Broken Crowns (11 page)

“You don't have to kill my father,” she says, her voice gentle. “But I can't tell you how much it means to me that someone else wants him gone as much as I do.”

“Maybe I'll only trip him, then.”

She laughs. It's an explosive laugh, and she throws her hand over her mouth, and in the next instant she's sobbing.

I go to her, sit across from her on the bed. “Don't cry,” I say, but my own eyes are filling. “Don't.”

“Nothing bad can happen to you, Morgan. Do you understand? There are pieces of me—important pieces—that stop existing when you're not around.”

Shuddering, she grabs my hands, but then changes her mind and throws her arms around me.

“When I told the king about the phosane, I was thinking of what would be best for you,” I remind her. “So I want to find the same Pen when I return. Sober and alive.”

She nods. Furiously, desperately, because she will tell me anything I want to hear in this moment. Anything that will make me happy. It is our way of protecting each other, filling each other's heads with these silly illusions that neither of us will change a drop while we're apart, and that we will see each other again.

When I leave the bedroom, I close the door behind me, holding the knob so as to make as little noise as possible. Most of the house is sleeping, and I'd like to avoid a teary good-bye.

But someone is waiting for me at the top of the stairs.

Alice's hair is bright red even as the rest of her is shadowed by the darkness of the hour. I hold my breath. It is the only way I won't fall to pieces and change my mind about going.

I can just see her sad smile. “I wanted to say good-bye before you left. Lex asked me to wake him, but it seemed for the best if I didn't.”

My brother and I had come to an understanding of sorts. He had lied about our father. If I was choosing to return home, he owed me enough to let me go. But he didn't have to like it. If he were standing here now, he would try to stop me, and being my brother and knowing me as he does, he would play to my sympathies. He would know just what to say, not to stop me, but to make me feel lousy enough about going.

“Don't worry,” Alice says. “I'll look after him.”

“Look after yourself, too,” I say, my voice tight. I will miss them both terribly.

“I'm working on him,” she says. “I think I've almost convinced him to come around to this world. When this war is through, we can get a new apartment. He can write his novels, I can work.”

“Just like home, but entirely the opposite,” I say.

She laughs. “Yes.”

I take her hands. “Tell him that there are different freedoms down here,” I say. “Tell him that no one will stigmatize him for being a jumper—the people down here don't even know what that is. Tell him you can have a family.”

She squeezes my hands. “That one will take more time, love. There's so much healing to do.”

“Healing can only happen once you begin the process. Tell him.”

“Yes,” she says, and her voice cracks with tears. I think it's because I brought up that awful memory again, and I hate myself for being so hasty. I'm so desperate for them to be happy that I lose my own patience. But Alice puts her arms around me, kisses my cheek with such force, I can still feel her lips even after she's drawn back. “Come back to us alive,” she says. “Whatever you have to do.”

I can't bear another promise I'm not sure I can keep. Instead I hug her and I tell her I love her, and I remind her again to combat Lex's stubbornness and get him to rejoin the living. They're both still so young. I can't stand the thought of my brother squandering all the decades they both have left to live. “There's still a life for you down here,” I say. “Don't let him go on harping about the terrible things when there's still so much good.”

She hugs me again. There are no more promises to be made, and neither of us wants to say good-bye. When we at last let go, I offer a smile before I turn away and descend the stairs.

Basil is wearing what I think is one of Nim's suits. He looks striking in it, I think, even if the shoulders are a bit snug. Nim is considerably thin and willowy.

Basil gives a somber smile when he sees me. There are tears in my eyes.

“Hi,” I say, keeping my voice low. The rest of the hotel is sleeping, or pretending to be asleep. Nimble says we're running a few minutes early. He says we can go say good-bye to the others if we like. “Until next time,” he quickly adds.

I look at Basil. “I don't want to. But you should go on if there's anything you need to say.”

“What about your brother?” he asks.

I especially don't want to say good-bye to him. If there is anyone in this hotel whose words are powerful enough to change my mind, it's Lex.

Even if my father's death were a certainty, I would go. I still belong to Internment. It's still a part of me. I have to see this through. I want to.

“I've said all my good-byes,” I tell him.

Jack Piper is nowhere, nor is his driver. Nim leads us to one of the black cars used by the staff here, and he drives us himself.

We reach a turn in the road, and the hotel is no longer visible when I look back, and I break into a fresh round of tears. They fast become hysterical, and I am a mess of incoherent whimpers that are meant to be the names of the people in that hotel.

Basil puts his arms around me, rubs my back and whispers that it's okay, let it out, go on, I've been incredibly brave. He understands that this is harder for me than it is for him. We are returning to his family and leaving mine behind.

He kisses the crown of my head. “Oh, Morgan.”

I shake in his arms the way that Pen shook in mine. I think she was what held me together for so long. “I wanted to be strong for her.” I gag on saliva. “And Alice and—” I can't speak.

Basil holds me steady against the jostling of the car. He has to be the steady one when I can't be. Alice was right. Things change. People leave. The one whose blood fills your ring is the one who never leaves your side.

I tighten my fists around his shirt.

For all its hype, the send-off is unspectacular. Nim stops the car in what at first seems to be the middle of a field. Then, in the approaching sunlight, I see the long stretch of concrete that leads like a road to a multilevel building with a large, closed door making up its front.

“Take a minute to dry your eyes,” Nim says. “We're running early anyway.” He turns in his seat and gives me the handkerchief from his pocket. It's embroidered with a black
JP
, for “Jack Piper.” The real name he never uses.

I sniff. “Thank you.”

His lips are pressed tightly, not quite a smile. I am going to miss him, and his sisters, but I can't think about that now if there's any chance of holding myself together. I watch him step out of the car and close the door behind him.

I dab at my eyes, blow my nose, and let out a shuddering breath.

“Why didn't you tell me this is how it felt when you left your family behind?” I say.

“It wasn't quite the same.” Basil uses his sleeve to dab at my persistent tears. “I knew that I was making the choice they'd want me to make. I knew that their best chance at staying safe was for me to leave them behind.”

I shake my head. “This isn't what my brother or Alice want. That's why I couldn't say good-bye to my brother. I want it to seem as though—as though I just stepped out for a walk before he woke up, and I'll be back soon.” I look at him. “And Pen. I need her. I need both of you in my life. I don't know who I am without the two of you beside me.”

“You're Morgan,” he says. “The girl I could never keep up with in kinder year, who was always chasing flutterlings and even bramble flies—anything with wings. You're the girl who dove into that ocean when Pen didn't surface. You're the thing that calls me back when my thoughts have begun to tread into darkness.”

I sniffle dumbly. “I am?”

He tilts my chin so that I'm looking at him. “Yes.”

“You always know the exact thing to say.” I blow my nose again and fold the handkerchief in my lap. “I don't suppose Nim will want this back.”

Basil laughs. “He probably meant for you to keep it.”

“Shall we go, then?”

“I'm ready if you are.”

Basil opens the door, and I follow him out into the dark morning air. It's chilly, although last night was quite warm. I hug my arms across my stomach. “Your weather is unpredictable,” I say to Nim.

We begin the walk down the concrete, and to keep myself rooted in the moment, I tell Nim about the long seasons and the short back home. There is no real weather. No snow. A slight change in the leaves sometimes, a slight dip in the temperature when the days get shorter, but nothing like this.

“I imagine all of our seasons must be a nuisance for someone like you,” he says.

“No. I think they're beautiful.”

“What do you call this road?” Basil asks. “It's strange. On one end it just stops in the grass.”

“It's a runway,” Nim says. “The plane will come out of that carriage house there, and pick up momentum by speeding down the runway, and then it'll take flight.”

I turn to him as we walk. “Do you wish you were coming with us?”

“The idea is intriguing,” he admits. “But I have my sisters to look after.” He brightens a little. “Birds will be excited to know you've gone home. She'll expect all sorts of stories when you return.” He says it with such confidence, and I cannot tell whether he believes it himself or is just a convincing liar for my sake.

I play along. “I'm looking forward to seeing her up and about.”

I look ahead to see that the carriage house that holds the plane is much closer. I can hear voices echoing inside its brick walls.

“Morgan,” Nim says. “Your kindness meant a lot to Celeste. She told me that you were someone she could trust. One of the only people that she could trust, actually. I was wondering if maybe—if you could give this to her. When you see her, that is.” He has extracted a folded envelope from his breast pocket and he puts it in my hand. It's sealed shut, and I can feel the heft of several pages inside. “It's very important that she's the only one who reads that.”

I meet his eyes. “Of course,” I say.

“And if—” He cuts himself off and then begins anew after he's summoned some courage. “And if what the others have feared is true, and she's no longer alive, I need you to destroy that for me.”

I'm amazed by his bravery, saying those words and accepting them as a possibility.

“Okay,” I say, and repeat something I've heard Birdie say so many times, copying her accent and emphasizing the four syllables. “Absolutely.”

Nim smiles, punches my shoulder lightly. “Thanks, kiddo.”

He bangs on the wooden door to the carriage house: once, pause, three times, pause, once.

There's a stirring and a metallic sound from within, like ropes being fed through a pulley, and then the door begins lumbering upward, arching back into the carriage house itself.

As the door rises and I begin to get a good look at the jet in the early morning light, a painfully bright flash blinds me. Too late, we shield our eyes. “There they are, our lovely young beacons of hope!” the king says. He's holding a heavy-looking metal device in front of his face, and he lowers it to smile at us. “That will look lovely on the front page of the paper. I'll be sure to reserve a copy for you when you return.”

If you don't call upon your men to kill us,
I think. That's what my own king tried to do to me.

As the burning dots fade from my vision, I see Prince Azure standing behind the king, outfitted on either side by two of King Ingram's men.
Hostage,
I think. He is dressed in more of this world's fashions; if he were to return home like this, it would take mere seconds for the schoolboys back home to mimic this foreign image. Internment would begin to resemble the ground. The thought frightens me more than I was prepared for.