The Never King, page 2
part #1 of Lost Lands Series
Her life was peaceful with me laid out all day. She was never before and has never since been as kind to me as she was during that week of recuperating. I think as an invalid I was finally the child she had always hoped I’d be.
Bastian never came to see me. Not once.
Gable visited every afternoon. He brought me books and buttery croissants that we ate together in my bed as he read to me. Crumbs littered the sheets, crunching against our skin. He told me stories as he drew swirling patterns on the wrap on my leg. I told him they looked like vines climbing a fairytale castle and he drew a tower at the top near my knee. A girl with impossibly long hair looked out the window, staring into the distance, waiting for her prince to save her.
“I don’t want to be saved,” I said. “I want to be the one doing the saving.”
“You’ll have to find a prince in peril then,” Gable replied, his eyes focused on his work. He was finishing the last few tendrils of the girl’s hair.
“Why does it have to be a prince?”
“Because you’re a princess.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You basically are.”
“I’m not,” I protested angrily.
“Fine,” he laughed. “You’re not.”
I wiggled my toes, distracting him from his drawing.
Gable looked up at me from the end of the bed with an affectionate grin. “Stop moving. You’ll ruin it.”
“Will you draw her a dog?”
“Why?”
“She looks lonely in the tower. Besides, I’ve always wanted a dog.”
“I’ll get you one,” he promised, turning back to my leg.
“You can’t. Mother is allergic.”
“Is she really allergic or does she say she’s allergic?”
“Probably she’s not really, she just says it. I bet if Iris asked for a dog she’d get her three.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Gable agreed.
“I hate that.”
“What?”
“That Iris is her favorite.”
“Yeah. Me too,” he said.
I felt a pinch in my chest. A hint of regret. If anyone understood not being their parent’s favorite, it was Gable. He was quickly being shut out by his father as Bastian became more and more the man he wanted him to be.
Cruel. Calloused. Arrogant.
Gable could never be those things. He was a generous person. Thoughtful and kind. There wasn’t a mean bone in his body and while that should have made his father proud, it genuinely seemed to make him sick. He said, in unhappy tones, that Gable was a felicitous boy, and while I understood what the word meant, I didn’t know what King Arden meant by saying it. I was sure it wasn’t anything good.
He’d hit Gable before. I’d seen the bruises. Bastian too, I think, but it was hard to tell. Neither of them would talk about it.
“I’m sorry, Gable,” I told him delicately.
“I’m sorry too, Relia.”
“I’m sorry more.”
“Okay,” he chuckled. “You win.”
“I always do.”
“I always let you.”
I wiggled my toes again to punish him.
Gable laughed, making me pinky swear I wouldn’t do it again. This is important, he said. Be still, just for a minute.
I sat still for over ten minutes as he finished his artwork. I stared out the window, watching birds play on a warm breeze and I imagined what it must feel like to fly. I asked Gable but he said he didn’t want to know. Birds scared him.
When he was done, he’d drawn the princess a small black dog with a wagging tail and eager eyes. I named him Fickle. He was a good dog. The best I ever had.
I struggled to sleep that night. My leg ached. I tossed and turned, calling out for my mother every hour. To her credit, she appeared each time, tired but willing, a cool rag in her hand and soft words on her lips. She warned me to be quiet. She said I’d wake the whole castle if I wasn’t careful. I knew who she was worried about, so I kept my agony between the two of us. I begged her to stay with me and she did, singing to me quietly until I finally fell asleep.
In the morning as she was leaving to check on Iris, she found a small, flat parcel on the floor. It had been slid under the door during the night.
Inside was a wilting crown of wildflowers.
chapitre six
The twins and I, we didn’t know what was coming. Everyone else did but no one bothered to tell me, Bastian, or Gable until a month before they turned thirteen. I asked my parents what we would do to celebrate their birthday, images of a carnival on the large, green lawn marching through my mind.
“The twins will fight to the death,” Dad explained.
I stared at him, stunned into a rare silence. I looked to my mother for confirmation.
She nodded stiffly.
“Why?” I whispered.
“Because His Majesty has made it law.”
“He made murder a law?”
Dad’s eyes were sad and watery. “It’s a competition to decide who will be the next King of France.”
Arden had made a lot of dubious decisions since his coronation. He cut ties with Brûlé[4], the powerful tribe that ran trade routes between us and the few remaining countries in Europe. He waged small wars with them, seemingly at random. He blamed them for everything from bad crops to homosexuality, which he had made illegal a year ago. He cut funding to schools and poured money into bolstering the Armée, demanding tests for new weapons, mechanical and chemical.
Arden was waging a war that no one understood but him. It all looked like madness to us, but this was the maddest thing he’d done so far. Pitting his sons against each other in a battle to the death.
“You have to stop him,” I whimpered at my dad.
“I can’t. No one can.”
“What about Prime Minister Cassel? Isn’t he supposed to keep him from doing things like this? That’s his whole job, right?”
“It should be. Yes.”
“Arden bribed him to allow it,” Mother said. Her voice was dripping with bitterness.
“But that’s illegal,” I protested.
“That’s how things are done now.”
I gaped at them. “Why does he want them to kill each other? Can’t he just point to one and say ‘You’re the next king’?”
“He could, but he’s decided this is how he wants it done.”
“He’s calling it The Strain,” Dad added.
I shook my head, unable to understand. It was insane. “What if they don’t want it? What if Gable says he doesn’t care about being king?”
“He can’t abstain. He’ll be banished from France if he tries.”
“He’ll die in the borderlands!”
“I know.”
I held up my hand, pointing accusingly at the ring on my finger. I’d worn it since I was ten. It had our last name etched around the band like a brand on cattle. It was the same ring every Villette wore, proudly reminding the world who we were. How powerful we were.
“What good is this?!” I demanded angrily. “What good are we if we can’t save him?!”
“I’m sorry, Relia. Things have changed since Arden took the throne. We knew they would, but we never thought—” He pressed his lips together tightly, his jaw set hard. “I never thought he’d do something like this. Not to his own children.”
“Ask Grandfather Villette,” I begged my mother. “He was King Wilhelm’s best friend. He has his own private army. He’s always saying how it’s the biggest in France. He could—”
“He can’t. No one can.”
“On their birthday, one of the boys will die,” Dad explained gently. “And there’s nothing any of us can do to stop it.”
chapitre sept
“You could run away,” I whispered. “I’ll go with you.”
Gable shook his head, his eyes on the floor of the empty throne room. “There’s nowhere to go.”
“I’ll take you to Fontainebleau[5]. I’ll hide you on Grandfather’s estate.”
“It’s the first place he would look for me.”
“Then we’ll go to Poitiers[6]. I’m the duchess there. I have a small army. They have to do what I say.”
“I’m not running, Relia,” he said forcefully.
My body sagged with defeat, slouching further onto the floor. “You can’t fight him.”
“I’m stronger than you think.”
“I know you know how to fight. That’s not what I’m saying.” I touched his arm with my fingertips. “I’m saying you won’t kill him but he will kill you. He’s not like he used to be. He’s… he’s savage.”
“I know. He’s obsessed with the throne.” He looked over at it like it was a sleeping beast that might suddenly awaken and eat us both. “He would kill anyone to get it.”
“So you can’t fight him. There’s no point.”
“I can’t run. Father will find me. He’ll bring me back and call me a coward.”
“Being a coward would be better than dying.”
“I don’t want you to be there,” he told me resolutely.
“Mother says I have to be.”
“Pretend to be sick.”
“I’ll try. But I want to—”
He stood abruptly. “I don’t want you there.”
His footsteps echoed on the stone floor with a purposeful rhythm that sounded like a drumbeat. I sat stone still until he was gone, the door falling shut behind him with a whisper of air and a gentle thud.
Then I cried.
Only a week away from the Strain, the stress was getting to everyone. Mother wasn’t eating. I threw up every time I tried. My little sister Iris was unsure what was happening but she could tell no one was happy. She clung to Mother like she worried she’d lose her forever if she let her out of her sight.
Queen Marie was the worst of us. Just that morning I saw her leaving breakfast with red eyes, a red tipped nose, and lips so puffy and pink they were almost en vogue. She looked tragically pale and gaunt. I doubt she slept more than an hour each day, and I heard that she was helping herself along with wine.
The only person who didn’t seem to be affected was Bastian.
He walked through the halls of the castle with his head held high. He looked his brother in the face at meals. He ate and laughed and lived his life as though nothing was wrong. He was the mirror image of the King; unbothered and unfeeling to the horror that was to come.
I wanted to slap him in the face. I hoped it would wake him up or break the spell his father had him under. A small, hopeful part of me thought maybe my friend was still in there. I thought maybe if I talked to him I could convince him to help me stop this. For Gable’s sake. For my sake. For Queen Marie and all of France who would be devastated by the death of a dauphin.
The day before their birthday, I got up the courage to face Bastian in the garden. We hadn’t been close for years, hadn’t spoken in almost a month. I was nervous to talk to him. He was walking back from the stables where he’d just finished riding. He was tall and lean, his long, brown hair shining in the dappled sunlight. His handsome face, identical to Gable’s, was foreign to me.
“Bast,” I called to him from under an apple tree.
He paused midstride to look down at me where I sat on the grass. Something flickered across his face – a glimmer of recognition. A faint ray of light. “Ria. What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No. Why would you ask that?”
“Because you don’t ever do ‘nothing’.”
I smiled faintly. “I would if I could…”
“But your mother won’t let you.”
“Not even for a second.”
“So what are you doing now?”
“I was waiting for you.”
I could almost see the wheels turning inside his head as he studied me. Processing my position under the tree in my casual clothing – jeans and a blouse painted with flowers – deciding what my intentions were.
“I’m in a hurry,” he said.
“So am I. I promise to be quick.”
“I’ll save you the trouble. I won’t quit the fight.”
My heart slammed in my chest. “Why not?”
“Why not?” he chuckled. “Is that a serious question?”
“Yes.”
“Because I want to be king, Ria.”
“There are other ways.”
“Really? What are they?”
We could kill your father instead. He’s insane. He’s tearing the nation apart.
“I don’t know,” I lied weakly.
“There are none.” He began to move away. “So if we’re done here—”
“I will never forgive you,” I blurted out in a rush. I felt my face turn red as one of the apples hanging over me. “If you kill him, Bast, I won’t ever forgive you.”
Bastian looked over his shoulder, his face in profile.
“I would never ask you to,” he replied.
chapitre huit
On the morning of the fight I tried to pretend that I was sick. Mother saw right through me. Only Iris, who was only eight, was allowed to stay home with her nanny. Even my grandparents made the long drive from Fontainebleau to attend the Strain, though they were openly enraged about it.
“The boy has lost control,” Grandfather Villette growled over eggs at breakfast.
“He’s not a boy anymore, Henry,” Grandmother reminded him primly. “He’s a man. He’s king and we have to respect that.”
“We serve no king,” Grandfather said. “We serve France and France is her people. I refuse to respect a man like Arden. His father wouldn’t stand for this. Wilhelm would take him behind the stables and beat him black and blue if he saw half the things this fool was doing to his country. People are starving. There was an uprising in the south. They tried to overthrow the baron at Millpond. The chateau is nothing but ash now and half the county was sent to Work Houses, which are overflowing because you can’t sneeze in this country without being arrested.”
“We heard about the fire. It was a tragedy,” Mother agrees delicately.
“It’s a mess. There’s a revolution on the horizon, mark my words. That boy is ripping the place apart with his taxes and sanctions and now this murderous production. His ban on trading with Brûlé is killing us. He expects me to send my own men into the borderlands instead. It’s absurd!”
Mother glanced nervously at the staff waiting against the walls. Our chambers were in a separate wing from The Crown but still… walls have ears. People have tongues. “Father, please.”
“Are they his servants or yours, Lynn?” he demanded.
“They work for us.”
“Then they’ll keep their mouths shut.”
“If everything is so bad, how is he allowed to do the things he does?” I asked.
All eyes turned to me like they were surprised I was there. As though I hadn’t been there all morning listening to them argue.
“King Wilhelm never did anything like this,” I continued. “Did he?”
Grandmother smiled at me affectionately. “No, dear. He was a good man and an even better king. People loved him.”
“They trusted him,” Dad clarified.
“Wilhelm knew Arden would be trouble,” Grandfather said. “That’s why he gave you Poitiers when you were just a baby, Aurelia. He was readying us.”
“Readying us how?”
“The Villette’s surround Loire. Between the Bluecoats in Fontainebleau and the army we command in Poitiers, we have Arden surrounded. Wilhelm planned it that way. Just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“In case Arden turned out to be the man he feared he’d be.”
I sat up eagerly. “Then we can attack. We can stop this.”
“No.”
My body felt deflated, like a popped balloon. “Why not?”
“Because it’s not time.”
“The problem is he’s got the Prime Minister Cassel in his pocket,” Dad said to Grandfather, deftly steering the subject away from treason. “Cassel is literally letting him get away with murder in exchange for land in the south.”
Grandfather growled. “It’s on the trade route to Italy. Cassel wants a post there to cut into my business.”
“We still have the northern route to New Deutschland,” Grandmother reminded him. “And we’re nearest to the port coming in from England.”
“Angers[7] is closest to the port. Arden owns Angers.”
“But they’d have to go through Brûlé to use it.”
“And Arden is terrified of the Brûlén,” Mother agreed.
Grandfather chewed on that and his toast, his old jaw popping with every upward motion. His eyes were green and hard as emeralds. Shrewd as a jungle cat’s.
Finally, he muttered, “Something will have to be done.”
chapitre neuf
The Strain took place on the same grassy lawn where I had imagined a carnival. Where the aristocracy made a neat circle beneath the old oak is where I dreamed of a ring for the miniature ponies. Just at the edge of the forest where the grass turns wild and dots with purple flowers in the spring, I thought they’d set up sack races. Maybe a face painting station where you could be made into a wild cat or a colorful bird. I’d want to be a zebra. I’d give just about anything in the world to see a real, live zebra. I wished I could kick off my shoes and run through the forest looking for one. I’d be as likely to find a unicorn as a zebra, but it wasn’t the exotic animal or the carnival I was really yearning for.
It was the escape.
“Aurelia,” Mother hissed. Her green eyes were fierce, her full mouth pulled into an angry, precise line. “Put your shoes back on.”
“They pinch.”
“So do mine but you don’t see me running around in bare feet like some itinerant. Shoes. On.”
On the other side of her, Dad looked down at me with compassion folded in the lines of his forehead. He gave me a wan smile, nodding slightly.
