Page 15

Chapter Fifteen

A puzzle, truly

S ome hours ago, I had summoned Sign, Seal, and Deliver. They had heightened the king’s fear and pushed him closer to the memory of the protocol that broke him.

Since his union, love had interfered in King Raise’s purpose, yet I wondered if Princess Raise had not accidentally fixed that already by helping her king with raising matters. Otherwise would not ancients have filled princes with the power to control their king time and again?

We had been distracted by the warping, believing love to be the culprit.

Perhaps it was.

But a broken king could not help me to save a world and every creature within. Once King Raise was shackled to my queendom, then I would have greater control over this stairway territory. Perhaps that was all the cure needed.

I rested my hands on the stone wall and pulsed my power into his kingdom. The same strategy had revealed the map of King Change’s haunted forest and where he hid.

Strangely, doing so revealed nothing at all about this territory other than the sheer expanse of it. There was no lattice of power uncovered, nor weaknesses highlighted.

“Hours, and nothing,” fretted the princess. “We are halfway through the day.”

So we were. Because I no longer believed the answer resided in torturing the king again. We had to do the opposite. We had to counter what had been broken, yet how could that be achieved?

I circled the table, and pawns stepped back.

The king tracked me with frenzied eyes.

“Princes were filled with ancient power to restrain you and enforce protocol eight,” I murmured.

Pawns hung their heads.

I had been right to call them because they had carried immense guilt from that interaction with their king. That guilt had driven them to uphold his purpose so strongly that they began to isolate from monsterdom too. That guilt was some of this problem. “If pawns were filled with ancient power,” I mused, “then a king should be.”

King Raise began to struggle again in earnest. Yes, I had felt the ancient ring in my words too. Surprisingly, I had felt little madness since descending into this kingdom, and I could not say why that may be.

I splayed my hands over King Raise’s blank face and pushed my power within him. He arched off the table, and I cringed against the knowledge of what he would feel. My power was as mud filling his lungs and organs. I was setting him in stone, pushing his blood out so my dark brand of monsterdom might erase everything he was.

He would become my vessel for a time as pawns had become a vessel for ancients.

I knew this because the king did not resist me. He could not. He had been seized from doing so by forces that monsters did not truly understand. By ancients.

And so the path forward formed.

I filled him with ancient power, and he struggled and thrashed and arched and moaned in body but not in magic.

Until he did not. King Raise surrendered in body.

Then, quite simply, I saw the map of his territory and power. Unlike King Change’s kingdom, this king kept the secrets of his kingdom within. I staggered at the utter mess inside King Raise. The tragic, broken mess. “Broken indeed, and no connection between.”

Bile rose in my throat.

“My queen,” whispered Sign. “Have you discovered somewhat of something?”

King Raise was made of thousands of staircases. Thousands of them, and yet not a single one connected with another. There was not any pathway through him that I could take to walk—in a spiritual sense—from the bottom of him to the top. The stairways did not lead anywhere . There was no point to them beyond the forming them. The pain and suffering painted before me could only revolt, for King Raise was scrambled and directionless. “Was love the culprit of this, or purpose, or protocol?”

I swallowed a fresh surge of bile.

The answer rose, and I closed my eyes to sway with the weight of the realization. “ He was a foot soldier .”

“He was,” croaked Princess Raise. “How did you know? Why is that relevant?”

I had not believed it was relevant at all. King Change had uttered such nonsense that I had disregarded as an effort to undo me. But had not King Change spoken of wanting me to succeed only to see me crumble apart the world with my feebleness? “’Tis relevant because a foot soldier is not meant to lead. Filled with merit of immortality as he was, your husband dedicated himself to what ancients asked of him anyway, but he never felt sure in the mantle of king. He never had direction within. His only truth in kingdom has been falling in love with a princess, and that is why love became his only direction and mantle.”

The revelation was staggering.

King Raise watched me, and there was such pain in his gaze because I had uncovered the fear of his soul and that which he had hidden for centuries.

I gripped his shoulder, not removing my power from his body. “You held your kingdom and yourself together, King Raise. I greatly admire you for this, for you were never designed to be a king nor rule a kingdom, but you did the best you could regardless.”

Love would not heal him. Nor purpose, nor protocol.

But a queen would.

“In the end, you were only meant to hold yourself together for as long as I took to arrive,” I told him softly. “With the help of a princess and three pawns you made it here. Now a queen has arrived to alleviate your burden forevermore, dear foot soldier.”

I understood King Raise astutely. I keenly felt what his immortal pain and confusion and feelings of ineptitude had been. How the only thing that had made sense in kingdom had been love.

Oil leaked from where his eyes must be. Tears of a king. A travesty. “Do you speak true, young queen? Will you save me? Will my princess be okay?”

Even now, filled with my power and seconds from bowing to me, his princess was foremost in this thoughts. Was that strength and power or a complete unraveled weakness? Maybe both. I could only be sure that such uncertainty was not what I would share with King See. Not now I had witnessed this.

“I will save you, Raise,” I told him. “If you will let me.”

We were equal in power. If he did not concede, then we could remain at this table for the rest of our days. Because I would not concede to him ever.

King Raise’s inhale shook. “I was but a foot soldier, and I long to be so again. A foot soldier who exists for his princess. I would be that and no more. Please.”

Ah. I straightened, gripping my power within him. “You will be as I tell you, Raise. That is all. Pawns, remove the princess.”

This would be a monstrous affair. Raise and I were about to climb thousands of stairs.

One after another after another, I feared.

Until we reached the top of the path.

To see what might be there.

So I did. In my mind’s eye, in my power, I set my feet upon the first staircase, and then I cast my power wide to find the next set of stairs that was meant to connect to the first. It was a puzzle, I quickly learned, and one that did not only require intelligence.

My power drained with each connection, but at least with each stairway connected, there remained one less to work with.

Yet the number of them threatened to overwhelm a queen.

Stairways dragged through oil, reluctant to answer my order. Yet I climbed, and with me and beside me, King Raise climbed too. I dragged him, for he was not capable of climbing this alone. His battle to get this far had left him weary beyond measure.

I would climb for us both.

Stairways became fewer, from thousands to hundreds, then to tens.

I grunted, staggering slightly from the power expenditure of calling another stairway.

“Close,” whispered Raise.

His hand was in mine, and as I stumbled up the stairs, the king crawled next to me.

I could not answer him. I could not see that we could make it.

Another staircase.

Another.

“Seven remain,” he said.

My vision was a blur. Sweat trickled over patch and stitch. I could not feel my connection to ancestral mothers, nor a connection to King See or other monsters. In this deep weariness and futile hope, I felt utterly alone. As if I had walked into the haze already.

“You are nearly there,” said King Raise. “Call another, young queen.”

I groaned as I listened to him.

When he whispered to urge me to connect the next stairway, and the next, I listened again.

There was great importance in a foot soldier, I was learning. Here was the most dedicated king. A king determined to do what was asked, no matter his feelings of aptitude.

Here was a king to whisper encouragement to a queen when she needed it.

I adjusted my grip on his hand. “Thank you, sir.”

“Thank you,” he said after a beat. “Now again.”

I did so, but with four stairways to go, I could not feel a scrap of power within me remaining.

My knees shook. But I could not fall to them. There was great significance in staying upright in this battle. Knees were a conquering part of a king and queen’s anatomy.

King Raise was already on both of his.

“Your key, sir,” I croaked. “Give me the keys to your kingdom.”

“My keys?”

He was confused, and in this place there was no trickery, and so I knew his confusion to be real.

There was panic then, because I could not pull us out of this place now. Not due to the incomplete stairways in Raise’s soul, but because my power had run dry. His was locked up in mine.

We were trapped.

I laughed, then, because such ironies must be appreciated in immortality.

My laughter broke off when someone touched my physical body. I could not see them from here, of course. But I could feel that the hand was soft and feminine.

Where my body stood next to the table holding King Raise, his princess had taken my hand. She flipped it, and from the great distance, a thud and scratch echoed to reach me with Raise’s soul.

A weight landed in my hand, a cool weight. Heavy. Coarse. Stone.

“Stone key,” I said.

“What do you mean?” asked the crawling king.

But I would not tell him that his princess had held the key to his kingdom, nor would I punish her for lying to me about her ignorance over such a key. She had not lied as such, after all. Her exact words had been “He has never spoken a word of this.” And he had not, I garnered, if protocol eight had robbed him of the knowledge and the princess had stumbled across such a key in later centuries. In any case, Princess Raise had just submitted to my queendom forevermore. A princess who was somewhat of a king had fallen to her knees. I had not anticipated both would need to be conquered. If not for their weakness in love, I might not have succeeded.

Warmth and darkness rushed into me, the embrace of a summer evening, and a whooshing rush indeed. Fresh power. Fresh ancientness. Understanding of a king.

I tipped my head back at the roar of power in my veins and my sigh vibrated the world, stretching at my stitches and surely every creature and thing everywhere.

I called the next staircase to me.

Then three remained.

Then two.

King Raise’s body shook with each crawling effort. I swooped down and lifted the large monster in my arms, holding tight to counter the slippery oil of him.

“We will get there, sir,” I told him.

The last staircase. I connected it. I walked us up to the top. And though the situation was very dire, I did pause to peer all the way down to the distant bottom. Then, I set King Raise on his feet again.

He was no longer a broken king and monster.

As to a princess who was somewhat a king, and a warped union, I could not yet be sure. But a king was no longer a mess of unconnected stairways. He was whole, and he was a foot soldier who had won.

And his kingdom was mine .

I unlocked my power from inside and around his, then pulled myself from the deepest parts of the king.

I jolted back into my body, and the sludginess in my arms and legs spoke of the duration of our inner battle. “ How long? ” I asked on the breeze. The stairway kingdom shook with my voice, and the whole world must have vibrated with all I was.

“Four nights, my queen,” answered an exhausted Sign.

Four nights, and now mere seconds might lose us everything. “Hellebores, Sign. Grave. Hurry .”

With that, the walls of me collapsed inward.