To Kill a Kingdom

by Alexandra Christo

  Lira shifts. “Quick,” she says. My fingers are webbed by her blood, shirttails damp against my hip. “Take this to make up for it.”

  She lifts a shaking arm and a small pendant falls from her hand to mine. Bluer than her eyes and far too delicate to hold so much power. The Págese necklace.

  She got it.

  I laugh and consider what smart comment I could make – telling her that it’s not really my style, or that maybe I already have it in gold – but then Lira’s eyes quiver back and there doesn’t seem to be much point in being funny if she isn’t the one to hear it.

  “Captain!” Madrid yells, Kye’s hands still clinched to her waist. “She needs a medic.”

  Torik shadows over me, squeezing my shoulder with his mighty hands and bringing me back to reality. I swallow. Nod. Stand with Lira far too light in my arms. Run from the dregs of Rycroft’s shitty ship, leaving a trail of blood in my wake.

  “Get moving!” I shout, once I step foot back onto the Saad. “And blow that ship to hell in our backwash.”

  The Saad lurches and my crew jumps into anarchy. They run from one end of the deck to the other, pulling the lines from their winches and recleating the boom. Trimming sails and scanning for the wind. I cleave forward, pushing past the ones who stop dead, noticing the blood-soaked girl in my arms and offering their hand.

  “Elian,” Kye says. “You’re injured. Let me carry her.”

  I ignore him and turn to Torik. His face is wretched as he stares down at Lira. She may not have been one of us before, but dying in the line of duty has a way of securing people’s loyalty.

  “Make sure the medic is ready,” I say, and my first mate nods.

  Rycroft is slung carelessly over his shoulder, his blood dripping down Torik’s back. He’s alive, but barely, and if I get my hands on him, then he won’t stay that way for long. With Lira still limp in my arms, I yell for Torik to get a medic and he throws Rycroft to the floor without hesitation before rushing belowdecks.

  Really, we don’t have a medic, but my assistant engineer traveled with a Plásmatash circus and that’s close enough. As I carry Lira toward him, through the twists and tunnels of my ship, I’m caught off guard by the notion that out of all the princes and pirates and killers and convicts, a small boy from a circus is the only one who can help. It seems funny, and I think how Lira might laugh, knowing that a rookie engineer will be stitching her skin back together. What biting comment she would come back with and how it would sink into me like a perfectly wonderful kind of poison. Like a bullet.

  I push my way into the cramped room, Kye rushing in behind me. The would-be medic gestures to a table in the middle of the engineering room. “Put her down there,” he says in a panicked breath. “And open her dress.”

  I do as he says and grab my knife. The strange thing is that at first I don’t think I can see any more blood gushing from the wound – it seems to all be on her dress and on me – and then when I do see blood, it doesn’t seem like enough. Or perhaps it’s all already come out. Maybe there just isn’t any left.

  “Gods.” Kye recoils as I slash open Lira’s dress. “Is she going to live?”

  “Do you care?” I snap back.

  It isn’t his fault, but yelling at Kye feels a little like yelling at myself, and I need to be yelled at right now. Because this is on me. If Lira dies, then it’s on me.

  I can’t believe you came back for me.

  But I left her first.

  “I don’t want her to die, Elian.” Kye squeezes my arm, keeping me steady as the fraying parts inside threaten to dismantle me. “I never did. Besides” – Kye shoves a hand into his pocket and sighs through the next words – “she protected you when I couldn’t.”

  “It looks like a clean shot,” the medic says, and I turn, the irony of it gnawing at me. It was a dirty shot, through and through.

  “It just scraped her ribs,” he says. “I have to check no organs were damaged though.” He points a gloved finger at Kye. “Don’t just stand there shadowing my light. Get me some towels.”

  Kye doesn’t bristle at the order, or argue that we should let Lira die to be sure she can’t betray us. He turns, hurries from the room, and doesn’t even waste the time to glare properly.

  “She didn’t nick anything important,” the medic says.

  He phrases the last part as an afterthought, but when he turns to me, his eyes are expectant.

  “I’m not sure,” I tell him. “There was a lot of blood.”

  He shrugs and grabs an instrument that does not look entirely legitimate from a nearby toolbox. “Haven’t met an engine I couldn’t fix yet,” he says. “The human body’s just another machine.” He looks at me with assuring eyes. “I saved a monkey with a knife wound to the ribs once. There was an accident with a balloon bursting. It’s not that different.”

  I think this is supposed to be reassuring, so I nod just as Kye bursts back into the room with a handful of fresh towels. After, we’re both ushered back out the way we came, and I don’t argue. I’m glad to be sent away so the medic can work, free from staring at Lira’s limp body and thinking about how I’ve never seen her look so vulnerable. So capable of being finite.

  I don’t give myself a moment to breathe before I walk back onto the deck and toward Rycroft’s body. My crew flares their nostrils, waiting to be let loose. Beside me, I sense the rigid way Kye stands. Barely able to restrain himself and hoping desperately I don’t ask him to restrain the others. That’s the thing about my crew. They don’t need to be friends. They don’t even need to like one another. Being on the Saad is the same as being family, and by saving me, Lira has proven something to Kye. I locked her in a cage and made her barter her way onto my ship, and she saved me all the same, believing that it was the right choice. A life for a life. Trust for trust.

  Tallis Rycroft stares at me and he’s not alive enough to make it look menacing. His left eye is closed, a lump stretching out like a mountaintop, and the wounds on his face make his lips indistinguishable. The hole in his stomach bleeds on.

  “What are you going to do with him?” Kye asks. His voice is not altogether calm, something unbalanced on those usually carefree tones. He wants revenge as much as I do. And not just for taking his captain, but for the broken girl lying in the dregs of our ship.

  “I don’t know.”

  Madrid walks a small pocketknife between her fingers. When it nicks her, she lets the blood drip onto Rycroft’s injured leg. “He doesn’t deserve to live,” she says. “You don’t have to lie to us.”

  One of Rycroft’s eyes blinks, slowly, as he comprehends the storm he has created. The young prince in me wants to feel sorry for him, but I keep looking at the half-moons and long, serrated lines that crease into his biceps. Wounds made trying to fend him off. Nail marks so similar to the ones along my own chest.

  I hesitate, caught off guard as a distorted image of the Princes’ Bane flashes across my mind. She could have snapped my neck or done any manner of things to disable me, but she let her claws tear slowly through my chest instead. That was the thing about sirens. They always went straight for the heart.

  “Captain,” Madrid says, and I blink away the image.

  “I’m going to find some shark-infested waters,” I tell her, regaining my composure. “And then drop his favorite appendage in.”

  There is a phlegmatic silence, while everyone within earshot considers those words. Rycroft half-blinks again.

  “Next time,” Kye says, clearing his throat, “lie to us.”

  “What about Lira?” Madrid asks.

  I shrug. “Depends on how pleasant she is when she wakes up.”

  “I meant,” she says, “is she really going to be okay?”

  I stare down at Rycroft, and it takes every scrap of strength I have to smile. “My crew is not so easily killed.”

  It’s a bullshit line, but I need everyone to believe it. I need to believe it myself. I picture Lira, and it’s like I can feel her cold blood drippin
g through my hands like melted ice. If she dies, then my plan and this entire mission dies with her. More than anything, I’m counting the minutes until our rookie engineer emerges and tells me that everything is fine. That Lira didn’t die for me and that she can still offer the last piece of the puzzle to free the Crystal of Keto from its cage.

  That maybe – just maybe – I don’t need to rip Rycroft into any more pieces.

  30

  Lira

  I WAKE AND THEN immediately wish I hadn’t.

  There’s a raw pain in my ribs, like there’s a creature gnawing at my skin, and I feel groggy in a way that tells me I’ve had too much sleep.

  The room I’m in is as jumbled as my thoughts. I brush my open shirt out of the way and brace my heavily bandaged ribs. My teeth grind against one another as I let my legs swing over the side of the bench. It’s a mere second of being upright before the gnawing turns into a bite.

  “There’s something about a bullet wound that makes me want to jump out of bed too.”

  Kye is washing his hands in a nearby sink. It’s thick with oil and grease. When he’s finished, he shakes the water from his hands and turns to me with a condemning look.

  “This is supposed to be a bed?” I ask.

  He places a wet hand against my forehead, and I resist the urge to retract from the cold.

  “I don’t think you’re dying now,” he says.

  “Was I dying before?”

  He shrugs. “Maybe. But the little circus medic fixed you up okay. He even taught me how to dress your wound so he could focus on helping the ship stay afloat.” Kye nods to the bandages with a smug look. “Pretty perfect, aren’t they? My first.”

  “Could you not have given me a bed, too?” I ask, not failing to notice that someone – I hope Madrid rather than Kye – has also dressed me in something more plain and comfortable than the dress I was in.

  “Madrid fetched you pillows.” Kye wipes his hands on a nearby rag. “It’s the best we could do since moving you wasn’t an option.”

  I glance down at the stained sheet draped thinly over me. There’s a black velvet pillow where my head was, plush enough for me to have slept comfortably for however long, and a thin oval cushion is pressed into the shape of my feet. It’s not exactly fit for a queen, but for a gunshot victim aboard a pirate ship, it might be considered luxurious.

  “How are you feeling?” Kye asks, and I smirk.

  “Were you worried?” When he doesn’t reply, I test my ribs with a deep sigh. “Fine,” I say.

  The bandage is tight around my body, and the dressing feels fresh and crisp against my clammy skin. It must have been changed recently, I realize, which means that Kye has been watching over me.

  “I expected Madrid,” I tell him. “Of all people, I didn’t think it would be you.”

  “She was here for a while,” he says. “Longer than a while, actually. I had to send her off to get some sleep before she resorted to stapling her eyes open.” He looks down at his hands. “She was worried you’d be just another girl who couldn’t escape.”

  “Escape what?”

  “Rycroft,” he says, and then shuffles uncomfortably. “I’m glad you’re awake.”

  The comment isn’t as throwaway as he might want it to be. For all the distrust between us, Kye and the rest of the crew risked their lives to come back for me, and while I lay bleeding on their ship, they didn’t leave me to sleep in solitude. They stayed. They came for me and they stayed.

  “So you trust me now?” I ask.

  “You nearly died trying to save Elian.” Kye clears his throat as though it’s a struggle to get the words out. “So like I said, I’m glad you’re awake.”

  “I’m glad that you didn’t kill me while I was unconscious.”

  Kye snorts a smile. “I like the way you say thank you.”

  I laugh and then wince. “How long was I asleep?”

  “A few days,” he tells me. “We had some strong sedatives and we all thought it would be a good idea for you to get some rest.” He grabs the rag from by the sink and passes it uneasily between his hands. “Listen,” he says gingerly. “I know I’ve given you a hard time, but that’s only because Elian seems to like putting himself in death’s hands a little too often and it’s my job to stop that from happening whenever I can.”

  “Like a good bodyguard,” I say.

  “Like a good friend,” he corrects. “And I think taking a bullet for him has earned you a break from me being shitty.” He sighs and throws the rag onto my lap. “I guess this officially makes you one of us.”

  I take a moment to process that. The idea that I belong with them on a ship setting sail for everywhere and nowhere. It’s what I wanted, isn’t it? To gain the crew’s confidence so that they wouldn’t suspect me. And yet, the instant Kye says it, I don’t think about how I’ve earned trust I plan to break. I think about how different it feels, to be a new kind of soldier, earning loyalty by saving lives instead of destroying them. Fighting a war on the other side.

  “I didn’t quite hear that apology,” I say. “Could you repeat it?”

  Kye glares, but it’s different than before, lighter, nothing hostile grazing over it. A smile settles on his face. “Guess Elian’s been teaching you his version of humor,” he says.

  At the mention of Elian’s name, I pause.

  He promised that he wouldn’t come back for me if something went wrong, and then he did it anyway. The moment he freed himself from the restraints and was faced with the opportunity to leave, he didn’t want to.

  I squeeze my eyes shut as my head begins to pound. My entire purpose for being on this ship is to kill him, and when the opportunity came for someone else to do it, I stopped them.

  I pushed him from the bullet the same way he pulled me from the ocean. Without thinking or weighing up what it could mean or how it might benefit me. I did it because it seemed like the only thing to do. The right thing to do.

  In my world, Kahlia is the sole remnant of my lost innocence. The only proof that there’s a tiny part of me I haven’t let my mother get her hands on. I don’t know why, but Elian has evoked the same feral feeling that used to be reserved only for her. The desire to allow sparks of loyalty and humanity in me to take hold. We’re the same, he and I. Just as looking into my cousin’s eyes feels like looking into a memory of my own childhood, being around Elian feels like being around an alternate version of myself. Reflections of each other in a different kingdom and a different life. Broken pieces from the same mirror. There are worlds between us, but that seems more like semantics than tangible evidence of how dissimilar we are.

  Everything is murkier now. And Elian made it that way in a single second, with an action as easy as breathing: He smiled. Not because I was suffering or bowing or making myself malleable to his every whim and decree like I’ve done with my mother. He smiled because he saw me. Free and alive, and already making my way back to him.

  I’ve been so focused on putting an end to my mother’s reign that I haven’t thought about how I can put an end to her war. Even if I get my hands on the eye, I still planned to take Elian’s heart, just as my mother ordered, thinking it would prove something to my kingdom. But what? That I’m the same as her, valuing death and savagery over mercy? That I’ll betray anyone, even those who are loyal to me?

  If I find the eye, maybe it’s not just sirens who don’t need to suffer anymore, but humans, too. Maybe I can stop the age-old grudge that began in death. Be a new kind of queen, who doesn’t create murderers from daughters.

  I think of Crestell, shielding Kahlia from me and laying down her own life instead.

  Become the queen we need you to be.

  “I should get the captain,” Kye says, breaking me from my thoughts.

  I slide from the bench, letting the pain soak through me and then drift away. I gather my footing and focus on this newfound urgency. “No,” I tell him. “Don’t.”

  Kye hesitates by the door, his hand already pressing down
on the handle. “You don’t want him to come?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “He doesn’t need to,” I say. “I’ll find him.”

  31

  Elian

  PÁGOS DRAWS NEAR, AND with every league the air grows thinner. We feel it each night, our bones creaking with the ship as she sweeps through water that will soon turn to sludge and ice. It doesn’t matter how much farther we have, because Págos is something that is always felt from within. More and more with each fathom, it looms somewhere deep inside. The final part of our quest, where the Crystal of Keto waits to be freed.

  Rycroft is as much a ghost now as he has ever been, hidden belowdecks with barely enough gauze and meds to stay alive. The minimum necessary to make the journey with us. I haven’t been down there, delegating that responsibility to Torik and other members of the crew who can handle him well enough and show restraint even better.

  Madrid can’t be trusted. Not when it comes to one of her own countrymen. Her memories tend to taint her morals and I can understand it. Kye, equally so. There isn’t part of me that trusts him to watch over Rycroft and deliver food that isn’t laced with poison. And then, more than any of them, there’s me. The person I trust the least.

  Lira may be alive, but that doesn’t put an end to things. The relief has layered over my anger like a film, masking the rage well enough that it can’t be seen, though never enough for it to disappear. But whether I go down there or not, Rycroft can sense the fate that awaits him. Even he can hear the slow wolf call of Págos. From the depths of the crystal cage, where Lira once was, and where he will remain until I give him over to the ice kingdom. He can catch the whistles in the wind, in a room as dark as his soul. And when we finally arrive, he’ll live with them as he rots in a jail as cold as his heart.

  “You’re not drinking.”

  Lira hovers on the ladder steps to the forecastle deck. A blanket is wrapped loosely around her shoulders, and when it slips, she shrugs it higher. I try not to notice the wince as she moves her arm too quickly, stretching her side and jarring the wound.