by Ryan Graudin
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 anger.
My hand finds his. It’s surer this time. The soft of my 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
“Hyde 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 I. 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 gol
d 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.”
The slats, coated in lichen and splinters, groan as I come to rest on them.
Richard settles next to me. His leg presses lightly against mine as he throws his arm on the bench behind me. I’m closer to him than I’ve ever been.
I don’t pull away. Instead I stare at the sky. Deep purple has seized the horizon, bleeding out all of the pastels of daytime. The colors are like souls being swallowed back into the depths of the earth. Quick and fleeting. Soon gone.
I’m not cold, but when Richard’s hand curls around my shoulder, I shiver.
Notes—music—carry through the falling night. It sounds like the soft chords of a piano.
“What’s that?” I ask. Richard cocks his head to the side, drinking in the sound.
“Must be a concert. They have them out here sometimes.” He flicks his wrist up and looks at his watch. Movement made of habit. “Lucky timing, I guess.”
I think back to the candy-apple shine of his Stratocaster, how he hates piano. “This doesn’t sound like your kind of music.”
“You’d be surprised. I like a lot of things.” I feel him looking down at me. His breath tickles the side of my neck, causing all my finer hairs to prick awake.
I close my eyes and try to listen through this intense, unmovable feeling. The melody is there, woven with harmonies into intricate chords, flowing across the fields and through the tree branches. I soak it in, along with the goodness of nature and Richard’s touch—heavy, always on my shoulder, sending notes of its own under my skin.
It’s frightening, this song of his fingers. This thrill of his touch. Unknown and new. I should pull away from it.
I should, but I don’t.
We sit like this for over an hour beneath the music and the rising moon. Every few minutes the melody changes as a new musician commandeers the keys, but our bodies stay the same. Eventually the music fades and the noises of night take over. Somewhere in the distance is the ever-present hum of traffic.
Sooner or later, we have to return to that world of rot and endings.
The prince’s fingers stroke up and down my shoulder as he traces invisible patterns against my skin, keeping time to music now silent.
I look up, suddenly very aware of how close Richard’s lips are to mine. He draws nearer, pulling me toward him. His other arm wraps around me, strong and steady, pressing me to his chest. The magic of his blood thrums through me, causing each and every hair to stand on end.
I don’t know how long the kiss lasts. I’m too distracted by the life pulsing through his lips, tender on mine. All I know, all I care to experience, is Richard.
Finally it’s the prince who pulls away.
“Strawberries and spring,” he murmurs. “That’s what you taste like.”
What Richard has just given me, my very first kiss—it’s beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. Nothing in my existence compares to it. No magic, no adventure, no flight has ever awoken me with such great urgency as this meeting of lips.
All of my insides are alive, thrilling with light. I never knew it could feel this way.
He leans down again. And for the slightest moment, in another life, I let him.
But now, I turn my face to the side, catch his lips on the softness of my cheek. They linger against my skin; his breath ghosts out, down my neck. I hear the sadness in it.
“I’m sorry.”
It’s all I can say, because I don’t trust myself to speak further. I don’t trust myself to do anything. The past two weeks play back at me and I see everything I’ve done at a new, illumined angle. Dropping the veiling spell, showing and telling who I am, reaching out my hand . . . Had I done all of those things because I wanted to? Because I knew, in some unreached part of myself, that there was this—spark, flame, inferno—between us?
Suddenly I feel selfish. Undone. No self-respecting Fae would do what I just did. She wouldn’t be so weak.
It doesn’t matter how many soul feeders and sorcerers I’ve fought. How many missions I’ve completed at Mab’s command. How many long-dead kings and queens I’ve guarded. In this, I’ve failed.
Richard pulls back. Says nothing.
I don’t move, because I know that as soon as I look at him, as soon as I turn my head, I’ll wan
t more.
“I’m sorry, Embers,” he offers finally, his voice rough and low.
“We—” I falter, not knowing what I was going to say. The flavor of him is still etched into my lips. Cinnamon and clove. Sun-soaked spice. My head spins with it.
“Should we walk back now?”
I nod. He’s the first to stand; his arms fall away, release me. I hadn’t realized how much warmth he held into me. The air creeps damp against my skin and blouse.
We walk back, slow and apart. The first half of our journey is silent, winding through silhouettes of bushes, bowing branches, and speared leaves. I’m very aware of my fingers—how they’re holding nothing.
“You’re right,” Richard says after the fifty-sixth step. “I should go to the meeting.”
“It would be for the best.” These words feel foreign and false, because it’s not really what I want to say. I want to ask about the kiss. What was it? An escape into a moment without pain? Something else?
But Richard, all tall and lank on the moonlit path, doesn’t look like he knows the answer.
More unsaid words ache between us until the pressing noises of the city are broken by something else. Another melody, but one that’s much more fragile and elegant than the ramblings of the piano. Birdsong. At first it’s only a single tune. But then others join in: a duet, a trio. Their notes both clash and sound incredibly right together, as only birdsong does.
The prince hears them too. He looks up into the near-invisible tangle of branches above us. “What’s gotten into them? It’s dark out.”
“They’re nightingales.” I feel into the trees. There’s an entire family of them, weaving in and out of twigs and leaves. Their chorus grows, swells with every passing moment.
“How can you tell? Maybe it’s just some insomniac sparrows.” Richard’s voice is all smile and tease, and I know that, for now, everything is back to normal between us.
“They’re my favorite birds,” I say. We round the final bend. I see the sleeping bodyguards and, beyond them, the car. “They sing when no one else will. When it’s darkest.”
