Page 84 of Of Skulls Of Shackles

I sighed, then said, “So I had believed the matter simple. Bring would grow weak, and conquering him would be easier for it. Then, once I was queen, I could figure the matter out—or he would die.”

Princess Bring whispered, “Has that altered, Your Majesty?”

“Now I believe kings are crucial to the fate of the world.” I tuned into Princess Change’s reaction.

She did not disappoint. She was very excited to hear such a thing. But only one curse had existed to kill an immortal. If there was another way to kill a king, no one yet knew of it—or so I expected. Making a new curse would require a power sacrifice from one king, and the want of King Bring to make another curseandbe strong enough to create it too. Sick kings were not strong kings. Shackled kings could not make a power sacrifice either.

“You believe the world will end for good if a single king dies?” whispered Princess Take. “But they are all sick.Myking is sick.”

“Princess Take did not care for any king but hers,”stated the skeleton.

Princess Take glared at the narrator in the armchair. The skeleton waved at the princess, unaffected by her towering ire.

“You see the fullness of our predicament,” I said.

“We must save kings and pawns.” She burst upward and began to pace.

The princesses were many steps behind.

“The princesses were many steps behind a queen, and she suffered them,”said the skeleton.

I grinned, then said, “Perhaps matters were never so simple as that. Perhaps I was misled by a curse unconsumed. Perhaps King Bring’s sickness had everything to do with frayed seams, and a crumbled union. He was not able to hold his seam together for long enough for me to deem fit to mend it—which I chose not to anyway. Perhaps the plague earned its foothold inthatweakness. From there, the plague spread to all fraying seams and the kings trying to keep them closed. If seams hold the world together, then one flapping seam could have triggered the slide to The Real End. Alas, theories and theories are still mere theories without The End to give us answers, and the answers come too late after The End to be any use.”

My mumblings were lost on princesses. They were not privy to the verse chanted by ancestral mothers to unlock the meaning of my words, even if they might have heard the original poem of kings while playing the part of witness to their lieges.

I replayed the verse in my mind.

Up and out

Weaves golden fate

Feeling ancient in gifted wisdom.

Five powers grasp

All icy demise

Free from her olden prison.

If throne is seat

Union is seam

Skulls are skin

Shackles are stitch.

Until ancient in truth

Tarry not

Linger never

Lest the world becomes forever buried.

Five powers no longer grasped the world’s icy demise, nor mine. Three of the kings were shackled in my tower. One of them was conquered and walked free, and he would willingly shackle himself whenever necessary. The fifth was sick and overdue a conquering. Soon no king would be free of my “olden prison”—which must be my conservatory, the place that also existed in the grayscale place of terror where my mothers sat vigil. Kings’ thrones had become seats, and their unions were still seams, but while I had perhaps mended the unions of Take and Raise, I had done the opposite to the unions of Change and Bring.

Otherwise, my stitches were the shackles of kings. That had been instinctive, and no great issue to figure out.

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