Crown of Oblivion

by Julie Eshbaugh

  I’m having a memory.

  As images rise in my mind like a dream I had forgotten, I duck between two parked trucks to stay out of sight of the guards. That’s when I see him. A man squatting in the bed of a truck tying down a load of purple logs. He is thin—wasting-away thin—and as jumpy as an exposed nerve. Something about him is familiar to me, too, but not so familiar that I trust him. Still, as I creep closer, staying in the shadows to avoid being noticed by the guards, I feel the craving in him. A raw need that’s almost as dark as grief.

  My right hand works its way into the opening of my bag until it finds, tucked away in the inside pocket, the baggie of white powder I took from the Enchanted man at Poppee’s Dance Hall. I creep toward him until I’m right beside his truck. When he sees me, he nearly jumps out of his skin, but then a flicker of recognition lights in his eyes.

  “I’d like to offer you a deal,” I say, lifting my hand to show him the baggie in my open palm. “A ride out of here in exchange for this?”

  When he hops down out of the truck bed right in front of me, for a moment I remember his name, but then it’s gone. “Get in the truck and keep your head down,” he says, but before I can move, he snatches the baggie from my hand.

  Inside the cab, I’m surrounded by photographs of a round-faced woman with big brown eyes and a baby with a face like a wrinkled old man. Something about the look in the woman’s eyes gives me a shock of pain in my head and in my gut all at once.

  The driver’s door opens and the man climbs in. He smells like clove cigarettes. “Offer accepted,” he chirps, and I can tell by the way he springs into the seat that my offer has made his day.

  The truck shakes awake beneath us. Then we’re moving, and my skin crawls as if the hornets are back, and I notice a terrible sound—the sound that female racer made when she collapsed on the way to the roadhouse—the sound of a dying gull. I’m thinking of the screams of that woman and of Darius in the gym, and wondering if the truck driver beside me is as frightened as I was when I first heard that blood-chilling sound.

  I try to look at him, but before I can turn my head every speck of the world explodes as red as blood. I close my eyes, and the red runs down behind my eyelids, washed away by an impenetrable black.

  Twenty-Seven

  The world goes as soundless as if my head’s been shoved underwater. I want to open my eyes and look around, but it feels like hands are over my face, holding them shut. I claw at my face, I try to scream into the silence, but then my mind’s eye opens on a memory.

  A man is waking me in the middle of the night, a man with authority over me. He pulls me from my bed with a whisper in my ear. “You are needed in the garden.” I’m young. I know this by my small feet and my thin legs, and also by the nightgown I’m wearing. I remember it was my favorite because it was the first one I ever had that didn’t itch.

  There are other beds in the room, but if anyone else is awake, they pretend to be asleep. I reach for the man’s hand—I trust him—but he won’t take mine. Instead he drags me by my wrist to the rose garden.

  When we get there, I see a girl watching for us. She’s just a child, like me, maybe twelve years old. Her eyes and face are puffy and red from crying.

  “I’m sorry, Astrid,” she calls to me from the place next to the flowers where another man holds her back. Memories come to me like objects on a darkened table after a lamp is suddenly switched on. She had wanted to see the moon garden—a patch of silver and white flowers her mother had ordered to be planted that would glow in the moonlight. She had taken a risk and snuck out, but she was caught, and now I will pay with a beating. The man who dragged me from my bed grabs the collar of this nightgown I love so much and tears the back open, forcing me to my knees. No! Not the whip! I hear the girl scream, and I know . . . this is the first time I’ve been truly beaten. These are the first lashes that will break the skin of my back.

  It seems you no longer respond to spankings, Princess. You have left us no other choice.

  As the whip cracks against my skin, I see blood splatter across the white roses. I hear a girl scream, but I don’t know if it’s me or the voice of the other girl.

  .

  .

  .

  I sit up, the hint of stale smoke mixing with the remembered scents of roses and blood. I press my palms against my ears to block out the screams, but they fade on their own. When I open my eyes, I’m still in the cab of the truck. Green pastures divided by low stone walls roll by, outside the window.

  Still here.

  The driver says my name from far away. I try to answer him, but I can’t find the words. My head throbs. A hot pain burns behind my eyes and I squeeze them shut, but even with them closed, I can’t block out a searing white light. My hands cup over my eyes, and yet the light grows brighter.

  Then my internal vison takes over again.

  I am being led to the whipping post. I know this is where I am going, and I know I’m going to die. I’m already wounded and bleeding—I was whipped the day before—but the princess was caught in a secret correspondence with an Outsider boy, a member of the OLA, and I will pay the price.

  The Princess . . . Princess Renya. I am her surrogate.

  A boy walks next to me. I see his feet, his fine leather shoes, but I don’t have the strength to raise my head. He slaps a whip against his palm, but someone reaches out and takes it.

  “Let me be the one to do it,” a voice says. A voice I know well. “You can stand back and watch.”

  “With pleasure,” says the first boy, and I don’t have to see his face. I recognize his voice as well. It’s the man who impersonated my brother and gave me a poisoned canteen.

  It’s Prince Lars.

  I turn my head to see the prince’s surrogate—Darius—take the whip and flex the leather between his hands.

  On my knees, I am bound to the post. I lean over and gag onto the stone floor. I don’t have enough strength to spit the vomit from my mouth. The whip cracks against my back, pain bleaches the black behind my eyes a blinding white, and I slide out of consciousness.

  .

  .

  .

  I open my eyes to find myself slumped against the door of a truck that is rolling along a road. I scramble upright, my heart pounding, but then I recognize the driver and the pictures of the woman and baby taped to the dashboard. I remember the Enchanted Authority officers at the gate of the Amaranthine Forest and the baggy of Oblivion I exchanged for a ride.

  I’m still here. But now that I know the truth—now that I know that Lars and Darius are friends who have teamed up against me—here is not the same place I thought it was.

  The image of Darius reaching for the whip plays over and over in my mind. It makes me so woozy, I’m worried I might throw up in this truck, but the driver must be worried about that too, because he hands me a paper bag I’d guess he had food in earlier.

  “You’re back,” the driver says. He glances at me so quickly I barely register the look of relief in his eyes, but I see it. It’s there. “That’s in case you get sick,” he says. “The bag, I mean.”

  I hold it open in my lap, grateful to have it. “How long was I out?”

  “Long enough.” Another quick glance. “Was it a memory?”

  “Yes. A bad one.”

  “I’m afraid for racers, that’s about the only kind you can expect. After all, you entered the Race of Oblivion for a reason.”

  I don’t want to talk about myself with this man who seems so strangely familiar. It’s this familiarity that drew me to him when I first saw him at the forest gate, but that makes me recoil from him now. The last thing I want at this moment is for something to prompt another memory in me.

  Although . . . I can’t regret this memory. As painful and terrible as it is, I need it. I need to know the truth about Darius. That he’s a monster. A monster and a liar. I need to know that I can’t trust him any more than I can trust Prince Lars.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.
I glance down at my palm, but my hands are damp. They were curled into such tight fists, there are dents in them from my nails. The words I’d written there are no more than a smudge.

  “The Ephemeral City,” he says. I don’t know what that means, but I didn’t understand the words from the clue either, as far as I remember. I look out the window. The world outside is an endless stretch of green beneath an endless stretch of blue. We could be anywhere.

  “Is it still the same day?” I ask, and his response starts with a snort. I’m glad he finds this all so funny.

  “You’ve been out for almost a day,” he says. “We’re still crossing the pastureland, though. We will be, I guess, all the way to the coast.”

  “What coast?” I ask, and I try to remember the words that I’d written on my palm. Something about green and something about burning, but nothing about a city and nothing about a coast.

  “Are you worried I’m kidnapping you?” he asks, and now he outright laughs. I notice how different he looks from when I first spotted him next to this truck. Then he was as jumpy as a cornered cat, but now he reeks of confidence. Literally. A scent like warm vanilla has supplanted the stale odor of burnt clove. I don’t like either smell, to be honest, so I turn the crank to bring the window down a crack, and a cool breeze ripples through my hair.

  The wind turns my mind toward Darius, and I shiver. “Are you all right?” the man beside me asks, and my heart leaps in my chest. “Hey, calm down,” he says. “You’re fine. We got away without anyone seeing you. And the stuff on your hand . . . ten, green, burning . . . I hope that’s the riddle you had to solve, because the answer is the Ten Viridian Isles, and that’s where we’re headed—”

  “You’re taking me there? To the place in the clue?”

  “Well, yeah.” He scratches his head. He’s as confounded by me as I am by him, though I can’t imagine how that could be. “I was already headed there myself.”

  “Then why did you say you were taking me to a city?”

  “The Ephemeral City. So not a city at all.”

  He’s giving me a headache, and nothing is making sense, and I’m not sure if it’s a side effect of the memory sickness or a side effect of traveling with a man who’s been using Oblivion. He scowls at me in a very deliberate way, like he’s trying to stay steady and grounded when his feet can’t quite touch the ground. His cheeks even look less sunken, like he’s been filled out with a sense of his own power. Like nothing bad could threaten him—or me—at least not right now.

  The craving I’d felt in him when I’d found him—the craving that had told me he’d accept the exchange of the baggie for a ride—is almost gone, but not quite. He’s like a pot of hot water, just on the edge of boiling. His eyes dart from time to time to the glove box right in front of me, and I suspect if I opened it I’d find whatever’s left in that baggie.

  Outside, the ground is like a checkerboard of green grass cut into squares by walls of piled gray stones. Cows huddle in one corner, ponies in another. Before I can get a good look, we’ve passed them by. From time to time, I spot a cluster of grave markers up on a hill, and it’s strange to imagine the people who lived and died way out here. Maybe they’re the same people who collected all these stones to build these walls.

  The sky is pale blue, draped with clouds that look like tattered cloth.

  “I guess you’ve never been to the Festival of Fire Flowers, then?” he says.

  “Wait, is that where we’re going?” I think again about what he’s said. The Ten Viridian Isles. It makes sense. They’re the location of the annual festival that celebrates the king. “I know what the festival is,” I say. “But I don’t remember if I’ve ever been to it. Are Outsiders allowed?”

  “Some,” he says, and he gives me a sideways glance.

  “So then what’s the Ephemeral City?” I ask. “If the clue points to the Ten Viridian Isles, and if we’re going to the Festival of Fire Flowers—”

  “The Ephemeral City is the home of the Festival of Fire Flowers,” he says, a bit exasperated, which I find somewhat insulting. “Every year, on the tenth of the Ten Isles, the city goes up and the festival rages. But it’s just for three days and three nights. Like most good things in this world, it’s only temporary.” He says this quite wistfully, and he glances out his side window, so that I wonder what memory he’s working through. I’m thinking maybe I should say something, maybe remind him of the round-faced woman and the baby in the pictures, but then he pulls himself back together and continues. “When the festival ends, the whole of the city is undone and shut away, until the following autumn, when the fire flowers bloom again and the city reappears.” He gives me another sideways glance. “I’d think you’d know all that, because of your . . . access to the princess.”

  He’s baiting me. Somehow, he knows who I am and he wants to lead me into a conversation about my connection to the royal family. And though I’d like to find out everything he knows about my history, I’m not ready to face the past again just yet, not ready to fall into memory sickness again.

  And I don’t like being manipulated.

  Beyond the windshield, the road rises, a long line of black cutting between green. We have time to talk, so instead of taking the bait and asking what he means, I stubbornly ask instead, “How did you become an Oblivion addict?”

  “Ah. So you already know who you are,” he says.

  “I know I’m her surrogate,” I say. “How do you know who I am?”

  “My answer to both of your questions is the same: I’m indentured to the palace. I know who you are because I’ve seen you there. And I became addicted to Oblivion because the king is addicted to Oblivion, and he sometimes shares it with me.”

  I make a small sound in response to this, something like huh!, and it doesn’t take Cientia for him to know he’s shocked me. “So you don’t remember that part then? That the king was an addict himself? They say that’s what got him killed—”

  “Killed?”

  “Ah! Something else you don’t remember.” He smiles bigger than he has before, and his front teeth protrude from under his top lip, giving him the look of a happy rodent. He’s clearly pleased to be winning some competition he thinks we’re having over which of us knows more about my past—a competition horribly stacked in his favor. He doesn’t seem to care. Like every addict, he likes to win. “Yes indeed. Killed for his lust for Oblivion.” He checks my reaction again, and then adds, “Not an overdose.”

  Does my face look like I was concerned the king had overdosed? If he had Cientia, he’d know I’m far more self-interested than that.

  But he just keeps right on with his story. “They say it was one of the Asps that did it.”

  “An Asp? Why—”

  “Because they were tired of being his suppliers? Because they were worried about the rule of an Oblivion-addicted king? I don’t know. I’m just glad no one turned their suspicions on me. But I doubt too many people knew I was bringing it in for him. Or that he was paying me for my troubles with little kickbacks of the drug.”

  The sky in the distance is darker than it is overhead, and I wonder if the coast is closer than I originally thought. My hands flutter in my lap, suddenly cold, so I slide them under my thighs. I’m not ready to get out of the safety of this truck. “I just don’t get why anyone becomes addicted to Oblivion,” I say, unable to keep my mouth shut. “How could something that sucks away your memories be a drug people want to abuse?”

  “Ah, but not every dose takes something away. A smaller dose gives something to the user. If you use just a bit, you get a tremendous surge of well-being.” He stops talking. His gaze fastens onto the horizon, and his hands tighten on the wheel. “Could you hand me that little case by your feet?” he asks.

  On the floor of the truck, there’s a small metal box the size and shape of a bar of soap. When I pass it to him, he opens it to reveal a half dozen clove cigarettes he clearly rolled himself. He gets one lit, drops the lighter back in his pocket, and t
osses the case back onto the floor instead of handing it to me. Then he slides right back into his story.

  “But you can take Oblivion an inch too far and you can fall into the hole it puts in your mind. Like what they do to racers. I’m much more careful these days,” he says, and now his shoulders relax a little as he exhales a cloud of smoke into the cab. I crank my window down a bit more. He doesn’t seem to notice. His gaze has found one of the photos of the round-faced woman taped to the dashboard right beside his right hand. “I have someone who believes in me now.”

  “So . . . ,” I start. At the end of the road ahead of us, I can clearly see the line of the ocean. A suspension bridge pushes out into the blue.

  “That’s the bridge to the first of the Ten Viridian Isles,” he says. “Right at the mouth of the Arrow River. We’re almost there.”

  I swallow, and though I know I should try to stay out of sight, I can’t help but move to the edge of my seat to stare out at what’s ahead. I don’t even know if I’ve seen them before with my own eyes, yet I know that the Ten Isles are beautiful. I know it the way I know that leaves fall from the trees in the autumn, or that they return as new buds in the spring.

  “I’m running out of time,” I say. “I want to ask you so many things. I want to know everything you know about me.”

  He slows the truck. We’re already crossing the first bridge, trading the rumble of the road for a soft hum beneath our wheels. I can see the other islands from up here, and they are all surprisingly small, linked together by a series of bridges like this one. And in the distance, I can see what looks like a city of colorful circus tents stretching high into the sky.

  “Everything?” he asks, his eyes narrowing. He is glancing more frequently at the glove box now. I wonder if the Oblivion he used is starting to wear off. “I’ll tell you what I know, but you may change your mind about wanting to know it all when you hear it.” The air outside is scented with salt and a smell I can’t quite recognize—it’s something green that grows only by the sea. The truck starts climbing the second bridge.