Crown of Oblivion

by Julie Eshbaugh

  Someone knocks at the door. “Excuse me, Your Highness.” An Outsider woman pokes her head in, and I recognize her as Gretchen, Renya’s maid. “You both need to start dressing for the ball.”

  Renya scowls at me. “You can’t dress until you wash,” she says, and I’m a bit insulted by her tone. But then, this is the friend I remember, after all. You don’t have to choose your words carefully when you’re the princess. Renya offers her own bathroom for me to shower and tells me to come over to her dressing room to pick out a gown as soon as I’m ready. She embraces me before she leaves, and her fingers trace across the scars on my back. “I can’t wait to help you choose a dress,” she says. “I have so many pretty ones that will cover your scars.”

  I give her a weak smile. I know she means well, but I can’t help but resent her desire to cover them up and forget them, as if they were never there. Whether they are visible or not, I can never forget.

  And who will bear her punishments now? Will the back of another Outsider girl become scarred, now that I will be a citizen? The thought of it turns my stomach.

  Once Renya leaves, I intend to be quick, but I first return to the open drawer where Renya pulled out my mother’s diary. I need to stash it away again, for safekeeping. Reaching under her nightgowns, my hands find folded papers wrapped in a ribbon. My heart gallops toward a cliff when I pull them out and my eyes fall onto what could only be the letters we were just talking about.

  I’m not sure how she managed to keep them, how it is her father didn’t throw them into the fire right in front of her eyes. How the queen didn’t shred them and feed them to the palace goats. But these must be them—their weathered folds prove these letters have been opened and read many times over. Maybe Sir Millicent didn’t find all of them. Maybe these were hidden separately. It doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that here they are, wrapped in a red ribbon in my shaking hand.

  I know that I shouldn’t read them, and I know just as well that I will.

  After all, didn’t she read my mother’s diary? If she can know my secrets, can’t I know hers?

  I slide out the first letter, the one that appears to be the most worn.

  It feels so light for something that holds so much weight. Weight enough to bend the courses of our lives. To Renya, it was a romance with a boy, but it was also a flirtation with rebellion. With ideas that could bring down her own family’s reign.

  And what was it to me?

  Proof that my life was just a pawn to the royals. Proof that I could trust no one. Not Renya, not Lars, not even my fellow surrogate Kit could be trusted not to hurt me.

  Kit . . . Darius. I think of him as he was on the Wheel of Fire, sitting so still, telling me his side of the story as the world flew by outside the window. How he struck me to protect me from the bloodthirsty prince. My head goes light, like I’m still on that wheel.

  I unfold the letter.

  Dearest R, it starts. For a moment I feel horribly guilty, but my eyes still float down the page. The words beauty and fire and longing jump out, and I decide I’ve made a mistake. I can’t read this letter. I thought it was something I was entitled to, I thought it would make me feel even somehow, but it only makes me feel dirty. My shaky fingers refold the letter and slide it back under the ribbon.

  But the letter has been turned so the back page is up, and my gaze lands on the signature at the bottom of the sheet. Yours, D.K.

  That’s when I realize I’ve seen this handwriting once before.

  Truth

  Mine

  Want

  You

  A list of words to a clue, written on a dirty scrap of paper found on the floor of a stolen truck. My eyes return to the bottom of the page. My ears start to ring and my eyes cloud, but I can still read the initials scrawled there.

  D.K.

  Darius Kittering.

  Renya’s secret romance was with Darius.

  Thirty-Five

  My hands are shaking when someone knocks on the door that connects this room to the dressing room. I turn, and Renya is standing in the open doorway. Her face loses its color when her gaze falls on the letters, still in my upturned palms.

  Gretchen pushes in behind Renya, and she scowls at me. “Haven’t you made any progress at all?”

  Renya crosses to me, and with an accusatory glare—she’s accusing me?—she takes the bundle of letters from me and replaces them in the open drawer. Gretchen sweeps into the bathroom, and I hear the water running in the shower.

  “Darius?” I murmur, while we have the room to ourselves. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “Tell you? Do you think I should be giving out the names of everyone I might know to be involved with the OLA?”

  The OLA . . . The idea that Darius is involved with the OLA shocks me almost as much as the fact that he’s involved with Renya. I fall back onto the bed Renya had brought in for me. This absurd bed that’s practically as plush as Renya’s, with half a dozen pillows scattered across the top. I grab one of those pillows and pull it to my chest, trying to process all this.

  Gretchen is back, talking fast, but I don’t catch a single word. She snatches the pillow from my hands and shoves a bathrobe in its place. She’s pulling me to my feet and dragging me to the bathroom.

  “Get washed!” Gretchen orders as she shoves me forward and closes the door between us. “Shower up and meet the princess and me in the dressing room. I have quite a few stunning dresses for you to try!”

  I rest my back against the inside of the bathroom door. I thought I knew what it meant to be unmoored and disoriented. I experienced it when all my self-knowledge was stripped away. Now I’ve been given more knowledge than I ever had, and I’m just as unmoored and disoriented as I was when I had none.

  I shower so quickly, the hot water does little to clear my mind. My hands are still shaking when I wrap myself in the bathrobe Gretchen gave me—soft and white and embroidered with Renya’s name—and slide my feet into matching slippers. I feel drunk on all the truths I’ve learned in just the last hour. When I woke up in the race I was hollow and empty, and now I’m full to overflowing, but to be honest, I don’t feel any safer.

  So I remind myself that when I woke in the race, I pushed forward, and that’s what I have to do now. I entered the race for one purpose: to secure safety and independence for me and for Marlon, and until I get those things, I need to keep going.

  Until I get those things, I’m still in the race.

  When I exit the bathroom I find Renya waiting for me, alone, wrapped in an identical robe.

  “I have some explaining to do,” she says, “and I want to do it quickly, before Gretchen comes back. I don’t need the whole staff gossiping about what might be going on between you and me. We need to carry on as if everything is normal.”

  “Normal?” I say. I sit down on the extra bed—my bed—and try to focus. The light in the room is golden, and outside, birds are singing in the gardens. I draw a deep breath and let it out. “I don’t even know what that is anymore.”

  Renya walks away from me, but she stops in front of the vanity, so I can see her face still, reflected in the gilded mirror hung above it. Her brow creases. She draws in a deep breath and turns to face me again. “I want no more secrets between us. I want to tell you everything, but I need to know I can trust you—”

  “Why would you ever doubt you can trust me—”

  “Because you wouldn’t commit to what I had committed to. What Kit had committed to. I know Aengus tried to recruit you, I know he told you your brother Jayden wanted your help, and I know you said no. But I had said yes. And Kit had said yes. Those letters—”

  The door to the dressing room opens. “Ladies!” Gretchen calls to us, and we both move dutifully toward her. I feel queasy, the words what I had committed to spinning in my mind. The floor beneath my feet feels unsteady, and I’m glad that, once we’re in the dressing room, Gretchen doesn’t stop me from sitting on the edge of a padded chair. “I want yo
u to start with these,” she says to Renya, handing her two gowns—one blue, one green. “And you, Astrid, the Queen of Oblivion,” she says, running her hands over a long rack of gowns in the center of the room. I’ve never heard the title Queen of Oblivion before. I can’t tell if it’s a real thing or just something Gretchen’s coined to tease me. “Let me know how you feel about these three.” Now I’m back on my feet, letting Gretchen drape the dresses over my arm. “Oh!” shouts Gretchen, and I leap back. “I left the ivory one I want you to try in the wardrobe. I’ll just run and fetch it. Start trying the others,” she says, and she’s out the door again.

  On cue, Renya launches back into her story. “The romance between me and Kit—that ended before it started. It ended the night you almost died paying the price for something so foolish.” She doesn’t look at me but paces, and I catch her reflection in one of the huge mirrors that line the wall, and then the next, and then the next. Her eyes are wide, her cheeks flushed. “But though we both put that part of it aside, neither Kit nor I could put aside our commitment to the cause. We both kept in touch with Jayden. We both continued to do what we could for the OLA. And now . . .”

  She sits on the arm of the chair I just got up from. My head is swimming as I try to keep up with every word that she says. I’m relieved she’s stopped pacing because I can’t handle the movement. The air in this room feels close. “Why didn’t I feel this secret in you, all this time?” I ask.

  “The letters, the boy, the OLA . . . the things that led to that beating . . . They’re the only things we never discuss, you and I,” she says. She takes my hands. Mine are icy, but hers are hot. “I never had to keep it from you. You never even went near it.”

  I realize this is true.

  It wasn’t until the race, until I forgot all that I thought I knew, that I began to see the world of Lanoria through open eyes. Until then, I didn’t understand the OLA at all.

  “I placed a bomb for Jayden during the race,” I say. “But I didn’t know it was a bomb. I . . . I wanted to help, but I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

  The door flies open and Gretchen storms in, carrying an ivory gown on a hanger. “This is the perfect dress for you, Astrid,” she says. Her eyes go wide as she looks from me to Renya and then back again. “Ladies, we need progress! You can catch up on gossip later.”

  I take the dress from her hands. “Yes. Sorry,” I say, and she steps back out.

  “Now Kit and I are working to help Jayden find Marlon,” Renya says as soon as the door is closed, barely missing a beat. “I know what Marlon means to you, Astrid. But don’t worry. Wherever Lars has taken him, we’ll find him, and we’ll bring him back.”

  She gets to her feet and stands in front of me, chewing her bottom lip again, watching my face intently with wide eyes. She’s waiting, and I think worrying, about my reaction.

  “You’re helping Jayden find Marlon? You and Darius?”

  She nods. “That’s one of the reasons I went ahead of all of you, on an earlier train—”

  “You’re in touch with my brother Jayden—”

  “Yes—”

  “And have been—”

  “Yes.”

  What sort of reaction could ever fit a revelation like this one? This makes the fact of her father’s love for my mother seem quaint. This is so much more. This is deception and subterfuge and rebellion. This is believing in the value of a cause so completely that you become willing to turn on your own people.

  Your own family.

  I guess Renya had her reasons for keeping her secrets from me.

  Until now.

  She’s given me a gift, by trusting me with her secrets, but she doesn’t yet know how great a gift it is. She doesn’t know I’m keeping a terrible secret of my own, one I feel I can trust her with now.

  “I want to help find Marlon, too,” I say, and immediately she releases her bottom lip. But I have to raise my hand to warn her I have more to say. “We have to find Marlon, because I know what Lars is capable of.”

  Her smile flattens. Her brows knit into a frown. “I think we all do. He’s all about oppression. Like our father before him—”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, I know what your brother is capable of because I know what your brother has done.” Renya presses her lips flat. “I was in the room when your father was murdered, Renya. I’d just been given the Oblivion.” Now Renya takes a half step back. “And it wasn’t an Asp who killed your father. It was your brother, the prince.”

  Renya’s eyes widen and her mouth falls open, but then her hands go to her face. When she drops her hands again her eyes are wild, but while I watch her, she takes it all in with long, slow breaths, until a few moments later, the only word for the look in her eyes would be resigned. I’d thought she might tell me I was wrong or at least that I was confused—that the Oblivion I’d been given had deceived me. But she purses her lips once, nods, and says, “Does he know that you know?”

  “I think so.”

  “Does anyone else know?”

  I shake my head.

  She nods again. She’s scared—I can feel it—but she’s trying not to let it show. “This will require some sort of action, of course, but first we need to find Marlon.” She wrings her hands once, but then she says, “Thank you for telling me the truth.”

  “No more secrets between us?” I ask.

  “No more secrets.” She takes a step toward me and I think she might embrace me, but there’s a knock on the outer door and Gretchen barges in, this time with another Outsider maid—a frightened-looking older woman—in tow. Gretchen has been Renya’s maid since she was weaned, so she can get away with bossing the princess around. I feel sorry for this other woman, who certainly doesn’t want to anger a member of the royal family.

  Gretchen clears her throat. I can’t help but wonder if this is what it feels like to have a mother. “The two of us are not leaving until you are both dressed and ready for this ball.”

  With Gretchen and the other woman helping, the process of dressing becomes a whirlwind, and before long I’m standing in the middle of the room in an ivory silk gown with a high back that fits like it was made for me. After the shower I wrapped my knee in a clean brace, and now I slide a pair of soft leather flats onto my feet. I should be able to stay upright, even if I can’t dance. Renya is dressed in a gown of emerald green, which fits her so well, it makes her look like the carefree princess she’s so good at pretending to be.

  The princess even I believed her to be, until today.

  When we arrive at the palace ballroom, nothing feels real. An Outsider footman with a ruddy face and the most ornate coat I’ve ever seen gives me a short nod before opening the door and holding it so Renya and I can enter, side by side.

  We walk into a room festooned with flowers, all of them white. The ceilings are high and the lamps are low, and spotlights illuminate elaborate arrangements of white blooms and silver foliage. Above the center of the dance floor, an enormous hanging basket holds cascading blooms—white roses, daisies, magnolias, even white tulips and daffodils—all twisted into vines that tumble like streamers over our heads. Dozens of tiny white lights twinkle among the blooms.

  “I should have told you—I tried to stop them, but it was too late. The theme tonight is In the Moon Garden.”

  My stomach pinches at the words, but I try to ignore it. Could it have been intentional? Could this be a move by Lars to keep me feeling insecure? Well, I won’t let him succeed. “White flowers,” I say, forcing a smile at Renya until it no longer feels forced. “I guess I chose the right dress, then.”

  It looks as if every citizen of the city is here, the room is so crowded. A tiny panic tickles the back of my mind, but I tamp it down and force myself to take deep, even breaths. Strangers clasp my hands and congratulate me. I smile and nod, not knowing what else to do. The music is loud, and the conversation even louder. I catch myself scanning the crowd for Darius’s face—so much has changed since I last saw him—wh
en Lars emerges, cutting a path through a mass of dancing bodies. He is dressed in a very crisp black suit. Across his shoulders he wears a red cape, reminiscent of the King’s Knights.

  “Sister,” he says, greeting Renya. “Astrid.” He bows as I curtsy, and before I can speak he is extending his hand. “Will you honor me with a dance?”

  Though every cell of me flinches away from him, I place my hand in his.

  “I requested a slow-tempo waltz. I thought it would be easier on your injured knee.”

  We reach the dance floor. My ears are ringing with music and panic, as I try to understand why the prince wants to dance with me in the first place. Maybe it’s traditional for one of the royal family to dance with the winner of the Crown of Oblivion. Is it traditional for him to leer at them, too? After all the pain Lars has caused me, when his hand touches my waist, I shiver.

  My leg throbs. I bite my bottom lip to keep the grunts and groans inside, because I’m not sure how well it would go over in front of all these people if I stopped in the middle of a dance with the prince. I can keep going. I certainly have endured worse pain than this. I’m grateful that Renya took so many dance lessons. She taught me most of what she learned, so I could dance the part of her partner when she practiced. Occasionally, we even switched, and she would lead.

  After the song ends, having not caught even a glimpse of Darius, I find myself in a quiet corner of the mezzanine with Lars. I’m not sure how we got here—he whisked me up the stairs before the music ended, as if it were all part of the dance. He has not taken his hand from the small of my back. “Astrid, can I tell you a secret?”

  My eyes slide to him. I’m thrown by his choice of words, though I try to appear relaxed. I doubt I succeed. Lars is standing closer to me than he’s ever stood. As usual, I can’t read his emotions.

  Can he read mine right now? I wonder. I’m sure that he can. Even a person without magic would be able to tell I’m afraid.

  I keep my eyes from his eyes. Instead, my gaze moves to his mouth. I notice his parted lips. His tongue runs along the back of his teeth, like he’s hungry.