Broken Crowns

Pen and Thomas are playing a board game. They’re leaning toward each other on opposing sides of the coffee table, the crowns of their blond heads almost touching.

It’s a beautiful day, and Alice has taken Amy and the youngest Pipers outside. Through an open window I can hear them laughing in the garden. This Havalais air has had a positive effect on Amy; she hasn’t had one of her fits in months.

Basil is trying to engage me in a game of cards. The decks they use on the ground are similar to our own, and with a bit of compromise we can duplicate most of the games we played back home. But I am having the hardest time sitting still. My leg shakes anxiously. My mind is spinning out dozens of scenarios about Nim’s efforts at the castle.

Should I tell Judas and Amy any of this?

The thought of Judas brings a rush of heat to my cheeks. We’ve barely spoken in weeks, and I don’t see him anywhere now, but somehow I feel his presence hiding nearby, as always, just out of frame. We have scarcely spoken since our kiss, save for a few benign polite exchanges—good morning; yes, please; thank you—but time has done nothing to extinguish my curiosity about him. Time has not assuaged my guilt, and the sight of him still confuses me. I do not know what it will take to rid myself of that kiss, but I would pay any price to undo it. I would pay any price to stop wanting another.

Basil lays his stack of cards on the table and then gently takes the cards from my hands too. I blink dumbly at him.

“Would a walk help take your mind off it?” he says.

I shake my head. “I don’t want to be gone when Nim gets back.”

“We won’t go far,” he says. “Come on. The air will do you some good.”

He’s right. As soon as we’ve stepped outside, I feel less anxious. There’s some comfort in hearing the living things in the grass and in the sky. A blue bird shoots from one tree to the next, and I wish I could capture a perfect image of him to take back home. There are no birds on Internment, only speculation as to what they must be like.

Basil and I walk a lap around the hotel, past the charred altar where Nim burnt his beloved car in offering so that his sister might live. Whether or not it was an answered prayer, Birdie did pull through. It makes me wonder if their god is real. It makes me wonder if any god is real, or if it’s only easier to believe in that than in the arbitrary series of events that make up all our lives.

“What do you think it’s like back home?” I say, to break the silence.

Basil is not one to lie about the way of things. “Ugly. I wonder what King Furlow is doing to reassure everyone. If he’s able to do anything at all.”

“I never realized how small Internment was until we came here,” I say. “From down here it just looks like a big clot of dirt in the sky. If I had lived down here all my life, I would never have suspected there was any life up there. I would think it a mistake of nature, something small enough to fit into my palm if only I could reach out and take it.”

How strange that I’ve lived so much of my life on a clump of dirt in an infinite sky. After all these months, I can feel myself starting to forget how alive it was up there, how bright and cheerful.

We’ve stopped walking, and as I shield my eyes and stare up at Internment, I can feel Basil watching me. My heart is fluttering in my chest, anxious and frightened and strangely thrilled. It is an act of bravery for me to look at him when he makes me feel this way.

“I was wrong, all those times I said your eyes might be the same color as the sea down here,” he says.

“No?”

“No,” he says. “They’re still the brightest blue I’ve ever seen.”

I look at the ground, flustered, smiling. Without looking at him, I can feel his victorious smirk.

“You’re being too kind,” I say.

“Ridiculous accusation. When have you ever known me to be kind?”

“It’s true; you’re a real beast most days. Flat-out tyrannical.”

He laughs. Somehow my arm ends up around his back, and his around my shoulders, squeezing me close. The sun burns the crown of my hair, and despite the warmth, my blood is running chills up and down my spine.

I want to tell him everything. About Judas kissing me in the grass, and the way he still haunts my thoughts even though he is surely using me to quell his loneliness. I want to tell Basil that I’m sorry, that I’ve made a mess of everything, that I’m scared.

But here beside him, insects hopping around our feet, all the worlds have gone still. This planet has stopped rotating around its sun. Everything is calm. We’re safe here. We’ll be okay.

4

After dinner, I help Alice with the dishes. For security purposes, Jack Piper has dismissed most of the hotel’s staff, and chores like these are supposed to fall to his children, but Alice always gets to them first. Years of being married to my brother have left her restless and with an endless desire to make things clean.

She hands me a clean white plate, and I go over it with the dishrag. “Do you want to go back home?” I say.

She shakes her head. “I couldn’t leave your brother, and he’s told me he won’t return. Not after what the king did to your parents, and especially to you.”

“I didn’t ask you what Lex wants. I asked what you want.”

She smiles. It is a kind, wistful smile. “Should there be any difference?”

“What a thing to say. Of course there’s a difference.”

She hands me another dish. “After your brother jumped, one afternoon while he was still in the hospital, I came home to tend to the plants, and there was a letter waiting for me at the door, from my parents. I was welcome to return home if I estranged myself from Lex. But if not, they felt it best for me not to associate with them anymore.”

I suspected as much. Alice’s parents stopped coming around, and jumpers carry a stigma. With the exception of Pen and Basil, I lost virtually all my friends. Still, to hear it said out loud disgusts me. There is no one kinder than Alice, and no one who deserves kindness more.

“That’s the thing about marriage, love. You hope you won’t ever have to choose, but if there’s a choice to be made, it’s the one whose blood is in your ring. It doesn’t matter how many worlds there are; our place is with each other.”

“Lex doesn’t deserve you,” I say. “Truly.”

She smiles. “But there is nothing left for me up there,” she adds. “Since you asked. Everything I need is here.”

I don’t know that there’s much left on Internment for me either. I tell myself that my father is still alive up there, and that I’ll be reunited with him. But when that happens, will he want to leave Internment behind? He risked his life trying to do just that.

After Alice and I have finished with the dishes, I slip outside unnoticed, and I walk to the ocean’s edge, where the boats bob along lengths of rope. This place is asleep, like all of Havalais, lying in wait for a solution to this war. I lie in the sand for what feels like hours, fixated on that dark shadow of earth in the sky.

Long after the sun has set, Nim still hasn’t returned. The smallest Pipers are asleep.

I lie in bed while Pen reads one of Birdie’s catalogs by candlelight. She’s got a drawing pad resting on her knee, and she keeps returning to a sketch she started earlier this evening of Ehco, a divinity that lives in the sea and contains all the world’s sadness. It’s Birdie’s favorite story from The Text, and I suppose the drawing will be a gift for Birdie when she returns home.

“Pen?”

I can hear the rapid strokes of the pencil on the page. “Mm? Sorry, am I keeping you awake?”

“No.” I turn onto my side so I’m facing her. “It’s just that you’ve been so guarded with your secrets lately. Why did you tell me your theory about Internment sinking?”

She goes on sketching. “It wasn’t the right time before now. No sense making you panic until King Ingram was back and we could do something about it.”

“It’s just … After I told Celeste about the phosane, and she went to the king, I thought you hadn’t forgiven me. I thought I’d been locked out of your head.”

The pencil stills in her hand. She stares down at the page as she speaks, with difficulty. “I thought about everything,” she says in a soft voice. “I thought about what it would have done to me to pull you out of the water, with you the one not breathing. I …” She draws a line on the page, feebly. “I saw it all very clearly, and I understood why you did it. I can’t say I’d have done something different if the tables had been turned.”

She clears her throat. “And besides, you could strike a match and set Internment on fire. You could lose your wits and destroy it all. I’d still be here. There’s nothing in the worlds that I couldn’t forgive you for.”

The words are so sincere and candid that I’d like to get up and embrace her. But I don’t move for fear of breaking this fragile moment between us. I have known Pen since before we were old enough to speak, and perhaps that is why so much of our friendship is built on what goes unsaid. But it feels so good to hear her say those words.

“I could never turn my back on you, either,” I tell her.

“I know what I’m like, Morgan. I know it’s not easy.”

“So it’s not easy,” I say. “What is?”

She smiles briefly, and then allows herself to be distracted anew by her drawing.

I close my eyes, and eventually I feel myself fading into sleep, soothed by the sound of pencil on paper and catalog pages turning.

But it isn’t a very sound sleep, because when there’s a knock on the door, I’m startled awake.

“You girls awake?” Nim whispers through the door.

Pen is still sitting up by the candle. “Come in,” she says.

I comb my fingers through my hair and wipe away the drool in the corner of my mouth, hastily trying to make myself presentable.

Nim opens the door and peeks his head in. “I didn’t see the king. Or my father. I wasn’t permitted into any of the meetings. My father isn’t exactly happy with me these days.”

“But you were gone all day,” Pen says. “What were you doing?”

Nim smirks. “I was speaking with a few of the king’s men. You remember how I said they were unhappy with things since the harbor? One of the men is assigned to guard King Ingram’s special guest, come down from Internment. My contact is escorting the guest to a meeting spot for us, but we have to go right now.”

“Him?” I say, trying to keep myself from hoping that the guest from home could possibly be my father. The disappointment would be unbearable if I were wrong.

“I think you’ll love this,” Nim says. “Hurry on and get dressed. I’ll meet you outside.”

I’m on my feet as soon as he’s closed the door. I’m finished changing before Pen. “I have to get Basil,” I say. “He’ll want to come.”

Pen sighs theatrically. “Must you?”

I stare at her flatly. “He’s my betrothed.”

“So?”

“You said you were fine with my telling him about all this. He’s coming.”

“Fine. But if you wake Thomas, I’ll strangle you.”

“Noted.”

I turn the knob to the boys’ room very slowly, wincing as I push the door away from the frame. I tread lightly past Judas’s and Thomas’s beds.

“Basil,” I whisper, as quiet as breathing.

He murmurs something, tries to embrace me when I lean in. It’s my breathy laugh that wakes him. “Morgan?”

I put my finger to his lips, nod my head at the door in gesture.

He climbs out of bed and follows me out to the hallway. In whispers I tell him that Nim is taking us to see King Ingram’s guest from Internment.

“‘Hostage’ may be more accurate,” Basil whispers.

“Perhaps, yes.” There are many people on Internment who secretly dream of life beyond the edge of the city, but most would be too terrified to ever leave. Especially now that King Ingram and his men have likely taken over the city.

We meet on the front steps, and Pen shivers excitedly. She has been carrying this information about Internment sinking in her head for months, and now finally she will be able to put her knowledge to use.

“Are you going to tell us who this mystery guest is?” she asks as we start walking.

“I don’t think you’d believe me if I did,” Nim says. “I’m not sure I’ll believe it myself until I see him.”

“How trustworthy are the men at the castle you’ve been speaking with?” Basil asks, the most practical of us all.

“Extremely. I’ve grown up in and out of the castle walls. I know which men are good and which are bad news.”

“How can you tell which are good and which are bad?” Basil asks.

“The bad ones are friends of my father’s.”

Despite the grim sentiment, Nim is the most upbeat he’s been in months. After the bombings and after Celeste’s departure, he became despondent. I’ve been worried about him, but Pen’s theory and the hope it brings has put light back into his eyes.

We can’t fail. I run the words in my head over and over as we walk through the darkness and into the woods. We can’t fail.

We walk for miles in fields and wooded areas off the main road. We must be near the city, because I can taste the burnt metallic quality to the air and I’m sure it’s from one of the fuel refineries. Whatever King Ingram is doing with that phosane, it can’t be right. I have never been inside the glasslands, but I have been near them, and there was never any smoke, never any horrid fumes.

Pen’s father works in the glasslands. He’s one of their top engineers. But Pen has not brought him up since our fight several months ago, when I found her request paper and she reluctantly confessed that he had hurt her in some way she wouldn’t share with me. I have wondered in silence since then, hoping for and dreading her confidence in the matter. But Pen cannot be pushed. She cannot even be coaxed. I know this.

I walk between her and Basil, and for the next several paces it almost feels as though we’re still back home, returning late from a play at the theater. We’re just ordinary schoolchildren and our world is intact.

I have yet to see the outside of Havalais. Annette and Marjorie go into Birdie’s room sometimes, and one afternoon they found a shoebox under her bed filled with all the postcards their mother had sent from the farthest reaches of this world. Watercolor paintings of sprawling cities and barren deserts and long slender boats coasting over still waters. There is still so much to see, and confined as we are by King Ingram and his rules, I wonder at whether I’ll ever have the chance.

Nimble leads us into the thick of some woods. We move guided only by the moonlight through the trees, and I can’t help asking, “How do you know where we are?”

“Birds and I used to play here,” he says. “The castle is less than a mile away. In the summer our father would send us outside so he could convene with the king. I know all the trees and roots by heart.”

“Morgan and I used to have a spot in the woods,” Pen says. “There was a cavern.”

“It’s still there,” I say.

“Maybe.”

“It is,” I say. It is important to me that she believes this. That she believes there is still a safe place for us in our own world, hidden from all the warfare.

A whistle pierces the air. Something rustles in the brambles ahead of us, and Basil advances protectively at my side.

Nim is unconcerned. “This way,” he says, and leads us toward the sound.

The trees are very tall here, blocking out most of the moonlight. But I can make out the dark silhouettes of two men standing side by side. I know it’s unlikely. Unrealistic. But I hope that one of those men is my father. In this darkness they could be anyone.

“You’re on time, but we won’t have long,” one of the men says. “The king is an insomniac since his return. He got up several times last night to wander the halls. No telling if he’ll want to check in on our guest.”

This guest, whoever he may be, doesn’t say a word, leaving me to agonize.

“Is this him?” Nimble says.

“I’m standing right here,” the other man says. “You could just ask me yourself.”

My blood goes cold. Pen is in a dead silence beside me. I think she’s stopped breathing. We know that voice, and it doesn’t belong to my father.

Nimble reaches into his pocket for his matchbook, and then he strikes a match and brings the flame to a lantern the first man is carrying. And I see the face of King Ingram’s guest. Prince Azure.

“May I present our honored guest,” the man says, rather unenthusiastically, as though he must appease some imaginary court, “Prince Azure of the magical floating city.”

“Internment,” Prince Azure corrects. “There’s nothing magical about it. We aren’t a bedtime story.”

“Prince Azure of Internment, then,” the man corrects.

Nimble is frozen in place for a moment. Here in the lantern light, Azure bears a striking resemblance to his sister. He has the same clear, sparkling eyes, the rounded cheeks, the gold hair.

Nim snaps out of it after a few seconds and falls into a bow. “Your Highness,” he says. “I’m—”

“Yes, I know who you are,” the prince says with impatience. He grabs the lantern from the man beside him and holds it to Pen, Basil, and me.

He is wearing a pin-striped suit with a ruffled lace ascot that I recognize from his appearances back home. He stands tall and regal, nothing at all like the dying boy he was when I left him.

“I hope you’re not expecting us to curtsy,” Pen says.

“Pen!” I whisper.

Prince Azure chuckles, but even with that cocky grin he’s wearing, I can see how tired he seems, how frightened. I am sure he wasn’t brought here of his own will. King Furlow would not have happily relinquished another of his children to this place.

“Don’t curtsy, don’t bow,” he says. “I think we’re well past formalities now.” He turns to Nim. “Don’t let these girls fool you, what with their dresses and this one’s curls. They tried to kill me.”

“You were holding us hostage,” Pen says through gritted teeth. “Your insane sister kidnapped my betrothed, held a knife to his throat—”

The prince puts his fingers to her lips. “Shh.”

Pen’s face goes red with rage and I can hear the crack of her knuckles. I put my hand over her fist, a silent plea for her to be calm. She can hit him with another rock some other time. There are more pressing matters to attend to now.

I am trying not to stare at Prince Azure, but I’m so taken aback by the sight of him. When I saw him last, he was limp and lifeless, bleeding from the head and being carried up the stairs by medics. And before that he had been a maniacal, childish young prince scheming with his sister to pry out of Pen and me information about the metal bird that would bring us to the ground.

But like his sister, he has grown since then. “Your Highness,” I begin cautiously. “You’ve surely noticed by now that Internment is in trouble, and we’d like to do what we can to help.”

Prince Azure looks to Basil. “It’s unfair to be male, isn’t it? We’re betrothed to these unreasonable things, and for what? Just for being born.”

Basil swallows whatever unkind response he’d like to give to that, and instead he says, “Morgan and Pen have some information about Internment that I think you’d be interested in. Perhaps you should ask them what it is.”

“They have information about Internment?” Prince Azure says, sneering. “From all the way down here? That’s a laugh. I’m the one who’s been made to watch as foreigners fly up onto my kingdom in a metal beast of a machine, terrorizing everyone, stealing our soil. I haven’t been down here very long”—he looks up at the sky and then sharply back at us—“but the view from down here hardly seems accurate.”

Pen is steeling herself beside me, and I fear what she may say next, so I speak first. “Be that as it may, Your Highness”—the honorific is sour on my tongue—“from down here we’ve been able to see that Internment is sinking.”

At that, the prince regards me as though I may be of some use to him after all. “How?” he says. “How can you see that?”

“It was Pen who made the calculations. She was able to compare its location in the sky against the sun. It began sinking bit by bit when the jet started to make its comings and goings.”

I don’t think I am doing the explanation any justice. I lack Pen’s finesse. But the prince seems to believe me. He advances on Pen and says, “How much has it sunk?”

“Not terribly much,” she says with surprising civility. “Equal to about an arm’s length, which isn’t enough to disrupt things. But if the jet keeps passing through the wind surrounding the city, I believe it will weaken the current that helps hold Internment in place. It may continue to sink bit by bit over time, or it may come crashing down all at once. I don’t know.”

I always thought the prince to be a fool, but he’s smart enough to be troubled by all this. He paces with the lantern in his hands. His shadow dances in the fragile light.

“We have to stop the jet,” he says. “I already knew that. King Ingram’s arrival has brought nothing but chaos to Internment, but if what you say is true, we will have to stop him soon.”

Pen looks startled by this. “You believe me?” she says.

The prince stops pacing and looks at her. “By the time I woke up, after you’d hit me, you were long gone. My sister had disappeared, too, and I knew that she had found her way to that contraption of yours that was headed for the ground. I was alone, bedridden, with nothing but free time. I wanted to know everything I could about the girls who’d tried to kill me. The girls my sister had followed to the ground.” He waves his hand at me. “You were boring, Stockhour. Yes, your brother was a jumper, but you were as dull as dirt. A nobody.”

I know it isn’t meant to be a compliment, but somehow I am flattered that my attempts to blend in and hide my daydreams convinced someone up there.

The prince turns on Pen. “But you, Atmus. The daughter of the top engineer at the glasslands. A perfect student. You have the lights on up in your head, don’t you? You’re just like your father. A budding engineer.”

“I’m not like him,” she says feebly. “Having a brain in my head doesn’t make me like him.”

He narrows his eyes at her. “But you know things. You figure them out. Who else in this bloody world down here would have thought to calculate Internment’s position in the sky? Nobody but you.”

Pen has nothing to say to this. People who figure things out on Internment are likely to end up dead for treason. If her father knows as much as she does, he’s not foolish enough to say it aloud while he’s in the city.

The other man clears his throat. “Your Highness, we should be getting back before King Ingram notices that you’re gone.”

“We want to go back to Internment,” I say. “The three of us. We want King Ingram to send us under the pretense of helping his cause, and then we want to help your father overthrow King Ingram’s men however we can.”

The prince gives a sad smile. “You want to help my father? Our world is being drilled apart, bled dry, and my father has been reduced to nothing. He cannot save us.”

“So who can save us, then?” I say. “You?”

“No,” he says softly. “Not me.”

He allows the other man to lead him back toward the castle. Down here, he is not a prince, but a prisoner.

“Wait!” Nim calls after him. “Your sister, Celeste, is she all right? Is she alive?”

The prince stops but doesn’t turn to face us. “Celeste is a silly princess with silly ideas that she can think the way a king thinks. She fancies herself the political sort. But she only ever makes things worse. You would be wise to forget about her.”

Nim’s shoulders sag with what may be despair or relief, or both. The prince spoke of Celeste as though she were still alive and well, and that’s something.

“I can’t stand that little nit,” Pen mutters.

“But he listened,” I remind her.

Nim is staring off into the darkness. The lantern has been blown out, and the prince and his escort have disappeared from view. Even in the frail bits of moonlight, I can see the pain in Nim’s eyes.