American King

by Sierra Simone

  AMERICAN KING

  SIERRA SIMONE

  Copyright © 2017 by Sierra Simone

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Design: Hang Le

  Cover Image: Braadyn Penrod

  Cover Model: Endi Zalic

  Editing: Evident Ink

  For Laurelin Paige, Melanie Harlow and Kayti McGee. We’ll always have the lake.

  A threefold cord is not easily broken.

  ECCLESIASTES 4:12

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  I. The Sword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  II. The Crown

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  III. The Place Over the Water

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Sierra Simone

  PROLOGUE

  ASH

  When I was a child,I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned liked a child. When I became a man, I set aside childish ways.

  For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then we shall see face to face.

  Now I know in part, but then I shall know fully, even as I am known now to God.

  THERE IS a certain fatalism in the old myths and legends that I’ve always relished. This idea that our paths are pre-ordained by some external hand—by God or by the universe or by fate, or by some mixture of the three. That from the moment I took my first breath, the date and time of my last were already stitched into determined existence. Why this idea should fascinate me, I don’t know, but it does. I suppose it promises meaning. And meaning, above all, is what I seek.

  I want to know this isn’t in vain.

  I want to know my life wasn’t in vain.

  I KEEP HAVING this dream about a lake. Mirror-still, glass-clear, fog wisping over the surface. There is a boat there, and women, and there is someplace to go. A better place, over the water.

  My Greer is there. And my mother, and Morgan, and strangely enough, Embry’s mother Vivienne. They cry over me like they would cry over a body, and the boat cuts through the water like a knife, swift and smooth.

  There is a better place over the water.

  It’s no easy thing, knowing the day. Choosing it. Fuck fatalism, because it’s still a choice. I still have to put on this armor I’ve chosen—cuff links, tie bar, flag pin—and I still have to pick up my weapons. I still have to face a man I love and hate—a man who loves and hates me in return—and choose to lay down my life, hoping that everything I fought for, all the fragile peacetime work of a tired soldier, will still stand when I no longer can. I have to trust—so much trust—that this sacrifice has meaning. That on this wicked day, when I fall to my knees, I will fall knowing that the world has shifted that much closer to peace and goodness. I will fall knowing the people I love are safe.

  I will die and go to a better place over the water.

  Now I know in part, but then I shall know, even as I am known.

  PART ONE

  THE SWORD

  ONE

  ASH

  then

  I pulled a sword from a stone when I was twelve years old.

  A carnival had come to town, all lights and cotton candy and generators whirring in the summer heat, and Althea had given Kay and me each ten dollars to spend there. Kay, too cool and too old to be bothered with the rides, bought a soda and spent the evening flirting and showing off her new yarn braids, bright blue and just finished after midnight the night before.

  But me, I spent every last dollar at the same booth. Sandwiched between the ring toss and the place where you shot metal ducks with cork guns was a small canopy strung with lights and carpeted by grass so trampled that the dirt showed through. It was a strength game, much like hitting a giant hammer on a scale—pull the sword from the stone and you won the blinking plastic crown hanging from the ceiling. If you could pull the sword up halfway, you won a stuffed animal.

  The stone was, of course, molded concrete, and the sword wasn’t a real sword. Just a piece of stamped metal rigged with bolts and slides to keep it from moving up all the way out of the stone. It was a money trap, exactly the kind of thing my adoptive mother Althea would refuse to let me spend her money on if she were there.

  But she wasn’t there, and for some reason I was determined. I think I had this idea that the crown would look good perched on my sister’s new braids. I’m sure part of it was an adolescent desire to show off. And part of it still lay beyond the realm of explanation; I couldn’t articulate why I wanted to do it, I just knew that I did. And so on a hot summer’s day, thunderclouds piling up like cars over the Missouri River, I spent ten dollars for ten tries at the sword.

  I failed nine times.

  On the tenth, the sword pulled free.

  A bolt must have broken, something sheared loose with a rattle and a snap, and all of a sudden I was staggering backwards, holding a sword-shaped piece of metal too heavy to keep upright.

  “Holy shit, kid,” the carnival worker said. “You broke that thing right off.”

  I was too stunned to answer, holding the sword-shaped metal like it was the answer to every question in the universe. Up until that moment, I’d been a good but unremarkable boy—I got good grades, I played a decent game of baseball, I got along with almost everyone. But holding that rusted, dull metal, the hilt cool in my hand, the humid air hot on my face, I felt the thrill of possibility. The insistent tugging feeling that I needed to be doing something, going somewhere, finding someone. The enchanting itch that there was a better, richer world just out of reach, that I could stretch out my fingers and part the very air like a veil, and that behind that veil would be a place that was more than my own mundane life. The trees leafier, the sun warmer, everything just more.

  Now I can look back at that tug or itch and call it destiny—or the beginning of my adult consciousness, depending on how pragmatic I’m feeling. But I had no words for it then. One moment I was an ordinary boy throwing his money away on a cheap carnival trick, and the next I was a young man on the precipice of something dizzying in its depth.

  I’ve never told another soul what happened next.

  The carnival worker, still swearing in a mixture of disbelief, annoyance, and admiration, reached up for the plastic crown and held it out for me to take…and someone else took it before I could.

  It was a man—well, barely a man, really—early twenties and thin in a way that reminded me of birds or a sapling in winter. He had pale white skin and near-black eyes, and it could have been his sharp and delicate face or maybe his shabbily elegant clothes, but I suddenly felt very aware of myself. Of my youth, of my ordinariness. Of my well-worn T-shirt and jeans and church-sale sneakers.

  He held the crown in his hands, studying the
plastic as if it were finely beaten gold, his head bowed in thought. “Is this yours?” he finally asked, glancing up at me from under dark eyebrows. He had a lilt that I mentally fumbled to place; it was Welsh and I’d never heard a Welsh accent before. What a man like him was doing in a hot city park in Missouri, I had no idea.

  “I, uh, I won that crown,” I explained lamely. I lifted the hand wrapped around the cheap metal hilt of the sword. “For pulling this thing from the stone.”

  He nodded, looking down at the crown with something like reverence, and then held it out to me. “Then I suppose you should take it.”

  There was a moment as I wrapped my fingers around it. Short, wordless, jolting. Like we’d done this before, this very thing. That I’d stood with a sword in one hand and this man had handed me a crown and I had taken it, knowing nothing would ever be the same.

  But the moment blew away in the electric, pre-thunderstorm wind, and the man gave me a small smile and turned to leave.

  I wasn’t ready for him to go. I felt a sudden anxiety I couldn’t name.

  “What should I do with them? The sword and the crown?” I asked the stranger. It seemed so important that I ask, that I know, and that he be the one to tell me.

  The man stopped, looking thoughtfully up at the dark, rain-laden sky. “The most important part of wearing a crown and using a sword is knowing when to set them down.”

  It was cryptic. And yet perfectly clear, somehow.

  “And until then?” I asked.

  “Why, until then, you use them. Goodbye, Maxen.”

  He knew my name.

  He left, and I stood there with a fake sword in one hand and a plastic crown in the other. Then the storm broke and the rain started pouring down.

  TWO

  ASH

  now

  When Embry Moore leaves a room, the air changes. The molecules of oxygen and nitrogen and argon rearrange themselves into something stale and listless, something only barely life giving. You can drag in lungful after lungful and never get enough, because it’s not enough. There’s not enough to fill your chest and push into your blood. Systems start shutting down. The world goes static-filled and dim.

  And now here I am, each breath grating in and out, bringing me no relief, no mercy. Because I am alone, and everything I’ve ever done wrong has made sure that Embry will never breathe the same air as me again.

  That’s not even the worst part.

  No, the worst part is learning that I’ve never breathed the same air as my son.

  Greer is away, Embry is gone, and I have a son.

  Whom I’ve never met.

  Whose mother is my sister.

  Fuck.

  I scrub my hands over my face, over the hair that Embry kissed not ten minutes ago. I try to breathe again, try to stop the way my ribs keep jerking with choked sobs, try to stop the tears burning their way past my eyelids. It hurts, my entire body hurts, my chest, my throat, my eyes. I’ve been carved up and I’m bleeding out.

  I slide out of the chair I’m sitting in, right onto the floor of my study, pressing my face into the carpet, and I cry. For a young man named Lyr that I’ve never met. For Embry, pressed by Merlin to refuse my love, pressed by Abilene to hurt Greer in order to protect me. Pressed by his own conscience to fight me at long last.

  I cry for Greer, because she’s not here, because she doesn’t know, because I don’t know how she’ll look at me when she learns that I got my own sister pregnant.

  How could I not know?

  I roll onto my back, pressing the heels of my palms into my eyes. It’s all there behind my eyelids—the fires at Glein, that fateful village during the war. Morgan’s limp form as I carried her out of the church. My child was inside her then, saved from incineration by moments, by luck. If he’d died, it would have been my fault.

  And all these years—how can my son ever forgive me for all these years apart? How can I ever forgive myself?

  There’s more. Embry breaking and betraying me…but broken and betrayed himself.

  Greer, with new shadows in her eyes, publicly shamed and taken by force when I couldn’t protect her.

  Everyone I’ve failed. Embry and Greer. Lyr and Morgan. Countless others…soldiers and civilians, American citizens and Carpathian villagers. The line of people I’ve let down is numberless, and I have no one to blame but myself.

  I stay there for a long time, stretched out on the floor, my hands pressing into my eyes until the tears stop and I see stars. I can’t remember the last time I’ve cried this hard. I can’t remember ever feeling this lonely, this alone. This…rudderless.

  What am I supposed to do? When the man who is supposed to love me hates me? When I can’t protect the woman we both love? When I have a son?

  What am I supposed to do?

  “MORGAN.”

  Her name from my lips results in silence on the other end of the line. Finally Senator Morgan Leffey speaks. “Mr. President.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?” my sister asks in a tired voice. “Be respectful?”

  “Put distance between us.” I close my eyes and think of Prague. Not with lust, obviously. But with a sort of fondness. She’d been the first lover to show me what I needed, both that time and then again after Jenny’s death. Even when she hated me, she’d still helped me.

  I couldn’t discount the debt I owed her for that. Not in the face of this new, terrible debt.

  “Why are you calling, Maxen?” she asks. “Is this about the V.A. overhaul? Because I told you that my committee won’t budge on—”

  I interrupt her. “It’s about Lyr, Morgan,” I say. “It’s about our son.”

  I hear a small intake of breath, then careful stillness. “Who told you?” Morgan asks, in a voice of glass pretending to be stone. “You weren’t ever supposed to know.”

  “That’s not true though, is it?” I’m walking around the empty Residence feeling just as empty as the rooms. “You wanted to tell me once. Before Glein.”

  “Yes,” she admits. “Before Glein.”

  I rub at the spot in my chest where my heart used to be, before Embry tore it out. “Fuck knows you don’t owe me anything Morgan, but why? Why couldn’t I have known?”

  “I thought it made us even. You left me to die, and I hid the new life we made from you. It seemed fair at the time.”

  “And now?”

  Morgan lets out a breath, and I can picture her running her thumb along her forehead, just like I do when I’m thoughtful or stressed or sorrowful. “And now I don’t know.”

  “I grew up thinking I had a father who didn’t care about me. And then you told me the truth about my parents at Jenny’s funeral, and I knew for a fact that my father didn’t care about me. All I ever wanted was not to do that…not to be that. And now that’s what you’ve made me. The same kind of man.”

  Morgan’s voice is sharp when she answers. “You want to pout about not having a father? What about my mother, Maxen? The one you killed when you were born? You think I don’t miss her? That I wasn’t scarred or lost or damaged knowing that she’d gone to bed with a man who wasn’t my father and ended up dying because of it?”

  “Dammit, Morgan, do you think I don’t know that? That I don’t feel her loss too? That I don’t feel the karmic weight of being born under such a fucking cloud?”

  “Don’t try that with me. You had Althea. You had a mother. I only ever had Governor Vivienne Moore, and even as stepmothers go, she was fucking cold. My father was a husk. I grew up alone.”

  “You had Embry,” I point out.

  “You had Kay,” she retorts.

  I stop at the window in the dining room, looking out on the night-dark lawn. Past the fence, headlights and taillights move through the District’s streets, lamplights glow, window squares of yellow light point to where the brightest minds of Washington are burning the midnight oil on policy and lobbying and diplomacy. “This is pointless,” I say. “This who-had-it-worse game.”


  She sighs. “Fine. But you have to understand why I wanted something different for Lyr. Vivienne suggested Nimue raise him instead, and Nimue is happy and kind and undamaged. She’s not like us, Maxen. There’s no stain on her. And I knew she’d be a better parent than either of us.”

  I listen to her. To the pain in her voice. And something in me cracks. “Was it hard? To give him to Nimue?”

  She lets out a noise that should be a laugh but sounds like a sob. “There isn’t a word for how hard it was. When he was born, he was so, so quiet, and so stoic, like you. He didn’t even cry when I put him in Nimue’s arms. He just looked at me, resigned and silent. Like he’d been waiting for me to let him down all along.”

  There’s silence for a long time, for both of us. Each of us lost in our own pain.

  “I want to tell him, Morgan. I want to meet him.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “What good will it do? You think we’re fucked up, just from sleeping with each other? Imagine what he’ll feel like knowing that’s where he came from!”

  “And if Abilene Corbenic makes good on her threat and reveals it anyway? Which is worse, him learning it from us or learning it from the internet?”

  “Maxen, everything I’ve built has been to protect Lyr. After I learned the truth about us, that protection became more crucial than ever. Even my ex-husband Lorne didn’t know about him.”

  I move away from the window and into my bedroom, taking a moment to straighten my well-thumbed Bible on the end table before I wander into the dressing room. There’s a small picture on the vanity of me as child with Althea and Kay. I have no pictures of Imogen Leffey. God knows I wouldn’t have to search the White House too hard to find a portrait of Penley Luther, although I’d rather not.