Chapter 28: Our Own King Are We
Like some poor wren that shrieking eagles tear, while
brute Dishonour, with her bloodless face stood by.
- John McCrae
She should have been grateful for the softness of the silk sheets, the warmth of the thick blankets, the opulence of the gold-wrought bed-frame. She ought to have savoured each bite of the intricately designed dish, the delicate palette of sweet and savoury, the brittle caution with which it had all been cooked. She ought to have felt safe here, with crisply uniformed guards patrolling the threshold of the palace with their rifles over-shoulder, with the high marble walls rising high around the palace, with the layers of landmines carefully planted, as seeds in a garden, between throne room and city, ready for priming at any moment.
She should have been grateful. Instead, Opal McIntyre looked out across the royal platoons arrayed in geometrical precision in the courtyard, and she despaired.
What had they been thinking, any of them? What had been going on in Theo's head, when he had left Hansport for… for the grim, the squalor, the hopelessness of the rebellion? In the safehouse, she had been impressed by the numbers of the revolutionaries, by the gritty determination apparent in the line of their jaws, by the skill with which they handled their guns and their cars.
But now, watching Mordred inspect a regiment of fresh soldiers some three thousand strong, prepared for deployment to the front line, Opal could see that they had never had a chance.
They had dreamed. Maybe there was something valiant about that, on its own, without anything else.
Because right now, she was quite certain that there was – could be – nothing else. This was the seventh such inspection in a week. She hadn't known there were so many young men in Illéa of war-fighting age, until they had passed through the palace in the space of six days, all spit-shine perfection and oil-slick confidence. So many! So many without purpose, except to be hurled unceremoniously under the spokes of the war machine, with Mordred at its head. And hurled they were, for if Opal had seen two thousand young men pass through these gates for their initiation rites, she had seen a quarter of their number return on stretcher for their final ones, all blood-stained and battle-ravaged.
When those days came by, she saw the eyes of Theo in every face on the ground.
In that respect, then, they were little different from the rebellion. Opal was beginning to think that was all this country was – a coin, of which the two sides were little different.
So yes. She should have been grateful. But she was resolutely, furiously, despairingly not.
She lingered there, under the grand arch which led to the foyer, a little side-parlour which led from the body of the grand palace house to the practical courtyard. The other Selection girls would be in the gardens, she thought, or in the Women's Room, or in the library – the three places in which they were permitted to while away their days, between staged interviews with the Report and stilted interlocutions with the prince. She wondered if all previous Selections had been so infused with uncertainty, uncertainty not merely about one's future within the Selection but one's fate in a much broader sense. Whether, at the end of this all, one's house would still stand, one's family would still breathe, the throne for which they fought would still even exist.
Well. Opal couldn't say she was fighting very hard.
Naran Altai had been chosen to accompany the prince today on his inspection of the troops. Opal had blanched upon first introduction with the pretty young Yukon girl, so overwhelming the resemblance to her twin sister, Saran, but after a few weeks of knowing her the differences were apparent: Naran's face was more moon-shaped, somehow softer, with a more generous curve to her mouth and bigger eyes. It made her look younger than her twenty years, and much younger than her older twin, though she shared the same diminutive build. Beside her, even the lean Mordred practically towered.
They moved slowly down the line, Mordred shaking hands firmly and speaking to soldiers softly. Naran, looking less subdued than usual, flashed each man a bright, warm smile which reminded Opal, not of her sister, but of Saran's perpetual companion, Yue – shy, and yet unabashedly glowing. Some of the soldiers looked a little taken, but Opal knew they shouldn't hold their breath… and not merely because she was in Mordred's Selection.
Naran might have been forced into this Selection by her grandfather, and Naran might have sworn to do her best to win for her family's sake, but at night, through the walls of the palace, Opal could still hear Naran crying for the girlfriend she had left behind in the north.
You would never have been able to tell, she mused darkly. For the best – she knew that if she had inclined her head upwards, to the bay window that overlooked the courtyard from the royal wing, Ysabel's razor-wire gaze would be fixed on the putative prince and his potential princess, as it always was during these inspections. She kept a closer eye on them than did Vandervell, the co-ordinator, a thin woman in her mid-fifties with unnaturally dark hair and a mouth red like an open wound. That hadn't been much of a surprise for Opal when she first arrived in Angeles – she had always thought that the widow queen was a cold, manipulative creature, though whether that meant she had murdered her husband, well, Opal couldn't have given that answer six months ago and she could not give it now either.
They were finishing the inspection. Opal smoothed down her skirts, and set her mouth determinedly. Vandervell had decided she should have an oceanic theme, and so her dress was a pale sky blue, off-shoulder, with voluminous silk skirts and a bodice intricately embroidered with aquatic flowers: purple water hyacinth, pickerel weed, white water poppies and duck potato. The silk required to make one strap, she thought, might have fed her family for a week. The whole dress might have kept the lights on for a year, might have sent Ruby to university, might have made sure her mother never had to go hungry again.
If she lived to see the end, she thought grimly, the dress was coming with her.
Mordred had offered his arm to Naran, and they were coming in Opal's direction now. For a moment, she wondered how she should stand – whether she was stubborn or supplicant – but before she could decide, they were in front of her and she just decided to fold her arms and meet Mordred's gaze squarely, just as they had been instructed to never do.
She thought, as she always thought when she saw Mordred up close like this, as she had always thought when she was in Demetri's close proximity, that he was utterly gorgeous. That was just a fact, like noting that the sky was blue, or that her name was Opal. He had a kind of spun-glass look to him, pale eyes somewhere between wheatgrass and mint, hair that seemed more white than blonde in this sort of arid, silver morning light.
She still didn't know what to make of him. She had not even got the chance to make up her mind about Demetri, so little time had she spent with him. Mordred seemed, if she was honest, like more of a king – but there were times, like during her first meeting with him, that she had wondered if it was all a well-scripted act. Sometimes she caught him, during banquets or during inspections, when he thought no one was looking at him, when a look of deep melancholy settled over his visage, a hollow kind of thoughtfulness that made it seem like he was contemplating a problem without a solution.
"Lady Opal."
"Your Majesty. Lady Naran."
She didn't really know what to make of Naran either, now that it came down to it. Saran had always been enormously emotionally attuned, kind and thoughtful and sensible, and for the little time that Opal had known her, well. Naran had been something of an opposite, the sun to Saran's moon in every conceivable manner. The younger Altai twin was always ridiculously honest with her thoughts and feelings during conversations in the Women's Room, sometimes before she had even finished processing them herself. But Opal did not believe Naran meant ill, and she appreciated the smile that Naran offered her now as Opal offered the slightly shaky courtesy she had slowly begun to master during her time in Angeles.
"To what," Mordred said, "do we owe the pleasure?"
He did not mention, though of course they were both keenly aware, that she should not have been here. The Selection girls were not permitted outside of their chambers or the garden without a chaperone – usually the prince, sometimes Ysabel or Vandervell. And yet, here Opal stood, her cynicism almost bleeding through her pores.
"Sir," Opal replied, and raised an eyebrow, and she saw the understanding – reluctant, irritated, almost regretful – understanding flit across the man's face, without her saying a single word further.
"Of course," he replied, and turned. "Lady Naran. I was very grateful for your company but you must please excuse me – I promised to bring Lady Opal to see the deer park this afternoon."
"Hunting?" Naran enquired pleasantly.
Mordred shook his head. "Perhaps if we could spare the horses, but such is war."
Opal smiled, and, with a prompting look from Mordred, took his arm as Naran released it. He was wearing a woollen jacket; her fingers sunk into the sleeve.
"I hope you have a good evening, Lady Naran," Mordred said, and then – "Lady Opal, shall we?"
They left her. The lie about the deer park had been well-chosen, for it was the same path that they took – a languid footway around the rose gardens, where the sound of laughter could be distantly heard; above the grates over the tiny smoking spaces accorded to the staff of the kitchen, the maids of the bedchambers, the grooms of the stables; and finally around the grander buildings of the complex towards the greyer squat-bungalows of the guardhouses. There were only a few prison cells in the palace itself, for fear that proximity to the royal family would lead to absolute tragedy – only a few oubliettes, or bottle dungeons, in which a few individuals were kept. For blackmail, Opal imagined darkly, blackmail or security.
The prison room contained no cells, only what they called an angstloch, small circular holes in the ground covered over by chicken wire and titanium grate reinforcement. It was these holes which led down into each individual bottle to the well-like room below, no larger than a metre in diameter; two metres in height. A tiny, dark space. Opal imagined dwelling within such a dungeon must feel something akin to visiting hell before death.
And she was here to visit the damned.
"Who's in the other cells?"
Mordred looked surprised at the question. He looked surprised to even be asked a question. "You know I won't answer that, Lady Opal."
"You won't?" She feigned surprise. "I wonder whyever not."
A tightening of his jaw. She may have been in his Selection, but she was one of the enemy. That much was obvious. She wondered if they were reserving one of these cells for her, for after her elimination, for whenever she fulfilled all of the propaganda purposes to which she could be put. She wondered how that would feel, just stone on either side and all around and not even the sky visible above her, only more stone, more steel, more darkness.
How long like that until a man was broken, utterly?
They came to the most familiar angstloch. Though the floor was littered with tiny grates, she could have recognised this one no matter what – the holes in the grate were a little uneven in size, wider on the top, an irregular shape on the left, more circular than square. Some black paint was flaking at the edge of the hole. It was a little wider than the others as well; it allowed more light.
And within…
"Can't you give us a moment?"
Mordred's eyes were pale, but they were also very cold. He did not answer her question, but nor did he move – only folded his arms behind his back, like the soldiers awaiting inspection had done.
Opal sighed deeply. Well. She had done her part, and this was her payment. In exchange for all of her propaganda use – the pretty smiles for the camera, the fawning interviews with the Axiom about how glad she was to be away from the rapscallion rebels, the passive tolerance of her new position in this new Selection. She had borne it all, without complaint, without losing her temper, without snapping. And this was the only reason why.
She knelt over the grate, and could barely bring herself to whisper. "Theo?"
And from below, his voice, quieter now, hoarser than before, like he was being fed rusty nails. Nonetheless. Alive. "Opal?"
Mordred, setting his jaw, turned his back to them. Opal rather thought this was his attempt to be thoughtful. Or maybe he just couldn't bear to watch.
There is always an aftermath to a massacre. No matter how much blood is spilled, no matter how many bodies fall, no matter how much ash is left to sift through. There always comes the time of reckoning and the time of tolling.
In this case, the Morrises were counting survivors.
Lethal had encountered refugees before, but never in these sorts of numbers. Ever since the border to Fennley had been breached and Tammins secured as a holding of the Kingdom in Exile, the province had experienced a flood of new arrivals from the destruction of Layeni, abandoning the dangerous Wastelands in favour of greater security inland, where one knew where the battlelines were drawn and what constituted a civilian. It was a flood, but not a large one.
There were too few left standing to allow for more.
The Morrises were not equipped for this, not properly. Wesick had been as good as his word – Tammins had been left for them as something akin to a fiefdom, won in battle but not converted over the way of the King of Dust, and life in the province had continued as normal, including their daily schedule of patrols and sabotage against whatever Crown enclaves remained.
But this – the part that came after. Lethal had never been trained for this.
The numbers were smaller than they might otherwise have been. Some portion of Layeni had melted back into the Wastelands, fled even further south, to the scrubland and desolation that they knew best. But then, the numbers were also larger than they might otherwise have been, because there had been a landmine on the road the day before and a bus containing survivors had flipped six times before landing on its roof, killing fifteen and leaving another fifty injured. They had been packed into the vehicle like sardines, Lethal thought, and now they were here, in what had once been a school gymnasium but was now something akin to cross between a refugee camp and a field hospital.
There were two of the Selected among them. Not Atiena. Lethal had not expected her to be there. Not his Atiena. She was smarter than that – tougher than that. She was long gone, doing her job – staying alive, moving forward, fighting the good fight. No, these Selected were smaller and frailer creatures, borne not of the battle but of the peace it won. There was a tall, thin, olive-skinned girl with wavy hair and a nervous tremor in her hand, a tremor she apologised for time and again. It hadn't ever happened before the massacre, she said. It was new. It scared her a little.
When the rebellion had turned on itself, Soledad Delrío had been in the care of its soldiers. Her guards had turned on one another, like sharks in a feeding frenzy. She had been the sole survivor in the bunker after it was all over. She had lived with the bodies for three days – too afraid to leave and face the desolation of the desert around her, without another living thing for thirty, fifty, ninety miles. She had stayed there until Marjorie Velmudez and Thiago Wesick had gone to investigate the radio silence from the men stationed there. She had stayed there, and she had trembled.
And then, there was the small New Asian girl with a slightly fox-like expression, a slyness that belied the innocence of her delicate features – those features that Lethal could glimpse, for the vast majority of her face was thoroughly bandaged, slight blood stains already leaking through where her eye was, had once been. It reminded Lethal strongly of Maria, of how she had looked in the weeks and months that had followed the mission that had lost her most of the right side of her face. This girl had arrived from the bus that had flipped, holding a piece of paper with Devery Atiqtalaaq's distinctively sharp signature at its base. Her arms were bandaged as well; she had punched out the windows of the bus to crawl out onto the road in the aftermath of the explosion.
"I'm Saran," she said, "Saran Altai. You must be Atiena's brother."
Lethal had nodded, and had said nothing else, but this did not seem to deter the smaller girl.
"Guy named Harjo come through here? Wick Harjo? We got separated..."
As usual, Daniel was Lethal's voice when he needed one. "We haven't seen him."
Altai's expressions were hard to read, with her face bandaged up so, but Lethal recognised the way her one good eye flicked left and right in distress. She had asked about Wesick as well, and the widow Klahan. Daniel had not been able to give her any of the answers she wanted, and eventually she shut her mouth and just nodded, and when she had got the chance, she had pulled Killmonger aside and handed him the note, now a little blood-stained and frayed at the edges, that bore Devery Atiqtalaaq's signature. The words were encoded in that distinctive Inner Circle style, on which Marjorie Velmudez had briefed the Morrises maybe two, three months ago, when rebel and revolutionary had first reached their tentative alliance.
ስᚴⵟⲑသိⴳⵍᛏնᎨᎴስϣമുⵙᏰчⲑપ્પલⵒⲑξ
Killmonger read it with ease – it was only a modified form of the encryption that had been used by Crown forces, under King Trajan, when he had been a young cadet. Designed by General Klahan, it still eluded Lethal's complete knowledge. How his foster father translated this strange mishmash of symbols with such ease would forever strike him as a mystery. It was for that reason that Killmonger read the message aloud, keeping his voice muted so that only his family could hear. "Escort this girl to Angeles. She must reach the palace by the sixth of the month."
It was the fourth.
And below, in a tight scrawl, Devery Atiqtalaaq's name. Lethal had no way of knowing what the Warden's signature looked like, but Killmonger did not seem inclined to question it. He had just scowled at the paper and then said, like the words were ripped from him, "very well."
The girl had stared up at him with those dark eyes of hers. "Well?"
"We shall depart in an hour." Killmonger had set a hand on Lethal's shoulder, and signed to him so that Altai could not understand. Hold the fort. I'll be back by sunrise tomorrow.
Lethal's movements were sharper, staccato, like he was stabbing the air as he signed. Yes, sir. He did not wish his father luck. He could not. It was not the Morris way. They didn't believe in luck.
He nearly asked if Killmonger was sure the younger man shouldn't accompany them. This girl was no danger but the world beyond – that was, always had been and always would be, full of danger and trepidation. Lethal rarely let the rest of family out of his reach. He always had to be there, to cover their back. He always had been, ever since Killmonger and Atiena had found him in what remained of the Tammins slums, his Eight parents murdered, the boy left behind, mute. Mute, and bloodthirsty.
The family joked that only Atiena and Killmonger could call him off, once the fight had started. If Killmonger was gone… well, Lethal thought, it might go worse for anyone who tried underhanded anything in his absence.
Killmonger had turned to the girl. "What business have you in the palace?"
"My sister," Altai said stubbornly. "I'm going to save my sister."
"Sentimental," Killmonger had said, and had said nothing more.
The girl had gone to pack what she could – not her belongings, for she had none left, but what food and medical supplies could be scrounged without leaving others without. Killmonger had gone to find them a car and a gun. They had been ready to go in twenty minutes, and less than half an hour from their first meeting, the girl from the north and the deserter from the Crown were gone, en route to Angeles, with a rifle on the backseat and two sandwiches on the dashboard for evening rations. The Morrises stood, and watched them go.
They did not wave. To wave would have been too close to a goodbye.
Daniel and Lethal had been returning to the gymnasium when they found the Delrío girl, standing on the threshold of the fire escape door, her arms folded to hide the way her hand shook without respite. "What's going on?"
"Nothing," Daniel said, his stutter holding back the words in a manner that made the word more suspicious than it ought to have been. Nonetheless, Lethal was grateful for his presence. His younger brother was an awkward, shy creature, but he was not a fighter, and that meant that he was a little less likely to put the visitors on edge than the glowering Lethal.
The whole motley family had rather stunted emotional skills, now that Lethal thought about it. It was a miracle Atiena had turned out as well as she had.
"Nothing," Soledad echoed, distantly unbelieving.
"She was trying to arrange passage home," Daniel added. That was a safe bet. Lethal imagined anyone with a home was desperate to return about now. He paused, and then, like he was straining to throw her off enquiring further, he added: "were you close during the Selection?"
"What do you mean?"
"With her. Saran Altai."
Soledad Delrío frowned. "That wasn't Saran Altai," she said.
"Yes," Daniel repeated, "she said she was going to save her sister..."
"That wasn't," Sol said again, her voice brittle, "Saran."
Set was not accustomed to the spectre of a losing war. They were not losing this war – not yet – but the shadow of a failure stalked their regiments in their every step. For every mile of ground they regained, the rebellion snatched back another five hundred yards. For every province that was returned to the Crown, another province fell. For every twenty rebels captured, the rebels killed ten. And, worse than that, the land that was lost was becoming entrenched in Exile – they were setting up schools, and hospitals, and banks, with new coins and new papers, all stamped with the seal of the imposter king.
That was a more long-term, more intractable issue than the exchange of fire and land. That, and the sheer unpredictability of it all. The Layeni massacre had been answered with ferocity and savagery – a destructive bombing of the Maxon Bridge in Carolina, of the Axiom headquarters in Angeles, the Clarkson military installation on the border between St George and Ottaro. The bridge had crumbled, cutting off a broad swathe of the province's people from the rest of the kingdom for the foreseeable future; the Axiom building had been left in piles of ash, the Crown left gutted by the loss of a key cog of its propaganda machine and by the sheer proximity of the bombing to the palace and its prince; the military installation, guardian of the miltary's northern reservoirs of dynamite and gelignite, had blown even higher once the missiles had struck the store.
Uzokuwa, turned to their cause, and his men with him. The false Demetri, fled to the Saharan Federation with what remained of the Inner Circle and his hollow Selection. And even that forced flight was not, could not be, a true victory for Mordred's forces, because in the Federation lay the chance of foreign validation and legitimacy in the eyes of former Illéan allies.
Layeni, in ash. Axiom, in dust. The spectre of loss, creeping ever closer.
It was almost enough to make Set wonder what any of this was for anymore.
