Free Burning Kingdoms by Lauren DeStefano Page B

us.”
    Flawless. She must have been planning what she was going to say. She raises her chin, quite proud of herself.
    “So you came down to welcome us,” King Ingram says skeptically.
    “There was something else,” Nimble says. “Her Highness is too modest to bring it up unprompted.”
    “Oh?” the king says.
    Celeste’s face becomes guarded. She sits, prim and rigid. She folds her hands in her lap. “As you can imagine, Internment being so small, there’s only so much room for advancement.” She lowers her eyes, composing herself, and then she looks at the king. “My mother, the queen, is rather ill. She’ll die soon if she isn’t treated.”
    And with those few words, it all makes sense. The tranquilizer darts, and holding me hostage while demanding information. Not telling her father or the patrolmen the truth when we escaped and injured her brother in the process. The stowing away, holding a knife to Thomas’s throat so we wouldn’t cast her out.
    She wasn’t a bratty princess discontent with her tiny paradise and striving for grander things, and she wasn’t trying to torment us like the game she hunted for amusement. She was desperate.
    King Ingram takes this as a bit of politics. “We know you haven’t got a sister,” he says. “Is there a prince?”
    “Yes, my older brother.” Celeste hesitates. “He’s incapacitated at the moment.”
    King Ingram tucks his lens into his breast pocket, pats it into place. “So I have Internment’s heiress presumptive in my parlor?” he says.
    “Yes,” she says, with some difficulty. “If you’d like to call it that.”
    “It isn’t a matter of what I like to call it,” the king says. “Your mother is dying, and your brother isn’t fit to inherit the throne—”
    “Not at the moment, Your Majesty, but—”
    “So at the moment, you are it.” He smiles, all the lines in his face spreading out, making him a drawing of himself. He breaks into a laugh that is startling, coming from a man so small in stature. “I think you should embrace it,” he says. “You’re your kingdom’s only hope. Yes, I believe we can work together. I’d be a fool to say no.”
    I don’t know what this means. I only know I’ve given up the idea that I’ll like him.
    There is talk of airplanes and biplanes and altitudes and atmospheres. According to King Ingram, Internment sits above the troposphere at thirty-five thousand feet, in a zone called the stratosphere. The most powerful planes the kingdom has to offer right now are hardly capable of leaving the troposphere and are unable to endure the stratosphere anyway. But there is talk of a new sort of plane that may be able to reach Internment. A jet, he calls it.
    “We had a lot of fancy hopes about visiting the floating island,” King Ingram says. “But then the war began and we’ve had bigger fish to fry. There is an archipelago that sits between the kingdom of Havalais and the kingdom of Dastor. King Erasmus and I are having, shall we say, a disagreement about who should have it.”
    “An archipelago is a cluster of islands,” Nimble tells us.
    “Yes, thank you, I gathered,” Celeste says, though I’m sure she hadn’t. We would have no cause to know something like that. I’ve only just learned what an ocean is. Celeste looks to the king. “Am I to understand that this war is all about a cluster of islands?”
    “It isn’t the islands,” the king says. “They’re too small to be inhabitable. But they contain something precious. There is a substance that occurs naturally beneath its soils, called phosane. When it is in rock form, it isn’t of much use. But once melted down and refined, a few gallons could fuel a city for a year.”
    If the war seemed absurd when I thought it was being fought over islands, I think it’s doubly absurd now that I know it’s being fought over fuel. Sunlight is always free and fuels Internment, and there’s plenty of that to go around. But I don’t say that, for I