Page 37 of Of Sockets Of Stitches (Unworldly City #4)

I nudged a bottle aside with my foot. “Sir, how long since you awakened?”

Marchioness Take and Princess Change lurked within the doorway.

Marchioness Take said drily, “Twenty minutes.”

I considered the bottles again. “Your speed is commendable, sir.”

He whirled from the wall, apparently noticing me for the first time. “ You. ”

The duke threw his bottle at me, and I cast it aside calmly. “Duke Raise, I am very sorry for your heartache.”

The monster clutched at his chest and staggered to one knee, and then the next.

“Heartache? There is no reason to be. I am turned inside out, the points of my ribs exposed and picked at by vermin. I am shattered bone. I am pulverized flesh and pointless fate. I am dead. I must be dead. I cannot go on without her.”

The idea seized him, and the duke lifted his head, gaze wild. “Kill me, Queen. For all that you have done. For all that you pushed me to do that stole her from me… Kill me.” He crawled toward me. “ Kill me! ”

Such was love.

I said very clearly, “The duchess will return.”

If Duke Raise’s screams for me to kill him were the black sea, then my words were Duchess Raise lost in them.

I whipped power around his throat and squeezed. His eyes bulged.

I said again, “Your duchess will return, sir. She is lost but not gone.”

His drunken mind was slow to process this. I watched the information pass from his ear to his brain, and then watched it paddle there for a time before awareness sparked in his eyes.

“But not gone?” he asked hoarsely.

“Not gone,” I repeated.

Quite simply, Duke Raise cradled his head in his hands, and then pressed them against the cold, stone floor. Sobs racked his body. Sobs of relief that she lived so he could live.

Marchioness Take asked, “How can you know this? You were as flummoxed as the rest of us.”

I nodded. “Prince Consort See knows this.”

She was not young in connection. “If he knows that, then he knew what would happen in the first place. ”

“Yes, he did.”

Duke Raise lifted his head. “He knew?” Fury twisted his features. “I will?—”

I thundered, “You will do nothing that does not serve your queen!”

My queendom squeezed and shook, and appeared to rattle the intoxication from the duke too.

He rose onto his knees, working to school his fury. “Yes, my queen. I am undone.”

His duchess was lost, and he had believed her gone. I could well understand his undoing. “Sir, the only way we find your duchess is to succeed in saving the world.”

The color in his face drained. “If we fail, then I will never see her again.” Relief made him sag. “If we fail, then I will be dead too.”

His face firmed. “Where do we go next?”

“There is good news,” I said, walking further into the room, picking my way between bottles. The duke hastily started to pick them up, opening up his stairway to drop them into the duchy. In a flash, he had straightened his tie, put on his shirt, and located his jacket. Wrinkled, but a good sign.

I continued, “I had counted forty-nine major areas requiring my stitch and champions. The damage in the lesser veins did not feel like it would require the same power and sacrifice to heal. Last night, this was proved correct. A vast area of lesser veins surrounding the Raises’ seam are flowing with life. ”

I pulled my power to form a picture of the map in my mind. The map of broken sickness in the world. But it had altered.

“Here?” Princess Change gasped, walking closer.

A quarter of the world was mostly covered in lush growth. Pockets of thick black still marred that quarter in places. These were the veins that remained in need of healing. “There.”

I stared with my champions at the tangible proof of our work. The green of the world that could be seen by the stars and moon .

“If our unions are each a quarter of the world, then where is your romance with Prince See?” asked Duke Raise.

Should I reveal the whole?

I would.

I peeled back the lush growth of the Raise’s quarter of the world to reveal the sickness below.

I peeled more and more until the sick, putrid core of the world was exposed.

“We are the center of the world. There is no point to healing the surface if we do not heal what lays beneath. The world will simply rot again.”

“But we are surely buying time with what we do,” whispered Princess Change.

My stomach churned. “The opposite, I have just recently connected. More and more I have considered the natural role of monsters in the world. The purpose of kings was always to grow their power—mistakenly against one another—in an attempt to either save, ruin, or do nothing. But each monster is so uniquely equipped and designed. I believe there must be a greater purpose for monsters. That has been proven since the loss of Duchess Raise.”

Duke Raise whipped to look at me.

I said, “Humans clamor at my picket and wall of bars. Fear does not drive them, but fate. For there has always been one monster whom I depended on for translation of human behavior. How coincidental that now she is lost, humans have abandoned all semblance of self.”

The princesses erupted into questions, but I did not shift my focus from the raising duke, who had reigned for centuries as a raising king.

The duke licked his lips. “There is nothing raising them, as there is nothing raising me.”

“You believe this is the greater purpose of a raising monster?”

“I have wondered from decade to decade, my queen. A king can only raise so many hundreds of thousands of stairs from contracts before he sees the solution to conventional downfalls. A person cannot feel spiteful and resentful for long if that person is sound in self-esteem and confident in their values. What if these qualities were raised ? Hopes, integrity, honesty, wellness.” He cut off, remembering the company of princesses.

The duke swallowed.

“Duke Raise, your connection is great indeed,” I told him. “You have molded more shape to the ponderings of a queen.”

He cleared his throat. “That is what a human liaison is for. I may not use a radio, my queen, but I will fulfill my role to offer guidance on matters of humans in my own way.”

I walked to the duke and rested a hand on his arm. “Of that I never had a doubt, sir, and truth be told, I will be glad to be rid of that radio that plays day and night and day again.”

“We dance in talks of the future to avoid talking of the now,” muttered Marchioness Take darkly, who stared at the map.

Her fists clenched by her sides, and she looked up to deliver a challenging look.

“Who is next to lose their loved one?” Her tone dripped in sarcasm.

“Surely not the Changes who cannot change. Surely not the Brings who have not met again. Ask what you must ask of me, my queen, but do not dance in merrier topics to avoid it.”

I tilted my head and considered defending myself before quashing that.

There was no need. She wished to be joined in anger, and that did not serve my queendom.

“Marchioness Take, you have just been reunited with your marquis. So fresh are your promises of what you will be for each other. So I give you tonight to say goodbye for a time or forever. We will heal your seam next because there is no other choice.”

“There is the choice to do yours,” she hissed.

“The heart must be last.”

She snapped, “Why?”

“Because I cannot be sure of my state after,” I replied .

The princess rolled her eyes. “Will you fill your chamber with bottles too? Will you be rendered unwilling to go on?”

She spoke hastily for a champion who had not yet lost her loved one.

The thought of crumbling in a heap had not occurred to me.

“No such thing, Princess. I cannot be sure of the toll on my power, and I cannot be sure whether healing the heart must occur once every other part is healed. Regardless, such an encounter will surely demand all I have, and so I wish to give over to that with certainty that I will not be required to face more battles after. That is why I will go last.”

The princess deflated before my logic. “I just got him back. For the first time I have all of him.”

“I know, my champion. I know.”

She inhaled. “So I have tonight.”

“You have tonight.”

Princess Bring interrupted, “What were you just saying about me?”

I glanced to the doorway where she blobbed.

“Not you, my queen, her. Who must I meet again?” the young princess demanded.

Marchioness Take scoffed. “No one.”

Duke Raise fortified the lie. “I wondered the same, but perhaps the princess spoke from an irrational place of emotion just now.”

The princess of taking glared, but said, as if she chewed nails, “Yes, I suppose I did.”

I rather thought the duke may be good for Marchioness Take. My other princesses rarely held her accountable.

Princess Change added, “Perhaps meet yourself again. You are learning so much every night.”

Their protective instincts warmed me. We had never cared for a baby monster, nor a teen monster.

We may never have that experience again.

Releasing our expectations of Princess Bring so quickly was difficult indeed, but I rather thought from the storm clouds gathering in her blobs that we should adjust with all possible speed.

She slapped the floor with her bottom blob, and I cut in. “What are your current mature thoughts, Princess?”

Princess Bring did her best to rein in her slap and squelch.

“I have thoughts of maintaining a home, Your Majesty. Of exploring the pleasures of my body. For as magnificent as I feel, I can only imagine the magnificence to be shared with another’s body.

” She looked at each monster in turn. “I had thought that only a pawn might remain to entertain me. Do you say that there is another monster I have not met?”

The princess was full in power, and she radiated a confidence that had been so rattled apart in her first life. That princess had reclaimed her self-esteem, but how heartening to see its pure form.