THE KINGMAKERS PART 1

Prologue

King Julien was not always a monster.

Before he was crowned and built the wall and lost the love of the people and drove off the mages and killed his heirs, he was only a man. A man called Jules.

No, King Julien was not always a monster.

Part 1

Amelie

The sun has reached its summit when a beastie finds us.

It slinks into the brush, bones jutting from jagged tussocks of tawny fur. I watch him through the scope of my rifle, tracking his jolted path.

“Maman—“

“Quiet,” I murmur to the red-haired boy at my side, nodding toward our prey.

Rueben yanks a bleached tuft of grass from the dusty ground. The blades crackle and snap as he tears them to pieces. Sweat drips into my eyes and I wipe them with the stained fabric of my headscarf, watching Rue arrange the broken grass into HUNGRY.

I chuckle, a light puff of breath, and return my attention to the hunt.

Rue is always hungry. Since the day he came screaming from my womb, he has hungered. Unlike his father, Rue’s appetite is for food alone.

A rare gust ruffles my hair, blowing our scent around. The beastie prowls closer to the hillock we crouch on. His glassy eyes search for danger but what he’s really looking for is food, starving like the boy at my side.

With the noise of the wind and the creaking sway of the brush as cover, I cock the trigger.

The beastie hears. He whips his scrawny head in our direction.

Time slows.

Between breaths, I note the scar on the beastie’s cheek. The scar of a bullet graze as he fled. This isn’t our first meeting.

My finger tenses against the cool metal of my rifle’s trigger and I pull.

In that moment, when my Rue covers his small ears and the bullet travels ever forward, I feel a small tinge of regret.

The bullet hits, sinking the beastie faster than it can flee.

Darkness bleeds from the bullet wound and tinges the air metallic. I squeeze my eyes shut against the cold adrenaline seducing my body. The faces of all the beasts I used to fell flash in my mind like a reel of nightmares.

“Whooo!” Rue hoots, jostling me as he leaps to his feet. “Good shot, maman.”

I shake myself, forcing a smile. “You remember that beastie, Rue? He’s the one that got away a couple weeks ago.”

“I can tell you the story of it,” Rue says excitedly.

I welcome his melodious voice as a distraction from my thoughts.

So my Rue narrates the tale of a heroine with hair made of starlight. As I wrap the beastie in a thick hide from one of our other hunts, Rue tells me of the heroine’s quest to slay the monsters and feed the villagers. I shoulder the beastie just before he finishes with a flourish.

I spare a hand and clap it against my bare arm. “Bravo!”

“Maman?”

I look down at Rue’s dimpled smile and my heart swells. “Hmm?”

“Can we eat now?” He asks.

I laugh and lead my boy toward the Village road.

The thick hide blanket chafes my sunburned shoulders as we walk, feet kicking up clouds of red dust. Rue carries my rifle, careful to hold it above the dirt-packed road; careful like I taught him.

“Tell me,” I say to Rue between short breaths (I’m not as fit as I once was), “How much d’you think this beastie weighs?”

Rue turns to walk backward, still cautious with my rifle, and twists his small red mouth in thought.

“Well,” Rue draws the word out, “I’ve seen you struggle harder under that beastie we sold at 9 stone.” He catches the midday sun between two grimy fingers. “But only a little harder.”

“You’re stalling again,” I say.

“8 stone, maman.”

“Turn around before you stumble over a rut.” My child does as I say. “Now, if one beastie at 10 stone gives 3 stone worth of meat, how much meat will our beastie here bring us?”

“About 2 and a half stone, maman.”

I can barely hold back my praise. “Since that was so easy for you, how about one that’s really challenging?”

The red-roofed homes of the village bob up over the sun-bleached hills as Rue grins. “Bring it on.”

So I quiz him on numbers until the road turns from dirt to dark.

The Village is too small to have a name. Too small for maps or kings to know it and know it needed a name. On one side of the black road are three red-roofed homes. On the other, a country store, post-office, and church.

The country store sells goods that are a century old and the Reverend still speaks from a book that most people forgot about long ago. The letters I send from the post-office usually take twice as long to arrive.

But I didn’t come here for convenience or luxury.

When the coronation celebrations ended and Jules gave us our choice, I was the first to go. I knew one day he’d look for me. So I traveled to the one place I’d never be found.

Rue haggles with the butcher at the country store while I make a few stops of my own.

The first is the post-office to send off a letter. It doesn’t bear my name or any identifying marks. The return address is blank (and I don’t know what I’d put there anyway). I leave nothing up to fate.

The postman stops me as I’m out the door. “Letter for you, Am.”

I suppress my questions and accept it. “Thanks.”

The two people I pass along the Village road don’t say hello. They do watch me with vaguely smiling eyes. That’s progress.

I loiter on the sidewalk until there’s no one to see me slipping into the alley between the church and the post-office.

I rip open the letter and scan it quickly.

Solene’s words dig into my chest, stabbing through skin and squeezing my heart until it hurts to breathe.

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We grew up on the streets of the citadel, Julien and I. Our first tryst came too early for us to know what it meant. But we were young and hungry for love. Love, that was hard to come by for two broke orphans such as we.

We grew older and apart. He had aspirations that extended far beyond the back-alley jobs I took to survive. Jules wished for power and change in a kingdom falling to poverty and dust. I wished only for money to buy the love I craved and so I grew depraved.

I became good at my job; Jules grew better at his. When we met on rare occasions to rekindle the love we found in each other as kids, I saw the change. And I was seduced by it.

“Am,” Jules whispered to me one night we lay under the Western skies. “I hear you’re growing a reputation.”

I stiffened. “Says who?”

“Says anyone with a tongue loosened with too much booze,” Julien said. “They say you’ll kill a man with a single shot guaranteed. They say there isn’t a job you won’t take.”

“Girl’s got to eat, Jules.”

He turned toward me, his eyes like sun on sand. “I’m not judging you.”

“You stand on a platform all day to preach against the greed and violence rampant in our streets.” I pushed onto an elbow to get a better look at him. “Of course you are judging me.”

Julien sat up too, taking my calloused hands in his softening ones. “Am, I need to ask you something.”

The way he was looking at me took my breath away. In that moment, I would have done anything for him. Julien knew it, too. And it was a mark of how he’d changed that he took advantage it then.

“Am, I want to be King.” He whispered it softly against my neck, a feather-light movement of air in the night.

I pulled away from him. “You’re talking treason.”

“I know.” Julien didn’t even look ashamed. “But I want it. I want it more than I’ve ever wanted anything.”

“Even me?”

Jules launched to his feet and paced. “Can’t you see it, Am? We would rule this city side by side. The gentle King and his warrior Queen. We would put the wealthy bastards in their proper place. Our children would be exalted! Our names pressed into history books and our legacy spread across the world!” He grabbed my shoulders, infecting me with the world he’d painted for me. For us. “Can’t you see it, Em?”

Breathless, I said “yes. How far are you willing to go?”

“I’ll do anything,” he said.

I raised one brow. “Anything?”

Julien took me in his arms and kissed me passionately then.

He had fallen off the righteous path, become like me. And I liked it; I loved it. To me, it meant the guilt I carried for the blood on my hands would never come between us again.

But when Julien looked into my eyes and whispered, “Anything, Am,” I should have known I had sold my soul for a dream that would never be.

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.

.

The letter from Solene sits heavy in my pocket when I step into the church.

The reverend is practicing her speech. I stick to the shadows and listen.

“And when David was in the wilderness of Judah,” her warbling voice rings out, “he sought earnestly for the Lord. His soul thirsted and his flesh fainted for water, for food. But in that dry and weary land, David craved the Lord even more.”

The Reverend looks up. She winks, but it’s the only sign she knows I’m here.

“I know you are like David,” she says in a sonorous voice. “You are thirsty for more water than our sandy wells offer. You are hungry for more than our fields and gardens yield. But know, the Lord has a plan and He will provide. Hunger for what is righteous and the Lord will provide.”

I applaud her and she snorts humbly, picking up her can to hobble from the stage.

“You say you don’t believe.” The Reverend’s cane ticks like a clock against the cracked tile aisle. “Yet I find you in my church more and more these days.”

She settles down on a pew and I lean against its side. “I may not care for what you speak of, but I do like the way you speak.”

The Reverend chuckles, splaying her brown fingers in the rainbow of light spilling through the colored glass window.

I gaze at the older woman, my lips twitching with the news. “Have you heard? The rumors from the West?”

“Don’t know why I should care about a place so far off.” The Reverend taps her cane against the floor. “Can hardly keep things straight around here.”

“King Julien exiled the mages beyond the walls.”

The only sign she cares is a slight stiffening of her spine. “That so?”

“Thousands were killed.”

“I’ll keep them in my prayers.”

“Solene is safe,” I add, watching the Reverend from the corner of my eye. “They took shelter in City-sur-le-Wall.”

She relaxes, her lips parting to release a soft sigh. “Who’s Solene?”

I can’t fight back my smile as I push off the pew. I help the Reverend to her feet. She leans against my arm and we make our way from the sanctuary.

“Will you ever return?” I ask her quietly, even though there is no one around to hear. “To your people? To your love?”

The Reverend’s face cracks, lines pushing together and making it difficult to tell when one starts and the other ends. “Ha! They are not my people, Amelie.”

“But your miracles—“

“Hush,” the Reverend says, pushing me through the wide wooden doors. “Your Rue is about done haggling and he’ll be ready to eat. Don’t want to hold him up.”

Questions bubble to the tip of my tongue. But I hold it, inspecting the Reverend’s impassive face. I sigh when I find nothing new.

“Come to dinner,” I say, backing down the front steps. “I won’t take no this time.”

The Reverend snorts and checks the broken clock on her wrist. “Fine, fine. I suppose I can fit you in.” She turns and heads into her fortress once more. “Here comes Rue. He’s had a successful day at the butcher’s. Make sure to tell him job well done. He likes it when you praise him every now and then, you know.”

The Reverend shuts the doors to her church just as Rue skips around the post-office. My boy wears a grin and holds a sack much larger than it should be. The Reverend’s words of a moment ago are exactly true.

Not a mage, indeed.

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If it was not for the Queen, I might have never left him.

From the rumors I’d heard about her, I expected her to cower that night we took the palace. To fall to her knees and weep and beg me to spare her powdered head. After over ten years of killing, I’d learned people’s last words were all pathos. All blubbering and sobbing and trying to convince you to spare them. They tried to speak to the part of your soul that was not yet blackened by the blood on your hands.

Not this Queen.

“I thought you would be taller,” was what she said when I entered her room.

The sounds of the siege rang out in the hallway behind me as I shut the doors and locked them tight.

The moon hung in the sky yet the Queen did not lay abed. She wore her powdered face and gilded crown and rings of jewel and silver. I would have very much liked to take that smirking face and hang it on my wall.

But I was no mage; I was not Solene.

“And you carry a sword,” the Queen continued as I circled her. “I was very much hoping you would bring that famous rifle. The One-Shot Lady, that’s what they call you, yes?”

I considered gutting her. Because that was what she’d done to me when my parents were executed for daring to steal a loaf of bread.

But I was no dramatic; I was not Marguerite.

“I know why you hate me,” the Queen went on. “I hear you grew up in the streets of the lower levels. Though I have not been to those slums, I hear reports. I am truly sorry for it, dear.”

Yes, the Queen’s men cut out the hearts of the disloyal so perhaps I should’ve cut out her heart. But, unlike Yanik, I’d never cared for justice. At least, not the kind he preferred.

“Do you know me?” The Queen asked. “Do you know why I wear a powdered face? To draw away attention from the bruises beneath my eyes. Because I do not sleep. I do not dare when I know there are those who suffer.”

Quentin. Cruel Quentin, who would have made her agonize. No, I would not torture her. Not her, not anyone.

“Because I love you,” said the Queen. “I love each of you, my people. And if you bore the weight of this crown, you would understand how hard I try for you.”

I stopped before the Queen, meeting her eyes. “It’s not enough,” I said.

The Queen rose and, lifting her skirts, she stepped onto the dais. Lifting the crown from her head, she laid it down before me. She smoothed onyx curls from her pale neck and pressed her forehead to my feet.

“Then my life is yours to take,” she said.

When she said it, it was like fate aligned. Yes, let her die broken hearted for failing her people. Let her die for love since it was love she stole from me.

And so, without hesitation, I cut off the head she offered.

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.

Rue is telling me the story of his barter with the butcher as I arrange three place settings around our small table.

I nod along and exclaim in all the right place. But my thoughts linger on the letter. Why would Julien exile his most powerful allies? Especially after losing the love of his people.

It makes my chest feel tight, but I can’t help but wonder: What is he planning?

“Maman?”

I look up, my heart plummeting when I see Rue’s disappointed face. “I’m so sorry, Rue. I missed the ending.”

“It’s alright,” he says softly.

I rush to my boy, taking him in my arms. “It isn’t. Tell me again from the beginning. I won’t be able to sleep tonight if I don’t hear it.”

“Maman,” Rue says, touching my downturned mouth. “Why do you look so sad today?”

I hold his hand to my cheek when he moves to take it away. “I got very bad news from an old friend, Rue. Very bad news indeed.”

Rue twists his mouth in thought. “Was it about my father?”

“No.” I hesitate. “Well, yes. It was some very bad news about your father.”

“I hate him,” Rue hisses with more indignation than I’ve ever heard from him.

“Oh, Rue,” I say, feeling lost. “You don’t have to hate him. He is your father, after all.”

Rue nods emphatically. “But I do have to hate him, Maman. He hurts you. And I’ll always hate anyone who hurts you.”

There’s something so innocent in the way he says it. So darling, so dear. Tears slip over my cheeks and I press my child to my chest, squeezing him hard to remind myself that we will always have each other.

A knock comes at the door and I straighten, wiping the tears off both our faces. “Now, you will tell the Reverend and me about the butcher’s from the beginning,” I say to Rue. He grins, always eager to show off. “But first, go wash up for dinner.”

Rue’s smile twists into a scowl. “Yes, maman,” he intones.

My son drags his boots and grumbles under his breath but he does as I say.

I chuckle, my face still tight with a smile when I throw the door wide. “You’re early!”

My smile dies when I see who’s on my threshold.

Ten years, I’ve been tucked away in my home outside the Village. I only told Solene where I was going. No one was supposed to find me here.

Still, I always knew this day would come.

“Hello, Amelie,” Quentin says.

I know he has a gun before he places it against my forehead. For what else would he come for but my life?

“He sent you.”

“Who else?” asks Quentin.

There are running feet on the floorboards before a gasp comes behind me. My heart quickens. Rue.

“Go into my bedroom and lock the door,” I call, trying to keep the fear from my voice. “Do not leave until the Reverend comes.”

“No,” he cries stubbornly.

A tear squeezes from my eye. Of all the days he chooses to disagree…

“Do as I say, boy!” I yell though I’ve never raised my voice at him before.

“But Maman—“

“Do it now!” I roar.

There’s a quick shuffle of feet and a slamming door and the click of the lock. I breathe. And I finally let myself look at him.

Quentin wears the purple and red. His midnight skin glows in the soft yellow light but his signature slash of a smile is gone, replaced by a grave gleam in his deep brown eyes.

“Please,” I say. My rifle is locked in its case only a few paces away, but I don’t run for it. I will not risk my Rue caught in the crosshairs. These walls are not thin but neither are they thick. “We can do this outside. Away from the boy.”

Quentin looks me in the eyes, his gun cold against my skin. “Why? Why, Am?”

“I could not stay after all we did to see him crowned.” It’s the truth but Quentin shakes his head.

“You misunderstand me,” he wraps one arm around me, almost a lover’s embrace. “Why would you keep the boy? You thought he would never find out?”

My heart stops, the reason for his visit becoming much too clear. My body grows cold. No. No.

“Please.” The word pushes out, squeezing from my core, my very soul. “Please, Q, he is everything to me.”

I wrap my hands around the gun, squeezing my eyes closed. Tears course over my sunburned face.

“Take my life,” I whisper. “It would be just. But spare my innocent boy. He is good and kind and he does not deserve this.”

“Damn you, Amelie,” Quentin says, the serious mask he’s worn since he arrived slips. “You had to know this day would come.”

“Please,” I sob, falling to my knees before him as the Queen did before me so many years ago. “If there is anything good left inside you, Quentin, I beg you—he’s a good boy!”

Quentin smiles, that cruel smile I used to know so well. “I almost didn’t find you here, on the edge of the world. Far from the life you once lived.”

I feel a moment of surprise when Quentin brings the butt of his gun against the soft flesh of my temple instead of unleashing a bullet as I expect.

Rueben.

Before unconsciousness claims me, Quentin’s feet creak against the floorboards and I hear him say, “Not far enough.”