Broken Crowns

by Lauren DeStefano

  Yes, I’d imagine she does.

  “Her father’s sheet, however . . .” He trails off. I think he’s waiting to see if I’ll interject. When I don’t, he says, “There are certain marks in public records to denote repeat offenses and vices—tonic addiction, disturbing the peace, people who have been to the attraction camps, jumpers, what have you. But Pen’s father’s record is utterly flawless, excepting a black dot by his name.”

  A black dot. That’s all there is to hold him accountable for what he’s done. Pen was strong enough to survive it, but there is far more than a dot of ink marking her.

  “I don’t know what it means,” the new king says. “But my father had a way of forgiving crimes if they were committed by someone he deemed useful. And Nolan Atmus is indeed useful, but in a way that I’d like to keep at arm’s length. What is your thought on that?”

  I take a deep breath. “My thought is that, if you don’t refer to her as Margaret, and you don’t bring up the black dot, Pen will be happy to help you.”

  “Splendid!” His sudden cheer is a relief. “Let’s go pay her a visit, then.”

  Pen is weak but entirely lucid when the new king and I enter her hospital room. She gives him a wry smile. “To whatever do I owe the honor, Your Majesty?”

  He ignores the jab, and she brightens considerably when she sees the drawing paper he’s brought her. “We’re to design a flight path between Internment and Havalais, and calculate the impact it will have on our city’s new tendency to sink.”

  She reaches for the paper greedily. “I’ve already done all the measurements.”

  As she explains the impact the jet has on Internment’s altitude, the new king says nothing of his plans. He asks questions that Pen is all too happy to answer. On a separate sheet, she draws the sunstone itself, explaining how the flecks within the soil are compressed and refined in a way not dissimilar from coal. And when he’s had enough, he rolls her drawings up neatly and tucks them under his arm.

  “Where are you going?” Pen says as he heads for the door.

  “To mull and brood,” he says, quite decisively. “It takes a great deal of that to run a kingdom.”

  Hours later, King Azure summons me outside of the tower. The sun has just set, and he carries a lantern but doesn’t light it. Wherever we’re going, he doesn’t want us to be seen even by the patrolmen meant to protect him.

  There’s a chill in the air, but it’s a relief in contrast to the stuffiness of the clock tower. I don’t know how the royal family can stand to live so high up in all that stale air, especially during the long season, when the air is like bath steam.

  Once he has led me away from the patrolmen, he lights the lantern. We walk in silence for what feels like an hour before he says, “When we were children, my sister and I would compete for our father’s attention. But we did so knowing that I would be the one to inherit the kingdom, and so when Papa confided in me alone, I reveled in it. I did enjoy torturing my sister with knowledge she couldn’t have.”

  “Now you sound like my brother,” I say, and brace myself against the pain that fills my chest with those words. I do miss him and Alice quite much.

  “One day,” he goes on, “Papa led me through the woods. Celeste wasn’t invited. At first I was rather smug about it. Important. But the farther on we went, the more I began to worry. I had never been so deep into the woods before, and this sort of . . . dread filled my stomach.”

  I also never thought the woods ran this deep. It’s as though we’ve stepped into a parallel world that’s twice as large as our floating city. He looks at me as though to determine whether I’m afraid. But I’ve spent years trying to navigate the darkness of my brother’s mind. A few trees and a starlit sky are of no concern to me.

  “What’s out here?” I ask.

  “Something my father didn’t want the city to see.” He raises the lantern, opens the door, and blows out the flame.

  It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and then I see slivers of light up ahead, peeking out from what appear to be buildings clustered together behind a fence.

  And I understand.

  “These are the attraction camps,” I say.

  “Yes,” King Azure says. “It’s the first thing I mean to destroy, as king. Normally there would be more patrolmen standing guard, but they’re all preoccupied now, as you can imagine. We can get closer, but we must be quiet. I don’t want anyone to know that you’ve seen this.”

  He is as silent as a hunter, the way he moves, and I do my best to mimic this.

  He crouches before the fence. “Here,” he whispers. “You can see into that window there.”

  I kneel beside him, gathering the skirts of my borrowed dress. I follow his gaze and I see a woman with cloth wrapped around her mouth, spooning liquid to a body lying on a bed. It’s hard to believe the body is alive, but I think I see it breathe.

  “I’ve put a stop to the surgeries,” he says.

  “Surgeries?” When I crane my neck, I’m just able to see the body on the bed. It looks like a child whose head has been shaved. My heart leaps up into my throat. “They do something to their brains,” I breathe.

  The king’s silence is his answer. I’m glad that he can’t take me farther than this. I do not want to see what exists in those other buildings without any windows at all.

  “It’s gone on for more than a century,” King Azure says. “As I understand, it began as an experiment to correct the boys who were attracted to boys, the girls who were attracted to girls, and the ones who seemed to be attracted to both or neither.”

  “Has it ever worked?” I ask, horrified.

  “The records say yes, but I think not,” he says. “If I had to endure what goes on in that place, I’d be more inclined to lie and say I was healed, wouldn’t you?”

  I’ve begun to feel dizzy. I press my lips tightly together and try not to be sick.

  “My father took a special interest in this place, even as a boy, before he was king. And its purpose has expanded since then to include criminals and traitors—anyone he means to change. When they recover, they’re never quite the same. They have seizures, or memory loss, or they can scarcely walk. In some cases they become entirely dependent on their betrothed to take care of them.”

  I think of the woman who used to live in my apartment building. Every day she would follow her betrothed to the doorway and then stand there to watch him go. I wonder if she was once here.

  “It’s awful,” I say.

  “I mean to have this entire facility demolished,” he says. “Let it become a field for livestock. Let it reek of manure. That would suit me just fine.”

  In the dim light of faraway buildings, I see the fear in his bright eyes. And I know that being a prince would not have spared him this fate, if only his father had known the truth about him.

  “Your Majesty,” I say, “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” He blinks and comes back to himself. “I’ve brought you here to show you that you’ve done me a favor. This place could never be destroyed while my father was alive. You did what I wish I could have done a long time ago.”

  I’m stunned that he would see my killing his father as a favor, even if I’m starting to agree. We begin walking, and I look over my shoulder at that horrible shadow of a tiny city. I know what he was trying to tell me. After the king attempted to murder his own grandchild to save the royal reputation, I have no doubt.

  I fear speaking, but I know that I have to.

  “Was my father in there?”

  He looks at me, the candlelight casting long shadows on his face. “I can’t say for certain. After you left for the ground, many patrolmen were killed for their insubordination. Others professed their loyalty. And others, yes, did end up in the attraction camps. The primary purpose is to change—or attempt to change—one’s sexual attraction. But that’s really only the start of it. My father believed any facets of the mind could be changed with surgery.”

 
; I veer around and start pacing toward the camp. King Azure grabs my arm. “Morgan, don’t.”

  I try to break free, but his grip only tightens.

  “Let me go!”

  “Would you lower your voice?” he says through gritted teeth. “I didn’t show you this place so that you could go charging in there causing a scene. I may be in charge of the kingdom now, but I’m still determining which members of my father’s council can be trusted, and I can’t have you putting yourself at risk.”

  “He’s my father,” I bite back. “He’s one of the few people I have left. You would go back if you thought Celeste were in there!”

  “Yes,” he says. “Yes, I would burn the bloody place to the ground if I had to. But Celeste isn’t in there, and neither is your father. I checked.”

  I stop struggling, and cautiously he lets go of my arm, watching and ready to apprehend me if I run again. But I don’t. My legs feel rubbery and numb. “You checked? What does that mean?”

  “After my father’s death, while you were recovering, there was much for me to do. It isn’t as easy as just becoming king, you know. I had to assess the damage, so to speak. That included going through the attraction camps and learning the status of each patient—”

  “Victim, you mean.”

  “If you’d rather. And I put a stop to the surgeries and instructed the nurses to return the victims to health. I saw every face in every bed, and there were no grown men left at all.”

  My breath hitches. “Left?”

  He hesitates. “There’s an incinerator for the patients who don’t make it.”

  “The ones your father didn’t want to make it,” I say. I’m struggling to draw each breath, and I can’t bear the look of pity in the king’s eyes. I lost my parents once already, and I did not think that sharp pain of the initial realization could repeat itself, but now I see that it can. There is no limit to how much pain can be felt in a life.

  Lex is the only person in either world who could understand. I wish that he were here. I would even take his cynicism, his “That’s the way it is, Little Sister. What did you expect?” if he had no comfort to offer.

  But I can’t have even that much. All that’s left of my family is gone from this floating city. There is no one waiting for me at our apartment. It’s only me.

  21

  Celeste is not the fool her brother makes her out to be. She has heard the full report of everything that happened the night her father was slain. She has heard that a maddened patrolman killed her father, and that I was the one to fight the patrolman off.

  I can tell, however, that she doesn’t believe a word of it. We don’t speak in the days before her brother’s coronation, and the truth lingers in the air between us, something between what she has heard and what she fears.

  Hours before her brother is to become king, I find her sitting on the top step before my chamber door, dragging her fingertip across her daughter’s face.

  “What do they know?”

  I stop ascending the stairs and hold fast to the banister. She’s just close enough that she could extend her foot and kick me to my death to avenge her father if she wanted.

  When I don’t answer, she raises her head. It’s the first time she’s truly looked at me since the ordeal that night, and I’m surprised at the lack of malice in her eyes. She looks only curious.

  “What does who know?” I ask.

  “The kingdom,” she says. “Have they heard about my daughter?”

  Strange, I think, that a child with such an important role to play remains nameless.

  “There have been rumors about a child,” I say. “The night we ran for the jet, some people heard her crying. But they suspect she’s the child of a mistress your brother has been keeping. Or that he rescued a fugitive from the ground and the child is hers. It’s hard to tell what they think—it changes by the hour.”

  Her sharp laugh hits the walls of the stairwell like a dozen slaps. “That figures he’d get the credit, even for this. Do you know my brother has been in conference with Nim all morning? ‘One king to another’ he says. I’m not even invited. Fancy that.”

  “It’s safer for you if the citizens believe the rumor,” I say. I mean to console her, and it’s also the truth. “There’s too much danger if the kingdom finds out you’ve had a child outside of the queue. It’s forbidden.”

  She shakes her head. “Dead kings dictated our history books, and male appointees transcribed them, Morgan. I wonder how many daughters and sisters and mothers wrote the stories that never made it onto the page.”

  I know just what she’s thinking: She wants to announce her handiwork to her kingdom. She wants to give them their new child of two worlds, and she believes they’ll love it the way she believed her father would love it. I know, also, that she can’t be talked out of her ideas once she’s had them. But still I’m going to try.

  Cautiously, I approach and sit beside her. “Celeste.” My voice is soft. “I think what you’ve done is incredibly brave. I do. And, with time, the two kingdoms will see it as well. Your brother will do away with the queue, and when he opens up a flight path to the ground, everyone will have more freedom than they can fathom. They’ll thank you for that.”

  She looks at me.

  “But,” I go on, “right now, all they will see is that you have something they can’t have. You were allowed a right that would be taken from them. They’ll hate you for it.”

  “Some will,” she says. “But I don’t care about that. It isn’t my mission in life to be liked. It’s my mission to do what’s right for Internment and Havalais. I’m here to change things. It’s why I was born; I’ve always known that, even before I knew what it meant.”

  “And you will,” I assure her.

  “Just not today, is that it?”

  “Nothing grand can be accomplished in a single day,” I say.

  “Oh, I beg to differ.” She stands, and for all her fire, she must move slowly and cringing all the while. She shouldn’t be out of bed at all, if she were to take her doctor’s advice.

  Her brother told me that it was a torturous labor. After hours of watching his daughter struggle, the king ordered the doctor to render her unconscious and to cut the child from her stomach. He was certain her screams could be heard throughout the kingdom and he wanted it over with. Prince Azure could only listen outside the locked door as his sister fell silent.

  That was the most he would speak of it. Celeste said nothing of it at all. She is not the sort of person to acknowledge something so unhelpful as pain.

  “We aren’t different, you and I,” Celeste says. “We don’t treat rules as though they’re walls. I suppose I was just born surrounded by bigger barriers to climb.”

  “Sometimes it’s wise to pretend to have no interest in climbing,” I say.

  In her sad smile I can’t tell if my words have reached her. I hope that they have.

  The coronation ceremony is to take place in the evening. The new king and Nimble have been in conference for days, with Celeste growing all the more anxious.

  At last, with three hours before the ceremony, the door to the king’s study opens and we’re invited inside.

  It’s a bizarre council for a king. His advisers consist of Pen, Celeste, and myself. He’s still determining whether Basil is trustworthy. The table could easily seat a dozen heads. Past kings might have chosen as few as three advisers, though all of them would have been men, and all of them much older and better versed in the old ways than we are.

  But this king does not care for the old ways, and we are the only ones on this floating city whom he can truly trust.

  “So kind of you to finally invite us in, Brother,” Celeste says, breezing past him and taking the seat beside Nimble, who looks at her with concern. Though there’s color in her cheeks and she looks well, something has changed. She’s aged years in just a few days.

  Her hair falls straight before her rigid shoulders, with no braided crown. She’s wearing a loose
button-up dress that hides her figure, with a lace collar that just brushes her clenched jaw. She looks a decade older than the mischievous princess who stowed away on the metal bird. Nonetheless she still looks the part of the princess Internment loves—pretty and benign.

  “Celeste,” the new king says, “I’ve invited you here so that we might get through this bloody ceremony as a team. But for that to work, I need you to trust me without having a tantrum about hierarchy.”

  “Tantrum?” She looks at him innocently. “Of course not, Your Majesty. I’m only the spare. Here to serve.”

  He rubs his temples and sighs. To the group of us he says, “None of us has ever been to a coronation ceremony, but throughout history they’ve been transcribed, and I can tell you from the pages I’ve just slogged through that they are long and insufferable. This won’t be one of those.”

  “Won’t it have to be?” Pen says. “You’re declaring so many changes to our law.”

  “It hasn’t been all fun and games behind this locked door,” he says. “I’ve written several new laws and arranged for copies to be delivered to every home. I believe it’s better this way. More organized.”

  The new king sits uneasily at the head of the table, still wearing one of his white ruffled shirts. He looks nothing at all like a king, and I worry over whether he’ll be able to command this city.

  “The feature of my coronation speech will be with regards to the ground,” he says. “Pen has done the math, and it’s her prediction that it will take roughly five years for Internment to resurface to its coordinates before the jet began making passage. Knowing that, Nimble—being the king of Havalais now—will head a project to build aircrafts that will travel between the two kingdoms. If all goes well, there will be a larger jet that will carry citizens between the two kingdoms every five years.”

  Celeste looks between her brother and Nim. “Five years?” she says. “Where will I be during that time?”