Broken Crowns

by Lauren DeStefano

  “You don’t get it, do you?” he says. “I’m not here by choice, Stockhour.”

  King Ingram has spotted us, and from across his party he calls our names, waving us enthusiastically back into the party.

  I follow after Prince Azure, with a lead anchor in the pit of my stomach.

  When I return to the hotel, I fall into bed without bothering to unpin my hair or scrub the cosmetics from my skin.

  Pen climbs into the bed with me and for the longest time we don’t speak. My back is turned to her, and I’m watching the curtain arch around the open window like a force field when the wind comes.

  “I’ve been thinking about the gardens of stones,” she says.

  “The graveyards?”

  “Yes. Those. I’ve been thinking about all those bodies beneath the earth just rotting and feeding the worms and the soil. On Internment we burn everything away—the skin and the bones, the brain, the heart, until there’s just dust.”

  She rests her chin on my shoulder. “But down here, what’s left inside these people who are buried? Do they still hold on to the secrets that people have told them? Where does it all go?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “I think we have a lot in common with the dead,” Pen says. “We’re filled with things we won’t say out loud. Things that get trapped inside us that nobody will ever hear.”

  When I leave, is she going to go on having thoughts like this? “We aren’t dead,” I remind her. “What we say or don’t say, the secrets we do or don’t keep—those are all choices. Conscious choices we get to make while we’re alive.”

  “I thought you’d see it that way.” She lies back against the pillow. “If there’s anyone I can tell my secrets to, it’s you, Morgan. You’ll keep them if I ask, won’t you?”

  “Of course I will.”

  I understand now what is about to happen. Several months ago, I discovered one of her secrets on a piece of paper that was meant to be burnt at the Festival of Stars. It was the most desperate, hateful thing I’d ever seen her draw: buildings with the word “die” making up their bricks and plumes of chimney smoke. We fought each other to the ground over that bit of paper and she never fully explained what it meant.

  That secret has taken on a body of its own. It sits between us all the time, this thing we don’t acknowledge.

  She turns away from me and settles with the back of her head against mine. “It started the day my father took me to the glasslands,” she says. “It was evening and we were alone. He said we were going to share a secret, he and I. I knew that something was wrong, because he’d never so much as talked about his work with me, much less taken me to see it.” She is very still as she talks.

  I don’t understand but I don’t ask. I know that if I interrupt, she will stop this story and never begin again. “I don’t even remember if I looked at him. I remember the spire filling up with orange light as the sun went down. I remember reciting a poem in my head. You know, the one we read in kinder year about the flowers being the eyes of the god in the sky, spread out to keep watch over us. I recited it over and over until the words didn’t seem like words anymore.

  “That was the first time.”

  I close my eyes tight against the words she is about to say.

  “After that, he started coming to my bedroom when it was late. Usually just as the sky was changing before the sunrise. I told Mother about it. She was still good back then. She still had her wits. She went right to the clock tower, to speak to one of the king’s advisers.

  “But what could be done when my father was so important to the glasslands? He’s one of their top engineers. He was in the middle of a project to outfit older buildings with electricity. The king didn’t want a scandal. So it was decided that I was mistaken, then. I had to speak to a specialist and explain, once a week, why I wouldn’t stop telling these lies.

  “Do you know what I remember most, though? All the lines that started appearing in my mother’s face. You’d think I’d be the one crying about it, but it was never me. It was always her. Breaking into hysterics while she was washing the dishes, or going for these long walks and not returning until after my father had gone to sleep. She never slept herself, and she was prescribed tonic. As much as she wanted. As much as it would take to drown her thoughts.”

  My nails are digging into my palms, and I hold my breath for long stretches, exhaling slowly, silently. I always blamed Pen’s mother for her battle with tonic. Vilified her at times for spreading that toxic addiction to her only daughter like a terminal disease. I never once thought that there might have been a cause.

  “There are dozens of men like my father on Internment. Maybe even hundreds. Even if you look, you won’t see them. Every king knows what happens in his kingdom. He knows how to hide things. I’m not afraid of my father anymore. I don’t know that I ever was. I’ve been afraid of what would happen to my mother and me if anyone found out. My mother can’t handle herself the way that I can. She’s like a train car that only goes backward. Around and around all the time in the wrong direction, and there’s nothing I can do to even slow her down. It wasn’t always that way, I think, but it has been for as long as I’ve been alive. I suppose I can’t blame my father for all of her madness. I don’t believe in that. I don’t believe in letting other people be the reason we turn out the way that we do.

  “Thomas doesn’t know. He absolutely can’t. He may not seem like much, but if he found out, I know that he would do something as violent as it is stupid.” She’s right. The boy has no sensibility when it comes to her, he loves her so. “I’ve found ways to handle it myself. I’ve started keeping a knife under my pillow, and the last time he came into my room, I pretended to be asleep until he came close, and then I had the knife at his cheek and I asked him how he would explain his injuries at work tomorrow. He does so value his charming smile. That’s how he gets everyone to trust him.”

  The curtain falls limp as the wind leaves it. Insects impassively go on with their songs.

  For the first time all night, Pen’s voice loses its cool detachment and she sounds small. “Say something.”

  Say something.

  After Lex’s incident I modeled myself after her. I wanted to be as strong for my parents as she was for her declining mother. I foolishly believed that we had something in common, something we didn’t have to talk about. Every night while I slept safely in my bed, while my greatest problem was that I didn’t have the attention I craved, the light was being stolen from Pen’s spirit, and I saw nothing, did nothing. And rather than bonding over our tragic little lives, the real truth was that our childhood was disappearing behind our footfalls as we walked, hand in hand, down very different paths.

  “I remember this one December, we must have been seven or eight,” I say. “We were at the Festival of Stars. My brother was supposed to come and light our papers for us, but you had been bouncing all day; you had thought of something really important to ask for, and you couldn’t wait any longer. So you climbed onto one of the picnic tables so you could reach the flame lantern. I couldn’t have stopped you if I’d tried. The fire burnt right down to your fingers before you let the paper go and it spiraled away from you. You stood there in your white dress, the hem and ribbons already stained by the grass, and you watched your flame disappear into a sky that was already on fire.”

  The sun was deep orange, like it was bleeding into the sky, and everything—our whole world—had seemed ablaze.

  “You were beautiful. You were the bravest and most powerful thing in the sky.”

  I turn to face her in the darkness. The moonlight clings to the curve of her cheek. “I still see that girl when I look at you,” I say. “I always will.”

  Pen closes her eyes, and her stoic expression melts.

  “No one has ever seen me the way you do,” she says.

  8

  It’s early when Nim knocks at my door. The sun itself is still sleeping. “We’ll be leaving in a half hour,” he sa
ys, and then he’s gone. I’m uncertain whether or not I’ve slept. I didn’t dream, and spent most of the night in silence, with Pen just as silent beside me.

  I light a candle so I can see what I’m doing, but I don’t turn on the light as I slip into a dress from the closet. It’s satin with a drop waist, and a sequined collar. The fashion will startle the king, if he bothers to notice.

  I thought Pen was sleeping, but she sits up and watches me attempt to brush the tangles from my hair. “I told you not to go to bed with all those pins in it.”

  “What do you think everyone back home will say about this dress?” I say, and can’t help but grin.

  “It’s positively scandalous,” Pen says, dropping back against the pillows with a flourish. Staring up at the ceiling, she says, “Are you nervous about flying in the jet?”

  “After tumbling to the earth in the professor’s metal bird, it’s a relief to be flying in something with a proper engine.”

  “That bird was quite impressive, though,” Pen says. “It had a full kitchen. I think we could have lived there if things had gone differently. For a while, at least.”

  “You should draw it,” I say. “Not like a map, but a full rendition, with the bolts and gears and everything.”

  “I don’t know if I remember it clearly enough now.”

  “Of course you do. Your mind works that way. You capture images of things and they stay up in your head forever.”

  She sits up again, turns on the lamp, and looks at me. “I hope you’re right.”

  It’s painful to take in the sight of her. Twin braids. Sleepy green eyes. Defiant smirk that never really leaves her lips. I saw it even after her body was pulled from the water, taunting death itself.

  She squints curiously at me. “What is it?”

  “I’m just thinking is all.”

  “Yes, thank you, I gathered that much.”

  Everything has changed. That’s what I’m thinking. The way I saw the world has changed. The way I saw life. But Pen still looks the same. My beautiful Pen, who has given me her ugliest secret.

  “Do you really want the truth?” I ask.

  “Yes, I really do.”

  “I’m thinking that when I go home, I don’t know what will be waiting for me, but I hope that I can find your father—in your apartment or just leaving the glasslands. I’m thinking I’d like to stop his heart. It isn’t right. What he did. It isn’t right that Daphne and my mother and how many others had to die such awful deaths, but he goes on as though he’s done nothing wrong.”

  Her face softens. Her eyes have awoken now.

  “You don’t have to kill my father,” she says, her voice gentle. “But I can’t tell you how much it means to me that someone else wants him gone as much as I do.”

  “Maybe I’ll only trip him, then.”

  She laughs. It’s an explosive laugh, and she throws her hand over her mouth, and in the next instant she’s sobbing.

  I go to her, sit across from her on the bed. “Don’t cry,” I say, but my own eyes are filling. “Don’t.”

  “Nothing bad can happen to you, Morgan. Do you understand? There are pieces of me—important pieces—that stop existing when you’re not around.”

  Shuddering, she grabs my hands, but then changes her mind and throws her arms around me.

  “When I told the king about the phosane, I was thinking of what would be best for you,” I remind her. “So I want to find the same Pen when I return. Sober and alive.”

  She nods. Furiously, desperately, because she will tell me anything I want to hear in this moment. Anything that will make me happy. It is our way of protecting each other, filling each other’s heads with these silly illusions that neither of us will change a drop while we’re apart, and that we will see each other again.

  When I leave the bedroom, I close the door behind me, holding the knob so as to make as little noise as possible. Most of the house is sleeping, and I’d like to avoid a teary good-bye.

  But someone is waiting for me at the top of the stairs.

  Alice’s hair is bright red even as the rest of her is shadowed by the darkness of the hour. I hold my breath. It is the only way I won’t fall to pieces and change my mind about going.

  I can just see her sad smile. “I wanted to say good-bye before you left. Lex asked me to wake him, but it seemed for the best if I didn’t.”

  My brother and I had come to an understanding of sorts. He had lied about our father. If I was choosing to return home, he owed me enough to let me go. But he didn’t have to like it. If he were standing here now, he would try to stop me, and being my brother and knowing me as he does, he would play to my sympathies. He would know just what to say, not to stop me, but to make me feel lousy enough about going.

  “Don’t worry,” Alice says. “I’ll look after him.”

  “Look after yourself, too,” I say, my voice tight. I will miss them both terribly.

  “I’m working on him,” she says. “I think I’ve almost convinced him to come around to this world. When this war is through, we can get a new apartment. He can write his novels, I can work.”

  “Just like home, but entirely the opposite,” I say.

  She laughs. “Yes.”

  I take her hands. “Tell him that there are different freedoms down here,” I say. “Tell him that no one will stigmatize him for being a jumper—the people down here don’t even know what that is. Tell him you can have a family.”

  She squeezes my hands. “That one will take more time, love. There’s so much healing to do.”

  “Healing can only happen once you begin the process. Tell him.”

  “Yes,” she says, and her voice cracks with tears. I think it’s because I brought up that awful memory again, and I hate myself for being so hasty. I’m so desperate for them to be happy that I lose my own patience. But Alice puts her arms around me, kisses my cheek with such force, I can still feel her lips even after she’s drawn back. “Come back to us alive,” she says. “Whatever you have to do.”

  I can’t bear another promise I’m not sure I can keep. Instead I hug her and I tell her I love her, and I remind her again to combat Lex’s stubbornness and get him to rejoin the living. They’re both still so young. I can’t stand the thought of my brother squandering all the decades they both have left to live. “There’s still a life for you down here,” I say. “Don’t let him go on harping about the terrible things when there’s still so much good.”

  She hugs me again. There are no more promises to be made, and neither of us wants to say good-bye. When we at last let go, I offer a smile before I turn away and descend the stairs.

  Basil is wearing what I think is one of Nim’s suits. He looks striking in it, I think, even if the shoulders are a bit snug. Nim is considerably thin and willowy.

  Basil gives a somber smile when he sees me. There are tears in my eyes.

  “Hi,” I say, keeping my voice low. The rest of the hotel is sleeping, or pretending to be asleep. Nimble says we’re running a few minutes early. He says we can go say good-bye to the others if we like. “Until next time,” he quickly adds.

  I look at Basil. “I don’t want to. But you should go on if there’s anything you need to say.”

  “What about your brother?” he asks.

  I especially don’t want to say good-bye to him. If there is anyone in this hotel whose words are powerful enough to change my mind, it’s Lex.

  Even if my father’s death were a certainty, I would go. I still belong to Internment. It’s still a part of me. I have to see this through. I want to.

  “I’ve said all my good-byes,” I tell him.

  Jack Piper is nowhere, nor is his driver. Nim leads us to one of the black cars used by the staff here, and he drives us himself.

  We reach a turn in the road, and the hotel is no longer visible when I look back, and I break into a fresh round of tears. They fast become hysterical, and I am a mess of incoherent whimpers that are meant to be the names of the people
in that hotel.

  Basil puts his arms around me, rubs my back and whispers that it’s okay, let it out, go on, I’ve been incredibly brave. He understands that this is harder for me than it is for him. We are returning to his family and leaving mine behind.

  He kisses the crown of my head. “Oh, Morgan.”

  I shake in his arms the way that Pen shook in mine. I think she was what held me together for so long. “I wanted to be strong for her.” I gag on saliva. “And Alice and—” I can’t speak.

  Basil holds me steady against the jostling of the car. He has to be the steady one when I can’t be. Alice was right. Things change. People leave. The one whose blood fills your ring is the one who never leaves your side.

  I tighten my fists around his shirt.

  For all its hype, the send-off is unspectacular. Nim stops the car in what at first seems to be the middle of a field. Then, in the approaching sunlight, I see the long stretch of concrete that leads like a road to a multilevel building with a large, closed door making up its front.

  “Take a minute to dry your eyes,” Nim says. “We’re running early anyway.” He turns in his seat and gives me the handkerchief from his pocket. It’s embroidered with a black JP, for “Jack Piper.” The real name he never uses.

  I sniff. “Thank you.”

  His lips are pressed tightly, not quite a smile. I am going to miss him, and his sisters, but I can’t think about that now if there’s any chance of holding myself together. I watch him step out of the car and close the door behind him.

  I dab at my eyes, blow my nose, and let out a shuddering breath.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this is how it felt when you left your family behind?” I say.

  “It wasn’t quite the same.” Basil uses his sleeve to dab at my persistent tears. “I knew that I was making the choice they’d want me to make. I knew that their best chance at staying safe was for me to leave them behind.”

  I shake my head. “This isn’t what my brother or Alice want. That’s why I couldn’t say good-bye to my brother. I want it to seem as though—as though I just stepped out for a walk before he woke up, and I’ll be back soon.” I look at him. “And Pen. I need her. I need both of you in my life. I don’t know who I am without the two of you beside me.”