Page 82 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
“You call me from Berlin when you can, and I promise I will pick up the phone.”
She smiled, the first real smile I’d ever seen on her face. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”
IT TOOK me almost three years to bring down Melwas, and it’s happening right now as I drink my scotch and read through my debate notes on a plane thousands of miles away. It’s anti-climactic…and that’s how it should be. That’s how I wanted it. Democracy is anti-climactic, and so is peace. Peace is working and working and working, and knowing that if you do your job right, most people won’t know you’ve done a job at all.
“It’s why I chose you,” Merlin says out of nowhere, nursing his own drink.
“What?”
“It wasn’t just that you were smart and looked good in a suit, Maxen. I wanted you for this job because I knew that you would do something like this. Pour time and energy into something that stayed hidden. You don’t do things for the glory, you do them because they are the right things to do, and that, above all, is what makes a good leader. And a good person.”
“That’s kind of you to say. Thank you.”
He makes a tsking noise. “You’re allowed to feel proud, you know. Happy. Take joy, even just for a moment, in what you’ve done.”
Proud.
I’m too tired to feel proud, I’m too tired to feel smug—although I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a small part of me that wanted to muster up smugness, that wanted to revel in the satisfaction of having resolved this without war, without violence and without Embry. He had doubted me and I had succeeded.
It should feel good.
But the satisfaction isn’t there, and neither is the pride. There’s only fatigue and the faint worry that somehow this might make things more dangerous for Embry in the long run. The Carpathian extremists have been hating and threatening him with relentless energy over the last two months, and if Melwas is taken down, if the country is put into the hands of a bureaucrat and it’s clear that the extremists won’t get the war they so crave…what then?
No, I can’t think about this right now. That by saving my country and theirs from war, I’ve put Embry in danger.
Except now it’s all I can think about.
I press my fingers into my eyes for a moment, trying to think of the most coherent way to explain to Merlin how far away from proud I feel. “I have a debate in twelve hours, and I haven’t slept in over twenty-four. The press is dragging my name and my son’s and my sister’s through the mud as we speak, and we can’t get anyone to focus on the issues because they’re so obsessed with the incest I committed sixteen years ago. I don’t know right now what will happen to Lenka or Carpathia or Melwas. I don’t know if I can take joy in any of it yet, or if it doesn’t matter because it’s on to the next thing. I want to do the most good for the most people, but right now I’m tired and heart sore and it feels never ending. The things to do are never ending and all my losses feel never ending. I’m at a deficit.”
“Losses. You mean Lyr? Embry?”
I rub my face and drop my hands. “Yes.”
“Lyr will perhaps always be a shadow on your heart, but as for Embry—it was worth his anger to solve the Melwas problem this way.”
I want to raise my voice, I want to scream, but I’m too tired, too broken. “Maybe,” I say, just to end the conversation.
There’s a long pause, a silence in which I want to lay my head on my desk and close my eyes. I settle for staring at the ripples in my scotch, drinking the ripples down. Merlin does the same.
“Maxen, I need to tell you something,” he says after several minutes of this. His tone of voice has changed from his usual cool sharpness into something different. He almost sounds uncertain, and that above all makes me go still.
“I—” He gives a small laugh. “I’m sure where to begin, but I don’t know that it matters. Either way it will be impossible to believe. But I think believe you must, if we are to go forward—”
Belvedere chooses that minute to open the door to my office. Merlin and I both turn.
“Sir, I thought I’d tell you that the news has just broken about Melwas. The Glein footage is everywhere, and Carpathians are starting to gather in protest in the streets. It looks like some people are already calling for his removal.”
Merlin stands. “We can finish this another time. Ryan, make sure that our president gets some sleep after he’s briefed. He needs it.”
I DON’T GET any sleep.
The insomnia is too familiar a bedfellow to surprise me, but I do find myself annoyed with it. I try the bed on the plane with no luck, and then after we land in Denver, my hotel. It’s the morning of the debate now, and I draw the curtains against the sunshine and take off my clothes. I close my eyes and meditate like a sixteen-year-old princess taught me to do years ago. I hate that she’s not here now, that she’s doing some campaign event in California for me, because fuck the campaign, I want her with me, in my arms, tracing sleepy circles on my chest.
I breathe. I try to clear my mind.
Melwas is handled.
I’ve already won one debate; I’m well prepared for this one.
