Perfect Ruin

“We can’t kill them,” I say.

“What’s this from the girl who wanted to slit the king’s throat?” she says.

“I wasn’t thinking clearly then,” I say.

“And now the dehydration and lack of sleep have enlightened you?”

“No,” I say, and the firmness of my tone makes her stop sawing at the twine and look at me.

I hate the prince and princess—I hate the whole family more than I would have thought possible—but I don’t want to do to them what they’ve done to me. “I don’t want to be the reason anyone is dead, Pen, and I doubt you do, either.”

She stares at me a moment longer before looking away, mouthing words I don’t catch.

Then she says, “I make no promises,” but I know it’s her way of agreeing to my demand.

She goes back to working at the twine, trying to loosen the knots around my wrists now. But it’s no use. Maybe the prince and princess have never had a hostage before, but they tie knots with precision, and the more we struggle, the tighter the restraints become. Pen finally gives up when I begin to bleed, and instead she helps me draw my knees to my chest, making me small enough to loop my arms under me until my hands are in my lap. For the first time I see the damage to my skin, swollen and red and oozing. Probably infected. Basil would be angry to see what they’ve done to me. Angry like when he found out about Ms. Harlan prodding into my head.

He’s so careful with me, always.

When I return to him, he’ll pull me into his arms. Sweep me up. I’ll close my eyes.

I feel his chest against mine. Feel his breath on my neck. My skin swells with little bumps. And then the memory of him is gone. I said that I wouldn’t kill them, but I know that I would. To return to him, I would.

By the seventh chime in the evening, Pen and I make the difficult decision to blow out the candle. We’ll hide on opposite sides of the door and we’ll use the darkness to ambush the prince and princess when they bring us a new candle.

Pen stands by the flickering light, staring into the flame before smiling at me. “One last look before it’s lights-out,” she says. “If this goes wrong, we’ll never get a good look at each other again.”

I narrow my eyes. “You always know what to say.”

She winks.

I’m standing by the door, arms out to help guide her back to me in the blackness.

“You really are a beautiful girl,” she tells me. “I never tell you that. I’m always fussing about your hair and things. But you are.”

I feel the blush burning across my cheeks. “You too,” I say.

She takes a deep breath, exhales, and we’re in the dark.

We settle on opposite sides of the door, and I press my back to the wall. My heart is pounding and I feel myself shuddering with it. This isn’t real darkness. This is unnatural, devoid of clean air and stars. The moon wouldn’t be able to find us here.

We don’t talk for the longest time, listening, waiting, knowing it could be hours before it’s time to strike. The clock strikes eight. Then later, nine.

I hear a strange rustling sound, like stone grinding against stone. It startles me before I realize the sound is coming from Pen, not the stairwell. “What are you doing?” I whisper.

“Nothing.”

“I thought I heard—”

“Shh!” she says.

There’s a noise from the other side of the door. Whispers. A little laugh. Faint gold threads of light appear through the wooden door. I hear the locks being unlatched, and just as Pen and I planned, I scoot away from the door so that I’ll still be in the shadows when the prince and princess step inside. The plan is to startle them and try to knock them down, then rush outside and lock them in. I’ve gone over and over it for what has surely been hours, hoping it will be as easy as it seems in my head.

The door creaks open, and Princess Celeste and Prince Azure cease their whispering when they realize we aren’t on the floor where they left us. The prince holds the candle up, and he doesn’t see that Pen is behind him. The princess does, though, and she draws a breath to speak, and I know it’s time. I spring forward and hook my arms around her, pin her against me.

She struggles wildly, but the twine that binds my wrists is keeping her in place. “No.” Her voice is desperate. “Please, no.”

I’m not going to hurt her. I’m just about to tell her that, when I realize she isn’t paying me any mind—the words are for Pen, whose eyes are dangerous in the candlelight. She’s got something in her hands and she’s raising it above the prince’s head, and now I understand what that noise was. She discovered that a rather large stone had come loose in the wall.

“Don’t!” Princess Celeste and I cry out at the same time.

We’re silenced by the sound of the stone colliding with Prince Azure’s skull.

He crumples, and the candle flies from his hand.

His sister explodes into a scream, and both of our bodies shake with it. Panicked, I let her go and she drops to his side. “Azure!” she’s saying. “Az!”

In the next instant her lacy sleeves are red with his blood. He doesn’t move. She lowers her ear to his chest, and her long, long hair wraps over her brother’s still form like a shield. Her braided crown holds firm, as if to insist that she is something great, even on the floor, even like this.

The candle rolls along the stones, and just as Pen is reaching for it, it goes out, leaving us in darkness.

26

Time was our very first king. We all live our lives to the aggressive ticking of the clock. We don’t question that our lives are a grid of seconds; even our pulses oblige. No succeeding king can hope to hold this kind of power.

—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten

PEN PUSHES ME THROUGH THE DOOR. I CAN’T see a thing, and I rush to keep up with her. We pick a direction that I think will take us toward the water room, and we run.

The princess is screaming and screaming. The stairwell is alive with footsteps. We stop and spin around to see the candlelight coming toward us.

We crouch behind a crumbling slab of wall, likely the remains of an old prison cell, and force ourselves to quiet our gasping. My lungs burn. My heart is racing. I’m furious. As Pen presses herself against me, I’m remembering what she said.

I make no promises.

How could you?

From where we’re perched, I can see the patrolmen rushing to the prince’s aide. I think it’s too late for him. The princess is sobbing that he needs a medic. Moments before she opened the door, she and her brother had been giggling.

One of the patrolmen leads her to the doorway and grabs her shoulders, trying to get something coherent out of her. “Who did this?” he asks several times before she seems to hear him.

Her arms are folded and she’s staring at Prince Azure when she swallows and says, “Men. They—they stole us from our beds and dragged us down here.”

“Men? What did they look like?”

“It doesn’t matter; they’ve gone.” She pushes his hands from her shoulders. “The heir to the throne is going to bleed to death if you don’t help him. Do you want that to happen on your watch?”

Murmurs and footsteps. Some of the patrolmen rush upstairs; there are too many of them to count, and my stomach is sick when I realize that Pen planned it this way. A scream from Princess Celeste would summon every patrolman on duty. All we need to do is wait them out.

Medics hurry down from upstairs, carrying a cushioned board for the prince’s body. And there’s someone else, too. King Furlow himself, his thin white hair disheveled, his white robe open, revealing his doughy stomach. To see him in such a state is to see Internment for the soil. He is as ordinary as the rest of us. No greatness to him at all.

And I know Judas was right—I wouldn’t have been able to kill him.

This is the man who had my parents murdered. But I take no satisfaction from the pain on his face when he sees his son, sees the blood all over his daughter’s white clothes as she chews her lip and trembles.

“Papa,” she croaks. “Make them help him.”

“They are, love, they are.”

Shadows move in the candlelight. Medics are carrying the prince up the stairs on the cushioned board. I can’t tell whether he’s breathing. All I see is that much of the cushion has gone red with blood, drops of it falling out of reach from the light.

Pen is trembling beside me. “Morgan?”

My wrists are burning from where the princess’s struggle dug the twine into my wounds.

“Shh.”

It seems the entire tower has gathered here. Except for the queen. There have been rumors that she has taken ill; looking back it does seem strange that she wasn’t in any of the broadcasts.

Maybe the king poisoned her too, I think bitterly.

But he puts his arm around his daughter to console her, and it’s an echo of my father comforting me when we stood over Lex’s hospital bed, not knowing if he’d pull through.

King Furlow and Princess Celeste follow the medics up the stairs. Patrolmen escort them on all sides. As they go, they take the candlelight with them.

The clock strikes ten, drowning out the sounds they make. But I can still hear Princess Celeste’s sobs; I suspect I’ll hear them for a very long time in my dreams.

Pen and I stay huddled in the dark after the last chime.

“We won’t have long,” I whisper when I’m sure it’s safe. “Let’s try to find a way out.”

“We shouldn’t take the stairs,” Pen says. I can tell by her voice that she’s fighting for calm. I don’t know how long she was planning to attack the prince, but she’s seen it played out and she’s seen the damage she caused, and it’s ugly.

I’m the first to stand and begin walking. She clings to my shirt hem.

“Morgan?” she whispers. “You understand that I had to, don’t you?”

“Just hope he isn’t dead,” is all I say.

“She didn’t tell on us. She could have. Why didn’t she?”

“I don’t know.” My arms are out in front of me, and I’m feeling along the grimy bricks, hoping for an out. My eyes are trying to adjust to the darkness, but there’s nothing.

And then, suddenly, there is. A glimmer of moonlight breaking through a wooden door.

I fumble for the doorknob, and it turns, but the door doesn’t budge. Pen helps me undo the series of locks. It’s taking so long, I feel we’re in a dream where air has been replaced by sweetgold.

I pull the knob again, and the door opens with a creak that I’m sure will summon the patrolmen. But no, they don’t come. They’ll be busy with all that blood.