Two Kingdoms
Long time, no see, Livejournal! Or actually there is seeing, because I still read my friends-list, I just don't post... So anyway, there was a merry_fates prompt competition and I was procrastinating so intensely I couldn't resist.
This is your brain around the 87,000th word of a 65,000 word novel you've been working on for over two years and are really, honestly about to finish. Alternately: 'I couldn't write traditional medieval high fantasy if I tried'. Or 'my brain works in strange ways, part eight million'.
Being invisible can teach you a lot of things.
It has taught me, for example, that the serving girls spit in the queen’s food, that the princess’ most prized possessions are the rows of wax cylinders lined up behind the phonograph, that two of the king’s guards are living a life of lies in stolen embraces, and that the king barely sleeps because he’d rather meet with his scientific advisors until early in the morning and pore over star charts and circuit diagrams endlessly. (It’d taken them two weeks to explain to him what zapping combination of gases and electric current allowed the glass globes he’d imported from the city to give off the blue light that dominates the palace now.)
But it’s more than that. Seeing other people when they can’t see you teaches you an entire other language. You learn to infer a lot of things from simple gestures, like which ones will end in private tears and which ones will end in fists intentionally meeting stone walls.
You learn to be the perfect spy.
They’re saying goodbye. Even if I couldn’t hear it, I’d be able to see it in the specific way she turns her back and pulls away, the precise nature of how he weakly pulls her back.
It’s tragic and sorrowful, if you’re into that sort of thing.
I’m not, because a soldier going off to war isn’t the kind of secret moment anyone gets an advantage from knowing about.
I sigh from my vantage point in the window. The stone blocks the tower was built from are wide enough to sit on, but the cold wind at my back reminds me it’s not the best idea.
The lady is presenting the soldier with a token made from a lock of her hair. I yawn.
Underneath the window is the city, dotted with bright blue lights. Against the valley, it looks like a spiderweb caught in the rain. The new railroad lines snake out, thick and black, in every direction.
The soldier kisses the back of the lady’s palm, and a tear leaks from the corner of her eye, and I hop off the windowsill and start down the stairs.
I leave note of my day’s observations in a niche halfway down, behind a tapestry of a bearded man looking through a telescope. He’s looking through the wrong end, but I suspect the artist didn’t know that.
There’s not much. The court and castle have been quiet, for once. It won’t last long, I’m sure. Someone will be by soon to pick it up, a progress report before my evening summary, a measure only useful on far more interesting days.
I continue down the stairs, pressing myself up against the wall every time another person barrels through, thinking they’re alone. I keep walking until I hear shouting.
It’s the king; it almost always is.
The room is the size of two adjacent broom closets, and contains two benches and a glowing hemisphere attached to the ceiling. The king is standing in the doorway, and the prince is sitting down.
The rough wooden bench is too low, and his knees stick up at an angle, like someone who hasn’t grown into their limbs yet.
The king has stopped shouting by the time I reach them, but his words are as sharp and as hard as the new metals the alchemists bring him each month. “My father ruled an entirely different kingdom,” he’s saying. “You’ll rule another one entirely. But I have to rule both, and that has taught me a thing or two about being strong.”
The prince nods, but his fingertips parade impatiently back and forth against the side of his knee.
“I’ll teach you to be strong,” the king says, with the same booming voice he uses for public proclamations. The king is one of few men who is not overly different whether he knows he’s facing a crowd or not. “And when you’re in my place, you’ll thank me.”
He reaches over to slam the door, and I slip past him just before it closes.
The prince leans back once he's gone, loudly puffing out a breath. “Sure, but do you have to be such a bastard about it?”
I sit down on the other bench as he rearranges his arms and legs, elbows and knees. I’m watching the progress of a spider across the ceiling when he settles.
“Oh,” he says, abruptly still and noticing my presence. “Hello.”
“Hello,” I say. Aside from the alchemists, the prince is the only person in the castle I've talked to in years.
“He’s really bought into his own self-importance, hasn’t his?” the prince says.
“A bit,” I agree. Monarchy does that to you.
The prince fixes me with a look, and I study the shadowy pattern of blue light across his nose.
“I’ve never asked you,” he says. “What happened?”
There’s a complication to the prince’s ability to see me: he thinks I’m a ghost.
“You’re only halfway here,” he says. “They say that only people who die terrible deaths become ghosts. Did you have an egotistical father too?”
“I don’t remember,” I say, the easy lie of a spy. It’s much better than telling him that I’m just as alive as he is, or that I have no idea why he can see even half of me when everyone else can’t see any. He’s not likely to share a ghost story, so as long as he keeps thinking I’m dead, I can keep talking to him.
Watching the palace gets boring. So there’s absolutely no way I could tell him that what actually happened was my mother wasn’t able to get me placed as one of the princess’s ladies-in-waiting, and instead I ended up an assistant in the alchemist’s lab, and I do in fact remember, that one day there was an accident but it didn't kill me.
“Maybe you’re waiting for someone to solve your murder,” the prince muses. He’s still studying me, and I suppose that, semi-translucent and under the blue light, I probably do look like a ghost.
It’s been a while since I saw myself in a mirror.
He’s not watching me anymore, though, and he’s taken up my previous occupation of watching the spider cross the ceiling. I join him, watching it be drawn in by the glow of the lamp.
“Do you think spiders have kings?” the prince asks me with his head tilted slightly to the side.
I sleep in a room off the labs, down underground below the north tower. It’s five curving flights of stairs down. Before I sleep, I tell one of the alchemists what I’ve learned.
It’s rarely the same one, but it’s always a man with a shining-shaven head and a long beard, and glasses sprouting a dozen different lenses, including the deep blue ones that make my invisible silhouette distinct.
Today’s report is boring. I don’t mention the couple saying goodbye. The king is frustrated with his heir again. The princess sent a servant into the city to buy her a set of peasant boy clothes. One of the duchesses is having an affair, but so is her husband.
A normal day for the castle.
The alchemist tells me to watch court tomorrow, and then I go to sleep, wondering why the world still disappears behind blackness when I close my invisible eyelids.
Watching the court invisibly isn’t much different than being a member of the crowd of simpering courtesans. All of the secrets here take place behind closed doors.
The king sits at the center in a throne adorned with gold and silver and glowing electric tubes. There’s an empty, less ornate, throne for a queen dead nine years, and two smaller versions off to the side for the prince and princess.
The prince looks bored. The princess doesn’t, presumably because she knows enough to hide it.
There’s nothing to see, but court observations are always the most important ones to the alchemists-and, by extension, the king they report to.
I’m sitting on a cushion at the edge of a group of newly-titled inventors and factory owners. Their clothes are as fine as the others, but trend towards darker colors, and fail to cover up the comparative roughness of their city-bred accents.
There’s another spider on the wall. They’re all over the palace these days, it seems. I watch this one, but it’s in a hurry and disappears among the stones within a moment.
I turn back to the scene, sure I haven’t missed anything, and see a familiar head making its way through the crowd. The soldier from yesterday, dressed in mail and battle colors.
With all the melodrama the day before, I would’ve expected him to be gone already. If that was the prelude, I can only imagine the production that will be made of the actual goodbye.
He weaves his way towards the king with single-minded focus, and I get to my feet. There’s something strange, overly purposeful, about his stride with helmet on and sword strapped to his side.
Maybe he’s on a last-minute quest to be excused from service to remain with his lady?
But he’s not walking like a desperate lover. He’s parting the crowd like a soldier on a mission.
As he makes his way through the crowds and breaks into the inner sanctum around the king, I do the same, leaving lords and ladies glancing over their shoulders in attempts to puzzle out how empty air managed to push them aside.
I reach the empty circle around the thrones a split-second after the soldier does, just in time to see him raising a gun.
The crowd gasps, and he pulls the trigger, silencing the gossip with three earsplitting shots and a sharp white crackle of electricity.
I continue to step forward, slow as a sleepwalker, but the king has three holes in him now. Even in the sickly blue electric lights I can see he’s dead.
The king’s guards tackle the soldier a minute too late, too distracted by their concern for each other’s safety, and I know that the goodbye yesterday was never about him going off to war at all.
I didn’t see.
The king’s children are at his side a minute later, walking slow and shell-shocked. The prince is old enough to inherit. He’s not the prince anymore. He scans the crowd blankly, but I see it register in his eyes when they skip over me. His sister is older, and walks ahead of him with a hand floating between them keeping him back.
The floor is splattered with the king’s blood, more and more seeping out belatedly.
The crowd is pressing in, and more and more people are trying to occupy the space I’m taking up, so I start to slip backwards through the crowd. I’ll go up to the top of the North Tower, maybe, or the abandoned throne room in the old wing. Someplace free of pressing crowds and blood and spiders.
I’ve nearly disappeared into the crowd when someone grabs my shoulder. Not accidentally. Precisely, the way you can only be when you know something is in front of you.
I turn around to find the princess at the other end of the grip on my arm. I don’t know how she escaped the circle around the body.
“It’s my understanding,” she says, “that with my father dead, you’re out of a job.”
I hadn’t thought of it as such yet, but it was true. The only ones who knew I was here were the alchemists, and with a new king no one knew the temperament of, there was no guarantee they would be here to stay.
“I suppose,” I say. From my experience with the alchemists, the voice from nowhere is generally quite distressing. But I’m not entirely sure she can’t see exactly where I am.
“Well,” she says, “I’m offering a second job.”
“What kind of job?” I follow up immediately.
“I want you to watch my brother for me,” she says. “I want to know his plans, his inclinations, his secrets, his habits. I want to know the king better than he knows himself.”
I don’t think about it. I say “yes,” and offer out my hand.
She doesn’t hesitate before reaching out to my invisible handshake, and I take note.
I really did not intend to write that in six hours...
This is your brain around the 87,000th word of a 65,000 word novel you've been working on for over two years and are really, honestly about to finish. Alternately: 'I couldn't write traditional medieval high fantasy if I tried'. Or 'my brain works in strange ways, part eight million'.
Being invisible can teach you a lot of things.
It has taught me, for example, that the serving girls spit in the queen’s food, that the princess’ most prized possessions are the rows of wax cylinders lined up behind the phonograph, that two of the king’s guards are living a life of lies in stolen embraces, and that the king barely sleeps because he’d rather meet with his scientific advisors until early in the morning and pore over star charts and circuit diagrams endlessly. (It’d taken them two weeks to explain to him what zapping combination of gases and electric current allowed the glass globes he’d imported from the city to give off the blue light that dominates the palace now.)
But it’s more than that. Seeing other people when they can’t see you teaches you an entire other language. You learn to infer a lot of things from simple gestures, like which ones will end in private tears and which ones will end in fists intentionally meeting stone walls.
You learn to be the perfect spy.
They’re saying goodbye. Even if I couldn’t hear it, I’d be able to see it in the specific way she turns her back and pulls away, the precise nature of how he weakly pulls her back.
It’s tragic and sorrowful, if you’re into that sort of thing.
I’m not, because a soldier going off to war isn’t the kind of secret moment anyone gets an advantage from knowing about.
I sigh from my vantage point in the window. The stone blocks the tower was built from are wide enough to sit on, but the cold wind at my back reminds me it’s not the best idea.
The lady is presenting the soldier with a token made from a lock of her hair. I yawn.
Underneath the window is the city, dotted with bright blue lights. Against the valley, it looks like a spiderweb caught in the rain. The new railroad lines snake out, thick and black, in every direction.
The soldier kisses the back of the lady’s palm, and a tear leaks from the corner of her eye, and I hop off the windowsill and start down the stairs.
I leave note of my day’s observations in a niche halfway down, behind a tapestry of a bearded man looking through a telescope. He’s looking through the wrong end, but I suspect the artist didn’t know that.
There’s not much. The court and castle have been quiet, for once. It won’t last long, I’m sure. Someone will be by soon to pick it up, a progress report before my evening summary, a measure only useful on far more interesting days.
I continue down the stairs, pressing myself up against the wall every time another person barrels through, thinking they’re alone. I keep walking until I hear shouting.
It’s the king; it almost always is.
The room is the size of two adjacent broom closets, and contains two benches and a glowing hemisphere attached to the ceiling. The king is standing in the doorway, and the prince is sitting down.
The rough wooden bench is too low, and his knees stick up at an angle, like someone who hasn’t grown into their limbs yet.
The king has stopped shouting by the time I reach them, but his words are as sharp and as hard as the new metals the alchemists bring him each month. “My father ruled an entirely different kingdom,” he’s saying. “You’ll rule another one entirely. But I have to rule both, and that has taught me a thing or two about being strong.”
The prince nods, but his fingertips parade impatiently back and forth against the side of his knee.
“I’ll teach you to be strong,” the king says, with the same booming voice he uses for public proclamations. The king is one of few men who is not overly different whether he knows he’s facing a crowd or not. “And when you’re in my place, you’ll thank me.”
He reaches over to slam the door, and I slip past him just before it closes.
The prince leans back once he's gone, loudly puffing out a breath. “Sure, but do you have to be such a bastard about it?”
I sit down on the other bench as he rearranges his arms and legs, elbows and knees. I’m watching the progress of a spider across the ceiling when he settles.
“Oh,” he says, abruptly still and noticing my presence. “Hello.”
“Hello,” I say. Aside from the alchemists, the prince is the only person in the castle I've talked to in years.
“He’s really bought into his own self-importance, hasn’t his?” the prince says.
“A bit,” I agree. Monarchy does that to you.
The prince fixes me with a look, and I study the shadowy pattern of blue light across his nose.
“I’ve never asked you,” he says. “What happened?”
There’s a complication to the prince’s ability to see me: he thinks I’m a ghost.
“You’re only halfway here,” he says. “They say that only people who die terrible deaths become ghosts. Did you have an egotistical father too?”
“I don’t remember,” I say, the easy lie of a spy. It’s much better than telling him that I’m just as alive as he is, or that I have no idea why he can see even half of me when everyone else can’t see any. He’s not likely to share a ghost story, so as long as he keeps thinking I’m dead, I can keep talking to him.
Watching the palace gets boring. So there’s absolutely no way I could tell him that what actually happened was my mother wasn’t able to get me placed as one of the princess’s ladies-in-waiting, and instead I ended up an assistant in the alchemist’s lab, and I do in fact remember, that one day there was an accident but it didn't kill me.
“Maybe you’re waiting for someone to solve your murder,” the prince muses. He’s still studying me, and I suppose that, semi-translucent and under the blue light, I probably do look like a ghost.
It’s been a while since I saw myself in a mirror.
He’s not watching me anymore, though, and he’s taken up my previous occupation of watching the spider cross the ceiling. I join him, watching it be drawn in by the glow of the lamp.
“Do you think spiders have kings?” the prince asks me with his head tilted slightly to the side.
I sleep in a room off the labs, down underground below the north tower. It’s five curving flights of stairs down. Before I sleep, I tell one of the alchemists what I’ve learned.
It’s rarely the same one, but it’s always a man with a shining-shaven head and a long beard, and glasses sprouting a dozen different lenses, including the deep blue ones that make my invisible silhouette distinct.
Today’s report is boring. I don’t mention the couple saying goodbye. The king is frustrated with his heir again. The princess sent a servant into the city to buy her a set of peasant boy clothes. One of the duchesses is having an affair, but so is her husband.
A normal day for the castle.
The alchemist tells me to watch court tomorrow, and then I go to sleep, wondering why the world still disappears behind blackness when I close my invisible eyelids.
Watching the court invisibly isn’t much different than being a member of the crowd of simpering courtesans. All of the secrets here take place behind closed doors.
The king sits at the center in a throne adorned with gold and silver and glowing electric tubes. There’s an empty, less ornate, throne for a queen dead nine years, and two smaller versions off to the side for the prince and princess.
The prince looks bored. The princess doesn’t, presumably because she knows enough to hide it.
There’s nothing to see, but court observations are always the most important ones to the alchemists-and, by extension, the king they report to.
I’m sitting on a cushion at the edge of a group of newly-titled inventors and factory owners. Their clothes are as fine as the others, but trend towards darker colors, and fail to cover up the comparative roughness of their city-bred accents.
There’s another spider on the wall. They’re all over the palace these days, it seems. I watch this one, but it’s in a hurry and disappears among the stones within a moment.
I turn back to the scene, sure I haven’t missed anything, and see a familiar head making its way through the crowd. The soldier from yesterday, dressed in mail and battle colors.
With all the melodrama the day before, I would’ve expected him to be gone already. If that was the prelude, I can only imagine the production that will be made of the actual goodbye.
He weaves his way towards the king with single-minded focus, and I get to my feet. There’s something strange, overly purposeful, about his stride with helmet on and sword strapped to his side.
Maybe he’s on a last-minute quest to be excused from service to remain with his lady?
But he’s not walking like a desperate lover. He’s parting the crowd like a soldier on a mission.
As he makes his way through the crowds and breaks into the inner sanctum around the king, I do the same, leaving lords and ladies glancing over their shoulders in attempts to puzzle out how empty air managed to push them aside.
I reach the empty circle around the thrones a split-second after the soldier does, just in time to see him raising a gun.
The crowd gasps, and he pulls the trigger, silencing the gossip with three earsplitting shots and a sharp white crackle of electricity.
I continue to step forward, slow as a sleepwalker, but the king has three holes in him now. Even in the sickly blue electric lights I can see he’s dead.
The king’s guards tackle the soldier a minute too late, too distracted by their concern for each other’s safety, and I know that the goodbye yesterday was never about him going off to war at all.
I didn’t see.
The king’s children are at his side a minute later, walking slow and shell-shocked. The prince is old enough to inherit. He’s not the prince anymore. He scans the crowd blankly, but I see it register in his eyes when they skip over me. His sister is older, and walks ahead of him with a hand floating between them keeping him back.
The floor is splattered with the king’s blood, more and more seeping out belatedly.
The crowd is pressing in, and more and more people are trying to occupy the space I’m taking up, so I start to slip backwards through the crowd. I’ll go up to the top of the North Tower, maybe, or the abandoned throne room in the old wing. Someplace free of pressing crowds and blood and spiders.
I’ve nearly disappeared into the crowd when someone grabs my shoulder. Not accidentally. Precisely, the way you can only be when you know something is in front of you.
I turn around to find the princess at the other end of the grip on my arm. I don’t know how she escaped the circle around the body.
“It’s my understanding,” she says, “that with my father dead, you’re out of a job.”
I hadn’t thought of it as such yet, but it was true. The only ones who knew I was here were the alchemists, and with a new king no one knew the temperament of, there was no guarantee they would be here to stay.
“I suppose,” I say. From my experience with the alchemists, the voice from nowhere is generally quite distressing. But I’m not entirely sure she can’t see exactly where I am.
“Well,” she says, “I’m offering a second job.”
“What kind of job?” I follow up immediately.
“I want you to watch my brother for me,” she says. “I want to know his plans, his inclinations, his secrets, his habits. I want to know the king better than he knows himself.”
I don’t think about it. I say “yes,” and offer out my hand.
She doesn’t hesitate before reaching out to my invisible handshake, and I take note.
I really did not intend to write that in six hours...