“A crown is not a gift. It is a debt, owed to every soul who kneels beneath it. And I have always paid my debts.”
The man in the third row put down his phone.
At last.
He had spent the first half of the scene illuminating his own chin while I negotiated the survival of a fictional kingdom. I had considered addressing my next line directly to him. Our director had already asked me not to improvise threats at the audience, however, and I had agreed to respect her artistic limitations.
For now, having his attention would suffice.
The gymnasium smelled of floor wax and the curry bread being sold outside. The lighting rig buzzed above my head. At the far edge of the stage, one of our painted mountains had begun peeling away from its backing.
It was not an ideal setting for a coronation.
I had prepared for one anyway.
Three weeks of rehearsals. Three weeks of watching interviews, speeches, parliamentary hearings. Anything that showed powerful people when they were not actively trying to look powerful. The interesting part was never the shouting. Anybody could shout. It was the man who reached for his water while someone else was still demanding an answer. The woman who let a hostile question finish, then made its speaker wait.
I stole whatever proved useful.
King Solvane II of Aurelheim had begun as a name on a stapled script. By the final rehearsal, he had acquired a posture, a pace, a particular way of looking at someone who had disappointed him.
The last required very little invention.
Across the stage, Miyata missed his mark.
He stopped half a step too close to the throne, putting his face outside the light. We had corrected this yesterday. And the day before yesterday. I had placed a strip of white tape on the floor myself.
He glanced down.
Found it.
Moved back.
Progress, though one hesitated to call it civilization.
“Speak,” I said. “Your king is listening.”
Miyata’s mouth opened.
Nothing happened.
From the wings, our director made a tiny, desperate movement with her script.
I rested my hand on the throne’s arm. Slowly. The audience followed it.
“The eastern watch,” I prompted. “You have come from the eastern watch.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. The watch has--”
Light appeared beneath my shoes.
My first thought was that someone had triggered the coronation effect two scenes early.
My second was that we did not have a coronation effect.
Gold lines spread across the plywood beneath the throne. They passed under the hem of my robe and emerged on the other side, forming letters I could not read. The rented lights above us flickered.
Miyata looked down.
“That isn’t--”
The microphone caught him.
Somebody in the audience laughed. Somebody else applauded.
For an absurd instant, I felt offended that they thought we had concealed a better production budget from them.
Then the circle rose.
It did not flare. It lifted, passing through the throne, through my knees, through the hand I had started to raise.
Miyata reached for me.
That is a detail I remember clearly.
He forgot his line. He missed his mark. When something impossible opened beneath my feet, he reached for me.
I did not reach him.
The gymnasium disappeared.
There was no useful sensation of movement. No fall I could brace against. I was briefly certain that my hands were somewhere my arms could not possibly reach, and that something enormous was examining the arrangement without much interest in whether I approved.
White.
Pressure.
A smell like a struck match.
Then my fingers closed around stone.
I was sitting down.
The throne was wrong.
The armrest beneath my hand was black, cold, and polished smooth along its edge. Small figures had been carved down the side: a procession of long-limbed things carrying objects I could not identify. Dust remained in the deepest grooves.
My throne had been plywood painted silver.
The left arm had wobbled.
This one did not.
Someone spoke sharply.
I lifted my head.
A hall rose around me: grey stone, narrow windows, banners hanging between pillars high enough to disappear into shadow. The air smelled of resin smoke and wet wool. Men stood along the walls in armor that bore the ordinary indignities of use: scratches around buckles, darkened straps, a dent hammered mostly flat.
At the center of them, seated in an oak chair beneath a carved canopy, was a man in a circlet.
His chair was below mine.
Three steps below, to be precise.
Even then, even with my heart trying to break something on its way out of my chest, I noticed.
The circle beneath my throne had cut across an inlaid pattern in the floor. Gold light still moved along one edge. A woman in grey robes was staring at the stone beside my knee.
“The seat,” she said.
An older man caught her sleeve.
Not my face. Not the crown.
The seat.
I wanted my phone.
The desire arrived with such stupid force that I almost reached for a pocket I did not have. My phone was in my schoolbag behind the stage, beside a packet of safety pins and the lunch I had not finished.
My mother had said she would arrive before the third act.
A guard moved.
I stopped breathing.
The man in the circlet raised two fingers, and the guard halted at the foot of the steps.
That helped.
Not enough to make any of this bearable, but enough to think.
They did not know what to do with me.
The woman in grey looked frightened. The older man looked offended by something more serious than my arrival. The King, for there was no sensible alternative, was studying the throne with the concentration of a man who recognized a problem without yet recognizing its dimensions.
I could stand.
I could tell them my age, ask where I was, explain the school festival.
The guard’s hand rested on his sword.
I remained seated.
There are moments when courage is merely the failure to identify a more promising action.
My body knew one useful arrangement. I gave it that.
Shoulders loose. Chin level. Fingers resting rather than gripping. Solvane received unwelcome news as though the news ought to be embarrassed for troubling him.
I had practiced that in the reflection of a train window.
Now I practiced it above a foreign king.
He looked up at me.
I looked down.
The angle was doing work I could not afford to waste.
My mouth was dry enough that the first breath hurt. I swallowed once, slowly, and let irritation settle over my face.
“You have gone,” I said, “to considerable trouble to bring me somewhere I never agreed to go.”
My voice held.
I cannot adequately convey how grateful I was to it.
“I am prepared to be reasonable about that.”
One beat.
Then another.
“Once.”
The old man’s fingers tightened on the woman’s sleeve.
The King did not look away.
Somewhere behind my calm expression, a boy in a school costume was waiting for an adult to tell him what had happened.
Nobody did.
So I continued.