Crown of Oblivion

by Julie Eshbaugh

  Courage gets a few to the summit, my father is saying, but fear convinces most to choose the mud. Don’t you choose the mud, Astrid, he continues. You are far too strong for that.

  My throat goes thick. I drag a bloody hand across my nose. I’m at the summit, Papa, I whisper to myself now. No more mud for me.

  I swing my head around for just a moment, throwing one more look back at where I’ve been, and I spot another racer.

  Darius.

  He’s not far away, and he’s gaining, running much faster than I can crawl. I turn back toward the mine and dig down for all the strength I can find.

  Darius is too far back for me to hear his steps, but they ring in my ears just the same. I imagine I hear them growing louder and louder, driving me forward, until I reach the threshold of the mine. Beyond the opening, a small group of Authority guards slouch against the close walls, since they have no chairs. The only furniture is a single tall stool that I imagine the lowest ranking officer had to carry, and on it sits the prince.

  No one is watching the entrance. One officer is telling a story about a woman he met in the City of Jackals, and I’m glad I can catch only bits and pieces. The other guards laugh, even the women, but then one says, “Oh, shut up.” The prince, a distance away flanked by the two Knights, looks at his comm while the Knights study theirs. They are bored, and they are distracted. No one notices me at all until I drag myself through the mouth of the mine and crawl right into their midst.

  Lars’s eyes go wide and he turns to the Knights, but it’s too late and they know it.

  Because I’ve been seen by others, and a small commotion is starting. Several very stiff and official-looking men and women, wearing long black robes and impatient expressions, see me and start prancing around like startled chickens. A voice calls out, “A racer!” A flash goes off as someone snaps my picture, and I can see by the look in Lars’s eyes that he, like the Knights, knows it’s too late. I turn my eyes from his, focusing instead on the effort it takes to pull my legs behind me, until I collapse at the feet of the robed man who was the first to call out when I appeared.

  A man I remember.

  His skin is as pale and as knobby as driftwood. This is the man I met after the explosion at the Apple Carnival, the one who registered me for the race.

  There’s another small commotion starting—someone else is crossing the threshold—and I turn to see Darius, staggering past the beams that mark the entrance. He stays on his feet for just a moment, his chest heaving. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a person more covered in blood. He sways, and then he drops into a heap right beside me.

  But the driftwood man doesn’t acknowledge him. His eyes are on me alone. He reaches down with both hands and pulls me, painfully, to my feet. My knee aches like I’m being stabbed, blood drips from my shredded hands, and my head pounds like a drum. Still, I hear every word he says.

  “Congratulations,” he shouts, as if he intends all of Lanoria to hear. “The Crown of Oblivion is yours!”

  Thirty-Three

  My body rocks so wildly, it wakes me. I try to sit up, but shooting pains in my knee and a sharp ache in my shoulder keep me on my back. I’m in some sort of truck, lying across the rear seat.

  “Where am I?” I ask the back of the driver’s head. But it’s the man beside him—a man so small and still I hadn’t noticed him there—who turns and looks back at me. It’s the driftwood man. He smiles, and I know some people have smiles like the sun, but he has a smile like the moon, mysterious and canny. He flicks his gaze over me, landing on my bandaged knee. I have no memory of it being bandaged. I have no memory of getting into this truck. “You’re awake,” says the driftwood man. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Like I don’t know where I am or where I’m being taken.”

  “Ah, well, that’s good. Not too much pain then?”

  “Plenty. Where am I?”

  “We’re in a sandcrawler. Well, a specially modified sandcrawler. It’s quite impressive, actually—fitted to cross the terrain of the Wilds. We’re almost to the train.”

  I scowl at him. My head is swimming and he’s talking too fast. “Train?”

  “You’re going back to the King’s City aboard one of the royal family’s private trains. You won the Crown of Oblivion! Don’t you remember? They gave you something for the pain and then you went out like a light, poor thing. But you won. Aren’t you glad you entered?”

  This is a strange question. After all I’ve gone through to win, you’d think the answer would be an immediate yes. But then, the things that I’d hoped to obtain by winning the race seem as far from my grasp as they ever were. I’d hoped to bring my family together, but the tiny apartment we called home is still lost to me, Jayden is a stranger, and for all I know, he’s dead. And my brother Marlon—the person who means the most to me in the world—is less safe now than he was before the race.

  So I’m a citizen, but without my family, what good is citizenship to me?

  When we arrive at the train, I’m lifted onto a stretcher by Authority guards and taken directly to a private compartment. It’s the picture of luxury—silks of blue and green decorate the bed and the windows. “This is the princess’s compartment,” I say. “I remember it.”

  “Well, your memories are back then,” says one of the guards as I’m delivered to the bed. “The princess will be happy to hear it. She gave express instructions for you to use this compartment.” I was already dizzy, and the speed with which I’ve gone from being hunted by the Authority to being attended to by these guards isn’t helping me get my footing. These same two men might have arrested me if they’d recognized me at the Festival of Fire Flowers.

  I won’t let my filthy hands touch the pristine bedding. I feel like an earthworm. I probably look like one, too.

  The officers leave, and with difficulty I slide my feet to the floor and make my way to the sink, holding the edge of the bed, then the desk, then the basin for support. What I see in the mirror would probably frighten me if I hadn’t just seen blood-covered Darius in the mine. I was more shocked by my reflection back at the roadhouse, in Mary’s bathroom, even though there are many more layers of dirt and blood on me now. My hair is matted like a bird’s nest, and my face is gaunt and hollow. But more than all that, the things that stand out to me the most are the signs of fatigue—the purple circles under my eyes that make me look like I lost a fight.

  Then again, I guess I did. I think of the ginger-haired racer, lying still where he dropped from that rock ledge, and I wonder if he’s alive.

  The hot water in the sink helps pull me back to the present. It feels so good, I wash my face, my throat, my hands, and my arms. There’s no shampoo that I can see, so I wash my hair with hand soap. When I’m through, the towel I use to wipe up the sink comes away black.

  I’m ruminating over what to do next—now that I’ve won citizenship for my whole family, I need to get answers about Marlon and news about Jayden—when there’s a knock at my door. Before I can answer, it’s opened from the outside, and three people stand in the doorway. One is Prince Lars. At first, the other two are strangers to me, but then my memory slides things into place and I make sense of their faces. It’s like I’m looking at one of those puzzles where you have to try to see both the profile of an old woman and the profile of a young girl. These two, dressed in the uniform of the King’s Knights, transform in an instant from strangers to people I know. One is Sir Arnaud, and the other is his daughter, Sir Millicent.

  “Astrid,” says Sir Millicent, and her face pinches into something that might be called a smile. “My congratulations to you. You are looking quite well, considering.” This is what my father sometimes called a backhanded compliment, which is another unexpected memory. I think she assumes I will smile, but I keep my face neutral. She hasn’t given me any reason to smile yet. “We’ve come to request that you join us in the dining car.”

  The train sways, and all four of us have to grab hold of the walls to keep our b
alance. My knee buckles, but I stay upright. I wish I had clean clothes to change into, but I suppose I should be happy that at least my face and hands are clean. I swallow, reminding myself that I’ve already been declared the winner, so it would be difficult if not impossible for Lars to poison me or throw me from this train without having to answer a lot of questions, especially with these two Knights present. So I nod, and my eyes move from Millicent’s face to Arnaud’s face to Lars’s, but when they land on Lars’s blue eyes and his angry smile, a memory rushes back that I had forgotten was ever there.

  I’m in a white room, and there’s music and fire and a man looking down at me as I lie on a cot. In his hand he holds a bloody knife, and King Marchant lies crumpled on the floor at his feet.

  Like a gust of wind, the memory of the king’s murder comes rushing back to me, and it’s as if the wind blows the clouds from my mind. The man in my memory—the man hovering over me and whispering that I will be dead before I can remember what I have just seen—is Prince Lars.

  And there’s something about the way his gaze is pressing heavily upon my face that tells me that he knows that I remember, too.

  I’m wearing only one sandal—I lost its mate outside the mine—so I kick off the other one and follow them out. With my bare feet and dirty clothes, I feel like a helpless urchin rather than the winner of a prestigious race, and I’m sure that’s not by accident. If there were ever any danger that I might forget my powerlessness, Lars has made sure that I won’t forget it today.

  But none of that matters. I might look and feel powerless, but I’m not. I won the race, and I won the rights and privileges it guarantees. Citizenship for me and for Marlon, and even for Jayden.

  And my victory means even more than that. It means I’ve won the right to never again be made to feel powerless.

  I don’t know what I was expecting to find in the dining car, but I wasn’t expecting to find the queen. It’s been some time since I last saw Queen Mariana—she’s been ill for months—but she must’ve made a complete recovery while I was in the race, because she’s looking quite well. She is an older version of Renya, dressed in navy blue—she loves blue—with her long auburn hair loose, and she is seated at the head of a dining table. Other than a clean white tablecloth, the table is bare. Prince Lars enters the room first, and he takes a seat beside his mother. Sir Arnaud and Sir Millicent enter behind the prince, Sir Arnaud bowing and Sir Millicent folding into a deep curtsy, and I suppress a shudder when I realize how much pain it will cause me to fold into a curtsy myself. But there are some things that must be done no matter the pain, and paying respect to the queen is one of them, so I reach out a hand to brace myself against the back of a chair and execute as close to a full curtsy as I can manage. I lose my balance and end up clinging to the back of the chair, but I stay upright, and the room fills with a mist of embarrassment on my behalf until the queen gestures to the other seats at the table. “Please, sit.”

  I hesitate, but her eyes insist, so I do as she says.

  “Astrid, let me get right to the point. First, my congratulations. However, I must immediately make it known to you that an objection has been raised to your victory in the race. The objection is based on the accusation that you cheated through the illegal use of the Three Unities. This objection has been raised by my son, Prince Lars, who has asked me to nullify your victory and name the second-place finisher, Darius Kittering, the victor in your place.”

  I try not to react. But the queen has strong Cientia, and I’m sure she knows the horror I feel.

  “Essentially, this meeting between you and me is a tribunal. My late husband created the Race of Oblivion as a means for worthy Outsiders to earn citizenship, and until my son is crowned king in his place, it will be up to me to make decisions concerning this race. The Race of Oblivion meant a great deal to my husband, and it is my intention to maintain the validity and integrity of this contest in his memory. Do you understand?”

  So this is it. This is how Prince Lars will steal back all the rights I have won for me and my brothers. How he will clear the way to prosecute and punish me—or worse—before I’m able to expose him as the murderer of the king. I feel his eyes on me when I say, “I understand, Your Highness.”

  “Lars, you have witnesses? Bring in the first to testify.”

  Sir Millicent stands and walks to the door, and my heart stops and my breath leaves me in a rush when I see the photographer, the one Darius called Mrs. Arrogance, enter the room behind her. She’s barely recognizable. Her hair, which was so perfectly styled, is now a disheveled mess, and her crisp clothing is filthy. But worst of all are the purple bruises that stand out on her face—one over her left eye, one on her right cheek. “What happened?” I say before I can stop myself.

  “I fell,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper, and I know this is nothing but a lie. Someone hurt this self-assured, beautiful, assertive young woman, in an effort to convince her to testify against me. And she’s an Enchanted! Whether it’s intended to or not, the sight of her both breaks my heart and fills me with dread, because it makes it quite clear how far Prince Lars is willing to go to strip me of the Crown of Oblivion.

  “What is your name, my dear? And what is your testimony?” asks the queen, though she’s not even looking. Her comm lies faceup on the table in front of her, and her eyes are on the screen. Maybe the queen can’t look into the face of someone she knows was injured by her own son.

  “It’s Candace, Your Highness,” Mrs. Arrogance says, or at least I think she does. Her voice is barely audible. “And I came here to testify that I observed . . .” Her voice trails off. There’s a tremble in her lower lip.

  “Go on,” growls Lars.

  I’d like to read the emotions in this room, but everything is overwhelmed by Mrs. Arrogance’s fear.

  “I just want to say, I never witnessed it myself, but as a journalist, I asked many people about Astrid.” Her eyes move to my face, and I think I see a flicker of an apology, but then it’s gone. I can’t blame her. Who knows how Lars might punish her for even an apologetic glance in my direction. “And many people I spoke with . . . racers especially . . . shared stories of Astrid fighting like an Enchanted. That is to say, as if she had Cientia.”

  Candace’s testimony is accepted, and she is dismissed, but the queen asks Sir Arnaud to escort her to the doctor. “Shame on you,” she says to Lars as they leave. “She’s one of our own.” She shakes her head and clucks her tongue, the way she did when Lars was a little boy.

  The prince presents two additional witnesses. One is the man from the guardhouse, the first person I ever used Projectura against. The second is the racer with the pretty face and the build of a man, the one who was with Marlon at the roadhouse, and who I noticed had a black eye at the festival. Her eye is looking better today. She tells them how she saw me fight several racers at the lighthouse and win easily, and how there was no doubt in her mind I had done it with the help of magic.

  When both of these witnesses have been dismissed, Lars stands and puts his hands on the table, leaning close to his mother’s ear. “That is all I have, Mother, but is that not more than enough? What more could you need to hear?”

  The queen doesn’t meet her son’s eye, despite the proximity of his face to hers. Instead, her gaze falls upon my face, and a flicker of fear runs through me. Something in the look she gives me tells me she knows all my secrets. “I’d like to speak with Astrid alone,” she says.

  As the others leave the room, Lars grunting his disapproval under his breath, the queen gestures to the chair at her immediate right, the place her own son just occupied. “Please, come closer.”

  I do as she says, of course, but my feet feel as if they have grown into the floorboards, and my body is heavy as I drop into the chair. Taking this seat feels as dangerous as placing my own neck into the guillotine.

  “Did you know,” she asks me, her words dripping from her lips like syrup, “that your mother was a friend to me, very muc
h like you are a friend to my daughter Renya.” I look up and meet her unrelenting gaze, and I know that this woman is as sure that I can use Enchanted magic as I am.

  “I am aware that my mother was indentured to you,” I say, and this is the truth. I know almost nothing about my mother’s relationship to the queen before her death.

  “Things happened back in those days when we both were young and newly in love and starting our lives,” the queen says, and I wonder why she should speak to me in this way. I try to imagine this woman and my mother as close as Renya and I are, but I can’t picture it. Then again, I can no longer picture my mother at all, and it makes me jealous and angry to know that the queen has memories of her when I don’t.

  If it’s true they were close, something bad must have happened. Otherwise, how could the queen have brought the children of her dead friend into the palace, to suffer in place of her own children? How genuine could their friendship have been if she were able to do that?

  The queen is leaning forward on her elbows, closing the space between us as if she wishes to take me into her confidence. My heartbeat grows faster, and my breathing slows, and I feel as if I’ve gotten myself into terrible danger. An alarm is sounding in the back of my mind, telling me I should evacuate, but there’s nowhere to go.

  “Things happened, both good and bad, when we were young and our children were young . . . things I can almost forget, but never fully can.” Perhaps the queen taught her son how to mask his emotions, because my Cientia gets nothing from her at all. It’s like my magic isn’t real after all. “We shared secrets,” she continues. “Secrets that have grown, bloomed into bigger secrets. Some of those secrets have to do with you.”

  I swallow. “What kind of secrets about me?” I ask.

  “I think you know,” she says, and I do. She means that she knows the secret of how I am able to use Enchanted magic. The secret I have yearned to know all my life. I wait, my heart dragging me forward like a wild stallion, pulling me closer and closer to the truth I know the queen is able to reveal.