I don’t care that I sound like a petulant, spoiled child. I still snap, “Give it to me now!”
But when I lunge for the prince again, I find a seventy-year-old monarch standing in my way.
The king’s voice is kind but strong. He doesn’t sound like a killer when he tells me, “This box was not your mother’s, Ms. Blakely.”
For a second, I’m so stunned that I recoil. That’s one of the curses of being me. I’m never really sure that I’m not lying.
“I’m sorry, Your Highness,” I say. I need to be strong. “But you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No, I’m the one who is sorry, Ms. Blakely. I should explain. This is not your mother’s box, you see. I know because this box is mine.”
The king turns and takes the box from his grandson. Carefully, he pushes and pulls the ornate carvings until, with a snap, the box pops open. He tips it on its side, and out slides a very old-fashioned key. He holds it up before me.
“Do you know what this is?” he asks.
“A key?” I say. I’m not trying to sound flippant. I’m just so tired and worn that I can’t help it anymore.
The king smiles. “Not just any key, Ms. Blakely. This is a key to the kingdom. And I mean that quite literally. It fits these gates, you see.”
But he’s not pointing toward the front of the palace. He’s pointing toward the tall iron gates that stand at the end of the south corridor. I realize that there is a sort of courtyard on the other side, and that is where the king leads us.
“Two hundred years ago the palace was smaller,” he explains. “And, these were the gates that the guards threw open the night the royal family was killed and the coup began.”
As the king speaks, I can’t help but remember the ceremonial opening of the gates that kicked off the Festival of the Fortnight. The king must read my mind. “We just don’t tell that to the tourists,” he says with a wink. “It’s not the gates that matter, after all. The whole thing is symbolic. Now.”
He turns from me to run a hand along the ornate ironwork. “Not then, though. Two hundred years ago, these gates mattered very much. And this”—he holds the relic up to the light—“was their key.”
I look at the old-fashioned key that still lies in the palm of the king’s large hand. It doesn’t look like it should hold any power at all. But once upon a time it changed the world.
“What most people don’t understand,” the king goes on, “what most people fail to realize is that no mob forms overnight. The royal family knew the people were angry. So the king ordered the gates closed and locked. And what no one ever says—what very few people even realize—is that the guards—the men who threw the gates open and let the mob run in—didn’t have the key.”
I look at the gates and the walls as if the truth were out there somewhere. But it isn’t. I’m just not entirely certain it’s in here, either.
“I don’t understand,” I tell him.
“This is the literal key to the kingdom, Ms. Blakely. And two hundred years ago there were only two in the world. One was held by the king and one was held by his brother. This is the king’s key.”
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Of course. You’re the king.”
He nods. “I am. The king’s key was given to me at my coronation. Just as it was given to my father before me and his father before him—all the way back to the War of the Fortnight. But this key did not belong to my great-great-great-grandfather. He wasn’t the king, you see. He was the king’s brother. And so a part of me has always wondered what became of his key. I told myself that it was lost to the war and to time, but now I highly suspect it lies locked inside that box.”
He points behind me, and I turn to see the prince holding a second box.
“I lied,” Thomas admits with a shrug. “I did go into your room.”
But I’m no longer angry. There are no words for what I feel as the prince holds the box out to me, but for some reason I pass it to the king, who runs his hands along the smooth wood, almost reverently. Within a few seconds the puzzle Megan and I have been trying to master for days snaps open with a click. A second key comes tumbling out onto the king’s palm.
“So that’s where that is.” His voice is soft, and it takes a moment for him to meet my gaze. When he does, he’s almost crying. “I don’t know where your mother got that box, Ms. Blakely. But it has been missing for two hundred years. Ever since the night this key was used to open those gates and let in the mob that killed the royal family.”
There are minutes—seconds—when the whole world can change and your life will forevermore be marked before and after. No one knows that more than I, and as I study the king of Adria, I know he’s having one of them now. I just can’t quite wrap my head around why.
“So a guard or someone stole the box,” I say. “I’m sorry, Your Majesty, but I don’t see …”
“You have a good heart, don’t you, Grace?” the king asks me.
“That’s probably up for debate,” I say, and the king laughs. He doesn’t know that I’m not joking.
“Have you learned to open the box?”
“No,” I say, almost defensive.
“Very few ever do,” the king says. “When you’re raised in this house, then history is all around you. My ancestors hang on the walls; my family tree is memorized in schools. My world should have no secrets, Ms. Blakely. No mysteries. And so since I was a boy, I have clung to one of the few unknowns that my family has left. A single question: What became of the second key?”