Burning Kingdoms

by Lauren DeStefano

  Shame. That’s the word that comes to me when I look at her. That’s what’s so strange about her face. She isn’t angry or about to faint. She’s ashamed.

  “We were both little girls then,” I say cautiously. “Anything you could have understood, I could have understood.”

  “But I didn’t understand,” she whispers.

  My heart is in my throat. The thought I’m trying not to have cannot be right. I don’t mean to say it aloud, to make it real, but it tumbles out. “Your father has been hurting you. And it started the day he took you to the glasslands.”

  She looks sharply at me. “You aren’t in a position to talk about normal families yourself, though, are you?”

  “I am waiting for you to tell me I’m wrong.”

  She stares at the paper in my hand, and I stare at it, too. It’s a tiny world in which she has been trapped and from which I’ve been unable to save her.

  Pen. What has he done to her? There are never any bruises. I grew up in the apartment just upstairs and never suspected a thing.

  The knife under her pillow. The way she spurns Thomas’s advances. All the expensive gifts from her father that she barely acknowledges. Drowning herself in tonic.

  I feel sick. “Tell me what he did to you,” I say, although it’s a feeble request, and one she won’t grant me. Whatever it was, her mother, drowned in her bottle, couldn’t stop it. All Pen had to turn to was a piece of request paper.

  “I never knew, Pen. You never seemed at all afraid of him.”

  “I was not afraid of him,” she says. “I was afraid of being declared irrational. You’ll understand I wasn’t in a hurry to have my reputation discredited and be fitted with an anklet so that I could never leave home until I was old enough to be married off to Thomas.”

  She has pointed out one of our world’s most dangerous flaws—how it treats those who argue or question or fight. Yet she would defend Internment until her death. She loves our city the way Alice loves the child she was forced to bleed away, and the way the prince would love the freedom to find his prince, and all the other things that label us as broken.

  Her expression has gone sour as she looks at the paper. I have never seen such hatred in her eyes. “Keep that if it means so much to you, then,” she says. “Perhaps it will be a cozy reminder of home.”

  She pushes me away from the door. I stagger.

  “Pen, please,” I say.

  She leaves me there. The Pen I’ve known all my life has hurried from the room, descended the stairs, and slammed a door. A stranger is left staring back at me on the page.

  22

  The stars are the only things the sky cannot devour. I’ve seen the way that even my floating city can disappear into the murky whiteness of a cloudy day and be a hostage there all winter. I’ve seen birds fly up into the blue until there’s nothing left of them. And now the sky has swallowed a jet that carries Internment’s only princess, and with her all our chances of going home.

  Yet the stars remain. I wonder if they are the true gods. Either way I don’t ask anything of them. Pen has shown me that a lifetime of devotion does not mean a request will be acknowledged, much less answered. It wasn’t a god’s duty to protect her. I was the one who should have seen.

  I try to imagine what terrible things she’s endured, and she disappears into something less than dust in my imagination. I suppose that’s what she’d want, to be burnt up like the request she never got to set on fire.

  The door creaks open, letting in just a moment of light before it’s closed again. Then my mattress moves with the weight of her climbing in behind me.

  She wraps her arm around me and rests her forehead against the back of my neck.

  Her skin is chilly from the night air. I don’t know where she’s been all evening. Perhaps something about her is supposed to have changed, but she seems the same to me.

  “I’m quite fed up with words tonight,” she says.

  There are many things I would like to say to her, and so very many questions I’d like to ask, but I don’t know which are the right ones, if any of them are. So if she would like silence, for tonight, I will give her that, because she has been my solace when I’ve needed it.

  I move my fingers between hers, and she squeezes my hand.

  All my unanswered questions are in the smoke and bottles she drew, begging to be burnt away.

  23

  I have envied my brother all my life.

  As a child I followed him everywhere he’d let me, and I would hold his thick textbooks open in my lap in the evenings, quizzing him for his exams just so that he would speak to me in that distracted, madman’s way of his. Even then, I felt that he had some sort of rare intelligence that could not be taught, and that if he had been any boy born of any other world, he would still have that same immovable wisdom.

  After the edge wounded him, I wondered if that part of him was gone forever. His eyesight was gone, and his vivacity. I mourned him. But soon Alice brought him that transcriber, and he returned to his furious writing, and I realized that he hadn’t changed. Only the view had changed. He had grown exhausted of our tiny world, had explored more than he cared to have seen, and now he was free to retreat into his mind with a luxury of abandon the rest of us would never have.

  I have envied him this as well.

  Morning light comes in through the window. A season called spring is in the process of thawing the frost from the grass and the bright weeds. This world takes weeks to awaken. Lex spent his life wanting to know what was beyond our world, and now that we’re here, he has given up. He prefers fiction, lost as he is in his own mind. He has made peace with his darkness, because it isn’t darkness. Not truly. It’s only something the rest of us can’t appreciate.

  But for all my envy, I have overlooked something that he has tried over and over again to make me understand: Lex is Lex, and I am me. I may wonder at his curiosity, but I have a curiosity of my own. And I may try to understand his blindness, but I know that I wouldn’t be at home there.

  Despite its cruelty, I want to know life.

  Lex has had his fill of society, and perhaps one day I can persuade him otherwise, but until then, I haven’t had my fill of new things. I suspect I never will.

  Pen has shown me this. Our world has hurt her, too, but still she visits new places and draws her maps so that they’ll always be with her, inside her somehow.

  I lie still so as not to wake her, until noises begin to fill the halls as the Piper children awaken. Annette no longer makes rounds knocking on the doors and calling, “Up and at ’em.”

  Someone slams the bathroom door, and Pen flinches as she wakes. Then, her mind not granting her so much as an instant of peace, she sighs. “Morning,” she says, and pushes herself up.

  “How do you feel?” I ask.

  “You mentioned a church,” she says. “It’s got my curiosity, if you’d like to go.”

  “Would it be open now? After what happened at the harbor?”

  “It’s nowhere near the harbor,” she says. “It’s three blocks from the library. And, according to what I’ve read about them, churches seldom close. Times like these are just when people visit them the most.”

  “We could go,” I say.

  She grabs a dress from the closet and moves behind the changing screen. “I’m still cross with you,” she says.

  “I’m still not sorry,” I say.

  “Good, then. So long as we’re clear.”

  “Should we invite the boys to come with us?” I ask as I slip into a dress. Back home, it was almost always a given that Basil and Thomas went along with us, and I’d like to cling to that familiar custom, but I’ll understand if Pen doesn’t want to be around Thomas, with last night’s argument still lurking in her mind. He can tell when she’s troubled, sometimes even when I can’t.

  But she says, “Sure. Yes. Though, try not to take it personally if Thomas gives you the cold shoulder. He’s been moody lately.”

  Ever since
she nearly drowned, she means. He was perfectly cordial to me most of the time back home, though Lex’s jumping put a strain on things. That was the moment when he began to suspect that I was like my brother, that I would one day do something equally daring.

  Pen stands with her back to me as she studies her reflection. She draws a deep breath, hesitates. I hope that she is going to say something about last night, or tell me to ask my questions and get it over with. But what she says is, “I saw you a few days ago. With Judas.”

  It feels suddenly hard to breathe.

  “How long has that been going on?” she asks.

  “It isn’t,” I say. “Nothing is going on. It just happened once.”

  She sits on her bed and looks at me. If this were something that had happened on Internment, perhaps there would be fear in her eyes. Perhaps she would tell me that a kiss with anyone other than Basil is dangerous. But we have spent so many days in this world without reason that she has become almost fearless. She leans back on her arms. “What was it like? Being wanted by one boy when you’re promised to another?”

  “What a word,” I say. “ ‘Wanted.’ ” But I realize that she’s right—that something in his eyes when he looked at me, when he kissed me, even when he plucked the leaf from my hair, was wanting.

  “Wrong,” I blurt out, trying to rid my mind of the memory. “It felt wrong.”

  “Morgan,” she sighs. “For the first time in your life, you do something dangerous and you regret it even before you’ve had a chance to enjoy it.”

  “There’s nothing about it to enjoy,” I say. “It happened, and if I could take it back, I would.”

  “You’re lying,” she says.

  “Even if that were true, you’re no better about telling lies,” I say. “And it would break my heart if Basil did the same thing with another girl.”

  “Would it, now?” Pen says. I don’t like this combative tone of hers.

  “Don’t,” I say. “I’m going downstairs.”

  She follows me and says nothing, but all through breakfast I feel her smirk whenever Judas makes so much as a sound. She’s wrong about him, though. There would be no future with him. Though, right now it’s hard to imagine what any of our futures will be like.

  After the breakfast dishes have been cleared and the Pipers have left the room, Pen says, “Morgan and I are going to visit the church, if you’re interested in coming along.”

  She isn’t looking at Thomas when she says it. She hasn’t seemed able to meet his eyes all morning, so she doesn’t see the concern on his face.

  “Why now?” he asks.

  “To admire the historic detailing, Thomas, I don’t know. Because it’s something to do.”

  “It seems dreary,” he says. “Surely we can think of a more cheerful way to spend an afternoon.”

  “Cheerful?” Pen says. “The harbor is in ashes, and the only friend Morgan and I have managed to make in this world is dying. Internment is about to be destroyed, and you want cheerful?”

  “Pen,” I say. My tone is a warning. I don’t want Annette or Marjorie to hear her say their sister is dying.

  She looks at me with the same ferocity she showed before she lunged at me last night. “I’m going,” she says. “You can come along or not.”

  She pushes her chair from the table and moves for the front door. I go after her, and just as she reaches for the handle, the door is pushed open.

  Jack Piper stands at the threshold, as gray as storm clouds. Since the bombings at the harbor, he’s become more ghost than human.

  “The car will be coming around in ten minutes,” he tells us. He only ever appears after he knows breakfast has been cleared, if he appears at all. He doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

  “Who are you talking to?” Nim is standing in the doorway now, his sisters at his heels. They are forever following him these days, as though he will also be taken from them.

  “I was speaking to our guests,” he says. “The king is back and has requested the audience of five residents from Internment.”

  “Why five?” Annette asks. I suspect she has no interest but that she’s grasping an opportunity to speak with her father for the first time in days.

  “Because that was his request,” he says. “I suspect a higher number would be overwhelming for what he intends. It’s no matter which five. Decide among yourselves. Ten minutes.” He’s gone before the last sentence is even completed.

  “I’m going,” I say immediately.

  “What?” Basil says. He lowers his voice and leans closer to me. “You can’t—you don’t know what he has planned. It could be a public execution, for all any of us know.”

  “I did this,” I say. “I’m to blame for telling about the glasslands, and Celeste being gone, and I’m sure that, whatever this is, I’m to blame for it, too. I’m going.”

  Basil opens his mouth to argue, but Judas says, “I’m in.”

  “And me,” Pen says.

  “And me,” Basil says. He sees that it’s useless to argue with me.

  “I’m not letting you go,” Thomas tells Pen. “Hasn’t this madness gone on long enough?”

  “It’s just getting started,” Nimble says. “Better hurry up and decide. You’re down to seven minutes.”

  “I’ll go,” Amy says.

  “Uh, no,” Judas says.

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll go,” Thomas sighs. I wonder if he ever curses the decision makers for betrothing him to a girl like Pen, who is always and forever in motion when all he has ever wanted is for both of them to stand still.

  By the time the king’s driver has arrived, we’re all assembled at the front door. Alice fusses with my collar.

  “Don’t tell Lex,” I say. “There’s no need to upset him, and I’ll be back soon. I’ll bet I’m gone an hour, tops.”

  Furious as I am with him, he is still my brother, and I still worry after him.

  “You look so grown-up,” Alice says. I think she’d like to say more, but her eyes are brimming and the driver has just honked the horn to summon us. I hug her before I run down the steps.

  Nimble watches us from the doorway, and his pitying expression unnerves me. His sisters peek out from either side of him, wide-eyed and silent.

  “What’s with the dramatics?” Pen mutters. She straightens her skirt as the car begins to move. “We’re not walking off to the edge of the ground.”

  It’s the last thing any of us says for the rest of the drive.

  I’ve been in this world for so long that I know its roads. I know, even before we arrive, that we’re headed toward the city, and that if we drive far enough, we’ll reach the harbor.

  But as the city comes into view, it becomes clear that driving to the harbor would be an impossibility. The road ends where heaps of bricks and walls and splintered boards begin. And though there are few clouds today, the city air is murky and dark.

  Basil draws a sharp breath, and I realize that I’m clinging to his forearm. He came straight to the hospital after the bombs hit, but he never saw what I saw. What killed Riles and left Birdie broken.

  Pen stares out her window for a long moment, and then she sighs, looks at me. “Ready for whatever this is?”

  “As I’ll ever be,” I say.

  “Where were you when this happened?” Judas asks.

  “I can’t see it from here,” I say. “Somewhere on the other side of whatever that building was.”

  “I think that was the brass club,” Pen says.

  “It can’t be.”

  “It is,” she says. “Look; I can see some of the lettering.”

  But I don’t look. I can’t stand the sight of this place anymore. I can feel Judas’s eyes on me; since our kiss, he has been hovering just outside my airspace, driving my senses insane without uttering a word. I don’t want his words. I want him to kiss me again, even here in this awful place, and I hate myself for that.

  The door is opened for us, and we file out. There’s a bitter
smell in the air. Blood and skin and stone have been ground into nondescript piles of ash. I’m breathing in death and spirits.

  The king’s driver leads us down a pathway that has been carved from the rubble.

  “Is anyone else hearing voices?” Pen asks.

  I had thought the distant mumbling was my imagination or an apparition, but Thomas says, “I hear them, too.”

  “Is that—” Basil shields his eyes against a ray of sun that has found its way into this mess. “Is that a stage?”

  My dread is mirrored on Pen’s face when she looks at me. Her prediction has come true. Even before we make our way up the rickety steps to a makeshift stage assembled from fallen buildings, we know what this is.

  I step over a trail of wires at the top of the stage. A crowd has assembled before us, and suddenly they are silent.

  The king stands where the wires meet a sort of copper horn, much like the one he used to speak with King Furlow. One of his men steps forward to adjust the wires, and a horrible screeching comes from the horn before the king is able to speak.

  “You’ve asked for hope,” he tells the crowd. His mechanical voice echoes. “And it stands before you now. Here is proof that there is a city atop the magical floating island.”

  He does not say the city’s name, nor does he bother to introduce us. Instead he goes on about an alliance with the floating city’s king—something the kingdom of Dastor can never provide its people. How very lucky they are to be a part of something so spectacular, he says. How lucky all of us are. This is, after all, the dawn of a new age: jets that can take us to new heights, and a tiny floating world offering to share its wonders. It will be something for the history books, he says.

  There is no mention of the new stones in the cemetery. There is no mention, even, of King Erasmus. King Ingram manages to make it all sound so cheerful, as though there will be a staircase that spirals from the ground up into the clouds. But he can’t promise a staircase. He can only present the lot of us as evidence. We have seen what this war is doing, he says, and we want to help. We want to bring it to an end.