The Heartwood Crown

by Matt Mikalatos

  “Would you warm mine, too, please?” Mrs. Raymond asked, lifting her teacup.

  Hanali gave her a look of disdain. “But my dear, your cup is perfectly hot. Perfectly hot, those were your exact words.” He motioned to the servant again. “Take this teapot away. I will not have anything spoil Mrs. Raymond’s perfect cup of tea.” The servant bowed his head and stepped away from the table, still holding the teapot. He didn’t move further away, just stood at attention with the teapot in his hands.

  “You are a petty thing,” Mrs. Raymond said. Hanali looked pleased. He steepled his fingers, turned his back on Mrs. Raymond, and gave his attention to Darius. “Now, my friend, tell us: why are you so set on killing the archon?”

  Why was he so set on this path? It was the wrong question. “This isn’t something new, Hanali. It has been my plan for some time.” He took another sip, set the cup down. “I’ve been planning this since the moment I became a Black Skull. Break Bones has always known this, the Scim elders know. But I haven’t told anyone else.”

  Hanali’s eyebrows raised in mild surprise. “Not even Madeline?”

  “Especially not her,” Darius said, his voice rising. He put his hands flat on the table, willing himself to be calm. Madeline still believed there could be another way to bring peace. Something without all the bloodshed. She honestly thought somehow that all the people of the Sunlit Lands might have a change of heart, might discover they wanted to treat each other with kindness. It was one of the things he loved about her—that naiveté, that belief that somehow the best part of people would rise to the top and win over the worst. He wanted that flame of belief to stay alive in her, to burn strong. He wanted, if he was being really honest, to believe that for himself, but he’d seen too much evidence to the contrary. So he would fix the world himself, as he must, and if the blood of the archon was not enough to make the change, then he would still have his sword, wouldn’t he? He didn’t need Madeline’s objections when he had already decided what must be done. It was a load he could carry alone. No need to weigh her conscience down with it too. “She wouldn’t understand. You saw her up on that tower. You saw how she decided the archon’s life was more important than her own.”

  “That’s not what I saw,” Mrs. Raymond said. “She decided it wasn’t her place to decide for the Elenil and Scim what their future would be. But she wasn’t going to be a part of the injustices herself. She removed herself from the equation. It was the Scim girl who made the choice to cut off the archon’s hand. She’s the one who brought us to where we are today.”

  “Oh, pish-posh,” Hanali said. “You weren’t even there, Mrs. Raymond.”

  “I saw it all through a messenger bird,” she said. “Don’t tell me that doesn’t count.”

  “A little bird told you,” Hanali said coldly. “Drink, drink,” he said to Darius, sipping at his own tea.

  Darius took another sip of the hot tea. He did feel more relaxed.

  “Go on. You were saying that Madeline is wrong.”

  Darius sighed. Madeline wasn’t wrong. She just wasn’t practical. Sure, she could try to disconnect herself from the unjust system she benefited from, but could she ever fully do that? And would it change anything? And how long would it take? And would it be wrong of Darius to kill the archon when it would save countless Scim? Hanali was thinking in black and white, in two dimensions, something that surprised Darius, given how old the Elenil must be. “Don’t be so simple minded, Hanali. Is this really about right or wrong?”

  Hanali leaned back in surprise. “Is it not? I have found humans to think every little decision to be a moral event.”

  Darius tried to think of the right way to explain this and found himself staring into the swirl of loose leaves in his tea. The others waited patiently, though he didn’t know why. A small question began to itch in the back of his mind: why did they need him so badly? He cleared his throat. “Madeline loves these fantasy novels called the Tales of Meselia. Do you know these books?”

  Hanali gave him a small smile. “I haven’t read them. But yes, I know them well. I daresay Mrs. Raymond knows them better than I. She has always had a soft spot for fantasy.”

  Mrs. Raymond narrowed her eyes, frowning at the Elenil. “I know them, Darius. Go on.”

  He lifted his hands, drawing their attention. “I’m Black. No doubt you know this already.”

  Hanali waved his gloved hands, as if this were a minor distraction. “I am unquestionably beautiful and stylish. Certain things go without saying. Please, go on.”

  “Fantasy novels . . . well, they’re not always the most popular in my community. When I started reading them with Madeline—not just Meselia, but other books too—my mom told me to stop wasting my time. Told me it would give me the wrong idea about the world.”

  Hanali’s eyes lit up with sudden interest. “The wrong idea about the world?”

  “Yeah. See, in a lot of fantasy novels—especially the early stuff—the bad guys are always dark. Dark purposes, dark castles, dark skin. The Orcs in Tolkien. The Calormenes in Narnia. Stuff like that. When I read fantasy looking for someone who looked like me, they were always the bad guys.”

  “Aravis is Calormene in The Horse and His Boy,” Mrs. Raymond said, though her face showed no excitement about the statement.

  “Yes, and her son, who is half Calormene, becomes one of the greatest kings of Archenland,” Darius said, trying to be patient. “I’m not saying there aren’t a handful of people with dark skin who do something good in the books, but I am saying they are the exception rather than the rule. One ‘noble savage’ for every hundred, every thousand ‘ordinary’ dark-skinned warriors.”

  “Fascinating,” Hanali said. “Such wonderful names and places. Archenland! Calormene! Aravis! It reminds me of other names I hear humans say from time to time. Minnesota! Colorado! Costa Rica! What strange and wonderful places you have in your world.”

  Darius couldn’t tell if Hanali was joking. Not that it mattered much. “So one day I was reading The Once and Future King by T. H. White. It’s all about King Arthur . . . how he grew up and became someone who changed the world for the better. And I was really resonating with it. It’s all about doing away with national borders, the need for a better solution in the world than violence and bloodshed, a sort of pacifistic war book. Madeline had given it to me and said she knew I would love it, that it was a favorite of hers, even that it reminded her of me. She said I was like Arthur. I was the boy no one noticed who would be king, who would be the example that the whole civilized world would try to follow.”

  “High praise,” Hanali said, sounding impressed.

  Darius drank another gulp of tea. “She was my girlfriend, remember. She loved me and saw me in a different way than others did. Her affection for me clouded her vision.”

  Mrs. Raymond leaned forward. “Love sometimes reveals a thing in the beloved that others cannot see. Do not dismiss her words so lightly.”

  “It doesn’t matter, that’s not the point. The point is that there’s this part of the story where Wart—that’s King Arthur as a kid—gets turned into a falcon. He goes into the mews to hear all the stories these noble birds will share. That’s how it’s presented—these noble birds. But one of the birds, he’s crazy. He starts spouting off about how the world is being destroyed by all these different groups of people, and one of the groups he mentions is Black people. Only he uses the n-word. The n-word!”

  Hanali’s brow crinkled in confusion. “This is not translating correctly.”

  “It’s a slur in English,” Mrs. Raymond said. “Used against Black people specifically.”

  “So, to be sure I am following all this . . . an insane bird in a work of fiction used a slur against your people.”

  Darius groaned in frustration. “You don’t see? Madeline read right over that. She didn’t notice it, or didn’t remember it when she was telling me. For her it’s a story about choosing to throw away the idea that ‘might makes right’ and instead embrace
‘do what is right, whatever the cost.’ It’s about how power comes with corresponding responsibilities to the people you’re in authority over. This is a message I believe. But at the same time she didn’t see this issue, this underlying issue with it.”

  Hanali motioned to the servant to fill Darius’s teacup. “You are becoming agitated, my friend. More tea.”

  “I’m saying that Madeline reads all those stories differently than me. She didn’t understand that a throwaway slur about Black people—even though it’s presented in the book as being something only a crazy person would say—ruined it for me. It made me more aware of the other things . . . like how Native Americans are constantly being run down as savages in the book for no reason. Basically any time archery comes up, the author has to say something about how savages don’t do archery the same way as the Brits, that they’re lesser. It doesn’t matter for the person writing the book, because I wasn’t part of the audience. He wasn’t thinking about me and my response, or he wouldn’t have included it. All these fantasies, all of them, come from this point of view of some Norse or Anglo-Saxon medievalism. The great god Aslan comes and puts the Calormenes in their place. The one true king returns and destroys the Orcs and the dark men with their elephants. The happy ending isn’t happy for my people.”

  “You, however, are not an Orc.” Hanali said this with a tentative tone, as if he weren’t quite sure.

  “I don’t know, Hanali. I don’t know. Maybe that’s part of the problem. But see, Madeline knows these stories. Narnia and Middle-earth and King Arthur. She believes them, believes what they tell her. For her, she can just disengage from the system and trust that the Peasant King or the Majestic One or someone is going to come along and fix everything. Maybe she doesn’t notice every little injustice, every slur in the story, maybe she thinks too highly of the people around her, that they want to do the right thing in their heart of hearts, and if she’s wrong about them, well, that’s okay because the new king will take the throne and he’ll save us all. If we just live a quiet life and do the right thing in our little sphere of influence, it’s all going to be okay. The new king will fix every wrong. Your plan is the story Madeline has believed her whole life: new king, new world. You become archon, you change things.”

  “Undeniable. Trust me, my friend, I have every intention of doing just that.”

  Darius walked to an ornate vase sitting on a small, oval table. It had gold paint showing some scene from an Elenil myth. Darius didn’t recognize the story, but the picture was of a male and female Elenil holding a stone, and light was radiating out from it, and below them were the other peoples of the Sunlit Lands, some cowering before them, others with beatific smiles. “It’s this story,” Darius said. “This is the problem. In this story, I bet some Elenil comes along and saves the world and sets it up the way it is now, Elenil on top, everyone else scrambling for table scraps.”

  “More or less,” Hanali admitted, taking the vase gingerly from his hands. “This vase has been in my family for several centuries. Please do not touch it again.” Hanali set the vase on the table. “The question, however, my dear sir, is why you are determined to kill the archon and why, of all things, you have chosen to keep this secret from your friends.”

  “I didn’t tell my friends because they don’t understand. For them, the king comes and makes the world right again. They don’t see that in their ‘right’ world, my people suffer. As slaves or working class or prisoners, disenfranchised and marginalized. The fantasy utopia requires my people to live in a postapocalypse. I look at those stories and realize that maybe, from my friends’ point of view, I’m the bad guy. Look at it this way: a few days ago an Elenil soldier murdered a Scim kid named Nightfall. Just a child.”

  “I cannot follow your argument, Darius. You jump around. Hawks and kings and Minnesota, and now it’s Scim children and the working-class apocalypse. Please, sir, please get to your point.”

  “If Madeline had killed the archon when she had the chance, Nightfall would be alive today.”

  Hanali considered this. “Perhaps.”

  “No, not perhaps. True. Madeline chose to spare the archon’s life and do what she could do herself. She removed herself from benefiting from the system. Maybe that would work. Maybe. If everyone else benefiting from the system did the same thing, it could. But if she had killed the archon, those soldiers would have never been in the Wasted Lands. They would have never come across that child. By trusting that justice was coming tomorrow, she guaranteed more injustice today.”

  “How do you weigh this out?” Hanali asked. “The archon’s guards would have killed her, as well as your friends, if she had harmed the archon. Most likely I would be archon in his place now.”

  “Would you have sent your people into the Wasted Lands to destroy the Scim?”

  “Not at all. In fact, I had unofficially had several conversations with the Scim elders about how to move toward lasting peace.”

  “So. Nightfall would be alive. Madeline chose Nightfall’s death. I chose his death, by standing by and letting her dictate that choice to the rest of us. Not that I wanted Madeline to die, of course. I would have grabbed her if I could, flown her away. I would have fought for her, protected her, until my final breath. Her plan, though, is to be righteous herself and trust that it will change an unrighteous society. I don’t believe that. I believe we have to go beyond that. We have to fight the injustice. Destroy it. Not just in ourselves but in others, too.”

  Hanali moved to the other side of the courtyard. “But in this case, would it not make more sense to pressure the archon, as I intend to do, with an unexpected war, and for me to take his place when his inept leadership is brought to light?”

  “No offense,” Darius said, “but I don’t trust you or any other Elenil to bring justice for the Scim. Why would you? I don’t think we’ll reach full equality until there’s a day when a Scim can take the throne.”

  A slight smile came to Hanali’s face. “As you know, Darius, we Elenil check in with various prophets and soothsayers and oracles. We like to know what is coming in the future.” He picked up Darius’s teacup and waved the servant over. He opened the teapot and poured the dregs of Darius’s cup in before setting the lid firmly in place. Mrs. Raymond looked at him with incomprehension. “They’re all quite clear on two things, Darius. One, that Archon Thenody will be killed by a human—a human using the Sword of Tears. And two, that I will take Thenody’s place. As you can imagine, he is less than thrilled, and getting a human into his presence has become, well, problematic.” His smile widened. “So teatime is over. I think you are our man, Darius Walker. I have every intention of helping you.”

  “I’m not interested in helping you,” Darius snarled. He pointed at Mud. “I’d rather put that Scim kid in charge of the Sunlit Lands. I trust him more than I trust you.”

  Hanali laughed at that, and Mrs. Raymond studied the top of the table, a look of sad determination on her face. “Thus revealing your excellent judgment, sir. My apologies for Hanali’s rudeness.”

  Darius wavered to his feet, feeling a wave of nausea rise up from his stomach. “You poisoned me.”

  “It is not poison as such,” Hanali said, stepping toward him.

  “Hanali!” Mrs. Raymond said sharply. “What have you done?”

  “A sleeping potion only, Mrs. Raymond. When he wakes, he will be in the loving possession of the Pastisians.”

  Darius grabbed the vase, the one with the Elenil holding up their enlightened stone and cowing all the people of the Sunlit Lands. “The necromancers,” Darius said, but his words came out impossibly slurred. He raised the vase over his head.

  “Not the vase—” Hanali cried, but his words were cut off by the sound of pottery shattering.

  Darius kicked the shards in grim satisfaction before toppling to the floor, still smiling.

  18

  AMBUSH!

  As for me, I dive down deep, down to the roots of the world.

  FROM �
��MALGWIN AND THE WHALE,” A TRADITIONAL ZHANIN STORY

  They were surrounded. The Elenil were advancing on Madeline and her friends: David, Shula, and Jason. David could fight, and he had weapons on him. Shula could fight too, and she could turn herself into a flaming torch. Madeline could barely breathe, and Jason, well, he was probably about as useful as Madeline in a fight. She counted six Elenil. Plus the two Aluvorean women, but they weren’t fighters. If Darius were here, or Break Bones, they might have a chance. Or Baileya.

  Where was Baileya?

  Jason must have had the same thought, because he shouted, “Baileya! Hey, we’re being kidnapped by bad guys!” One of the Elenil pushed Jason to his knees, wrenching his hands behind his back. “They are not as gentle as I would like!”

  Madeline hadn’t moved, was struggling just to stay sitting upright.

  “Let him go.” It was Baileya’s voice.

  She stood behind Gilenyia, having pulled the Elenil woman’s arm behind her back, the spear blade of Baileya’s weapon under Gilenyia’s chin, resting on her neck. Everyone stopped moving. David slapped Jason on the shoulder. “Hey, bro, your girlfriend is saving us!”

  “Fiancée,” Jason said.

  The Elenil holding Jason loosened his grip but didn’t let go completely. “Gilenyia, what are your orders?” he asked.

  Gilenyia sneered. “She can’t harm me.” She drove her free elbow backward into Baileya, spun to one side and broke free of the Kakri woman’s hold. She pulled a silver knife from her sleeve, and before Madeline could shout a warning, drove the knife toward Baileya’s neck.

  Baileya plunged her spear into Gilenyia’s heart.