by S. K Munt
There were environmental factors too. We didn’t want to pollute the world as they had in the time before and so public, solar-generated transport was going to be the future, and horse-drawn carriages were used in place of personal vehicles in the interim. One day we would definitely need cars for certain things, and planes, and for trading purposes, trucks were already a necessity, but we’d never have a planet full of parking lots again. In fact, an Academic in Tariel was working on a way to invent something that was a cross between a car and a motorcycle but solar powered which the government had high hopes for and was one of the reasons why the kings were not too concerned with drilling for oil or pulling an excess of coal from the earth. In the time before, technology had developed step by step as processes were learned, but now that we already knew what it would take to get from A to Z, we were asked to hold on tight while the kingdom bounded forward at a safe, sustainable pace. We could do almost everything that they could in the time before, but our priorities were different- as was our end goal which was to live in harmony with the earth and one another- not send people out to fidget with space too. We knew what was truly out there- nothing, and that if we looked after earth right; we wouldn’t have to worry about colonising one of God’s failed projects as a back-up plan.
Kohén made a rude sound, interrupting my thoughts. ‘No. He’s proud of that patch, and his eye is almost completely better now. Really, he just wears it to look tough nowadays. He says it makes the other third-borns in the Corps respect him more for who he is, instead of judging him for being some lapdog to the duchess, you know?’
‘Ah,’ I said, though I didn’t. How fortunate that the twins were so attractive that they could opt to hide some of their faces for their own amusement! Would I be seen as tough and respected more readily if I put a bag over my head? No of course not, because I was a girl and we were supposed to try and look prettier than the next, not scarier.
In the summer that I turned nine, a new, larger glass factory was built in Arcadia and ten percent of the builders were released from hard duty as Blue Collars (we had enough houses for now) and sent to work there instead. Shortly after that I learned, via the king, that my brother had been one of them for he’d turned eighteen that same week. At the same time, Tariel started processing as much coffee as they did gold and so, our glass jars was sent their way, to be returned full of the brown, ground beans. Kohén became addicted to the stuff instantly, but I avoided it, for it was far too bitter to be palatable to me. He insisted that I only needed to add sugar to it, but my teeth were the only redeeming feature that I had and I wasn’t about to see them turn brown from the coffee and then rot, so I refused. Besides, thanks to the locusts, we were low on sugar that year anyway.
By my tenth birthday, New York City, or what remained of the island of Manhattan, had sunk almost completely underwater and was declared unsalvageable and then, a national reserve. Many of New York’s toppled concrete monoliths could still be seen at the lowest tide; those not already buried in muddy debris, of course, which made it a fascinating sight, but useless to us. It would be years before those remaining buildings would sink completely to form the new foundation of the ocean floor and until that happened, construction within two hundred miles of the area was prohibited, for the earth was far too unstable and the sea still deciding where it would rest.
But despite the complete destruction of what had once been the capital of the world, Lady Liberty’s torch was still visible above the surface of the Atlantic ocean; only she was deteriorating fast from having lain on her side beneath the water for so many centuries. A national debate broke out as to whether people should be sent there to dredge her out, or to New Rome where the Romanese were frantically trying to preserve what was left of their ancient wonders, but in the end, Lady Liberty won. She was pulled out and propped up on the land, cleaned down and repainted to stand as a monument on dry land on a section of the coast. Most of the Callielian’s rejoiced over this, especially the king of Janiel whose borders stretched closely towards the old New York State, but in the eleventh summer of my life, an earthquake rocked the eastern Seaboard and Miss Liberty ended up leaning dangerously to the left. People started asking if she should be evacuated, but this time the pleas from the Romanese won out and a Corps mission was sent to the Parthenon instead. Apparently we needed wine more than hope.
Lady Liberty was still in one piece by my twelfth year, but I begun to pray that she knew how to hold her breath, because the pictures I saw of her in the newspaper showed that the disturbed Atlantic tides were closing in on her every year, and soon she would have to either stand up for herself, or learn how to tread water because every time another one of the toppled buildings on the submerged island beside her went under, the level of the water would rise again. Ironically, Lady Liberty was being drowned by the city that she’d inspired her people to build in her spirit.
‘You should tell your father to pull her out and put her somewhere else,’ I said, pointing to her crown. ‘Like here! She’s nobility, after all, and a symbol of what was right about America- she belongs here in Eden.’
‘Send in a team to rip her from the earth, dismantle her, lug her across the country instead of resources and rebuild her in North Arcadia?’ Kohén asked. ‘Well, it will cost thousands if not millions, and she’ll probably disintegrate on the way over but for you sister dear- anything!’
I punched him in the arm and he winced for by then, I’d upped my training sessions to twice a week, and was developing good little muscles in my biceps. ‘You’ll do it if you truly love me,’ I said.
‘Yeah well, I guess I don’t- for I truly love my head where it is- on my own neck, which father would wring if I asked him to make such an exception for my buddy!’ He glowered back at the paper then. ‘Not that I’ll ever have that kind of power with Karol next in line anyway…’ and I’d blinked, surprised by his mutterings. It had never occurred to me that Kohén wanted to be the king- well, not outside of Pacifica anyway- and I was a little caught off-guard by his resentful tone. Unfortunately for him though, he was right. Unless a sudden death occurred, the crown of Arcadia had been passed down from father to son for generations- never from brother to brother, and considering that Kohén and Karol were only thirteen years apart well, Kohén’s chances of getting to rule before Karol had an heir of his own with more youth were slim. Why, Karol would be eligible to rule in five years time!
Back during my seventh winter, the Arcadian government started building a single rail line across the continent and by my eleventh, it was completed and suddenly we started getting more visitors to Arcadia from the southeast than ever before. Work immediately commenced on a southern route, and was slated for completion by my seventeenth year, which excited me. So much for Kohén’s warnings that traveling to Yael had been a pipe dream! With every year, my fondest wishes seemed to become more and more within reach. I’d thought that staying in the palace until my twenty-first year would feel like an eternity, but time was passing quickly- almost too quickly!
Not just for me either, but for everyone everywhere. The other Given girls started losing the baby fat from their faces and filling out in other places, and by the time Kelia was twelve, she could read as well as Emmerly who had stopped working on her mind long before, convinced that she was being trained to be a princess to one of the princes. Perhaps Kohén, maybe even Kohl if he was ever returned- but the prospect of marrying even Karol was in the cards for her as far as she was concerned because by the time we were twenty-one, he would be of marriageable age. We’d all laughed at her, for we’d just had our official sexual education lesson the week before to commemorate Elfin’s first blossoming bleed, and understood how unlikely it was that Karol and Emmerly could be matched, but I saw some of the girls scowling into their mirrors afterwards or after her and it made me wonder that every single one of them was entertaining the absurd fantasy as well.
And it was absurd. Yes we’d been treated well, but we weren’t princesses in traini
ng. Marriage within the royal family was forbidden until the prince had been crowned, and no princes were crowned king before the age of thirty, so long as the king was in good health. Elijah Barachiel was in perfect health and had demonstrated this by using his powers to turn the locusts occupying three regional vineyards to dust in my tenth year in a heartbeat, only requiring a day’s rest after while his people celebrated. Besides, everyone knew that the princess was selected from the nobility caste, and usually from one of the other kingdoms, and despite the fact that Emmerly had been born into a noble family, she was not nobility now. In fact, we were forbidden from conversing with them at all, whereas the noble children were actually permitted to attend the balls and mingle with everyone. We had to wait until we were turning sixteen to attend a ball at all!
But Emmerly’s announcement that she was now fit to become a duchess clearly got the other girls thinking because after that day, they all started studying harder, dancing with more technique than enthusiasm and painting with more precise strokes. Emmerly started perusing the newspaper, wanting to be on top of current events so that she could continue to be second best in our Academic classes (Martya was ahead of us by years, not just points), and spent twice as much time brushing her hair out at night, so Lette, Elfin and Rayleigh followed suit and started borrowing my books, though I never saw any of them turn more than the first two pages before they fell asleep. When they started doing those things though, Emmerly started hanging around the royal family every chance she could get and attempting to make conversation with Karol, who they all had a crush on. She never came out and said that she wanted to be preferred by the monarchs, but she did start lingering in the throne room and on the common more often instead of gossiping with her friends, as though she wanted to be seen and not with the rest of us. Unfortunately for her, Kelia started tagging along when I was busy with Kohén, and she was always the one who got the most ‘Oh aren’t you darling!’ comments from the nobility.
It was a waste of time though- nobility is not something you inherit but is granted. You could not charm your way into the elite caste! If we took advantage of our education there was a good chance that we could come out as Academics in our twenty-first year, but the only way to become nobility after that was to prove your worth by doing something great with your life and the last time I’d checked, perfectly matching your lip gloss to your nail lacquer was not a great feat. Well, it eluded me- but the others got it!
Martya and I didn’t buy into the princess parade charade at all, for we were both too clever to fall for any of Emmerly’s nonsense, which I proved later that year by pulling into the second-highest rank in our studies despite how hard she’d been working. Determined to do something as important with her life as I was, Martya started a vegetable garden in the rear of the palace’s one for some experiment she was doing with a spray she wanted to make that she thought could help control locusts (the bane of our nation’s existence) and I helped her grow the plants perfectly before she let them be ruined time and time again. It wasn’t pretty work, but the king and duchess voiced appreciation for her curious mind one day when Kohén dragged them out to look at it. Unfortunately, it was attacked as much as the pumpkin vine in the garden across from it by critters that summer, but at least she was trying to build herself from the inside out and though Kelia was still for all intents and purposed my ‘best’ friend, Martya was my favourite person after Kohén. I wished that I’d been born rightfully into the Academic caste at her side because I think we would have bonded quickly.
As I’d predicted, Kelia and Elfin grew to be the most beautiful of us all, though Kelia seemed not much taller after six years than when she’d arrived. Her face sharpened though, and she was lovely- all the more lovely for the enigmatic smile she’d started sporting a few years after she’d moved in when her homesickness had worn off.
Elfin had never suffered much from homesickness- in fact none of them had aside from Kelia, Martya and I- but that changed around our tenth year, when the girls started being called home less and less often. Martya was picked up every six months like Kelia and written to weekly, but Emmerly, Lette and Rayleigh’s families stopped writing all together, and started collecting them for only one week in the winter. Elfin’s mother stopped writing and collecting her for visits by her ninth year, and stopped sending her dresses in her tenth. By her eleventh, she was as lonely as I and by our twelfth- refused to speak of them at all. We didn’t know why we were being forgotten, but the time to discover the reason was looming and that curiosity was more fun to wonder about than why our parents didn’t love us anymore.
We all got correspondence from the king though- little notes sent to us to keep us informed of what our families were up to. My brother stayed at the glass factory for a year, and then was joined- not married for love- to another girl Blue Collar girl from the neighbourhood beside ours, whose name I didn’t recognize, when he was twenty-one and I eleven. In the winter before I turned thirteen, he became a father to a little boy and in that same winter, my sister turned eighteen and attended a Joining ceremony on the common and came to the palace for the ball after. Emmerly delighted in telling me how beautiful she looked when we peeked in from the window on the common side and she was right- Jaiya had grown to be a lovely woman and men were flocking to her side. I wished I could have found a way to make contact with her, but she didn’t see me and didn’t so much as cast a searching look around for me so after, I felt worse than if I’d never seen her at all and silently prayed that she’d fall madly in love with a handsome Blue Collar man who grew up fat.
But Finch started writing to me that year. The letters weren’t long, but he asked many questions about my life and told me all sorts of things about my nephew, Ibis. He said that he hoped that I was happy, and that as soon as I was released- the very day- I was welcome to come stay with him and his family and that he would provide for me if I would become a governess to Ibis, who he wanted to be educated well. Naturally he didn’t say why that would be a possibility, but it was an exciting offer and I hoped that it would come to pass even if my dreams were a little broader by then than becoming someone’s governess.
At the end of every letter, Finch would write: ‘I know these are read before being given to you, dear sister, so I will keep the truth of my emotions off the page. But I miss you dearly and pray to God that you will grow to be happy every day. If I could have collected you for visits myself, I would have- please know that. Love always with a regretful heart, your brother.’
The others received different news- Emmerly’s father died after catching some awful strain of flu while on a voyage to Tariel’s coast that same fall, and she wept every night for two months. Lette’s older brothers both got joined and moved out of their homes when they were twenty-one, and Elfin’s mother had another child and wrote to her only to moan about it, after years of having ignored her. Elfin had scrunched up the paper, muttered: ‘Karol was right- Artisan’s ARE irresponsible, unthinking idiots!’ And then had tossed it out. She hadn’t written back and though I didn’t blame her, I felt sorry for the fourth-born child of that cold family.
In the spring of my twelfth year, I heard from King Elijah that my sister Jaiya had fulfilled her fondest wish and had married a man whom she’d met at the ball, and had relocated with him to St Miguel where he ran a lodging house for visitors- proving that he’d come from a line of intelligent and frugal Blue Collars. She probably would never know extreme wealth or status, but the house was a family investment that he’d inherited, and was grand enough to have twelve guest bedrooms with ocean views. For Jaiya, that would be enough and I was happy enough for her.
The biggest news however, was delivered to Rayleigh in the winter, just before Emmerly’s thirteenth birthday, and just before we were slated to be illuminated about our future. She didn’t get a letter though; Maryah and the king arrived at our dormitory and told her that she had to pack her bags. Rayleigh’s fourteen-year old sister, Emilia, had been trampled by a horse wh
ile practicing tricks to qualify for the athletic caste, and though that was sorrowful news indeed for Rayleigh had been very close with her sister still, it meant that her family were now able to take their third-born back if she was willing to leave and they willing to provide for her again. They were and so she was- she left within ten minutes of the king’s arrival, sobbing too hard for her to hug any of us good-bye while we watched, goggle-eyed. No one had told us that we could return to our parents if one of our older siblings died before turning twenty-one, so it was a shocking revelation indeed!
