Burning Kingdoms

She stares at me, horror in her eyes.

“Pen? I’m going to find you something to wear, and we’re going to have breakfast, and we aren’t going to panic.”

She nods dazedly.

“Say it.”

“We aren’t going to panic,” she repeats.

After a deep breath, she’s ready to face the morning.

We find Basil and Thomas at the bottom of the stairs. “Morning,” I say, perhaps too brightly. I kiss Basil’s cheek.

I nudge Pen, which prompts her to give Thomas a flat, if troubled, stare. “Good morning,” she says. It puts her under his immediate scrutiny. I can see as much in his eyes.

Basil is looking at me the same way.

“Oh, all right,” I say. “Birdie showed us where the tonic was last night and we were up late in her room talking and sharing a bottle.”

I’m startled by how easily the lie comes. I’ve never lied to Basil. But while the people of the ground find magic in the floating island, they are perhaps too blind to see the magic that hides in this city, in silver screens and brass clubs and the beautiful thieves that live in the ocean, who carry stolen trinkets from the human world to depths beyond even the sunlight’s reach.

I feel an inexplicable need to protect that magic. Or to keep it for myself, buried in the blood that rushes around my beating heart.

Pen has no trouble with the lie. Secrets have always comforted her. “Don’t look at me that way,” she tells Thomas, and shows him the back of her ring hand. “I didn’t lose my virginity in a card game. I’m still your betrothed, no matter how far we both fall from the clouds.”

I’ve no idea why I find this so funny. Perhaps she said it to amuse me.

Thomas clears his throat and then looks between Pen and me. “Word is this morning that you’re going to meet King Ingram.”

“Morgan is,” Pen says. “I want nothing to do with all that whatnot. It makes me sick.”

That’s all she cares to say on the matter. She pushes between the boys and makes her way toward the dining room. That’s what they call it. So many rooms that there’s no need to eat in the kitchen, where the food is prepared.

Thomas frowns after her.

In the car, Celeste hooks her arm around mine and lets loose a squeak of excitement.

Two schoolgirls. What an audience we are for the king of more land than any one person should control.

Jack Piper drives while Nimble points out landmarks for us. He’s in high spirits, but all I see are more possibilities for bombings. There’s been minimal talk of the banks, and no talk at all of what casualties could have occurred.

“There’s our hospital,” Nimble says. “Saint Croix.”

If the hotel is the size of a city, the hospital is the size of ten. “Morgan,” Celeste says. “Your brother is a medic, isn’t he?”

I don’t like the liberties she’s taking by discussing my family this morning.

“He was,” I say. “Before he lost his sight.”

“The one who never comes out of his room?” Nimble says. “That’s your brother? Married to the redhead?”

“Yes,” I say, and then quickly, “How long has your hospital been here?”

“Went up the year Riles was born,” Nimble says. “They seem to be expanding on it every year.”

Celeste leans in to me. “I wish for us to be friends,” she says, softly so that only I’ll hear. “I’m a great judge of people and I have a sense about you.”

I haven’t forgotten the hours I spent shackled in the clock tower while she and her brother brought me grapes like I was a pet, or a game. But it seems so far away now. It happened in a place I can’t even see when I look for it, it’s so cloudy all the time. “I think it was brave of your parents to be a part of that metal bird’s creation,” she says. “I am sorry that they aren’t here. Truly.”

“Thank you,” I say, for lack of fitting words. My head aches and my mouth feels stuffed with sheep shavings. I am thinking of Pen, inebriated and dancing in the smoke and noise, trying to forget what we’ve had to leave behind. And of the blue bird that sailed over our heads, unaware of its own brilliance, indifferent to whatever silly worries the humans may have.

“I’m sorry about your brother, too,” I tell Celeste, because it seems like the right thing to say. Even if a part of me thinks he deserved what Pen did to him.

Celeste smiles mischievously. “He’ll be so jealous when I tell him about this place. We’ve always been rather competitive.”

“Have you considered the possibility that we won’t make it back?” My question just slips out.

“Not at all.” The princess doesn’t miss a beat. “Have a little faith.”

“In what?” I say.

“Well.” She draws her eyebrows together. “In the way of things, I suppose. And in me.”

I return her smile. We are all doomed.

We drive through the streets that Pen, Birdie, and I haunted the night before. We pass women in long coats that are a trove of buttons, hats that look like shells or folded paper, all of them with flowers and big white beads that Birdie calls pearls. They, too, are a treasure of the sea.

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