells me, “There. All better.”

  Now her voice is bright. “Sounds like fun.”

  “It’s too cold for the fish,” Nimble says. “But I’m going to uncover the boats today, if anyone would like to tag along.”

  Annette and Marjorie eagerly raise their hands.

  “Anyone who is tall enough to reach the cereal boxes,” he amends. They grumble.

  After breakfast, Nimble and Birdie lead us to the docks. There are at least a dozen boats bobbing on ropes, covered up in blue blankets—tarps, Nimble calls them. They’re for the hotel, he explains. The Pipers rent them to guests. Some of the boats are big enough to live in, I think.

  Pen kneels at the edge of the dock and reaches into the water. “How deep is it?” she asks.

  “Here?” Nimble says. “About ten feet, I think.”

  She stands. Her fingers are dripping water onto the boards. She nods to the horizon. “What about out there?”

  Nimble laughs. “Much more than ten feet. Hundreds. Thousands.”

  She smiles over her shoulder at me. It’s a mischievous but melancholy smile. “Want to swim for it?”

  I can’t tell if she’s kidding. Thomas links his arm through hers; he isn’t taking any chances. “It’s too cold, heart.”

  “The cold probably wouldn’t get you,” Nimble says, pulling on the tarp, revealing another boat that’s half the size of my apartment back home. Birdie helps him with the folding.

  “No?” Pen says. “How would I die out there, then?”

  “The mermaids could mistake you for a treasure, pull you down to their collection of trinkets,” he says. “You could be swallowed up by a whale. Or you could have a limb bitten off by a shark and then bleed to death. But most likely, you’d get tired and drown.”

  She stares the ocean down like she is accepting its challenge.

  As though to prove that there is a god in the sky looking out for her, the clouds break apart and create a distraction. “Look!” Birdie says, and we all follow her gaze. As small as a stone in the sky, for the first time we get a glimpse of home.

  Basil hugs me to his side. We shield our eyes and stare for as long as we can stand it, before the sunlight becomes blinding.

  “We should look through the telescope,” I say to Pen. But she’s gone. Not in the water, but down the pathway that will take her back to the hotel. Thomas goes after her, and when she realizes he’s behind her, she runs. She was always the superior athlete of the pair and he can’t keep up. I watch him double over to get his breath, and she is only just getting started. By the time he’s regained himself, she’s out of sight.

  “Should we go after her?” Birdie says.

  I shake my head. “She’ll come back if she wants.” The reminder of home was surely too painful.

  Thomas is still trying to catch up. He’s mad for her—always has been. I’ve recently begun to believe that love is synonymous with madness. It can’t possibly be an act of sanity. It is restless and always in pursuit. It will fall from the sky to have what it wants.

  Pen doesn’t come out of hiding until dinnertime. I’m not sure where she’s been all day, but she’s got a crown of yellow flowers in her hair. “Buttercups!” Annette says. “Do you have those on the floating island?”

  “Yes,” Pen says. “But we call them raydrops. Like drops of the sun’s rays.”

  “They aren’t made of sun,” Annette challenges.

  “And they aren’t made of butter,” Pen says. “We don’t even have butter on Internment. That’s one of your strange inventions.”

  “Why don’t you have butter?” Riles asks.

  “Because we don’t consume things that are extracted from udders.” She’s being snappy, but I can hear the sadness in her voice. She twirls her fork around the plate and stares at the unfamiliar food this world has to offer. If she’s hungry enough, she’ll force some of it down. But most nights she just pushes it around and says “Thank you; it was delicious.”

  She’s quiet for the rest of the meal, except for when Nimble mentions a moonlit boat ride, and she says it sounds like an adventure.

  After dinner, I follow her upstairs and we pick out hats and coats to wear on the boat.

  “Where were you all day?” I ask, placing a cloche hat on her head; we have a similar sort of thing on Internment that we call a shell hat. She studies it a moment before deciding it doesn’t go with her dress.

  “Theme park,” she says. “I didn’t have any money for the telescope, so I just sort of . . . wandered about.”

  “Were you at the restaurant bar?”

  She shrugs.

  “Pen. We had a pact.”

  She stares over my shoulder a moment
before looking straight into my eyes. “I don’t need another Thomas to talk to me like I’m a child; one is more than adequate,” she says. “I am going to step past you now, and go downstairs, and have a moonlit boat ride.” She retrieves her buttercup crown from where she’d tossed it on the bed, and places it in my hair. “You are welcome to join me.”

  She leaves the room, and she doesn’t look back to see if I’ll follow.

  It’s a warm night, and I shed my coat as we’re walking for the docks.

  “Let me carry that for you,” Thomas says. Somehow I’ve straggled behind Basil, Pen, Birdie, Nimble, and the princess, whose vivacious chatter seems to be filling up the night air.

  “I’m all right,” I say, hugging my coat to my chest.

  “Are you?” he says. “You seem troubled.”

  “No,” I lie.

  “I thought Pen might have confided in you what she was doing today,” he says.

  I am immediately uncomfortable at the thought of being caught between the two of them. I don’t think it’s right for Pen to keep secrets, but I’ve kept secrets from Basil myself, and I know that she must have her reasons. Whether or not I agree, it isn’t my place.

  “You might try asking her yourself.”

  “Well, that won’t do any good, will it?” Thomas says, and for the first time in all the years I’ve known him, I hear an edge to his tone, like he’s challenging me. “She doesn’t tell me all the things she tells you.”

  “I’m sure that isn’t true,” I say.

  “Isn’t it?” he says. “She tells me that she loves it here. That’s clearly a lie. Says she wants to forge a new identity and live in the city. But the city is loud and filthy and nothing like home. She’s trapped here—we all are—and she won’t just say what she’s thinking, that she wants to go home.”

  “I can’t speak to her thoughts,” I say, feeling just brave enough. “But she has said nothing of the sort to me, and this is a conversation you should be having with Pen. Excuse me.” I push forward and catch up to Basil and the others.