Crown of Crowns

by Clara Loveman

  “You can’t threaten me,” Zawne said. “I am your king!”

  Raad laughed. “Not if the Gurnots tear you limb from limb. If the fighting keeps up, you know damn well there will be war. If you spit on Kaelyn’s memory now, Gaard will remember. Gaard never forgets.”

  Zawne sighed. He seemed stripped of life, empty, like he had been after Lordin’s death. It must have been a crushing blow for him. Both his loves had perished. Zawne was the only human left to carry the secret of Shiol.

  “I loved your sister,” Zawne said. “I loved her with all my soul. You and I will work out her burial. I’m sorry to snap at you. It’s just … it’s just so devastating.”

  Raad softened. He looked to be holding back tears. “I understand,” he said. “If it wasn’t for my Aska training, I’d be in ruins. I’d be on the floor with a bottle of rum.”

  “Me too.”

  The two men lingered silently on each other’s screens. The sorrow was full and sweaty, making them appear damp. Zawne surely knew I was a Min, that I wasn’t gone for good. But Raad didn’t. His heart was shattered to pieces.

  “There’s something you can do for her,” Raad said to Zawne. “Emell, Lordin’s mother, she murdered Mama. We need an investigation. We must check her alibi, do DNA samples, and review all P2 footage from that day and the previous week. We need proof for an arrest.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Zawne said with a sigh. He didn’t seem shocked. I wondered why. Maybe Zawne was too defeated to care.

  “I have to go,” Raad said. “Papa is bleeping on the other line. This news will devastate him.”

  Oh no, I thought. Not Papa. His heart can’t take it! I feel like such a fool!

  Roki took hold of my arm. He had been right. Even without reading my mind, Roki knew my thoughts. “It’ll be okay,” he said. “We’ll find a way to keep you in their lives.”

  “How?” I asked. Zawne had ended the call and was lying on his sofa, blinking at the ceiling like a zombie. “Tell me how, Roki. I can’t leave them like this!”

  “We’ll have to figure it out later,” he said. “I’m sorry, Kaelyn, but we have a mission to complete. You need to get inside Zawne’s mind while I keep our presence masked. Rummage through his memories. Find the clue.”

  “All right,” I said. But I was extremely distraught. Seeing Raad’s teary eyes, hearing him talk about Papa, about my burial—it had jarred me.

  I tried to relax. I took a deep breath, stretched out my gift, and drifted into Zawne’s memories.

  Chapter 17

  A lifetime flashed by, the life of a royal boy grown into a man. I couldn’t slow to watch Zawne’s younger memories. It was as if my instincts had control over my power. They guided me to a dusky night on the beach, Zawne standing before his commander as his Aska training began.

  “This is not a physical test,” boomed the authoritative voice of Zawne’s commander, a hulk of a man nearly seven feet tall. “This is not an athletic sprint to the finish line. This is not a day at the beach. This, men, is the greatest battle you will ever wage against your minds.”

  The commander, a man named Thun, paused to let the gravity of his words wash over the two dozen men gathered on the dusky shore. “Your mind will tell you to stop. The pain will be severe. The stress, the fatigue, the agony—they will destroy you. Your mind will beg for release. Your body will beg for reprieve. You will have none. The desert will burn you. The starkness of the ocean will swallow you. The traitorous brain in your skull will trick you. There is no way to overcome. Here, there is only suffering. There is only pain. Should you balk beneath it, you will die.”

  Thun paused, massive black waves breaking against the shore behind the nervous recruits. The air smelled of seaweed and driftwood. Zawne listened to Thun impassively. He already looked dead, unfearful of any pain, for there could be no pain greater than the loss of love.

  “There will be no special treatment here,” Thun said. He was looking at Zawne, at the spoiled prince. “Should you choose to wade into these waters, you will either die or overcome. There is no rescue. Your visins have been deactivated. There will be no calling for help, no food being delivered, no paths to guide you. All you have is your team and your pain. I suggest you embrace them both. Value your teammates, for without them you will die. Value your pain, for if you cannot embrace it, you will die.”

  Thun paused, puffed out his chest, and stared into each of the twenty-four recruits’ scared faces. “Some of you are boys. You will probably die. Some of you are men. You, too, will probably die. The sharks will rip you to shreds. The leopards will chew on your bones. The hyenas will laugh at you in the night when you feel most hopeless. Should you give up, you will die of starvation and be stripped bare by the desert winds. Should you somehow make it to Lodden, the training will likely break you.”

  “I can’t do it!” screamed one of the men. He dropped to his knees and shrieked, “Let me go home. I don’t want to die here!”

  Thun walked to the boy, glared down at him as he groveled in the sand. “Go,” Thun said. “Go home, child. Congratulations, you’ve just cost your team a man.”

  The boy ran, scuttled through the sand and vanished into the night.

  “Anyone else?” Thun asked. Again he was looking at Zawne. “If anyone wishes to leave, now is the time. Once you set foot in the water, you are beyond my help. You are forsaken to the wild and its untamed dangers. You are stripped bare, nothing but your rags and your packs to carry with you, nothing but your bones and loose teeth to be lost to the sands. As everyone knows, the route to Lodden is a no-go zone. Tech doesn’t work. Drones don’t fly. Flyrarcs are prohibited. Only over the next few months will you understand the meaning of loneliness.”

  No one said a word. Zawne was pensive. He doubted Thun’s words. Zawne was thinking he could never be more alone than he was in that moment.

  “These are your maps.” Thun walked along the line of recruits and handed every fourth man a paper map. “This is your guide. You have no technology, nothing but this map to point you toward Lodden. You will first cross the Ganga Sea. All twenty-three of you will share the small raft over there.” Thun pointed to a rickety platform of logs bound together by rope, a limp cloth sail on its shoddy mast. It didn’t look big enough for a group of four, never mind twenty-three. There were six thin wooden panels affixed to rings on the edges.

  “Some of you will die before this raft reaches Surrvul. Without working together, you will all die. The sun, the salt water, the harsh cold of the night, the elements to ravage your body. If you slip your toes into the water, you will likely be eaten by a shark. You have no fire. You have no water. It’s one week of paddling to reach Surrvul’s shore and the small cache of water placed ahead of your arrival. It will be your only mercy.”

  The men glanced at each other nervously, then glanced at the raft. No one said it, but they were clearly terrified. Half of them had probably never been in the ocean before.

  “When you reach Surrvul,” Thun said, coming to a stop and folding his massive arms, “you must trek through the wasteland to the other side. This means the entire western portion of the Surrvul continent. There are no people. It’s a no-man’s-land. There are small rodents, snakes, sand scorpions, and antelope. You may eat what you catch, if you can catch anything. Upon making it to the channel that separates Surrvul and Lodden, you must push your weary bodies across its shark-infested depths. In Lodden, you will begin the real training.”

  Everyone kept quiet.

  “Bolster your thoughts,” Thun said. “Steady your focus. Harden yourself. Brace for pain. When the pain comes, let it fill you. That’s what being an Aska is about, accepting pain and using it as a tool. Should you cross this treacherous course and complete your training, you will be the most formidable of men, able to carry any burden and weather any storm. You will be greatly honored in our society and have far-reaching opportunities.”

  Thun nodded. “That’s it. Your boat awaits. Upon reaching Surrvul, y
ou’ll split into groups of four and work together to survive. Good luck, men.”

  No one moved. Thun watched them with his arms folded. He had finished his pep talk and would offer no further assistance. It was only when the silence deepened into an inescapable dread that Zawne left the line, determination black in his eyes, and started for the boat.

  The other men followed.

  With morning came heat and dehydration. Six men rowed the crummy raft, Zawne included. He grunted and rowed with his mouth pinched. The current was strong in the ocean, and seventeen men lay in a pile in the center of the raft, half-naked, with their shirts tied around their heads as they chopped through the waves. They were sullen and grumpy, twisted into ugly contortions for the lack of available space. Mouths smooshed against shoulders, legs tangled in knots of limbs. And then someone screamed.

  “Sharks!”

  All around the raft were gray shark fins like arrowheads cutting through the water. Zawne kept rowing, his dull expression unchanged. But one of the other rowers lost his mind. “They’re going to come onto the boat!” He took the paddle and tried to whack one of the passing sharks. The paddle smacked the water, and the man lost his balance and fell in.

  There was a soft splash. A few bubbles rushed to the surface, then blood. Blood frothed around the exposed shark fins, and the man was gone.

  Zawne shouted, “Someone take his spot! Keep rowing!”

  Four days later the twenty men left on board were very thirsty. There was no water. The sun beat down on them with unrelenting fury sixteen hours a day. The salt water had their lips cracked and dry, split and caked in blood. Zawne was deathly pale. So were the others. They were thirsty and lethargic and near death. They did what they had to in order to drink and stay alive. It was ugly.

  They washed up on Surrvul’s southern shore in the night, nineteen alive and one dead. Two of the recruits dragged the boy’s corpse up the bank and into a patch of stark grass. “We should bury him,” someone said.

  Zawne shook his head. “There’s no time. Anyway, we can’t bury him deep enough without tools. The scavengers will get him.”

  The men looked unsure, glancing at each other with unease. They had survived the brutal week on the raft, and now they had to leave the dead boy on the beach to be eaten by vultures. In most Geniverd traditions, not burying the dead was bad luck.

  “I’m with the prince,” said a bald man. He was wiry and young, probably from Shondur, like Zawne. He stepped through the men and said, “We don’t have time. Let’s find the water cache left for us, rehydrate, then start walking. It’s better to walk in the night and sleep in the heat of the day.”

  “What’s your name?” Zawne asked him.

  “Nkem,” he said, “but it doesn’t matter. We’re all nobodies here, food for sand fleas. Let’s make our teams and get off this beach. I’ll team up with the prince.”

  Another man came forward. “Me too. My name is Stingl, and I’d like to join the prince and Nkem. If the rest of you want to waste your time with burials, go ahead.”

  “This is rubbish!” a man shouted. He steamed out of the crowd and picked up the dead kid’s body. “At least see him off to sea. I’ll give him a worthy Nurlie burial, but I won’t leave him in the sand.”

  He took the kid in his arms and waded waist-deep into the water. The others watched as he let the body drift away on the current. He gave a salute and uttered some half-forgotten hymn under his breath. Then he started shouting.

  “Ow! Hey, get away from me. Ow! What the …?”

  He struggled to shore, no one daring to jump in the water and help. He started up the bank and collapsed, twitching with spasms in the sand. Zawne and the others ran to check on him, and in the light of the moon, they could see pink and purple sores where jellyfish had stung him. He foamed at the mouth, seized, mumbled something, and died. His body was pink, and his veins distended from the jellyfish poison.

  “Anyone else want to paddle?” Zawne asked. He received only silence as an answer. “All right. Let’s get into groups and find that water. The desert awaits.”

  “Five thousand miles,” Nkem said. It was dawn, and they were still walking, Nkem, Stingl, and Zawne. The others were mirages in the distance behind them, like wavering shadows following through the awakening scrubland. “Coast to coast, I mean. Five thousand miles from here to the north coast. It’ll take us maybe eight months.”

  Stingl laughed. “Yeah, only eight months.”

  “It is nothing compared to a lifetime of discipline,” Zawne said. “I remember when my brother, Jaken, returned home from his Aska training. He was the same man, but different. His emotions had cooled. He was sharply aware of everything. He seemed like a stronger person, someone still capable of love yet capable of great horrors. I saw a secret truth in his eyes, and the possession of this truth strengthened him and gave him purpose. That’s what I seek in this desert. I seek truth and purpose.”

  “Deep, man,” Stingl said.

  But Nkem wasn’t convinced. “You’ll get truth all right, Prince. You’ll get truth in the way of pain and misery like you wouldn’t believe. Let’s talk again after you’ve been stuck inside your own head for two straight months. That’s the real torment. You, your thoughts, your regrets, your secret truths. Your mind will haunt you until you’ve gone insane.”

  Then Nkem laughed, raised his hands to the great dust plain and said, “Welcome to your doom, Prince. Welcome to the infinite horrors of your psyche.”

  Zawne shrugged it off. His pace was fast, but Nkem and Stingl kept up well. All three were fit and lean, made for desert walking. “Nothing can compare to the recent horror I’ve faced,” Zawne said, “my wife being decapitated by a crazy groundskeeper. Lordin had given the world so much. She had given me so much! And some lunatic took it all away. The pain of this desert is nothing to me. The memory of Lordin will carry me through.”

  “Let’s hope,” Nkem said, “for all our sakes.”

  They slept at high noon in the scanty shade of a cactus, and when they woke five hours later, the sun was a flare of death on the horizon. Nkem cut open the cactus, and they drank its milk. It was the only cactus they had seen thus far.

  “I hope there’s more of these,” Stingl said. “I’m not sure what we’re going to do for food.”

  “Or water,” Nkem said.

  That night, as they marched, the scuffling of many feet could be heard circling them as nighttime predators stalked them in the blackness. Zawne, Stingl, and Nkem walked clustered tightly to dissuade attack. If there was food to be had, it was too dark to find it. The same went for water or cacti.

  As dawn’s first light began to warm the desert sands, Zawne said, “We should walk in the day. We can find no food at night. We also risk attacks from animals.”

  So they walked through the day under the hot wrath of the sun and didn’t sleep. They were far ahead of the other groups. The only sound was their harsh breathing and the call of the wind. As darkness fell, they used what few tools they had in their packs to set traps. Each man had an empty tin can. They dug three holes in the sand and placed an empty can in each one. “The dried juice on the bottom of the cans will lure scorpions,” Nkem said. “We’ll check them in the morning.”

  They caught one scorpion during the night and ate it raw in the morning, sharing the paltry bit of meat between them. The next night, they used the small tarp provided to make a solar still. They dug a wide hole and stretched the tarp taut over the hole, and through the night, the moisture dripped from the tarp into one of their tin cans. It was just enough for a sip, just enough to stay alive.

  It was six months and roughly four thousand miles later when Nkem was explaining to Zawne and Stingl about the primal history of the Ava-Surrvul.

  “See, they used to farm salt out in these flatlands. It was maybe a thousand years ago, so the salt has mostly dried up. The Ava-Surrvul worked all day in the sun without water or food, chopping salt out of the ground in huge chunks. They shaved it,
strapped it to their camels, and marched back to civilization to sell it. The tradition lasted until the unification of Geniverd, even after the advent of cars and machines. The Surrvul have always been a hardy people. They thrive in this wasteland.”

  “It’s interesting,” Zawne said. “But what I want to know is how you can still be so chatty after four thousand miles of stark nothingness. We’ve come across human bones, sucked water out of mud gullies, eaten lizards and venomous scorpions, had our skin flayed by the sun, and been forced to do disgusting things to stay hydrated … and still you yap!”

  Stingl chuckled. “It’s Nkem’s charm. Imagine how boring this would have been without him. Not to mention we haven’t seen another person since the beach. I wonder if—”

  “Better if you didn’t,” Zawne said. “I’m sure they’re—”

  Zawne stopped in his tracks. Up ahead was a shallow crevice in the desert, one of the many dried-up riverbeds that cut through the land. Climbing onto its rim were three leopards.

  “We’re in trouble,” Zawne said. “Ready yourselves, men. It’s another test!”

  The leopards moved toward them with silent, stealthy resolve. They were nearly invisible against the sand, their yellowish coats the perfect camouflage in the scrublands.

  Nkem was pulling his pocketknife from his rucksack, but Zawne stopped him. “No, brother. It will prove our worth as warriors if we can defeat our enemy without killing them. It will show our mercy.”

  Nkem nodded. “Got it.” He dropped his knife in the sand, and the men readied themselves. They firmed their stances as the leopards began to charge.