Chapter 6
Serenity
Nothing’s happening.
Granted, it’s only been thirty minutes, but I’ve taken to stalking through what appears to be an honest-to-goodness palace. The king’s sly smiles only serve to make my foul mood even fouler.
The man beside me, for his part, has been cordial and chivalrous and completely and utterly fake. It makes me want to rake my hands through his hair and shake him until the calculation in his eyes drips onto his tongue and out his mouth. He’s acting like I’m a ticking time bomb and he’s waiting for me to explode.
I hate it just as much as I hate each subsequent room I enter. I don’t like the gold filigree that adorns just about everything, or the intricate designs carved into the very woodwork of this place. I don’t like the white, white walls and the polished floors. The delicate art and the crystal chandeliers.
The sheer opulence of it is an insult to the land beyond the walls.
“They were right about you, weren’t they?” I ask, rotating to the king. When I catch sight of him, déjà vu ripples through me, but I can’t place it—yet.
He’s already studying me, like I’m some fascinating creature he wishes to collect.
“Right about what?” He lays his hand on the small of my back, trying to steer me out of his drawing room—or is it his tea room? They all have absurd names and more absurd purposes.
“Your cruelty.” I shrug off his touch, striding ahead of him.
The ploy doesn’t work. He’s much taller, his legs much longer, and in a few short paces he’s cut me off.
The king looms over me, and he takes a step forward.
I stand my ground, though it means brushing against him.
“Have you not already figured that out for yourself? You’ve always been able to see right through me,” he says, his voice low. The pitch is both secretive and threatening, and I can’t stop the goosebumps that spread down my arms.
He’s the boogeyman, and he’s come to claim me all over again.
With that thought, I catch a memory. Just a snippet, really.
“Serenity?”
My hand was already on the door. I turned back to face an older man with hair the color of dusty wheat.
The wrinkles around his eyes and mouth deepened. “As an emissary, if an accord is ever to be reached between us and the Eastern Empire, you will likely be a key player in it.”
I swallowed and nodded. I now carried a heavy responsibility.
“Do you know what that means?”
I waited for him to finish.
His gaze lingered on me a long time before he finally answered his own question. “One day you’ll meet the king.”
I blink, and the object of my memory is in front of me again.
The king tilts his head. “You just had your first memory, didn’t you?”
I nod. The man from my past—the man I spoke with—he’s at the edge of my mind and the tip of my tongue. I’m positive I know him, but his identity still eludes me.
“What did you remember?” He picks up a lock of my hair and rubs it as he asks.
He wants to touch me. He’s been fairly obvious about this, but I sense his impatience increasing.
“Nothing that I can make sense of.”
Those dark eyes probe mine. “That’ll change soon enough.” And then you’ll be mine. I swear I hear the promise, though he never voices it.
The king backs off, but that stubborn hand of his presses into the small of my back again. There’s no use fighting him on this; he’s going to keep doing it, and I’m going to keep losing.
In the halls, men and women pass by, and they’re just as ridiculous as the rest of this place. The people here wear fabrics with fine names I doubt, even if I could remember, I’d know.
Their outfits are intricate things that come in colors brighter than I knew existed, and each one is paired with decorative medals and sabers or ropes of jewels wrapped around necks and wrists. Their hair’s too coiffed, their teeth too white, their skin too stretched, their bodies too soft.
It all looks so luxurious and impossibly fake.
I don’t belong here.
The king must see my lingering attention on the people who side-eye me. He leans in, his lips brushing the shell of my ear. “None of them are as beautiful as you, nire bihotza.”
I scowl at him. “I don’t care about your standards of beauty.”
If anything, it annoys me. These men and women bask in the opulence of it. But how many lives has this lifestyle cost?
The king’s gaze tracks my movements, and I wonder if I’m one of the lives it’s claimed.
I suspect I am.
In the brief silence between us, a dizzying number of questions bloom. It’s amazing how many a girl with only a few days of memory can have. I want to know more about who the king is, who I am, who my enemies are, why wrong seems right and right seems wrong. Most of all, I want to know how I’ve been bent and twisted into this person that seems to hate and be hated so fiercely by everyone, save the king.
“Why did you marry me?” I ask as we leave the king’s grand ballroom. I won’t even touch on the ridiculousness of a room dedicated to nothing but dancing.
“Ssssh. I’ll answer your questions soon enough. Let me enjoy the last few minutes before you hate me again.”
I know his words are meant to grate, but I doubt he realizes how ominous I find them. What would it take for a woman like me to hate him?
“When I was a prisoner, they told me you killed my family,” I say.
“They told you that?”
“They told me many things. Is it true?”
His features are guarded. “You’ll know soon enough.”
And I do.
We’re in the palace gardens when it hits.
I stumble, reaching out for the king—Montes. After the bits and pieces I received inside the palace, I assumed the rest of my memories would subtly surface. I didn’t imagine this.
This is a barrage of enemy fire. It rips through me suddenly and violently.
Montes’s arms lock around my torso as I gasp, my messy golden hair dangling around me.
Every memory feels like an epiphany, and I can’t possibly describe the euphoria that comes with each. Life is a series of experiences that stack, one on top of the other.
I see my mother and my father—the man from my first recalled memory now has an identity! I see bikes with training wheels. Suburbia. My parents hold my hands and, on the count of three, they swing me. There are candles and birthdays and mentions of war breaking out in Europe.
There are chalk drawings and games of tag with the kids on my street—some I’ve known for ages, some who are part of the recent influx of immigrants. Nail polish and days out with my mother while my father buries himself in work. My childhood crush that lives down the street.
The act of remembering is magic; I get to live a little of my life all over again.
And then …
And then, somewhere along the way, they turn.
For every ray of light each happy memory casts, there is a much darker shadow.
I moan as I hear phantom explosions. I see blood spray. This dark past is sucking me under.
I step out of the king’s embrace and hold my head. “No, no, no.”
One bad memory follows the last. My mom’s broken neck, soldiers with glassy eyes. The first four men I killed—my friends watch me with wary eyes after that. A bomb that takes over the sky and hides the sun. My city, my home, my childhood crush and everyone else is obliterated in a single blast.
Then, radiation, everywhere. In the food, the water, our bodies. Civilizations swiftly fell into depravity when the last pillar of humanity gave out.
My father’s body cradled in my arms.
I feel the loss all over again. Fresh. New. As though in this moment I lose my mother, my father, my land, my freedom all at once.
Through it all is a single face, the answer to all my anger and anguish.
Montes Lazuli.
The king did this. I blink back tears. He did this and now I’m his. Bound to the root of the evil I tried so hard to stop. It’s almost unfathomable. There is no fairness in the world. There is no kindness.
A sick feeling twists my gut. I’ve laid with the king. I’ve let him into my body. Worse, I’ve let him into my heart.
I only have a moment to register that I’m going to be sick before I begin to heave. But there’s nothing left in my empty stomach to purge. The queasiness doesn’t abate.
“Serenity!” Montes’s voice cuts through, and it’s so concerned. I jerk myself away from the monster.
More memories force their way through and I press my palms into my eyes. I scream as bloody, broken bodies flood my mind. And behind it all, the kind’s white, white smile. I want to smash it in and not stop until those teeth rip up my knuckles and fall out of his mouth. I let out a sob because I like the very smile I also detest.
It’s the face behind every nightmare I’ve ever had, and the face that awakened my heart. It’s ripping, bleeding. This shouldn’t be the way of things, hating and loving something at the same time.
But it’s not enough for my mind to end there. I feel the squeeze of my heart as a memory of the king holding me sneaks its way in. Another of his fearful expression when he learned of my cancer. The unguarded face he wore when nothing separated us. And through it all I see his eyes, filled with a bottomless reservoir of emotions reserved for me.
The heartless king has found his heart after all. It rests beneath my ribcage. God save me, he swapped mine for his when I wasn’t looking. And now we’re stuck—me with the weight of his death count, him with the guilt of my suffering.
Flesh and bone aren’t meant to contain all this. The mind shouldn’t stay sane when the world’s fallen to chaos, and love shouldn’t be able to grow in the wastelands of our consciences.
But, God save us all, it does.
It does.