Broken Crowns. Lauren DeStefano
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role that is painful to watch, but it pays off. He convinces his father that we could be of some help to the king.
Jack Piper, whether it is arrogance or exhaustion, mistakes our scheme for gratitude for Havalais’s hospitality. Over dinner he tells us that he’s arranged a meeting with King Ingram in the morning.
I stare at my plate, trying to ignore Judas’s and Amy’s stares. True to my promise to Pen, I have not told anyone about our encounter with the prince. Not even Alice or my brother.
If things go as I hope, I’ll tell Lex that I’m leaving. He may wish to stop me, but he won’t be able to. He knows that he owes me that much, after letting me think our father was dead. I have to try to find my father as well.
Thomas clears his throat. “Pen?” he says. “Can I speak with you privately?” His calm tone is a mirage.
“It’d be rude to leave the table before dinner is over,” Pen says, mirroring his tone.
Basil and I exchange worried glances but say nothing.
When the Pipers begin clearing the dinner plates, I have never been so relieved in my life as I leave that dinner table. Pen, poised and cool, follows Thomas outside. Basil and I go upstairs.
Once we’re in my room, I close the door behind us and drop onto the edge of my bed.
Basil sits beside me. “That’s going to be an ugly fight the two of them have.”
“I wish she had just told him,” I say. “He would have been happy. He wants her to go home. He begged me to find a way to get her back to Internment.”
“Unless she means to go without him,” Basil says.
“I believe that’s it,” I say. “She’s forever evading him. It’s been that way since we were children.”
“They’ll work it out eventually,” Basil says. “They always do.”
I think of Pen’s drawing, the ugly word she wrote over and over on that scrap of request paper, and I wonder if I will ever fully understand her. I wonder if she would want anyone to.
And am I any better than she is? I’ve got secrets of my own. Even now, the words are on my tongue: Basil, I kissed Judas.
I almost say it. I let it replay in my head over and over as this loaded silence exists between us.
But I don’t. Selfishly I rest my head on his shoulder and I think about the jet breaking through Internment’s atmosphere. I think about what will await us when we arrive, if we arrive, and I wonder if any of it can be undone.
Pen is gone for most of the evening, and she returns just as I’m turning down the covers. I’m only going through the motions; I know I’ll be too nervous to sleep.
“Well, that was brutal,” she says, and falls onto her bed.
“What happened?”
“He was upset that I didn’t clue him in to what’s going on. It’s just that he worries about me, and I feel how much he worries about me.” She squirms against the mattress. “All his doting can make me so itchy.”
“Did he go along with it?” I say.
“Ultimately, yes. He hates this world. Maybe he’s foolishly hoping that we can go back to Internment and it will be as we left it. I don’t know.” She wriggles under the blanket. “He’s going to try to come with us if the king will allow a fourth. I suppose I owe him at least that much.”
“Mind if I turn out the lights?”
She shakes her head, closes her eyes.
It’s only after I’ve gotten into my bed and we’ve settled into the darkness that I’m brave enough to say what’s on my mind.
“Do you think I’m a detestable person for kissing Judas?”
“From what I saw, he was the one who kissed you.”
“Even so.”
I hear the sheets rustling as she moves. “You’re not a detestable person, Morgan. I mean, if you were—what does that make me? I’m sure if we kept a tally of our sins, I would be in the lead.”
“It’s not the quantity of sins in this instance, but the magnitude.”
“I don’t think it was right,” she admits. “But I know you, and I know you wouldn’t have done something like that at home. It’s this mad world that’s made us all feverish.”
I think of the night I saved Judas from the patrolmen who were coming for him. I pushed him into the lake to hide him, and after that he tried to scare me off. I still remember the fresh grief in his eyes, the severe angles of his face. He was nothing at all like Basil, and yet he stood so close to me that I could feel his breath. I was terrified with intrigue.
But Pen is right. I wouldn’t have kissed him, because back home I did all I could to follow the rules, to be what was expected of me.
“I spent my life thinking all those little things mattered back home. Those rules. But five minutes in this world and it all came undone.”
“Stop punishing yourself,” Pen says. “Everything I ever loved about you is still intact. I’m sure Basil feels the same way.”
We don’t speak after that, and eventually her breathing changes, and somehow she has found a way to sleep.
I’m still lying awake when the sun begins to lighten the sky. Nimble knocks on the door and says, “Ten minutes.”
It’s still early enough that the rest of the house is sleeping. The night’s insects are still singing.
Nimble is waiting for us at the door, weaving the car keys between his fingers anxiously. He watches as Pen, Basil, Thomas, and I convene before him. His eyes are sympathetic. “Sorry, kiddos. The king sent word this morning that he’d like to speak with only you and you.” He nods to Basil and me.
“What?” Pen says. “But I thought—”
“Prince Azure’s request,” Nim says. “We should be grateful that he convinced King Ingram to meet with you at all.”
Pen looks from Thomas to me, fury in her eyes. “That royal terror is trying to ruin everything.”
“He must have a plan,” I say, trying to calm her. “Let Basil and me go. We’ll see what it’s all about, and I’ll tell you everything once I return.”
Her teeth are gritted, but she knows no good would come from arguing and she gives in.
Nimble is our driver, and as usual, Jack Piper is nowhere. “I visited with Birds yesterday,” Nim says, trying to sound cheerful to lighten the mood. He glances at us in the rearview mirror. “Father finally got around to visiting her, and wouldn’t you know, they spent the whole time arguing.”
“Why?” Basil asks.
“She’s got scars,” Nim says. “In particular, this deep continuous gash that runs down the side of her face and her arm. Father says it ruins her. He says no man will ever marry her and that he’d like to send her overseas to this surgeon in the north who can fix it. Only, she doesn’t want it fixed. She wants to keep it. She says it’s a part of her now.”
“She should keep it, then,” I say.
“Father hates the reminder. I dare even to say that he feels guilty for what’s happened to her. Maybe he has a conscience in there after all.”
Like burials, this is another custom I don’t understand. We wear our scars where I come from.
I meet his eyes in the mirror for an instant before he looks back to the road. “If that’s what it’s about, don’t let him send her off to that surgeon,” I say. “If her scars remind him of what he did, he should have to look at them every day. Maybe it will change his mind the next time he goes