The Never King, page 14
part #1 of Lost Lands Series
“Have you ever been anything else?”
“Like what?”
“He means romantically,” I mutter.
Fennel looks at me sharply. “I warned you. This is number two. If I have to do it a third time, you’ll leave. Understood?”
“Yes, sir. Y—Yes,” I stumble over my mistake.
No ‘sir’s. No ‘ma’am’s.
Bastian shifts in his seat. His hand flexes around mine. “Yes. We’ve been romantic.”
“When?” Fennel insists.
“Recently.”
“How long have you been engaged?”
“We’re not engaged,” Bastian replies confidently. “We haven’t even said ‘I love you’. It’s very new. We kissed for the first time less than a week ago.”
“Where?”
“In the orchard.”
“Is that where you meet so no one will see?”
“Yes.”
“Where else?” Fennel asks aggressively.
“The garden.”
“Where else?”
Bastian tenses. “Nowhere.”
“You’re sure about that?” Fennel asks meaningfully.
I squeeze Bastian’s hand.
He’s trying to trick you. There’s nowhere else.
“No,” he answers. “That’s all. Just the orchard and the garden.”
“State your name.”
“Gable Bouchard.”
“You swear to it?” Fennel demands.
“Yes.”
He looks at me. “Do you?”
I nod. “Yes.”
“On your good name, you swear to me today that this man is Gable Bouchard?”
“Yes,” I lie without hesitation. “I swear it.”
He glances at our hands held between us. His face relaxes slightly. “We had to make sure.”
“How did you know what questions to ask? No one knows about us.”
Fennel smiles sympathetically. “Henry Villette is your grandfather. You have no secrets, Aurelia.”
He knows. Grandfather knows about Gable and me. That means Mother does too.
I feel strangely embarrassed, like all the things I said and did with Gable are common knowledge to my family. Like they opened my journal and started a book club about it. Did they read our letters? Does Iris know? Did Dad?
Weirdly enough, I hope he did.
Fennel stands suddenly.
On instinct, I do too. Bastian follows slowly.
“We’ll move you in the morning. Early,” Fennel explains. “Be ready.”
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Somewhere safe.”
“Are you sending us home?”
“France isn’t safe right now. Too much has to be decided. Henry and I agreed that you should stay in Brûlé until the dust settles.”
“You’re not talking about the flood.”
Fennel shakes his head. “No. With Gable’s parents dead and his brother missing, there’s no one on the throne. Loire is in chaos. Lynn’s taken control as much as she can but she’s struggling. Henry is marching in now with the Bluecoats to support her and Brûlé will support him if he needs it. We’ll hide the two of you until it’s safe for you to go home.”
“Madame Villette has taken control of France?” Bastian asks carefully.
“Someone had to,” Fennel reasons.
Bastian is angry. I can feel it rolling off him like heat from a star about to go supernova. We’ll have it out about that later, I’m sure.
“Why do we need to hide here?” I ask Fennel. “Can’t we go to Fontainebleau?”
“There are a lot of people in Loire who want a chance to control the country. The Bouchards have the strongest claim but the Villettes are a close second. There are other families that fall in after that but both of your lines would have to die out to give them a clear path.”
“He’s the last Bouchard but I’m not the last Villette. Not by a long shot if my mother, sister, and grandparents are alive.”
“Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘Never put all of your eggs in one basket’?” Fennel asks me.
“I’m an egg?”
“A valuable one. That’s why you’ll both stay here with us.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes for France to get its house in order.”
chapitre trente-six
Sadness is a funny thing. Sometimes it will smother you until you can hardly breathe and you wonder if you’ll die because of it. Other times it hides, waiting for you to forget before leaping on your chest and ripping your heart to shreds. Again and again.
My sadness is overwhelming at first. I cry so hard I can’t breathe. Brymer brings me tissues and chocolates that she swears will make the pain go away. They don’t but they’re sweet. So is she. I share them with Bastian but he only takes one to make me feel better. He does it out of pity and I want to snatch it back from him and throw it across the room.
Fennel told Brymer not to lock us up, but he also told us not to leave the police station. I sit in my cell on my bed with my knees pulled up high to my chest and I cry into the cave between them and my body. Bastian sits next to me. He doesn’t touch me but he doesn’t leave me. Not for a second.
That night we eat dinner at the desks. They bring us different clothes. They’re nicer than our prison gear, softer and better fitting. We each get a wool jacket – dark and delightfully scratchy around the collar. It’s chilly outside, they tell us. Fall is officially here.
“I wonder where they’re taking us,” I muse over dinner. I need to talk to distract myself. The second I stop talking, I start thinking and when I think I see Dad and Gable and—
I have to keep talking.
“I don’t know,” Bastian shrugs. His eyes are on his food. He’s so focused you’d think he was performing surgery on it, not eating it.
“I doubt I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”
“Probably not.”
“How have you been sleeping?”
“Like the dead. When I can.”
I frown, methodically ripping my bread apart. “You’re quiet.”
“Am I?”
“Don’t do that. You’re being weird, and I get why, but I hate it.”
Bastian sighs, sitting back in his seat. “I’m trying, but I’m not used to this.”
“Used to what?”
“Having a friend. It’s a lot of maintenance. I forgot how much.”
I smile, small and hesitant. “Am I your friend?”
“Don’t be smug.”
“I’m not, I’m just—It’s sweet.”
He grimaces. “God, Villette.”
“What?”
“I’m struggling, okay? I don’t know what I thought was going on in France while we’ve been out here, but I sure as hell didn’t think my entire family was dead and your mother was sitting on the throne. I should be angry, and I am, but I’m also relieved she’s there.”
“Me too. The country needs help.”
“That’s the problem. I have to deal with how you feel about everything too. It’s just…”
“It’s a lot,” I agree readily.
“Yeah,” he mutters, dusting breadcrumbs off his hands. “It’s a lot.
Bastian looks away, out the window where the rain pours down in a torrent. It’s not helping the flood. Everything is getting worse, more muddled, more dangerous. Nothing and nowhere feels safe.
Nothing but him.
“Your mom won’t give up the throne without a fight, will she?” Bastian asks.
I snort. “No. Not a chance.”
“For the good of the people,” he mutters sarcastically.
“For her. She’ll keep it because she wants it. She always has but she didn’t want to marry your dad to get it. She thought he was strange.”
He looks at me in surprise. I’ve shocked him by being honest about my mother’s motives but I’m too tired for the dance. We’re on the other side of the wall. Things are different here. I want to let the veil fall away and see the world for what it really is. I want to speak the truth, the actual truth, and not some carefully contorted version of it that will fit in whatever box I need it to be in.
“He was strange,” Bastian agrees slowly.
“Can you imagine them married?”
“Hell no.”
“Which one do you think would murder the other first?”
He smiles. “Her.”
“I would guess him.”
“Did you ever think about killing her?”
“My mom?” I chuckle. “Only in like a playful fantasy kind of way. Not seriously. Did you? About your dad?”
“Every day.”
“Playful and fun?”
“No,” he answers seriously. “In a methodical, plotting kind of way.”
I feel disoriented for a second. Adrift. “You mean that,” I whisper.
He nods, his eyes on a cheese knife in his hand. He rotates it between his fingers slowly, the blade reflecting the light on every pass. “I’d have done it on a hunt. One shot to the back of the head at close range to make sure it took.”
“You would be caught.”
“Maybe, but accidents happen. They happened around him all the time.”
I frown at my hands in my lap, unsure how to look at him. I don’t want to judge because I thought about killing his father too. A lot. I imagined it at night when I was going to sleep, like a bedtime story. I can’t judge that, but I also can’t understand.
“I thought you loved him,” I say.
“I did. He was my dad. Of course I loved him.”
“But you wanted to kill him.”
“More than anything.”
I nod like I understand but I don’t.
“You can love someone and still want them dead,” Bastian explains. “You and I both know that.”
I frown, disappointed. “I never wanted you dead.”
“Are you sure?”
“Almost.”
He smiles, nodding slowly in acceptance. He knows who he is and what he’s done. Awful as it is, he isn’t sorry.
How can you not be sorry?
“I want to ask you something,” I tell him, my heart in my throat.
It’s been on my mind for so long. Can I even ask it? Is it too late?
Bastian’s eyes grow wary. “Not right now.”
“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“Yeah, I do, and I don’t want to answer that tonight.”
“Why not?”
“Because we have enough misery between us. We’re good right now. I want to put your mother on the rack, but you and I are good and we haven’t been like that in a long time. I want to live in it for a while.”
I smile softly, oddly relieved that I don’t have to know tonight. With everything else that’s happened, I’m not completely sure I’m ready. “So do I.”
“Then leave it for now.”
“I’m going to ask someday.”
“And I’ll answer you. Just not tonight.”
“Will you answer something else?”
He puts down the knife, crossing his arms over his chest. “What do you want to know?”
“Why’d you want to kill him? Your dad, I mean.”
He sighs, running his hand over his mouth slowly before asking, “Did you know that my brother was blind in his left eye?”
“No.”
“He was. Dad did that when we were ten. Do you remember when I was gone for a while two years ago?”
“Yeah. You left in the middle of the night. You were gone for a month.”
“I was in hiding. Dad was trying to kill me. He thought I was a spy for Spain.”
“What?”
Bastian pulls his collar to the side, exposing his shoulder. There’s a scar that I’ve never seen before. It’s about four inches long. Thin as a blade. “He tried to have me assassinated in my sleep. I fought the guy off and put his own blade in his neck. A guard got me out of the castle that night. We didn’t come back until we got word that dad was over the fit.”
He’s talking about Jacquard, but he can’t say his name. If he did and Brymer heard him, it could raise questions. And questions are not our friend right now.
“Did he have a lot of fits?” I ask.
“Dad’s whole life was a fit. He was destroying France with them.”
“That’s part of the reason you wanted to kill him, isn’t it?”
He smiles wryly. “For the good of France.”
He’s being sarcastic but he’s also being honest. He wanted to kill his own father to save the country. But he didn’t do it. Maybe because he couldn’t. There are only so many lines a man can cross before he loses himself entirely, and I hope against hope that the reason Bastian didn’t cross this one is because he wanted to save himself.
As we sit together in a comfortable silence slowly filling with all the things we lost, I pull out that small pebble of hope. I hold it in my palm, warming it with my breath, and into it I whisper his name.
chapitre trente-sept
Early the next morning, before the sun has even started to rise, Brymer takes us out the backdoor through her office. I get a quick glimpse of it as we walk by. It’s a compact library, the walls lined with books from floor to ceiling. A long table covered in paper sits square in the middle like a small, warm island.
“What do you do, Brymer?” I ask curiously.
She hurries ahead of me, not looking back. “Everything, Duchess.”
Outside there’s a car. It’s big and black, puffing thin white clouds out the exhaust. They’re using some kind of biofuel but I’m not sure what. I guess they don’t have electric cars yet. I open my mouth to tell Brymer my dad’s family is famous for restoring electric motors, that he could teach them, but then I remember that he’s dead and my heart cracks in half. It bleeds onto the pavement, mixing with the rain until I can’t feel it anymore. I can’t feel anything but cold.
Bastian climbs into the car behind me. There are three other people with us. One is the driver – a man I’ve never seen before. There’s a passenger up front – Fennel. In the back there’s a woman with dark eyes and short hair cut up to her ears. She doesn’t say anything when we climb in and she doesn’t look at us either. I decide to ignore her too.
Bastian’s hair is wet from the rain. He runs his hand through it, pushing it to one side in a practiced sweep that reminds me of rainy days jumping puddles with him. Cold days that turned into warm nights by a fire eating wild apples we picked in the forest. He’d tell me scary stories that gave me nightmares, but I never asked him to stop.
And when I’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming, my dad would always be there to chase them away again.
“Where are we going?” Bastian asks as we pull onto the main road.
“Somewhere safe,” Fennel promises vaguely.
It’s not an answer. That’s why Bastian hates it. It’s something he would say because he’s used to being in charge and now he’s not and that sucks for him. He looks out the window watching the town float by, his finger pressed hard against his lips.
The drive is quiet, the road long and winding. No one speaks, either because of the early hour or the complete lack of common ground between us. The sun is hidden behind the clouds, the rain falling tirelessly. Inside the cabin the air is too warm, the rhythm of the windshield wipers like a metronome.
Whoosh.
Swish.
Whoosh.
Swish.
As the countryside rolls by, green and shimmering, I feel myself drifting. I’m falling asleep even though I don’t want to. I don’t know where we’re going or when we’ll get there. I don’t know if I’m safe or if this is a trick. I don’t know much of anything except that I’m tired. So incredibly tired. I haven’t slept through the night since the flood, and it’s taking its toll. Even the fear of the unknown isn’t enough to keep me from drifting.
Eventually, the weight of my eyelids is too much to take.
I fall asleep just as the sun starts to arc across the sky.
I dream in black and white. Gray. Beige.
Bastian is with me but I can’t see him. I feel him, though. And that’s enough.
The air is cold, water rising around my ankles slowly. I have time. That’s the impression I get right away. Danger is closing in, but for now I’m okay. I’m as safe as I’ll ever be.
I try to call out to my dad. I think he’s close, though not as close as Bastian. My voice doesn’t make a sound. It’s drowned out by something else, something louder. A motor. It’s revving so high it sounds like it will blow out. We’re driving too fast. We’re going to crash.
My mother’s perfume is in my nose.
Iris is laughing.
My dad… Dad is gone.
The water rises to my knees.
“This is not safe,” Bastian snarls.
I blink my eyes open, my stomach coiling tight around the tone of his voice. He’s angry. And afraid.
“What’s happening?” I ask blearily.
Bastian glances at me. His eyes are livid. “We’re in Paris.”
“What?”
“They’re taking us into Paris.”
I look out the window, stunned by the monochromatic landscape outside. The rain is still falling, blurring my view, but the buildings outside are obviously destroyed. Eaten by flames. Licked down to the bone and beyond. I’ve never seen anything like it. I feel like I’m in another world where color doesn’t exist. Only black and gray and burnt. It goes on for miles. We roll through the empty streets, weaving around rubble that looks like it’s been there since the beginning of time. I search for signs of nature taking over inside the debris but there’s nothing. Not a slip of green grass. Not a single determined flower poking through cracks in the pavement.
Life lost the fight here and it will never come again.
Growing up in France post-plague, you hear ghost stories about Paris. It’s a mass graveyard from the greatest tragedy the world has ever seen. It’s a holy, haunted place.
It’s cursed.
“We can’t be here,” I tell Fennel angrily. “Why would you bring us here?”
“You’re safe,” he promises.
“No one is safe in Paris!”
“You don’t know anything about it.”
Bastian jabs his finger at the window. “We can see it. It’s completely destroyed. Is this where you plan on leaving us?”
