The Never King, page 1
part #1 of Lost Lands Series
The Never King
By Tracey Ward
The Never King
By Tracey Ward
Text Copyright © 2019 Tracey Ward
All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author, except as used in book review.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places, events or incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to places or incidents is purely coincidental.
prologue
chapitre un
chapitre deux
chapitre trois
chapitre quatre
chapitre cinq
chapitre six
chapitre sept
chapitre huit
chapitre neuf
chapitre dix
chapitre onze
chapitre douze
chapitre treize
chapitre quatorze
chapitre quinze
chapitre seize
chapitre dix-sept
chapitre dix-huit
chapitre dix-neuf
chapitre vingt
chapitre vingt et un
chapitre vingt-deux
chapitre vingt-trois
chapitre vingt-quatre
chapitre vingt-cinq
chapitre vingt-six
chapitre vingt-sept
chapitre vingt-huit
chapitre vingt-neuf
chapitre trente
chapitre trente et un
chapitre trente-deux
chapitre trente-trois
chapitre trente-quatre
chapitre trente-cinq
chapitre trente-six
chapitre trente-sept
chapitre trente-huit
chapitre trente-neuf
chapitre quarante
chapitre quarante et un
chapitre quarante-deux
chapitre quarante-trois
chapitre quarante-quatre
When the plague took half the population, it took civilization with it.
We lost artists, scientists, and doctors. Leaders and liars.
We lost touch with the stations in the stars and ships on the seas,
and as we burned great cities full of dead,
we lost the memory of what we used to be.
prologue
Once upon a time, there were thirty-one flavors of ice cream.
I actually think there were more, but the records that have survived and the stories that have been passed down all agree that there were at least thirty-one flavors before the end of the world.
But it wasn’t really the end, was it? Of the world, I mean. The plague was definitely the death of something and a whole lot of someones, but it wasn’t the end of humanity or the world. If it was the end, then there would be nothing left. Not a single blade of grass in the fields or drop of water in the ocean. Not a stone or a breeze or a goat with three eyes.
I saw one once at a fair when I was little. He’s probably dead now, but not a day goes by that I don’t think about that goat. In my head I named him Brantis. He liked cauliflower and having his beard tugged.
Anyway, if the world was one-hundred-percent over and done with, there’d be nothing to say. There’d be no one to say it. Not only would there no longer be thirty-one flavors of ice cream, there would be zero. Think about that for a second. No ice cream at all. Ever.
That’s bleak.
But that’s life, right? Sometimes it sucks. Sometimes you’re at a fair with a goat and other times you’re bleeding out your eyes. Your nose. Your mouth. Your skin sloughs off in great chunks like you’re a wax candle abandoned in the midday sun. Your stomach explodes. Your intestines swell and... well, you get the picture.
That was the plague. It was brutal and ugly. It was fast. So fast they didn’t even have time to name it. They just called it The Sickness so that’s what we call it too, a hundred years later. No one feels like getting clever about it or renaming it. We actually try very hard not to even talk about it, like it’s a demon waiting in the shadows, ready to dive down your throat and finish the job it so brutally began.
Don’t say its name. Don’t look it in the eye.
The plague hit its height in two thousand and thirty-eight. Within a year of the first infection, entire countries started to vanish. In thirty-eight, the death toll was close to three billion. They lost track after that. There weren’t enough people left to keep counting, to keep communicating. Travel was banned, borders slammed shut. Society broke down.
The lights went out.
Food became scarce.
That’s when they started the fires. They set whole cities ablaze; full of bodies. Not all of them were lifeless yet, but it didn’t matter. They were trying to stop The Sickness. People ran to the country to hide. They were savage and scared. Humans became wild things that forgot what it was like to live together.
It was dark days for a long time.
France was one of the few countries to rise from the ashes. After a long, troubled history of regency and rebellion, France established a new monarchy. Her first king was a good man who brought people to the safety of the Loire Valley where there was a river for fishing, land for farming, and cities easily defended from outsiders. Tribes started to form in the hinterlands left between countries that had shrunken in on themselves. Lawless, roving tribes that took what they wanted and left destruction behind them. A decade after it began, The Sickness had subsided but the world outside of Loire was still a dangerous place. France built walls for protection. She reformed an Armée[1]. She protected herself the only way she knew how.
Her second king was a diplomat. He made alliances with the countries that were left standing. He negotiated trade deals and established a partnership with a growing tribe in the north to run those trade routes for him.
France was on her feet again.
She was growing, living.
Breathing for the first time in thirty years.
Her third king was a man of science. He pushed for innovation and experimentation. Old electric cars were brought back to life, though they were scarce and fickle. The power of the wind and sun were harnessed, the roads were repaired, and France began to expand her borders. She was fat, happy, and comfortable for the first time in more than seventy years. For once, monocracy looked good on her.
Her fourth king was a madman and a tyrant. He stripped her of her charms. He starved her, abused her. He tried to ruin her.
Then, her fifth king... Well, her fifth king changed everything.
chapitre un
I was born in the early dawn hours of a warm summer day under the reign of Wilhelm, par la grace de Dieu, Third King of France. The sky was pink and gold. My mother lay on a bed of clouds in a thin white dress, her long yellow hair tied in a braid over one delicate shoulder.
She didn’t scream.
I didn’t cry.
The Royal Family came to see us. King Wilhelm himself commented on how golden my hair was, and by that remark I was named.
Aurelia[2].
The Golden One.
♥♣♦♠
That’s the legend of my birth. It’s the story my mother tells any chance she gets because, yeah, it’s a good one, and a lot of it is true. But not all of it.
First off, I was born in the middle of the night. My dad says Mother paced the room in a faded old nightgown because she didn’t want to ruin any of her good clothes giving birth. She was a sweating, swearing mess of anger and frustration for most of the night.
When I finally decided I was ready to be born, I was quick about it. It’s true that my mother never screamed because she’s a Villette and a lady, and a lady doesn’t do such things, but I definitely did. Dad says I wailed like a siren. Even after they cleaned me up and laid me on my mother’s chest, I screamed in her face for a good ten minutes before she asked someone else to take me.
I left a bloodstain on the bedsheets that they were never able to get out.
The Royal Family came to visit at dawn after Mother had a chance to wash and dress for the occasion. I was finally quiet. Dad was keeping guard over us like a Centurion. The King’s twin grandsons, Bastian and Gable, waddled up to my crib to babble at me through the bars. They were almost three at the time. King Wilhelm commented on how golden my hair looked in the early morning light while his son, Prince Arden, said he expected me to be longer.
Not a soul in the room knew what to do with that comment.
chapitre deux
I grew up with Bastian and Gable, seen as a third grandchild by the King and Queen. I loved the twins like brothers and they treated me like one. We learned to ride horses together. How to hunt. How to sword fight. Gable taught me to play piano. Bastian taught me to swear. My mother promptly taught me how to stop swearing. It hurt to sit for days.
My grandfather grew up with King Wilhelm the same way I was growing up with the twins and my mother had grown up with Prince Arden, though they were never close. Mother said Arden was a strange child who said strange things and preferred to be alone. Still, our families were inexorably intertwined. We went to parties and ceremonies together. I spent every free moment with one or both of the twins. Bastian stole candies from the kitchen for me and made me crowns of wildflowers in the spring. He was funny and loud. If there was a height to climb, he’d do it. Right to the very peak before jumping off. I can’t count how many bones he broke testing the limits of his body.
Gable was reserved and imaginative. He wrote me stories about magical places and performed plays with me in the gazebo by the river. Bastian would only take part in our productions if I begged him relentlessly. He rarely spent time with Gable if I wasn’t there. King Wilhelm once told me that the twins didn’t get along. He asked me to keep the dauphins[3] together if I could.
“You’re good for him,” he said. “You’ll make it easier.”
“Make what easier?” I asked, not sure which of the boys he was talking about.
He smiled sadly. The corners of his eyes wrinkled like creases in paper that you can never smooth out. “Everything, Aurelia. You’ll have to help him with everything. France is counting on you.”
He gave me a red sugar stick to seal the deal on my lifelong vow. I took it readily, sure the job would be easy.
I was wrong. Very, very wrong.
King Wilhelm died of a heart attack that winter. I was five. Gable and Bastian were seven. We didn’t understand it at first but then we were brought through the dimly lit halls made stuffy by closed windows and drawn shades. Everything was cloaked in black, including the big man sleeping in the bed. It didn’t look like Wilhelm. I didn’t recognize him. Mother says I screamed and embarrassed her right out of her skin, but I’m sure she’s lying. I don’t remember screaming or crying.
What I remember is standing between the Bouchard twins, my hands held in theirs, clammy and uncomfortable. I remember Gable hiccupping. His mother, Princess Marie, was moaning. Arden was strangely silent. I remember the curtains fluttering, a sliver of light dancing on the worn, ornamental rug.
I remember Bastian crying.
chapitre trois
Arden’s coronation took place the next day. My mother complained, saying it was too soon, but she never said it to Arden.
“It wouldn’t matter,” she told Grandfather. “He doesn’t listen to anyone. He never has.”
“If you had listened to me—”
“I was never going to marry him.”
“You could have been queen.”
“Or I could be happy,” she shot back. “I married for love. I chose to be happy.”
He grunted, unimpressed. “And he married a spineless mouse. Now all of France is at the mercy of that boy. Does that make you happy, Lynn?”
The look on my mother’s face made it clear that it did not.
At the ceremony, my family was seated next to The Crown. I was allowed to sit next to Bastian if, and only if, we swore on each other’s souls that we would be quiet.
We were not.
“I spy with my eye…” he whispered to me, scanning the crowd inside the church, “…something old and purple.”
“Madame Duris. You made it too easy, Bast,” I whined. “Make it harder.”
“Alright, alright,” he laughed.
“Make it something yellow.”
“Why yellow?”
“I like yellow.”
“I’m not making it yellow.”
Gable leaned over his brother. “Shhh. Father is coming.”
Bastian and I quieted, watching as the Grand Dauphin made his way slowly down the main aisle. The throne sat heavy and dark at the end under the stained-glass windows. My mother told me they had survived the end of the world, that’s how special they were. Green, blue, red, pink, yellow – every color of the rainbow glowing softly over the head of our new king. I imagined God was smiling on him through the special glass that he had saved.
I also thought burps were hilarious and that my toes would pop off if I ran too hard.
I was five and knew literally nothing about the world.
“Ria,” Bastian whispered.
He was the only one who called me Ria. He had trouble with ‘l’s when he was younger, making my name impossible for him to pronounce, so he changed it to ‘Ria’. I didn’t know then how special that nickname was to me. I wouldn’t know until he stopped using it.
“What?” I breathed back.
“I spy something yellow.”
“I thought you weren’t going to do yellow.”
“I found something good.”
I wiggled in my seat excitedly. My eyes searched the church for something bright and sunshiny, but there was nothing. Everyone was dressed in black, mourning the death of the king just the day before. His body wasn’t even buried yet.
“I don’t see it,” I complained.
“Look at the throne.”
There was nothing on the throne but his father being crowned. Arden, par la grace de Dieu, Fourth King of France. He held a golden scepter in one hand, a steel sword in the other. His robe was black as midnight.
I started to feel upset. “I can’t see it.”
“Do you give up?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I want to find it.”
“It’s his crown.”
“Bast!” I cried unhappily.
Heads turned toward us, shaming us until we slunk back into our seats silently.
“I was going to get it,” I pouted.
“No you weren’t. I win.”
“I don’t like that crown.”
“I do,” he said with hushed admiration. “I’m going to wear it when I’m king.”
“What about Gable? What will he wear?”
“I don’t know. I’ll give him a crown too, I guess. But he can’t be king. Only I can.”
“That’s mean.”
“You can be queen,” he offered.
“I don’t want to be.”
“Why not?”
I looked past him to his mother sitting beside Gable; pale and dour. “Because the queen never looks happy.”
chapitre quatre
When the twins were eleven, King Arden started training them for their future. One of them was destined to be king, though Arden never said which one would actually get the honor. Their birth order was a national secret known only to him and the doctor who had helped bring them into the world, and that doctor disappeared years ago. No one knows where.
Arden taught the boys to fight in ways I was not allowed to learn. Both Mother and the King forbade it. The twins missed math and history lessons so they could learn military tactics and the theory of warfare. Right out the gate, Bastian had a better mind for it. He quickly became Arden’s favorite, getting extra lessons and spending more time behind closed doors with his father.
Gable was jealous but I was relieved that he was spared. Bastian came out of those lessons different. He stopped climbing trees. He stopped making me crowns. He started getting into fights and the bones he was breaking weren’t his anymore. Then, when he was twelve, he killed a kitten with a stone. Crushed its skull in one blow.
It was from a litter by Queen Marie’s cat. She gave the kittens to girls in the court as gifts. Emmy was the youngest of us. She was only five at the time. She got the runt. She thought it was the cutest because it was the smallest. It had sweet little crossed eyes and a funny way of walking that made us giggle. Its fur was white and black.
Then red.
I remember Emmy. Bastian stood by the door with his hands behind his back, his eyes focused somewhere in the distance. There was blood on his shirt.
I stared at him, trying to understand, but I couldn’t. I could hardly see him through the rage that coursed along my veins, turning my vision red at the edges. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to scream at him, throw things at him, demanding to know why. Why would he do that?
How could he do it?
Who was he becoming?
I wasn’t sure who he was after that. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I never asked about what happened and he didn’t try to explain, and I think that hurt more than anything else. He felt me pulling away and he let me go without a fight.
As though I’d never been the closest person in the world to him.
chapitre cinq
That summer I sprained my ankle. It was just a week after my ninth birthday, riding the horse my parents had given me as a gift. I fell off and landed all kinds of wrong. I was laid out in bed for a few days after, unable to put any weight on the leg. I hated it. I was not the kind of kid who liked to be indoors. I missed the sunshine and the wind in my hair. I missed my lessons and the smell of bread baking in the kitchen in the morning. I used to wake up before everyone else and run through the halls of the castle with my nightgown billowing behind me like a kite about to catch the wind. I would sneak into my mother’s bedroom to smell her perfumes. Sometimes I’d steal her hairbrush and hide it, just to make her angry.
